Saijo City 2025 Roadmap

A project that has been occupying my time is slowly becoming a reality: the Saijo City Metaverse. This is the roadmap for Phase 1.

Originally, Saijo was a cyberpunk city built in the virtual world of Second Life about 20 years ago and has existed on different platforms and in different ways ever since. It attracted emergent gaming, role-players, corporate brands, writers, machinimists, and virtual photographers. It was (and remains) an open world.

The open world piece is important, because I've worked to design the city-state with two key tenets at the core: Connected Universe and Open Content.

Connected Universe

For me, a shared universe doesn't go far enough. I want this world to be inter-connected and to be eventually affected by a diverse multi-genre game ecosystem. For example, the Saijo universe is affected by player activity and decisions within other games in the same setting, regardless if those games are simple mobile puzzles, tabletop RPGs, or FPS. It's a complicated and potentially expensive proposition, yet I believe putting this at the forefront of design decisions now will help make this a reality down the road later.

Open Content

When people showed up in the early 3D version so many years ago, they did anything and everything. I was simply the architect of streets and buildings. It was the people who walked those streets, engaged in combat, roleplayed, wrote stories, created movies and pictures– the absolute essence of exploration and emergent gameplay. It was living, breathing, derivative work.

Roadmap

There are eight pieces in this roadmap of the first phase.

1. The City Guide
   The main sourcebook for the city's lore, history, corporations, gangs, etc. This is the main resource for understanding the world and creating derivative works or gameplay. The City Guide also contains industries, corporations, jobs, and a compatible framework for other RPGs, such as 5e etc.
2. Saijo City RPG
   The main RPG, based on and compatible with the excellent Cypher Systems TTRPG.
3. Saijo City: Theseus
   The worldbuilding TTRPG, built on the brilliant Ex Novo system.
4. Trading Cards
   Cards are fun and both RPGs already have plenty of elements like NPCs, resources, bad guys, and locations that can be used with both RPGs or simply as collector pieces.
5. Saijo City: Takeover!
   A chess/checkers hybrid style of game played on a grid.
6. 5YM810T1C
   Pronounced 'symbiotic', this abstract part of the project revolves around the many city sports teams and their related underworld nexuses. This is compatible with larger-scale battle systems.
7. Saijo Newsfeed
   The newsfeed is an ongoing river of news based on game activity across the connected universe, results of player campaigns, etc. Mostly automatically generated, also contains official lore, rumor, and seasonal campaigns injected into the stream.
8. Saijo City OST
   A soundtrack to play while gaming.

There's still a lot of work to be done with websites, discord, socials, etc. I'll post more updates and organize information as everything progresses. Thanks for reading and if you've been with me over the years through this, I can't tell you enough how much you're appreciated!