BT006: Chromed Out

An overview of the project about the unhinged first decades of a planet, that can now truthfully see the corner that it has backed itself into.

Anyone from my community, or who has ever been on these servers before, will probably tell you that I am up-pumping how good this shit is. And I kind of am. I mean it’s a low-spec game, an antiquated engine, and a lot of smart people distorting and twisting it using a scripting language built for application extensions. So, we make application extensions, to some degree.

Every server is: Framework → Schema → Plugins. My friends currently produce and maintain the Framework for this, that was abandoned(?) by the original developers, that have since moved on.

So, one could call the Schema the product, the plugin it’s extensions, and the framework it’s libraries.

At the core, the bulk of how you make something polished or unpolished, is how much effort you put towards the plugins, for all of this.

But enough about that.

Core Purpose

I suppose that, in actuality, Chromed Out is a story-telling series that is written by a team of writers, but also written by players, as well. It’s a game, for sure, but it’s also designed to be a very long-term, thought-out, gameplay-looped simulation of a person’s lifestyle, as you choose it to play out through decision-making.

It’s a power-fantasy simulator, that is to some degree, designed specifically to bring out the absolute worst in people. Players are incentivized to be brutal and exploitative, classist and vapid. Care is taken into creating a gameplay loop that is centered around further pollution of a rapidly decaying world society.

Interactions are handled completely player to player, and automated gameplay systems largely have to do with your personal condition, your assets, your abilities, and your lifestyle.

Through this, a micro-society forms across locations/servers that contends with it’s own problems, solutions, failures, and successes. An active economy is formed, that is susceptible to inflation and deflation, and it becomes a collective task for a specific class of character to maintain that.

Everything going on, at any given point of time, is usually traced back to the actions of an actual player-character. Through long-form collaborative writing at both the permanent (wiki, lore articles) and the temporal (in-game events/occurrences), we have chronicled a massively detailed world that focuses on some alternate history, fiction, and non-fiction.

We’ve written the current state of the world, and within that, others have written about how we arrived at that point. Others currently write the details of current affairs, and the results of decisions made in-server that have affected the world around it. For myself, I prefer to write some of the more abstract details of the world, though started with a rough, larger picture of the world. I also enjoy writing about the viewed concepts/experiences of the ‘degradation of society’ as it exists, in this very objectively unhappy world.

Each decision matters, and is permanent - Chromed Out is an ever-evolving multi-media project that was born from collaborative writing and worldbuilding, hosted in many different forms.

It seeks to tell the story of the unhinged first decades of a planet, that can now truthfully see the corner that it has backed itself into, through the viewpoints of a collection of individual characters that stand out from the crowd, somehow.