Cozy Corner Devlog #1

I've been busily working away on cozy-corner.at and thought it would be good to capture my thoughts about what I'm building and why I'm excited about it.

Before we get to the exciting parts let's start with the genesis.

Over a decade ago I came up with the idea for a Clash of Clans like game. You were a wizard, you would build a tower, stock it with various items you collected, and cast various spells on it. Then you would visit other wizard's towers and try to fight your way through their spells and traps an into the wizard's sanctum – at which point you'd earn some more stuff to put in your own tower to defend it against other wizards.

Lately I've been diving deep into the At Protocol and part of that is thinking of new and interesting things to build on it. This exploration had mostly been focused on social adjacent apps until I read Dan Abramov's great post on the at proto as a social file system this has left me thinking of the addressable problem space as more as more:

"What are tools that would benefit from user's having data portability?"

I'm not sure if Online Gaming is really the answer to that question but it's where my head has been at lately...

So let's imagine our wizard game but now each user's tower is a record on their PDS. You can visit the tower and the game engine acts as the app layer and lets you fight your way to the sanctum.

The biggest issue is controlling scarcity – a user could easily write whatever items, tools, traps, and spells to their PDS. No need to actually go through those pesky battles to earn them. I thought of several ways that the app view could provide assurances but then the whole point of hosting data on the PDS starts to break down - If an app view went rouge or just got taken offline you'd lose the attestation that you earned the records in your pds.

So since I didn't want to put blockchain on the at proto what could I do? The simple answer was to come up with a "game" that didn't involve scarcity. I'm calling that game Cozy Corner.

I'm going to go through the evolution of Cozy Corner in more depth in future posts, and it has evolved quite a bit. In it's current conception it's less of a game and more of a social neighborhood.

Rooms are records hosted on a user's PDS decorated and stocked with items. Room exits lead to other rooms, potentially other user's rooms. Fully realized each room becomes part of a web that you can explore, find treasures and discover connections that you never knew existed.

Exploration, Creation, Curation, and Collection.

I'm excited to keep building, and keep writing - hopefully you're excited to try it you when I'm done.