This past while I've been working on some changes to Tilemap Town to try and get things in place to make it handle unreliable connections a bit better, as well as make it work better as an instant messaging thing, should it need to play a role like that in the future.

The game world is conceptualized as a bunch of entities that are nested in each other arbitrarily, and until now I had the concept of a player character very strongly tied to the concept of a player's connection and their client status, but they're separated now. That means:

• A connection can exist on its own without a corresponding character in the wold
• I can later set up something where a character loses its connection and has it replaced with a new one while staying in the world and not creating a lot of noise with notices about the player disconnecting and reconnecting
• With some light refactoring I can make it so I can attach a connection to any kind of entity and let you play as anything
• I may be able to later set up something where multiple people control the same character? That may be messy though.

A very important part of Tilemap Town for me is the concept of presence, where there's a feeling of actually hanging out with your friends because you're actively present on the platform, taking up a specific position in a specific location in a virtual world with other people, and it's really important to me that I preserve that. It's important that if you chat somewhere then people hours later who weren't involved will not see it, maintaining some privacy and also just making it meaningful to be there for something.

But, at the same time Tilemap Town kind of plays the role of being a space to exist and interact with other people that is not tied to whatever a big company ends up deciding to do to make more money. There's some amount of comfort in knowing that even if Discord eventually becomes full of ads or whatever I'll still have this. With that in mind, it's helpful to have a chat method I can rely on longterm that isn't focused around everyone being actively present.

Lots of other kinds of platforms I know about already have big problems, like Telegram feeling really icky with the Pepes and dogwhistles, IRC being designed for a different era's needs, and other things I've looked at being too strongly tied to phones for my comfort (Signal requiring itself to be on your phone to use the desktop app is unacceptable to me). So it's helpful to have the cool reliable hangout some friends and I already use be able to fulfill a simple (1-on-1 messaging only, rich text only) version of this use case too, should it be required, without compromising what it's about. There's some precedent here with Furcadia's Pounce!.

The ability to just kind of partially log into a Tilemap Town account and be able to see when your friends are online and message them is great, since then you actually can have that be a thing where you're just always logged into (if you want to) without making presence meaningless, and you can have a phone app or whatever that lets you be reachable and talk to your friends here and there as you're out and about, without just idling on a map that you aren't really looking at.