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An update on this, from the dev account rather than my main one. Same person: I build Bitiverse on my own.

Since I asked, the answer to "where does it lose people" turned out to be mostly the first ten minutes and the shop screens, and a lot of that came from one player who sent me fifteen bug reports in a week. All fifteen are fixed. Shop racks now group by what a thing is rather than where it landed, a shop counts its things instead of its shelves, and the row that refuses to open a homestead shop finally says why.

Guilds also grew a council: any member can call a vote, quorum counts people seen in the last fortnight rather than everyone who ever joined, and a passed vote lapses if the leader sits on it for a week.

The ask has not changed, and I am still short of testers. If you have ten minutes, walk in as a guest, come and break something, and tell me where you got stuck or what read wrong. That is the part I cannot see from the inside.

https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse

I am one person building Bitiverse, a persistent 1-bit MMO that runs in a browser. I am going to keep this thread updated as I go, so this first post is where things stand and what I have been chewing on.

This month's problem: guilds that actually decide things.

Guilds in most games are a chat channel with a bank attached. I wanted decisions to have weight without turning the game into paperwork, so guilds now have a council. Any member can call a vote: a rule, a project, a spend, a seat, a poll, or a recall of the leader.

Two design choices I went back and forth on for a while.

Quorum counts people who have actually been around. It is 55% of members seen in the last fourteen days, not 55% of everyone who ever joined. A guild that has quietly emptied out should still be able to make decisions, and a dead roster should not be able to block the living one.

A passed vote lapses if the leader does not seal it within seven days. Passing something is not the same as it happening, and I would rather a stalling leader lose the vote than get to sit on it forever. Recall exists for the same reason: a guild can hand itself to whoever was actually paying attention.

What went wrong, since that is the more useful half of a devlog.

Guild ranks carry ten permission bits, and "may take from the vault" and "may open the officers' chests" were the same bit. Any leader who let every rank take from the vault had also, without knowing, handed every rank the officers' chests. That is the kind of bug you do not find yourself, because you already know what you meant. A player found it. Separating the bits took a migration, which was the fiddly part.

Also this week: shop racks now group by what an item is rather than where it landed, the chat caret finally goes where you point it, and a fallen hero's gear ends up in the right rack instead of the pantry.

Where the reports come from.

A player called reverie sent me fifteen bug reports in a week and all fifteen are fixed. That is most of my testing effort, from one person, which is a slightly uncomfortable thing to admit in public. It is also why I would rather talk to players than advertise at them.

Next: the homestead dungeon. You dig one under your own estate, haul the spoil out, and hire heroes to go down into it, because you are the landlord rather than the adventurer. Depth beyond the first floor is the part I am still working out.

If you want to poke at it, it runs in a browser with no download and guest play, and I would genuinely rather have testers than players right now: https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse

I will post progress here as it happens. Tell me what falls over and I will write about fixing it.

Bitiverse is a free persistent MMORPG that runs in your browser. No download, no account needed to try, and there are Windows, Linux and Android builds too. I build all of it myself.

Recently added: guilds now have councils, so any member can call a vote on a rule, a project, a spend or a seat, and a recall can hand the guild to whoever was paying attention. Books are real items you write, bind and shelve, and a printing press copies them. The in-game gazette is a weekly newspaper the players write and are ranked on.

Already there: one shared persistent world, nine crafting stations, a player economy with market stalls and shops, homesteads you build and dig a dungeon beneath, seeded dungeons with their own bosses, taming and mounts, and ten real board and card games in the taverns.

It is playable now and updated most days. I am looking for testers more than anything, so come and break it and tell me what you did.

https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse