Road Trip Island

No open TBDs

A cooperative, non-competitive web game played in the car on long drives. The children share one persistent home island where they build and farm. The real-world journey feeds the game: as the car passes pre-loaded route waypoints, new islands unlock to explore and gather materials from.

Core loopdrive → waypoint triggers → new island or resources unlock → explore and gather → return home → build and farm

Design pillars

• Cooperative, never competitive.
• Two roles that fit two very different ages, in one shared world.
• The trip is the progression system.
• Permanent home base — nothing they build is ever left behind.

Settled

No open TBDs

Roles are soft, not locked — either child can do anything. Difficulty of a task scales rather than being gated by player.

Parents have no special role or admin powers. They can join as an ordinary player if they want to explore alongside the kids, and can leave at any time.

Identity

Each player has their own persistent identity, stored in local storage on their own device. Pick up the same phone on the next trip and you are the same character — no login, no account.

One device, one player. A device carries exactly one identity, and there is no recovery path: if local storage is cleared or the phone is replaced, that character is gone and a new one is made on next launch. The shared island and stockpile are server-side, so nothing that was built is lost — only the character.

No player cap. Any number of devices can join a trip. Since the game is cooperative with a shared pool, extra players add hands rather than pressure.

Solo play works as-is. One child alone in the car needs no special handling — roles are soft, both toolsets are available to every player, and nothing in the design requires a second character to be present.

Settled

No open TBDs

On launching the web app, you choose a mode: Player, where you control a character, or Base screen, a shared ambient view of the island with no character.

The game is fully playable with players only. The base screen is an optional bonus, not a requirement. Nothing essential may live exclusively on it.

Player mode — phones

• Camera follows your own character.
• Tap anywhere to walk there.
• Tap an object to interact with it.
• Other players visible and live.
• All core actions available: explore, gather, build, farm, check the stockpile, check journey progress.

Base screen mode — iPad, or any spare screen

A calm, glanceable overview. Adds atmosphere and shared awareness:

• The home island world view.
• Journey progress bar.
• Shared resource stockpile.
• All players' characters moving live.
• Waypoint unlock moments as a little celebration.

The view is pannable and zoomable — drag to move, pinch or scroll to zoom — with a reset view button that returns to the default framing of the island. That is the full extent of its interactivity: no character, no actions that change game state.

Any number of base screens can connect at once. They all behave identically and none is privileged, so there is nothing to enforce or arbitrate. Each one pans and zooms independently — camera position is local to the screen, not shared state.

Presence and dropping out

A character's presence is driven by radio silence from their device, not by any explicit leave action.

• After 2 seconds of silence, a symbol appears above the character. They stay in the world and keep their position — this is the common case on a drive and must read as ordinary, not alarming.
• After 1 minute of silence, the character drops out and is removed from the world. The symbol is the warning; the drop-out is the conclusion.
• On rejoining, the player respawns exactly where they were. Position is part of server-side state, so it survives the drop-out regardless of how long they were gone or which device they come back on.

This covers both cases with one rule: a phone in a tunnel and a phone put down look the same to the server, and both resolve correctly. Note that the 2-second symbol is deliberately far shorter than the offline-play window in Technical Architecture — the departed player's own device keeps running and stays playable while the others see them flagged.

Orientation and screen size

Both portrait and landscape are supported, on players and base screens alike. No minimum phone size is specified — the layout is expected to cope with whatever the family already owns.

Settled

9 open TBDs

• Route is pre-loaded before the trip.
• One device acts as the location tracker, feeding GPS position to the server.
• Passing a waypoint fires an event: an island unlocks, a supply drop lands, a materials haul arrives, or a random event occurs.
• Progress bar builds anticipation: “10% until the forest island unlocks.”
• The world does not physically expand around the home base — unlocks are new destinations plus rewards.

Route setup

A route is authored by typing in places, not drawing on a map. Before the trip, a parent enters home, the goal, and any waypoints in between, as an ordered list from home to goal. Each entry is geocoded to a GPS coordinate.

Geocoding happens at setup time, not during the drive. The resolved coordinates are stored with the route and downloaded up front, so the journey system needs no network and no map service once the car is moving — consistent with the offline requirement in Technical Architecture.

A waypoint registers as hit on proximity: when the tracked position comes within a set distance of the waypoint's coordinate, the event fires. Nothing needs to match the road, the direction of travel, or the order in which places were entered — being near the point is the whole condition.

Because waypoints are places the family chose by name, they are already meaningful: the forest island unlocks at a real forest, the harbour at a real harbour. That is the intended link between the drive and the game, and it needs no landmark detection of its own.

Location tracker election

The devices decide among themselves who tracks location — no manual setup, no prompts.

• A base screen device is preferred whenever one is present and connected.
• If there is no base screen, or it drops out, any player device automatically takes over.
• Exactly one tracker is active at a time; the server arbitrates and tells clients who holds the role.
• Handover is silent and seamless — progress must never stall or double-fire waypoints because the tracker changed.
• A device that loses signal or is backgrounded loses the role; the next eligible device picks it up.
• Whoever holds the role, waypoint events are resolved server-side so all players see the same progress.

4 open TBDs

The permanent base. Never resets, never moves. Everything built here stays.

• Free-roam area for both characters.
• Buildable space.
• Farmable space, created by the player rather than pre-placed.
• The shared stockpile lives here.

5 open TBDs

Each waypoint unlocks a new island. Children travel there to explore and gather, then return home to build.

5 open TBDs

Shared stockpile — both children draw from the same pool. This is deliberate: it forces cooperation.

6 open TBDs — nothing settled yet

5 open TBDs

Farming is crafted, not given. The child uses a tool to clear a plot anywhere on the island, then plants seeds wherever they like.

4 open TBDs

Settled so far: shared stockpile, shared island, live visibility of each other, complementary roles.

5 open TBDs

• 2.5D, Stardew Valley–style: a slightly angled view so trees and buildings have height and overlap what's behind them.
• Depth sorting by Y position — objects lower on screen draw in front.
• Tile-based islands, layered sprites.
• Warm, friendly, readable at a glance on a phone in a moving car.

5 open TBDs

• Web app served from the family's home server, reachable over the internet.
• Phones connect over 4G/5G. A base screen device such as an iPad connects via Wi-Fi tethered to a phone.
• Same app on every device; mode is chosen at launch, player or base screen.
• Real-time sync between all connected clients.
• Rendering: Phaser, which handles 2.5D depth sorting natively.

Connectivity resilience — hard requirement

Mobile coverage on a long drive will drop out repeatedly. The game must never break, lose progress, or need a restart because of it.

• Each client keeps a local copy of game state and stays playable during a dropout — movement, exploration and interaction should not freeze while offline.
• Actions are queued locally and replayed to the server on reconnect.
• Auto-reconnect with backoff; no manual refresh, ever.
• Connection status is visible but calm — a small indicator, not a blocking error dialog.
• The server is the authority on shared state (stockpile, buildings, unlocks); conflicts resolve server-side on reconnect.
• Frequent, cheap server-side saves, so a dropout at any moment loses at most a few seconds.
• Waypoint and GPS events buffer locally and fire on reconnect if the trigger happened while offline.
• The journey route is downloaded up front, not streamed, so progression works with no signal at all.

5 open TBDs

Assets to be generated via an image-generation MCP server, with the goal of the project being built by Claude end to end.

6 open TBDs — the section is the list

No open TBDs

• Competition between the children, scoreboards, or win/lose states.
• A world that expands around the home base.
• Creature collecting — considered, rejected in favour of building.
• A native iOS app.

Settled