Cut your shape
Start from a cutout in the library or draw the silhouette yourself. A monster on wheels is fine. Nobody is checking.
58 shapes · or draw your own outline
01 — the visual rule
Everything you see
could be made
on a craft table.
Lined paper, construction paper, cardboard, tracing paper, tape, glue, crayon. No plastic. No realistic stone. No perfectly clean digital gradients.
The rule is one sentence long and it decides everything: if it couldn't be cut out with kids' scissors, it isn't in the world. That is not a style, it is a constraint, and it is what stops the world from slowly turning into every other sandbox game.
It settles arguments cheaply. Should the river have a specular highlight? No — paper doesn't. Should the mountain get a rock texture? No — it gets folded cardstock and a snowline cut from white paper. Should the UI have a drop shadow? Only the hard, offset kind that a cutout standing a few millimetres off the page would cast.
The pay-off is that the whole thing hangs together. Everything shares the same handful of materials, so a bridge somebody built out of scraps sits comfortably next to a hillside that was authored months earlier.
The paper drawer.
Every sheet below is a real file the game draws from, not a mock-up of one. When a material is harvested it visually remembers which sheet it came from — salmon ribbonwood stays salmon ribbonwood in your scrapbook.
- Brown construction paper bark, soil, cardboard boxes
- Green construction paper leaves, grass, hedges
- Blue lined notebook paper the ground you walk on
- Blue plaid wrapping paper picnic blankets, curtains
- Folded stripes awnings, market stalls
- Cork board notice boards, backing
- Folded pebbles, aqua shallow water, tiling
- Monstera patch undergrowth in the damp places
- Ribbon weave trim, gift wrap, bunting
- Crosshatch cubes quilts, market floors
- Subtle bubbles deep water
- Building blocks garden walls, foundations
the first thing you do
You are a drawing.
Shape first — a silhouette from the library, or an outline you draw yourself. Then paper stock, then a printed pattern, then crayon on top.
Stamp it
Eyes, mouths, hair and limbs go on as pre-drawn stamps — and they are allowed to hang outside the silhouette, because a crayon stroke can never make a convincing arm.
39 stamps · arms may hang off the edge
Nothing is bought
Your drawing decides nothing about how you move. The hidden body presets — small, wide, tall, wheeled, hovering — come from the shape you chose, so a big flourish never buys a big hitbox.
no advantage · no hitbox
Keep a wardrobe
Save as many looks as you like, rename them, wear whichever one fits the day. Later the wardrobe becomes a closet you build in your own house, displaying the looks you chose to share.
tiers are display only, never capacity
the sheet grew to 130 × 180 around a 100 × 140 cutout box, purely to make room for arms that stick out.
— avatar-and-identity.md
how big it is
A neighbourhood
is a stack of pages.
Not metres — pages. Square sheets that each hold their own terrain, paths, props, resources and permissions. Some are authored exactly, some are grown from a seed, and most are authored structure with the details rolled.
Distant hills live in a parallax backdrop behind tracing-paper haze, so far away actually looks far away rather than just being smaller.
Water runs creek to river to something Mississippi, bending across pages, throwing off waterfalls and swamps, ending in a lake. Width and depth are functions of distance from the source. You can always wade. Deep water is where a boat becomes useful, never where you die — and a river is never a wall, because bridges, docks and beaches arrive with it.
