I think the time has come to announce my latest project, Astral Realms. It is at heart, a virtual world, but it is also a social network, and a social experiment. The premise is, fundamentally, to do the opposite of what most social networks are doing today. Think about it, sites like Facebook bombard users with information, from messages, to "likes", to tags, to shared photos or links. This sheer quantity of information reduces the meaning and the importance of the very thing the site was created to do, to communicate. Now, what if, instead of making it easier for people to communicate, we make it harder. We reduce the quantity of information, to improve the quality.

Most virtual worlds have central locations where players "Spawn", cities, castles, etc. Players can meet each other and chat, trade, or form parties for quests. In Astral Realms, players will be spawned at a completly random location in the world, that is unique to that player, no two players will share the same spawn point. This means they will have to search for other players to talk to, and interact with. There will be no fast travel, no game lobby, no quick match-making of any kind, players will be totally alone in this vast, open landscape. It could take days for a player to come across another. This is the exact opposite of what regular virtual worlds do, most of them rely upon constant interaction, often paying for very expensive advertising to guarantee an unending supply of new players. That's where the social experiment comes in. It is all too easy in today's online social networks to sacrifice meaningful communication with other people in lieu of frequent, meaningless conversations. I am taking a gamble that doing the reverse will appeal to a certain group of players.

Astral Realms features many playable worlds (called "Realms") which the player can explore. Hidden within these realms are gateways to other realms, allowing them to continue their Journey.
In Astral Realms, in addition to being able to talk to players that they meet, they can also leave behind messages and clues to where they have been. Other players can follow these clues and read and add to these messages, forming a kind of "message in a bottle" system, where players can read messages left by other players, possibly without ever meeting them.

I am also experimenting extensively with emergent gameplay in this project, I want the world to be as dynamic as possible, random terrains, random environments, random weather, day/night cycles, etc. Eventually, if the project goes well and becomes popular, I intend to add the ability to create buildings, and terraform the Earth, create rivers, trees, etc. In this way, it should be possible to create a dynamic world, a single player builds a homestead at their spawn point, another player stumbles across it and builds their homestead nearby, then another player, and another, and soon a village, then a town, then a city springs up. The bigger the settlement, the more option players will have in terms of building types, and terraforming. This, again, is an experiment, I can't think of another game project quite like this, where the world is essentially a blank slate, and the players are left to wander around and create it for themselves.
I don't intend to add any combat to the game, at least not in the forseeable future. I am strictly experimenting with the social network side of it for now.

I am taking a lot of inspiration from the old MUD's, or Multi User Dungeons that were so popular in the 80's. They had no graphics, except for simple ASCII art, and yet they were some of the most immersive and deep worlds available. By removing the expensive graphics players were required to interact with the world in a different way, which I think had many advantages over the games of today. In Astral Realms, players will be given free reign to tell their own story, and create their own reason for playing. Instead of following the games preset story, or endlessly following the same quests or side stories, players will be able to take part in a story of their own, and share in the stories of others, a little bit like those collaborative short stories that are popular on writing sites, where each author writes a paragraph.

The first concept demo is just a few months away from completion, and will feature the bare bones of the entire system. I should be able to tell from that if the project can work or not.
I have some development pictures which I will upload later in the week, I will also post a status update of the project then.