Those Who Came Before
A browser game of archaeological interpretation: procedurally generated artefacts, an Interpretive Lens that bends what you see toward what you already believe, and error as the engine.
About
The core loop is: inspect a procedurally generated artefact, form an interpretation, record it, then meet new artefacts whose presentation is filtered through what you already believe. Wrong readings do not fail; they compound. The Interpretive Lens reorders observation salience, primes classification suggestions, and introduces omission blindness without ever fabricating or revealing occluded truth. It cannot lie to you; it just makes you more likely to confirm yourself. The procedural generator is the technical centrepiece: a bottom-up, intent-free context-free grammar over geometric primitives (elongated, cylindrical, flat-broad, ring-form and others). The grammar never branches by function; it produces physical structures and has no concept of what a sword or pot is. Culture biases weighted selection with a floor so no output is ever impossible. A plausibility checker re-rolls implausible forms. Per-component material assignment draws on geological availability and cultural affinity. A separate recursive decorative grammar can layer decoration on decoration, implying rework across cultures. The generator and lens are specified in depth across thirteen design documents; the v3 build is underway on a reset branch.
Highlights
- Intent-free geometric-primitive grammar: produces physical structures, never item types; classification is entirely downstream.
- Culture-biased weighted selection with a probability floor plus a plausibility checker that re-rolls invalid forms.
- Interpretive Lens: player beliefs mechanically filter observation salience, classification priming, and cross-reference without revealing ground truth.
- Recursive decorative grammar: decoration-on-decoration implies rework across cultures, creating temporal depth the system never flags.
- Runs SvelteKit through Deno via @deno/svelte-adapter; thirteen design documents specify the full generator and career/publication system.
By the numbers
- Commits
- 388
- Lines added
- +80,193
- Lines removed
- −30,472
- Source files
- 27,793