Stonelark

Walk into a town and people are already living their lives—schedules, relationships, and their own opinions of each other and of you. Do something notable, good or bad, and it can travel as rumor, reputation, or simply change how someone treats you. 

Stonelark is a pixel-art fantasy RPG where the world keeps track of what you do—and echoes it back at you.

🎮 What's Playable in this Demo?

• The Town of Stonelark: Experience living town routines across a full day/night cycle—from morning market commerce on some days to occasional tavern performances by local bards.
• Wilderness & Caves: Venture beyond town walls into caves and the surrounding wilderness. Ask others about what you've found, share your stories, and see how they react.
• Origins & Daily Routines: Choose from different character backgrounds and discover that your history can affect how people treat you.
• Character Wizard: Customize your appearance, clothing, and gear before setting out.
• Social Simulation: Talk to people about themselves, other people, and things happening around town. Characters have their own knowledge, relationships, opinions, and perspectives, and those can affect how they respond to you.

🛠️ About This Build

This is an early playable prototype, not a finished game.

Many parts of the world are still placeholders or intentionally minimal. In a few places, activities and objects exist primarily to provide something for the social and dialogue systems to react to while I build out the larger game. There are also still bugs and unfinished edges.

The core simulation and social systems are further along than the surrounding content, so you'll probably see some rough spots. That's part of what I'm interested in exploring with this build.

🧠 What's Underneath?

Stonelark is built around a portable Entity Component System (ECS) designed to keep the simulation independent from the presentation layer and able to scale as the world grows.

The social and dialogue systems are built on top of that simulation. Dialogue Director V2 (DDV2) uses the actual world state, character knowledge, relationships, perspectives, and available actions to determine what can happen in an interaction.

The goal isn't to have an LLM simply generate dialogue. The goal is to use it inside a structured simulation where the game determines the relevant context and possible actions, and the resulting information can become part of the world state.

I'm building the underlying systems this way because I want the world to be able to support a lot of small interactions and consequences without requiring every possible conversation to be individually authored.  Data driving the dialogue harness requires a new way to author and a lot of simulation systems .

🌲 Where It's Going

This prototype is the beginning of a much larger experiment.

I'm working toward a social RPG where there are many different things worth doing—not just because they advance a quest, but because the world can notice them.

Help someone. Sell something. Make an enemy. Attend a gathering. Miss an appointment. Learn something about another person. Explore somewhere dangerous. Build a reputation. Gain access to people and places. Lose it again.

The intention is for these systems to overlap and create opportunities that aren't completely predetermined.

Over time I want to add more activities, progression ladders, relationships, personal stories, reputation, rumors, commitments, and other systems that make the town and surrounding world feel increasingly open-ended.

Some of that is here now. Some of it isn't.

This build is a first look at the direction I'm heading.