Prometheusdevlog
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The game behind the engine

· 3 min read

Contents
  1. A dungeon that reads its players
  2. You can't die, but you can forget
  3. Holding the line
  4. Why build an engine for it

Before the engine posts start, here's what all of it is for.

Forgotten Memories, Endless Abyss is an online MMO built around one shared goal: dive as deep and as far as possible. Humanity has found a dungeon that seems to have no bottom. It's so vast that towns have sprung up just to keep adventurers supplied, and everyone is chasing the same questions. Does it end? Why does it exist? Is there a story beneath it all?

The name has some history. Forgotten Memories was a game idea of mine from college, and it still has a Steam page from back then. Once there's a game to talk about, that page will be carrying this one.

A dungeon that reads its players

The dungeon isn't just procedurally generated; it's behaviourally generated. It watches what its players do, in aggregate, and reshapes its landscapes, difficulty and monsters to match. Every layer sits somewhere between order and anarchy.

  • Order comes from cooperation, guild work and players policing each other. Monster pressure eases, towns grow, and blighted ground heals into livable land.
  • Anarchy comes from player-killing and hostility. Spawns get nastier, the terrain degrades toward a hellscape, and town defences can be overrun.

Anarchy spreads like a sickness: one pocket, then many, then faster and faster. A layer that flips blocks fast travel through it and creeps back up toward the shallower layers, so griefing on a deep floor becomes everyone's emergency. Nothing is permanently solved. A paradise left alone can fall again.

You can't die, but you can forget

There's no permadeath. Every revival costs you something instead: fragments of memory. Abilities you've earned can weaken with each revival until they're gone, becoming Forgotten Memories. You feel yourself slipping before anything is lost outright.

The way to get them back is to go deeper. Clearing the dungeon and discovering new layers recovers what death took, so loss pushes you forward rather than back toward safety. That's the title: the endless abyss is the dungeon, and Forgotten Memories are what it costs you, and what it repays.

Holding the line

Roughly every ten layers a raid boss blocks the way. Beat it and travel to that depth unlocks for everyone. But bosses come back. As one nears its return, monsters surge until the layer breaks out in a stampede, and an ignored break loses that layer, then the ones above it, one by one. The frontier and the homeland are the same responsibility.

Towns need supplying too. Players haul materials to keep them running, and an under-supplied town dries up and loses its services. Guilds form around defence, expansion, exploration or policing, and a big enough guild can hold a layer, for a while.

There's more under the surface than this, and some of it is meant to be discovered by players rather than read in a devlog, so I'll leave it there.

Why build an engine for it

A world like this needs things an off-the-shelf engine doesn't hand you: a server that owns the simulation for everyone, the same simulation running on the player's device in a shipped game, and a pipeline that turns 3D models into the pixel-art sprites that live in its 3D dungeon. It also has to run well on phones.

So I'm building Prometheus, a custom 2.5D engine and editor on an all-open-source stack with no vendor royalties. The next posts are about that.