This is a placeholder for a game I am just slapping together in a hurry to get out the door.
If you want to just jump on into the game ASAP, here you go, just pick your class and such and get playing. You don't need a login or anything, and it's totally free. Not "free to play" either. Just a public service here.
But what if you don't want to just start playing some weird browser game you stumbled onto totally blind? Well I guess explaining what the deal here is would help then wouldn't it.
This here is one of those casual browser-based RPGs. They used to be a lot more common/popular, but fell out of fashion. The basic idea is, you make a character (which really just means you pick one of six classes), and pop into a really bare bones world. Every day you get some number of energy points (25 as a baseline, but there's ways to up that, and there's a bonus the first day you start playing). You can spend these to do a few things, but the main one is to poke around in some dangerous area, and probably get into some little hostile encounter, use your skills to get through it, get rewards, repeat. You level up your character, get fancy stuff and new abilities, unlock more areas, they're more dangerous, this keeps going you reach the final area, there's a nasty boss fight, it opens the ability to loop the whole game with some bonus. You hopefully get into a groove where you're kinda hooked and keep coming back, but the limited energy system means you're realistically only going to waste like, maybe 10 minutes a day playing. And you know hopefully you dig it enough that you through money in the tip jar and I get to keep being alive and adding new weird stuff to enrich the experience and so forth.
Curious about the theme? It's one of those idiosyncratic deals where you just deal with what the lone creator finds amusing at a given moment really, probably a bit in-jokey, probably full of low-effort art. Stress and Money stand in for HP and MP, the basic starting areas are just browsing the internet, taking a walk through the woods, and wandering around downtown, which then eventually lead into cyberspace and magical lands and things just kinda get decreasingly anchored in reality and you know, hence the name.
What about the mechanics? Again, this is a pretty casual game. While I totally reserve the right to bolt increasingly complex mechanics on down the road, the core of the game shouldn't be much more complex than your basic basic RPG fair. And there's an equippable item that explains what everything does very plainly.
You may also be wondering, hey, if there's no logging in, how do I keep my progress from day to day? Well, turns out browsers these days have a cool feature where they'll just quietly save things from a website in some local hidden file, so as long as you're always logging in using the same web browser, from the same device, and loading up this site the same way (i.e. sticking "https://violethargrave.neocities.org/theworldgetsstranger/index.html" into that url bar, as opposed to some weird alternate url or http without the s, you should just jump right back into the game. If you tried to do that and you're on this page instead, uh, let's try and work out what went wrong there. Manual backups for peace of mind/transfering stuff to a new computer/phone/whatever, or sharing your computer and browser with someone else (like oh, library patrons) is totally on the todo list by the way. Or passwords maybe? Something.
OK testing time here. If I just say like, the name of the player here, is that cool?
OK testing more! Seems to me you have never pressed the little button before this with this browser setup, I'm like Psycho Mantis.
OK, now let's test if we can make a deck of cards here... Are we playing with a full deck? WTF in there! OK and the last one is...? WTF! And before that.. WTF. Of course, we used pop for that, so that leaves us with... less cards.
Cool cool cool. So! Let's fill that up to a full deck of 20 cards. lots of cards. And now let's draw one at random. Let's say... ace of spades? That should leave us with... .
and that is incidentally nineteen left.
One last test here. The first time I checked the time was a bunch of numbers.
One last test here. Currently the time is another bunch of numbers.
So it's been a whole... . You can rest after 18 hours, or 64800000 milliseconds.