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Ideas — the miscellaneous shelf

repo: land-of-lor (workshop/epics/ideas)

Where this stands (2026-10-05)

Opened 2026-10-05 (Kris, by voice): a shelf for ideas that have no epic yet, so a session that arrives with nothing obvious to work on is sent here. Nothing on the list is promised or scheduled; an idea that grows up moves out into its own epic or a GitHub issue. Decided (2026-10-05): this epic never gets issues of its own — an idea becomes an issue only when Kris picks it, under the epic it then belongs to. No open issues.

What this is

Kris’s words (2026-10-05): “an epic that is like miscellaneous ideas … capture ideas that I’ve had and some notes somewhere, if I ever come into a session like this and go, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure what to work on,’ that we get directed to there and go, ‘Okay, here’s some things.’”

The list is the content. Add to it freely, in a line or two per idea, with the date and where it came from when that’s known. Keep it plain bullets, newest at the bottom.

How to use this shelf

• A session with nothing named: read the list, pick the smallest thing that can be tried end to end, say which one you picked, do it, report. PICKUP.md’s “do what you were asked” rule still holds — picking from here is what you were asked.
• An idea that gets done moves to the “Done or moved out” section with a date and where it went (a commit, a deliverable, another epic). It does not get deleted.
• An idea that turns out to belong to an existing epic moves there, with a line here saying so.

The list

• Racing, like Mario Kart (Willow, 2026-10-05). Kris: “Racing cars will wait for now because it’s different to how the rest of the game works.” Willow’s reply, which is the idea worth keeping: vehicles could still come in through the game’s own mechanics — a spell to tame an animal; leather and rope to make a bag or sack; the sack put on the animal; the sack holds ingredients for spells; a tamed animal follows you around. (The pet-follow half already exists for created creatures — docs/handoff/mud-and-life.md; taming a wild one and a carried bag do not.) She’d also love to help make some of the base items.

• Snails (Willow, 2026-10-05). Snails in the world. In tag you collect them and throw them at others to slow them down; you’re slowed when you go near one; a snail-immunity spell lets you pick them up to throw.

• An invisibility spell (Willow, 2026-10-05).

• A ruin somewhere that looks like the photo below (Willow, 2026-10-05): a roofless Gothic folly — pointed-arch windows and a doorway, a broken tower, trees growing through it, long dry grass in front.

• Characters downloaded in chunks as players go (Kris, 2026-10-22): “I wonder if we want to implement something whereby chunks of characters are downloaded as players go along — say we have 20× the number of models, once we add a number of NPCs and also other kinds of enemy and beast type creatures to the world — is it still sensible enough to bundle all that?” Context: the characters pack is one 14 MB download today (twelve bodies, ~1.2 MB each); the native builds carry the bodies inside, the web fetches the pack in the background. The pack machinery already exists (characters.json + a .pck by hash), so “chunks” is several packs keyed by what an Area needs, fetched on arrival.

Kris’s note on the four (2026-10-05): all of these are good for tag, but it would be better to set up other mini-games or game mechanics so they are part of the core game even without tag.

• Mist (Kris, 2026-10-23): “Add mist as a thing in the game, an atmospheric thing, but also it blocks your view — and then there are special goggles that you will be able to make as part of a spell that will let you see there.”
• Signet and the cast — fake players on errands (Kris, 2026-10-23), parked: “an NPC that walks around the Village of Lor, The Badlands and The Mountain Pass — just so it feels like there is someone else in there… like the ‘door probe’ I saw running around — deliberate, on a mission going somewhere… fake players, you can’t interact with them… never start up an area.” Worked out that evening into a roaming cast on their own clocks, doors used for real, never reacting to players — and then parked: “I’m not certain I want to do this… possibly it will come in later when we have multiple servers and someone gets relegated to a new one with no one else in.” All the notes, the facts found in the code and the design are on issue #36 — an idea, not work.

From a conversation with Rah, 2026-10-24, all of it in one recording — Kris: “all of this does actually need to go on to the ideas board right now, because it’s just not fleshed out… capture all the notes.” The whole transcript is docs/thought-specs/2026-10-24-night-market-chat-with-Rah.md. Kris’s reason for liking it: “part of what I’m dealing with at the moment is the world is quite empty.”

• The Night Market (Rah, 2026-10-24). A market somewhere else that only opens at night, so it needs day and night. The portal to it has a lock on it — maybe not animated, just the ring with a lock in the middle — and only at night can you see it open and go in. Inside, a lot of stalls, mostly food (Kris: “night markets usually are food”). At the very far back, one big main stall with a name, its stock not decided yet. A blacksmith could be in the day Bazaar. Kris: “I actually love the idea of the night market … maybe we can do it later.”
• A stall where you sell your pets for elements or something good (Rah, 2026-10-24).
• The carpenter sells the house things (Rah and Kris, 2026-10-24): the man you get the chest from is where you buy all the building and house stuff — Rah: “it just makes it easy for people … I want to buy a table, or I want to buy a chair.” (He is Hob Hartwood, in the Bazaar, on staging with the chest quest, issue #40; the spell table already places tables, chairs and chests as builder spells after the MVP — spell-crafting-interface.)
• The Bazaar changes hands at dusk and dawn (Kris, 2026-10-24), the other way to have a night market: keep the one Bazaar. At night the carpenter gets up, walks out to the home-Area portal and goes through it, “just as if that’s his home, like any other player”, and a food seller comes the other way and stands at a table of their own; the carpenter’s table stands empty at night, the seller’s by day. The technical half, his words: “there’ll be an exact set time that they walk to and from and switch positions, but we don’t need to animate that … we just need to know when that area fires up if they happen to be partly through their walking thing.” Nothing runs while the Village is asleep; the clock says where they are when it wakes. (Facts: there is no day/night cycle or server clock today — the night sky is a backdrop only, docs/handoff/sky-and-map.md. The parked roaming cast on issue #36 already worked out NPCs on their own clocks who use the doors for real.)
• Food: apples and carrots (Rah and Kris, 2026-10-24). The food seller sells apples and carrots; Rah also named dragon fruit (and one word the recording lost), Kris: “I think that’s plenty.” An apple increases your health; a carrot improves your vision — “see through the Mist and through darkness” — and can heal you too. What they cost isn’t decided. Kris: apples and carrots should be elements, each one of the 64 hexagrams, picked to fit the I Ching meaning — but special, because you can eat them. Open: “I guess you can eat mushrooms then too?” (the Mushroom is already element 2, The Receptive) — “or do we treat food as different?”
• The goggles quest: eat your carrots (Rah, 2026-10-24), building on the Mist entry above. You ask a character for the goggles that see through the Mist; they ask “is your vision good?”; you say no; “well then, eat some carrots — eat three carrots, and then come back”; you come back and say yes; “well then, here you go.” The point is that you eat the carrots yourself, not hand them over. Kris: a different character from the food seller, who makes the goggles. Note the two ways to get the goggles now on this shelf: Kris’s 2026-10-23 entry makes them with a spell, Rah’s gets them from this character. Not decided.
• Frogs and slime mould in Far Hop (Kris, 2026-10-24, renaming Far Away to Far Hop for Esmeralda’s “where do I find…” answers): “I will make it also be the place where there is a spawn point for frogs, and also ‘slime mould’ as a new element (which will be the ingredent to swap into the familar spell for making a frog (a new spell with that difference) in place of the mud .. or in place of some of the mud)”. So: a frog spawn point in Far Hop; slime mould as a new element; a frog-making spell that is Make Life with slime mould for (some of) the Mud. (Esmeralda already answers “A frog” when asked what you’d rather make — @what_then in her dialogue — and says her creator hasn’t told her the ingredients yet.)
• A Shrink spell (Kris, 2026-10-26): “a SHRINK spell, that shrinks you down to the size of a familiar — that’s how everyone else sees you, and you move at 1/10th the speed — and for you, you stay the same, but all the ground and rest of the world scales up 10x — so you see yourself walking as if per normal, but the ground is pixelated because now a single cell takes 10 times as many steps for you to cross it.” Kris: “we will leave it at that for now.”

Done or moved out

(nothing yet)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:ideas (private repository — sign-in required). The dated Where this stands section above names the open ones.

Also available as raw markdown.