You push once. The land and the herd decide together what that meant.
A solo-built multiplayer god game. It got all the way to a complete playable season — a full season arc with an archive ending — and then went on the back burner.
A god's input is blunt by design: a nudge, not an order. Nothing in the gesture says what should happen. Everything that makes it interesting happens afterwards, downstream, in the simulation — which is also where it stops being yours.
That is the design law, and terra was built on the same one: act simply, the system interprets, the outcome escapes you. Two games, one bet — that the gap between the gesture and the result is the thing worth playing.
The original vision was a living-nature world. By the author's own account it got lost trying to be a game — the nature receded as the systems arrived, and the thing that had drawn him to it in the first place ended up underneath them.
The unfinished shape is the herd. Herding came from a sheepdog concept, where you press on animals rather than command them; the open idea is that it turns into inhabiting wildlife instead — being in the herd rather than above it.
Three beats, in that order. Break the order and it's a strategy game.
Act simply
The whole interface is one gesture with no argument attached. You choose where to press, and that is the entire scope of your authorship.
The system interprets
Terrain, season, and a herd with its own rules take the gesture as pressure and work out the rest. The same push at two places on the map is two different events.
The outcome escapes you
What comes back is never quite what was asked for, and it keeps happening after you stop watching. A god who could predict it wouldn't be playing.
Backburner, but finished enough to walk back into.
What exists. A mature design document and a playable HTML demo, sitting in the repo together. The season it reached is complete: it arcs, it ends, and the ending is an archive of what happened rather than a score.
What's open. Whether the living-nature world comes back — visible seasons, growth you can watch — and whether the herd stops being something you drive and becomes something you're inside.