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.
4 · Publish a world
When Beam gets through, tap Publish world to save a world code — the whole place (walls, water, keys and doors) as a little file a friend can load. Nothing uploads; the code lives on your device.
Meet the crew
- Beam the woodpecker — the first visitor; he playtests your place by playing 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. Moving/mechanical parts and full scripting are still on our roadmap.