What is The O'Ruggin Trail?
A fully on-chain text adventure in composability.
An interactive narrative, a cautionary tale. Amusing words. A physical, 3 Dimentional, multicolour, smell-o-vision simulator rendered in black and white (mainly green) text.
A Multi user dungeon for the modern age.
We explore the wondrous danger of words and composability through a surrealist interactive fiction that players can build upon and tell stories with as they attempt to cross a hostile landscape with just a grocery bag of pocket fluff, loose buttons, shit coins, and lucky charms in the hope of reaching anywhere else but here and claiming their plot in the golden lands of the new world and settling into the simple, safe, and idyllic life of a humble retired International Crime Lord (or not).
The game play centres around classical text input and puzzle solving to progress, but the game has sinister intent! We want players to change the world for each other for both good and bad.
Status
The O'Ruggin Trail is currently in early prototyping phase. It's purpose (other than the fun of frustration) is to test the limits of composability and explore boundaries. With this in mind we have to date built the game across the 3 best known on-chain games engines or frameworks researching the possibility space for cross framework and cross chain operations.
- Play The O'Ruggin Trail - World Engine (Celestia) here. Check out source code here.
- Build The O'Ruggin Trail - MUD (EVM/Optimism/Redstone) from source here and play locally.
- Build The O'Ruggin Trail - Dojo (Starknet) here.
- Watch for The O'Ruggin Trail - in other cross chain environments such as Fluent (blended execution VMs) and Magic Blocks (Solana), coming soon.
Behind The O'Ruggin Trail
The fully on-chain gaming scene has close to achieved its short-term goal of proving that robust games with palatable user experiences can be built by leveraging the innovations of teams like Lattice, Cartridge, and Argus.
This leaves us with the more elusive and ambitious goal of uncovering the next paradigm shift in gaming that the on-chain gaming movement foretells.
We acknowledge the parallels between the limitations that blockchains currently face and the early days of Commodore and Spectrum game development when strict memory and disk size limitations made for intense creativity, great games and eventually informed the vibrant Demoscene where developers still compete to make the most fully fledged games they can within 128kb. Fun times!
The O’Ruggin Trail is a highly experimental game that leans into limitations and affordances of on-chain games by taking the classic format of the text adventure and adding the persistence and shared state of a blockchain and the ability for players to build on top of each other’s worlds.
Our major inspiration comes from the games of the #Zork engine and #Infocom era combined with games like, Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death and Bay12's Dwarf Fortress, likely one of the most impactful and popular independent game designs in the last 20 years.
The O’Ruggin Trail is both a commercial game and art as interactive software, (much like Dwarf Fortress). Unlike Dwarf Fortress however it intends to create an experimental scaffolding between games.
It is the culmination of our ongoing research into fully on-chain games. We believe that it is the ideal mix of:
- demonstrating the unique affordances of being fully on-chain and
- being commercially viable with a strong and resonant launch strategy.
We bring with us a view that the greatest successes in persuading players to play independent games vs titles from AAA giants have always offered them something that AAA can't.
Art is the thin end of the wedge that opens people's minds to genuinely unique and interesting web3 experiences. Given a cultural nod, it can open the gate to more conventional audiences. This niche and advocate first approach has a domino effect. If a game is genuinely meaningful and has something to say, it will be played and written about and this moves paradigms.
Read more about [Building The O'Ruggin Trail] here
Go to Market
Why is O'Ruggin interesting to the market?
The O’Ruggin Trail is a highly experimental project with the persistence and shared state of a blockchain and the ability for players to continue each other’s narratives.
It is both game and art (as interactive software) and creates an experimental scaffolding for composability between games.
What are people impressed about? And what is our take on brand building?
O’Ruggin Trail is the culmination of researching and refining our thesis on fully on-chain games. We believe that this game is the ideal mix of:
- demonstrating the unique affordances of being fully on-chain and
- being commercially viable with a strong and resonant launch strategy.
One of the insights and approaches we bring with us to the ecosystem is that the most success we have had persuading players to play the independent games vs titles from the incumbent AAA giants has always been to offer them something that AAA can't.
Art is the thin end of the wedge to open people's minds to genuinely unique and interesting web3 experiences. Once there is a cultural nod, it opens the floodgates to more conventional audiences. This niche and advocate first approach often has a domino effect. If a game is genuinely meaningful and has something to say, it will be played and written about, this shifts paradigms.
You can read more on The O'Ruggin Trail's design here.