Deliverable #29 · 2026-09-15
The floating islands — a trial build where the neighbouring places float beside the one you stand in
Kris is working on the sky behind the world — what replaces the plain blue — and one of the ideas is that each Area is a floating island, and that the places laid out beside each other on the world map could be seen from each other. This build tries exactly that, on the staging server so nothing about the live world changes.
What it does
- While you stand in an Area, the public Areas within a radius of it on the world map are drawn as static islands around you: their ground only, on a rock skirt, a gap away and a little below. No creatures, no items, no bodies, nothing moves on them. You still cross by portal.
- The ground of each island is cached on the phone by its content digest, so returning to a place costs nothing, and a publish of an Area’s ground tells every connected client to fetch it again the next time it is drawn.
- Homes are never drawn. An Area you may not enter is not drawn.
How to try it
Open spellgrove.com/play-islands — the web build, pointed
at the staging realm — or install spellgrove-islands-trial.apk from that page beside the normal
app. Staging has the same authored world and its own accounts: make one with an email on the
title screen (a live account will not sign in here, and Play Games sign-in is not set up on
staging). Walk into the Village and look around; zoom out. The HUD’s frame time is the measurement.
Where it lives
The code is on the islands-trial branch, not on master, behind a director flag that staging
alone has set; the write-up is docs/handoff/neighbouring-islands.md. Whether it becomes part
of the game is Kris’s call after the sky design lands.
Sources & artifacts
← related epic: world-map-and-portals
Also available as raw markdown.