It's Critter Time!

Tilemap Town is a virtual world I've been developing since 2017. It's inspired by old BYOND "building games", Second Life, Furcadia, and MUCKs. It allows you to play as anything you can provide a 32x32 graphic for (so you can just directly play as your sona or any of your characters with no compromises outside of what you have to sacrifice to fit in 32x32) and you can move around a 2D grid of pixel art tiles. You can modify the map to build things, and you can collaboratively make a world with the other players. Alternatively, you can make your own map and set your own restrictions on who can visit and who can build on it.

The low-spec pixel art look makes it very easy to get your character into the game in some form without having to know how to do 3D modeling or texturing or animation or anything; a small simple doodle is plenty, and because everything is low resolution there's less of a problem with your art looking out of place next to someone's amazing art. Though there's already a lot of variety in visual style so that helps too.

You can use your own custom graphics for the player, for any props you place down, and for map tiles (though this is currently a little clunky). There's autotiling and animation support, and there's Lua scripting (which requires me to grant a permission). The protocol is documented and custom clients and bots are welcome and encouraged. The whole game itself is open source too.

Tilemap Town is designed to be good for roleplaying; there's /me and /spoof commands to narrate actions, /ooc to mark messages as out-of-character, and commands to quickly switch between characters. You can make map modifications and place down props to help give a visual. In my experience, having a concrete world everyone can look at helps encourage spontaneous freeform play, using the world sort of like a writing prompt to do something interesting, or like a big playset.

Unfortunately it turns out that non-erotic non-ttrpg furry roleplay is incredibly niche, and it's hard to tell if there's just no demand for that anymore or if I'm having a hard time getting it in front of the right people; hopefully posting about it here will help. That said, it's totally fine to just hang out on there or just focus on building things, but I do hope that making RP really approachable will encourage people to give it a try (and some people have!)

Here's a cyberspace area I've been working on, showing that you can make an area with a vastly different feel than above:


Here's me about to kick my partner's butt in Connect Four:

This uses a feature that allows entities to display a little screen and detect being clicked on, and this game runs on a bot. For the game's own scripting system there's a system set up to pretend you have a monochrome bitmap display that you can draw shapes and text on. I've had a few sessions where I've played around with writing and testing a script to show off different effects alongside someone else who's doing the same, and that's fun.

There's a bunch of stuff that's been built over the years (here's a link to a big snapshot of the main area, taken in May) so there's a lot to explore. Hopefully this post made some people curious about checking it out, and hopefully eventually I can get an active community established on here.

Oh wow, that's really neat! I've never done pixel art before, but now you've suddenly got me wondering if I could squish my blorbo into 32x32. I'll definitely have to give it a shot and take a tour sometime. I'm not one for roleplaying, but chillin' out in virtual worlds is something I've always liked since learning about LambdaMOO way back.

Here's a bunch of 32x32 sprites I drew for myself and for friends, to give some inspiration on how characters might be adapted for this: I have the most trouble with quadrupedal characters that also have big tails; for the character in the bottom left you can see how I had to angle the tail up to make it fit. Bipedal ones usually aren't that bad.

Oh this is PRECIOUS! I need to look into this. ^^