At the end of March Atmosphere Conf 2026 happened in Vancouver BC. In hindsight I probably should have gone – firstly because I have family in the area and could have absolutely gotten a last minute ticket and crashed with them, secondly because not going inadvertently caused me to stop progress.
If I had gone to Atmosphere Conf I would have used it as a excuse to pull some extra late nights and finish this little atmosphere project – I could have soft launched something . Instead since I wasn't going to be going I focused on living vicariously through everyone who did. This had some unintended consequences:
- 1.
I didn't get to invest time in working on my project while I was seeing what everyone was up to
- 2.
I got new ideas of things to build, or sometimes had old ideas rekindled
So for a while I did not work on Cozy Corner, instead working on things like a firehose leaderboard. I wrote the beginnings of a pitch deck for an at proto startup. I posted a bunch and got excited about other projects. I even started writing my own PDS.
Basically I was spiraling, my side projects had started to spawn their own side projects. And while I think I do have a interesting idea for an extension to the core pds, the time there takes away from cozy-corner.
The compendium grows! Everyone, say hello to @quillmatiq.com, an adventurer! See their character sheet and more: https://rpg.actor/quillmatiq.com
Seeing this post kind of broke me. My first thought was "I can't believe someone already built the thing I was working on".
Of course one of the things I've often scolded myself on is getting too disappointed when someone does build a thing I've been working on, after all there's lots of room out there for different versions of new social experiences. So reluctantly I logged in and created an Sprite.
To my relief rpg.actor was not a direct competitor that had just beaten me to the punch. It was a totally different idea – but moreover it was something I could leverage, both for my own motivation and to solve a problem.
One of the issues I'd been stumbling on was what a new user experience was going to be. We couldn't let you walk around and interact with Cozy Corner without an avatar record, and right after logging in you simply wouldn't have one. We could do a special one-off detection, but given that we may want similar things in the future it would be useful to have re-usable systems.
The nice thing with the rpg actor sprites is that I could skip some of onboarding. Instead I would just use a sprite if it existed. My on boarding would still need optimization, but much less than it would have if everyone was coming into it without an existing character.
The other thing that helped to spur me on was the game jam. I'm not sure if cozy corner will be done in time but it gave me a deadline (April 20th) that I needed to march towards. And so I was back at it.
There is one thing with a game jam – people expect a game. Cozy corner no mater how much is done is not going to be a game, it's going to be a quasi social experiment. What I realized is that I should probably put some sort of fetch quest into the system to show what user generated content could do. The problem became that I felt like I was fighting limitations of the data model and the game engine. So cozy corner needed to change again, one last time – I hope.
Cozy Corner is Social, Interactive, Storytelling
The non-bidirectional connection of rooms, mirroring the follow graph on something like bluesky still makes Cozy Corner first and foremost a game about exploration. Building your own room, and filling it with items you like should feel intuitive. But what is layered on top of that is an interactive storytelling system. Authors should be able to build branching story lines that span rooms, and last days.
I've got a new focus, and a new deadline, time to get to work and not rewrite this from scratch again.