Not Oregon Trail
A long road, a small wagon, and questionable decisions — a trail sim whose real engine is a text spine you can replay without drawing a single pixel.
Play it: not.gpl.sh — working title, every screen a work in progress.
What it is
You know the shape of it. A wagon, a party, two thousand pounds of cargo, a hundred and sixteen days of food at twelve pounds a day, and a river between you and the next landmark. The screen tells you it is 53°F at 8:11 in the morning on April 1st, that you have six oxen and $264, and that the Kansas River Crossing is 102 miles ahead.
Then the river asks the only question the genre has ever really asked: ford it, caulk the wagon and float it, pay the ferry, or wait a day and see if the water drops. Danger, risky, safe, and a shrug. The game grades the choice and the road keeps going.
The part worth looking at
Most browser remakes of this are a renderer with some state behind it. This one is inverted.
Underneath the pixels is a sim spine — the whole run as a deterministic simulation that needs no screen at all. play/run executes an entire journey and prints it as text, with a replay link at the end. The pixel-art presentation is one harness over that spine, not the thing itself.
That buys the unglamorous properties you want and almost never get in a hobby game: a run is reproducible, a bug is a seed plus a tick, and you can test the whole game without a browser in the loop. The renderer is a view. The simulation is the product.
Everything is gated and regraded live. The asset gallery puts every sprite on one authored ground strip under an hour slider and a weather dropdown, and the whole lineup re-grades as you drag it — bison, wagon, oxen, the four walkers, all sitting in the same light at 61 fps. One place to see whether the art holds together at dusk, instead of finding out on the trail.
The harnesses
The entrances are the design, so they’re all exposed:
play/game | Register, Matt’s store, roles, checklist, then the trail |
play/travel | Straight onto the trail with a default outfit |
play/gallery | Every gated asset under a time-of-day slider |
play/run | The whole run in text on the sim spine, with a replay link |
prototypes | The design mockups the game bible was written from |
toy.html | The original text-mode toy it all started as |
The keyboard is a map of the screen: Tab opens the bag, Q–T is the hot bar, A–G is the party, N and M are the pad, 1–5 pick a choice, [ and ] change speed, P pauses.
Why it’s not on bmux
Every other game here lives on bmux.sh. This one sits on not.gpl.sh, which started as a joke about the working title and stuck. It is the only one of the set that began as a text toy and grew a renderer, rather than the other way round — and the domain is a reminder of that order.