Deliverable #41 · 2026-10-26

Your own house in the Village — the design sheet, and how Kris voted

epic: world-map-and-portals promised

Kris, by voice, 26 October — a design that is largely Rah’s: “Instead of everyone having their own little room that they come out of through the same portal… it becomes a house, very much like the bazaar is a tent… the door will be away from where you’re seeing… the walls should be the same colour as the pants colour of the player and the roof the colour of the top… when the player is offline, a reduced, simpler, standard version — maybe the lights are out, probably just brown, but a nice little house.”

Every picture below is the game’s own renderer, from the chase camera at its normal height unless it says otherwise. The four owners in them are Rah (rose top, denim pants), Tom (marigold, khaki), Ivy (teal, wine) and Kris (scarlet, navy); a brown house with its shutters closed is somebody who isn’t in the game; four little marks on the grass are a plot nobody has yet. A design review had already been through the first renders and asked for taller walls under a lower roof, a door a child can walk through (the first one came up to Tom’s chest), cream trim so a dark pants colour still reads as a colour, and gold names for houses so a place never reads as a person.

1 — Which house? The cottage

A street of cottages: four in their owners' colours with lit windows, two brown and shuttered, one empty plot — A — the cottage (chosen)

The cottages closer, gold names over the coloured ones — A, closer

The door side of Rah's cottage, Tom on her doorstep — A, the door side — the north, away from the camera

The same street with hipped roofs — B — hipped

The door side of a hipped house — B, the door side

The same street with steep roofs and stone chimneys — C — storybook

The door side of a storybook house — C, the door side

2 — The walls: the owner’s true pants colour

Walls in the owners' true pants colours — True (chosen)

The walls lifted toward cream — Softened toward cream — navy, wine and khaki all drift to beige

3 — Offline houses

No vote: brown, a little smaller, the shutters closed, no name, and a tap does nothing — Kris: “if offline the house looks and acts like background decoration.” They are the brown houses in every picture.

4 — A plot nobody has yet: the corners

Four ways to mark an empty plot on the grass, left to right: a line, four corners, a dashed line, four pegs — Line · corners (chosen) · dashed · pegs — walkable until somebody moves in

5 — The door you can’t see: leave it

The camera looks north and the door is on the north side, so whoever is knocking stands behind the house. Three ways to deal with it were drawn; Kris chose to leave it — the house hides you while you knock.

Tom hidden behind Rah's house, only his name showing — Leave it (chosen)

Rah's house see-through, Tom visible — See-through

Rah's house with the roof off and the walls cut low — Cut away

6 — Inside: lower walls, a honey floor

Your home is the room you already have, chest and all, drawn inside the house’s walls in your colours, the roof’s edge in your top colour.

The room with tall walls, like the Bazaar's — a — tall, like the Bazaar

The room with lower walls and a grey plank floor — b — lower walls, the grey plank floor

The room with lower walls and a honey plank floor — b with the honey floor (chosen)

Closer, Rah on the honey floor — b with the honey floor, closer

Two changes from the sheet, in Kris’s words. The rug goes: “no rug on the floor, that is something to purchase in the game later and add.” And the door moves: “the door should be against the BACK wall… there should be a visible door against the middle of that back wall — because that is where the door IS, and you just can’t see it from the standard camera angle… with the portal kind of in front of it.” The honey planks became a ground of their own: the grey planks in the pictures turned out to be the ramp up to the high ground, not a floor, so Kris chose a hexagram for it — “use Wind over Fire… change Wind on Fire to be the wooden floor honey plank”: Wind over Fire (37), The Family — “warmth given out slowly, evenly, to everyone in the room”. Its lower trigram makes it a lava by type; as the Plank floor it is dry, flat and on the ground’s own level, and the ramps keep their look.

What comes next

The Village of Lor grows south by six rows of street blocks with eighty plots (Kris: “let’s go for 80 house sites to start — that’s an arbitrary but interesting milestone to hit”), and a “Player Home” in the area editor for adding more by hand. Each player is given a plot when they log in, the house shows their colours while they’re in the game, and anyone can knock on a lit house — the owner says Let in or Keep out, and a visitor can only walk around. It goes to the staging server first, with some test players living in the Village, before anyone else sees it. The work is GitHub issue #42.

Sources & artifacts

← related epic: world-map-and-portals

Also available as raw markdown.