WorldForge — for grown-ups 🏗️
WorldForge is a playable-place builder for ages 9–14. Your child paints a place from a tool palette — walls, water, keys and doors — sends Beam the woodpecker to play it (real pathfinding that collects keys and opens doors), and publishes a solvable place as a world code. It's the flagship of the maker-ladder — the rung where the child builds a full 2-D world with interactive parts and playtests it.
1 · Build your place
Pick a tool from the palette, then tap the grid: 🧱 Wall, 🌊 Water (Beam won't cross it), 🔑 Key and 🚪 Door, or move 🐦 Start and 🏁 Flag. Tap 🧽 Erase to clear a cell. Tap the Key or Door tool again to change its colour (gold → blue → red).
2 · Keys open doors
A door blocks the way until Beam has picked up the matching-colour key. So a locked door is a real puzzle: is the key reachable before the door? Colours are also shown as border styles (solid / dashed / dotted), so they read even without colour.
3 · Send Beam (playtest)
Tap Send Beam → 🐦. Beam searches every route — collecting keys and opening doors — and the path he found lights up as dots. If there's no way to the flag, he tells you why (for example, "he can't reach the gold key"). That's the playtest telling you the place is unfair.
Before Beam goes, you can Walk it yourself: arrow keys, or tap a square next to you, one step at a time. You walk by Beam's rules (a key goes in your pocket, a door opens when its colour arrives), so you play your own place before the machine does. If you dressed yourself in DressTots and shared the look on this device, Use me lets that figure do the walking.
Pick the 🔍 Look tool and tap any key, button, door, bridge or logic gate (or move onto it with the arrow keys) and its rule shows under the grid as one sentence. Look never changes your place: WHEN Beam picks up this gold key → DO open 2 gold doors. A logic gate shows its truth table, and a gate you wired in the Workshop is named as yours.
4 · Publish a world
When Beam gets through, tap Publish world to save a world code — the whole place (walls, water, keys, doors, buttons, bridges and gates) as a code you can copy. Nothing uploads; the code lives on your device.
For older builders: three searches
On Three searches, one place, breadth-first search, depth-first search and wall-following explore the same place side by side, with the order each one looks in and its step count. The rules are Beam’s; only the order of looking differs.
Meet the crew
- Beam the woodpecker — the first visitor; he hops through your place square by square to playtest it.
- The palette — walls, water, keys, doors, start and flag you paint onto the grid.
- The path dots — exactly the route Beam found (or none, with the reason why).
What it teaches
- Level design: a good place is twisty and solvable — build → playtest → fix.
- Cause and order: a locked door means the key must come first — the heart of puzzle design.
- Publishing: a world you made becomes a thing someone else plays.
We make no claim WorldForge raises test scores. It runs entirely on your device: no account, no sign-in, no public gallery or strangers, nothing leaves your browser. The 3-D view is an optional tap-to-load extra; the flat grid works everywhere. To write rules for the moving parts (“when the button is pressed, open the gate”), try the script page.