We are expecting that the community will grow as we allow more and more people to try the game, and that word of mouth will be the primary engine of promotion for BitCraft. We currently plan on doing many playtests and we believe the resources we have will get us to a version of the game that is fun and has many of the core features we envisioned. That means doing early playtests with the community and getting valuable feedback to incorporate in future updates.

We are focusing on the development of BitCraft and leaving as little as possible up to chance. Players who travel the world will find mountain settlements, big naval ports and remote outposts in the desert, and whatever else the community decides to build. The unique aspects will come when players will join together to build cities in different parts of the world. The world offers a variety of biomes and survival aspects in the early gameplay which we think will captivate new players. The activities we expect players to participate in vary from the more single player (survive on your own in the wilderness, farm and fish) to the multiplayer experiences of cooperatively building a city and creating empires.

There are some considerations, of course, the procedural algorithms have to generate a world that offers interesting landscapes and variation to allow for different gameplay opportunities, trade, etc. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be carefully scripted by us since we don’t know how players will want to inhabit it. The BitCraft world is a blank slate for players to create in. The other reason relates to the editable world idea I mentioned earlier. Handcrafting the game world wouldn’t scale to the size we are imagining. The main reason why we opted for procedural generation, is that we want the BitCraft world to be massive. Small remote outposts by lone wolves or small parties who would rather explore the more inaccessible corners of the world. Big cities by large groups who get together and coordinate to leave their mark with large and bustling towns. This is the selling point, and unique feature of BitCraft we will generate the world, but all the cities and roads, campsites and outposts, and remote villages will be built by players. We drew inspiration from the editable worlds in Minecraft and started to imagine what game mechanics and rules would allow such worlds to function and thrive in an MMO. That idea felt very powerful to us, and we decided to start brainstorming some more detailed game design concepts to explore them further. He wanted a world where Varrock was built and governed by players instead of by developers. Tyler, a longtime Runescape player, came up with the original idea, always being slightly dissatisfied with the static nature of the OSRS world. Tyler and I were working on a different project called SkyLab in late 2018 when we started discussing the concept for BitCraft.

Bitcraft platforms