Untrustedlife

Development Logs

What is Pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage is a persistent-world retro ascii roguelike-thing built in Godot that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Where you play individual lives inside the same simulated world. Your characters die permanently, but the world keeps going, and what you do can affect future playthroughs.

The world has its own simulated CANON. Your creatures exist within that alongside other important people/creatures. So it’s not just you.

​You can also create as many worlds as you want to play in!

Playable Modes

Unlike most games, Pilgrimage does not simply have a single playable mode. Instead, it has multiple modes that all play very differently from one another. Like Spore or Dwarf Fortress.
Each mode is developed almost like it is its own game, but they all act as different ways of experiencing the same persistent world, and everything you do impacts the world’s CANON.

There are two currently playable modes. (Though I plan to make more)

King’s Sea III

A sequel to my game King’s Sea II, but built inside Pilgrimage. In it, you play as an aquatic creature trying to survive, grow, eat, and live out its life in the simulated ecosystem. It’s an aquatic life sim taking place inside the larger world.

You start as a baby and grow into an adult, and your goal can be whatever you want it to be. Hunt down the creature that killed your last character, live peacefully and die of old age, or ascend and become enlightened.
Yes, you can be THE BUDDHA FISH.

Canon Viewer

Your window into the world’s CANON (Which includes its history), letting you read about the people, creatures, generated plants, and events, and other emergent nonsense.

You can also view the CANONdex (Beastiary), and you can also summon new hist figs from thin air, simulate time skips, and see what happens. (Note it can be easy to simulate a lot just to see what happens here, but remember that it permanently affects your world.)

One fun way to play is to check the CANON Viewer before starting a run and remember a few interesting historical figures. Then, after a few in-game years have passed, you can check the CANON Viewer again to see what they’ve been up to in the meantime.

All your runs directly affect the world’s CANON. Creatures that kill you become historical figures, your own dead characters can return as ghosts in later runs, and you can encounter and even kill existing historical figures yourself, which means you can also get revenge on the creature that killed you in your last playthrough.

A crayfish can beat a fisherman to death in the world simulation, then later, when you’re playing, the ghost of that fisherman can try to catch you as “one last catch.”.

Or you can do a battle royale, summon like 100 historical figures, and simulate time until only one remains to see who survives :3

Development Goals

This is very different from Dwarf Fortress, where for the longest time much of the broader world simulation did not continue running while you played. In my case i’ve started development with the world sim running as you play, so all future developmnet will be with this in mind, Of course, Pilgrimage’s simulation is much more simplistic right now than DFs. But i plan to eventually get to that level of scope. Wish me luck :3

Moddability

In Pilgrimage, almost all of the game’s text, creatures, non-generated plants, and similar content (Even your worlds) are stored in what I call “block” files. These are simply JSON files that follow a defined schema. You can find the schemas in the block file folder itself, and it’s very easy to add new creatures, plants, or pretty much any other kind of thing you want.

World Importing

You can import custom fantasy worlds into Pilgrimage, including existing fictional settings, if you have the patience to build them using my JSON schemas, which are provided in the */blocks folder. Once imported, the simulation takes over, creating new stories and alternate histories. You can also duplicate worlds and see how differently things play out!
(You can also package creatures and plants directly into the world file. You don’t need to create separate block files for each one!)

You can download custom world templates above!