The city was built to keep something in. Nobody remembers what.
Blacksite is a real-time multiplayer door game for NetBBS: a cyberpunk city called Karst, sealed off from the world for forty-one years under a sky full of orbital wreckage, with a network underneath it that has been very patiently running the numbers. Players are Wakes, freshly decanted clones with no memories, and the game is about what they become and how far down they are willing to go.
It is played in a terminal, over Telnet, SSH, or NetBBS's web client, at 80×24 or larger, in colour. Several callers on the same node share one persistent world in real time: they see each other move, fight, and talk; they run the city's network (the Lattice) while crewmates guard their bodies; they capture relays for their factions; and once a season they go down into the Blacksite together.
Design complete, implementation not started. This repository
currently holds the world bible, the game design, the technical
architecture, the asset manifest, and a build plan broken into slices
that are filed as issues. See docs/plan/00-roadmap.md for the plan and
the issues for what is being worked on.
Blacksite is developed as a third-party native door: it has no commit
access to NetBBS. What it needs from the platform is written up in
docs/upstream/ and filed in the NetBBS repository.
- Players and the curious:
docs/world/00-bible.md. - Developers and agents:
AGENTS.md, thendocs/design/02-architecture.md. - SysOps: the operator guide arrives with the first release.
One long-lived game service per NetBBS node owns the world (an asyncio simulation with a SQLite database in the door's install directory). Each caller's NetBBS door session runs a thin client that connects to that service over a local socket, sends keys, and renders what the server tells it to. Nothing leaves the machine.
BSD-2-Clause. See LICENSE.