A map, a story and a square kilometre of Reedhaven

Zizeeria is an MMORPG in development, set in a torn world with two playable sides, the Weavers and the Tearers, who land at the same harbour, the town of Reedhaven. This is not a release post, because there has been no release. The download is still 0.1.25, which went out at eleven minutes to nine in the morning, by the clock the servers keep, on the ninth of October, 35 days before the date of this post. What has changed for a player since is on the patch notes page, under hotfixes, on three days. Four more creatures live in the marsh around Reedhaven: reed skitters, which never fight back, mist adders, reed lynxes, and marsh bears, which are level 12 to 15 and can defeat a new character who stands and fights. Health comes back by itself, eight per cent of the full amount every second, once fifteen seconds have passed since you were last hurt or last struck a creature that still stands. Experience was reshaped: the second level takes 36 experience instead of 100, Too Many Deer opens at level six instead of eight, and the bar that draws your experience was left behind by the change and still stays empty from level three on. Everything else in this post is work that a player cannot reach yet, and it says so each time.

The world has a map now, or the start of one. On the morning of the thirteenth the person paying for the game asked whether anyone had built a map of the world, and pointed at three pictures in a conversation with an image generator, three versions of a chart titled A World Woven in Stone, Ash and Dreams. None of them was in the repository, and none of them can ship as drawn: they are generated and untouched by any person's hand, their lettering is machine-made and partly unreadable, and most of what can be read on them is not in the world's canon. Where a name on them and the canon's disagree, the canon's wins, which was the answer given. The chart's kilometres could not be used at all. Between the same two places, Reedhaven and the Ashreaches, the burnt country beyond the ridge to its north-east, one drawing's bar says 3,450 kilometres, another's 6,260 and the third's 10,200. At the game's walking pace, five metres a second, an hour on foot is 18 kilometres, so the first of those would be 192 hours of walking, where the road out of Reedhaven on the new map reaches the Ashreaches' border 1,132 metres from where you arrive, in under four minutes. So the chart is taken for what all three drawings agree on, which lands touch which, on which side of the compass, and whether the way between is land, sea or down, and every distance is set by how long the walk should take. On seeing the first plate redrawn from it, the same person asked that the world keep room to grow if the game does. The lands and seas the chart draws beyond the continent Reedhaven stands on are therefore reserved: nothing there is built, named or told until an expansion is planned, and nothing in the base game may close a direction off.

The story has been written on. The site now has a page for it, put up on 13 November, which tells how the main story begins and no more: the night the tide ran wrong, a torn world with two shores and two looms, a harbour where both sides land and neither is the story's villain, and four acts by name, What the Tide Left, The Burn and the Deep, Two Capitals and The Marsh Bell, of which only the first is partly in the game and the other three are marked Planned. Behind the page, the later acts have been written as chapters told from both sides, and held together with every quest the game has. The list is short. On 13 November three quests are in the game, What the Tide Left, Reed for Bread and Too Many Deer; six more optional ones for Reedhaven are in the game's database and not published; and the quests of the later acts exist as titles and outlines, with no rows, no steps and no lines of speech.

The Tearers and the Weavers are the game's two playable sides, and they are not yet told with equal weight; the gap is plain. Every quest a person gives in the game today is given by one of the Weavers' peoples. No person of the Tearers' peoples has a row in the database, and the survey of the quests puts that down to a body and not to a choice of the story's, so for now the town says the same words to both sides, as the story page also says. The writing for the later acts was briefed to close that gap from Act II on, with each side told as a home and neither as the story's villain, and nothing in the game yet shows whether it has.

Reedhaven's ground has been rebuilt as a square kilometre, with the town in it. The ground the game runs today is a plate 240 metres across. The new one was cut from a heightmap, with four layers of moss, mud, reed bed and stone, and the boardwalk now runs whole from the beach to the town, about a minute's walk, with the lantern tower about 273 metres from the beach. A second pass dressed it with dead wood, stumps and lichened stones, placed by rule along the water and the edges. A third gave it an overcast morning with the sky brighter than the ground, and about a hundred dead trees and snapped poles along the creeks. A fourth raised a ridge to the north-east with the road cut through it, and on the road a border: a player who walks into it will be stopped and told, "The road runs on into the Ashreaches. You cannot follow it there yet." That line is already in the live data. The part of the game that acts on it is not on the servers yet.

Some of it came out wrong first. The first round of the morning light came out as a moonlit night, and the faces of the town's people came out blue-violet under the new light, which the project's record traces to a lighting setting that had not been set and has since been set. None of it has been looked at in a client a player downloads, because the client that exists was cooked on the third of October, before any of it was built.

Dying will mean something. Today a creature that brings you down lays you where you fell for ten seconds and then stands you up at the arrival with all your health, at no cost; the zone's own code says plainly that it does not call the part of the game that keeps the account of a death. The next release replaces that. A panel will say you have died and offer Release spirit, which will happen by itself after five minutes if you leave it. Your spirit will then stand at the nearest graveyard, and you will run back to your body. Within fifteen metres of it a panel will offer Resurrect, and you will stand up where the spirit stands with half of every pool. A spirit healer at the graveyard will stand you up there at once with all your health, but the weakness the death left will stay until you have walked back to where you died. A death will take twelve per cent of the experience you had earned into your current level, and the weakness will be ten per cent off every stat; nothing you carry is lost. Those numbers are rows in the live data already, and no zone running today uses them. The map has two graveyards, one by the town, 30 metres south of the lantern tower, and one out on the northern flats, each with its spot for a healer. The run back has been walked only by automated tests, never on the servers, and the mark that shows where your body lies on the map is not landed. Death also changed the arithmetic of the first hour: with the run back starting from the graveyard on the northern flats, the hour's route measures about two kilometres on the new map where it had been planned at two and a half, and the person paying for the game, asked which should give way, chose to keep the graveyard and shorten the route.

Places will be found. Stand in a named place for the first time and the game will write Discovered and its name on your screen, once, and pay a little experience. The four names approved for Reedhaven are Tidewrack Shore for the arrival shore, The Reedwalk for the boardwalk, The Tide Lantern for the lantern tower and The Grazing Line for the north grazing line, and the map now carries the points for them. Nobody discovers anything yet: the part of the game that judges it is not on the servers, the points are on a map no server runs, and the live data lists no places at all.

A handful of other things are built and wait with the rest. A quest will be abandonable from its page in the quest log, after a card asks you to confirm, at most twenty times a day. Chat will scroll back over its last 200 lines, with a jump to the newest. Armour will lessen what hits you: a physical hit will lose a share that grows with the armour you wear and falls with the level of whatever struck it, and never more than three quarters. Creatures that hunt will keep a list of who has threatened them and go for the top of it, where now they keep their first target. Weapons will be drawn in your hand, for each item that has a model. Creatures are the part that is not finished. The way for a creature to wear a body of its own is built, and two, the mist adder and the reed skitter, have bodies from free-licence models; but the rows that say which body each of the marsh's seven creatures wears have not been edited to name them, so unless that is done the next client will draw all seven as the same deer-shaped stack of boxes it draws now.

What broke on the way. On the eleventh an update to Visual Studio, which Windows installed by itself, left the build tool judging every engine step out of date, and from then until 11:57 on 13 November, by the clock the servers keep, no change to the game's Windows code could be compiled; it took a rebuild of the engine's own parts, run once on the person's word, to bring it back, and two days of changes to that code could not be proved in the meantime. At 12:36 a usage limit on the tools much of this project is built and checked with cut off every builder in the four runs then in flight; three scripts passed that nothing to a verifier, which rightly refused to verify it, and the runs were restarted with a guard against that.

What is not in it, plainly. No client. The download is 0.1.25, the next one is not cut and has no date, and a rule since the thirtieth of October says that each phase takes as much as it can before a client goes out and that the person paying for the game is asked before the next is cut. When it does go out the world moves with it: a 0.1.25 client cannot enter the next release's zones, nor the reverse, because the network surface changed for quest abandoning, death, discovery, the border and the journal, so players update then and not before. Nothing above can have been seen by a player on the live servers, because none of it runs there. At four minutes past noon on 13 November, by the clock the servers keep, the zones took content version 100, which the person paying for the game published; it carries the same five quests, four people and three regions as before, and no places. The six quests, the town's other people and the places wait on a publish that waits on a zone that can show them. The graveyards and the healers have no names, the Tearers have no voices in the town, and no photograph of the new town has been taken in a client. Reedhaven still has its four people.