edited by vera

For today’s Devs on Devs, we sat down with opnpc and 5p0rt5BEArD of Downstream, “the world's first Post Singularity Civilisation Simulator.” In this chat, the two spoke about all kinds of origins, building in Downstream, and what we can learn from gaming’s past. You can play Downstream, check out their builder docs, and learn more about their Redstone Community Spotlight.

Naming Origins

opnpc: So, let’s deal with the elephant in the room! Why is your name 5p0rt5BEArD?

5p0rt5BEArD: Good question. It's a nickname my friends gave me. When we started Playmint I didn't really have a good online tag and since a lot of the space is pseudonymous I felt like I needed to pick a good one. The name 5p0rt5BEArD is funny because it's surprising that I like sports. I'm stereotypically geeky, and it's unusual for someone of my perceived level of geekiness to either play or watch sports. What about you?

opnpc: I had the same thought when we started; “I need a pseudonym for working in this space.” opnpc stands for Over Powered Non Player Character. It came from that meme about most people being NPCs; the idea that some people are main characters but most people are NPCs. And I remember thinking, firstly, that's a bit mean.

And then, okay, surely the extent to which you're a main character or an NPC is a matter of perspective, right? And if everyone else sees themselves as main characters, it might actually be smart to go undercover as an NPC, but an overpowered one. You need me around to progress your main quest line!

5p0rt5BEArD: I think this whole project was your naming responsibility as well. Why is our game called Downstream?

opnpc: There's two reasons. One is convenience. The repo was named “DS” because the game was originally called Dawnseekers. And the engineers told the creatives that they could pick any name they like as long as it abbreviates to “DS”.

The other reason is that Downstream is a post-singularity civilization simulator. It's about what happens downstream of a fast-takeoff AI scenario. We imagine a friendly, well-meaning, but somewhat misguided AI has destroyed everything, and is trying to rebuild society out of hexagonal tiles and goo. We thought that was a fun prompt for a game about building. If you have to rebuild society from scratch, what do you build first? Games of course!

So with that in mind, what can you actually build in Downstream right now?

What Can You Build in Downstream?

5p0rt5BEArD: Downstream is a multiplayer world. Your agent in the world is a kind of woodland creature who moves around blue hexagons and gets to do a certain number of things like build or knock down buildings, extract goo from the world, make items, or turn those items into other items. Downstream is about using those core systems, and providing tools for people to build experiences out of those.

Right now in Downstream you can create what we call a zone, and as owner of the zone you get to shape what that little part of the world is like. Then anyone can go and play in your zone. You set some rules as the creator, but then everyone plays under that same set of rules. You’re creating zones and experiences for other players, but then other players can permissionlessly build on top of them, with the potential for chaos to emerge.

It's early days in the civilization simulation. What can you make out of goo?

opnpc: Well, you can make an infinite amount of things out of goo.

5p0rt5BEArD: I think that's more of the problem. Anything and nothing is possible. It makes it hard to explain the game to other people. Do your kids know what we're making? How do you explain Downstream to your kids?

opnpc: I just tell them that we make games. At a stretch, maybe you can have a conversation about where games come from in a more general sense, like who makes games and who owns them. I don't think we’ve got as far as talking about decentralization, but one of the times they see me most frustrated is when I'm trying to deal with permissions for Minecraft servers. So they will grow up with an understanding of the evils of centralised control!

What about you? Not just kids, but with friends and ex-colleagues. What do they think about what we're doing?

5p0rt5BEArD: It’s interesting trying to explain it to ex-colleagues, partly because there's a lot of misconception about working with anything to do with blockchain in the games industry. I mean they're polite about it. I don't think I've got a reputation for scamming people, but they think maybe I've been misled by someone else. By an overpowered NPC.

If I’m talking to my kids, I tell them I'm making games. If I've got a bit of time, we usually go quite high level quite quickly and start talking about the benefits of decentralization and sort of dismantling the power of centralized corporate networks and maybe talking about social media networks, before then bringing that back into games.

You can usually bring people on a journey. So what if the place where I publish games isn't owned by anyone? Or maybe the Apple App Store exists in a format where it's not owned by Apple and they don't have the right to pull games that they don't like. And people start understanding it from a high level and then understand what we're building with Downstream and sort of emergent composable worlds. It's still quite abstract though. I'm looking forward to being able to show more of them Downstream in practice.

Genuine Freedom in Games

opnpc: I think game developers are often in the place where they're super focused on trying to make and ship their games. And so if you're working on something that doesn't immediately help them make and ship their current game, it can seem just a bit bizarre.

5p0rt5BEArD: The normal mode of operation in game development is moment to moment, getting the next game done, getting it shipped. So while I've kind of gotten used to it now, I find it really refreshing that we're more future-thinking in what we're building. That is odd to most game development life.

And what about you? You're quite good at describing what we're doing at a high level.

opnpc: We're fascinated with the idea of giving people genuine creative freedom in games as something beyond just user-generated content. We want to give people the opportunity to make completely new things together. We heard someone in the scene call it wizard powers in reference to early MUD games — multi-user dungeon games rather than Lattice's MUD. We're imagining the feeling as something more like jamming with your friends or doing improv comedy.

It's that feeling of creating something meaningful together in that moment. So one of the thoughts we're chasing is: can we make everyone into a creator, give everyone the experience of making something genuinely new and cool, and the opportunity to show it off? I think the Autonomous Worlds thesis kind of gestures at this, but a lot of people have imagined AWs as these big monolithic spaces.

The problem with big shared social spaces is that they're really hard to manage. The main issues are actually social rather than technical. So in Downstream, we're giving everyone the power to make much smaller things at the beginning called zones. Everyone gets the chance to make a zone and you can go into someone's zone and help them build something new. Perhaps some of these zones will grow to be independent nation states and others might just stay as a little chill out area for you and your friends.

Blockchain is hard, so we do have technical issues too. We limit each zone to 20 concurrent users right now. But that will get better over time, whereas the social issues of having lots of people in one area will remain.

Since we’re talking about Autonomous Worlds, what do you think of when you use the phrase?

5p0rt5BEArD: My thinking evolves a lot. Many of us who've been thinking about it for the last year or so might have different answers. But the main thing for me is it's a godless world. A digital world that doesn't need anyone or any company in particular to keep it running. So if Playmint were to make an autonomous world, it's important that if we disappear, that world keeps going.

That's the essential bit of an autonomous world. But then what makes that interesting is everyone's experience and interaction with that world, I believe, will change when they trust that it's autonomous and doesn't rely on Playmint. So all of these creators creating in that world are creating on a consistent, solid bedrock — what we term digital physics. The set of rules that don't change in that world.

I don't think anything's really got there quite yet, but we're definitely on that path and we're trying to build Downstream to demonstrate the interesting bits that will be possible when it is autonomous. And I think it's a big step coming up with our first mainnet release of Downstream. That's a big part of credibly living forever.

So yeah, that’s why we took part in the race to mainnet. It's exciting to be on Lattice's Redstone in particular. Maybe opnpc, you can talk about why we're happy to be on Redstone.

What Can We Learn From Minecraft?

opnpc: This is still very early days for Downstream. We keep saying that we're like Pre-Alpha, like not even Alpha. But we want people to have that experience of building on something that feels independent of us as Playmint, like you say. So launching even a pre-alpha on mainnet is important step for us. And to do that with friends as part of a wider community effort makes it super fun. Seeing all the different projects coming together at the same time is really exciting.

5p0rt5BEArD: Yeah, definitely on-chain indie vibes. That feels like where we're at. It's fun, experimental stuff at this stage. We’re not at final solutions.

opnpc: Right, and Downstream is the way for like other people to get a piece of the action. We started off saying this as a joke, but we think Downstream might be the easiest and fastest place to make on-chain games right now. Partly just because a whole bunch of the work is done for you, so you can turn up and use our assets and infrastructure, and make your own little game in a zone.

We also love the story about Redstone in Minecraft. It might be apocryphal but it’s too perfect. In the original Java edition, Redstone was full of bugs. Things like quasi-connectivity and zero-tick piston retraction are unintentional features of how Redstone was implemented. But people have gone on to build these incredible machines on top of it. So at this point, nobody wants it fixed.

So when Microsoft came and rebuilt Minecraft in C++ for consoles, what they’ve called Bedrock Edition, they ‘fixed’ some of these bugs. This broke a whole bunch of the most useful farms and tutorials. And we think that's a pretty beautiful metaphor for a bunch of people working on something really early. The correct implementation is less important than capturing the imagination of builders and letting them cook.

5p0rt5BEArD: The important thing is that the physics of a world are fixed and reliable. People get annoyed if it's changed, but they don't get annoyed if it's somehow broken or not quite what the creator intended. They’ll work around the broken parts because that's the way the world is. That stability is important for people to build on top of it. It's definitely a good metaphor for what we think is cool about autonomous worlds.