Tileworld
Tileworld is a planned game world for the members of Molecular Reality Corporation's software EQBio-OS: a world of tiles in which each member's avatar would live and, in the words of the software's tour, "serve a surprising scientifically meaningful and artistic purpose". As of October 2026 it has not been built. It exists as two sentences in a guided tour, a prototype from 2024 and a row in the company's list of unrealized projects.
In the tour
The tour of EQBio-OS has fifteen steps, and two of them promise the tileworld. The step headed "Your avatar" says: "That's you, for now. When we deploy the tileworld, your avatar will get a lot more interesting". The step on the Playground, the black band at the top of the screen where live data from a member's device would appear, says that members will also see videos and "(eventually) the tileworld", and that Epic Quest Bio will grow into "a fully-featured MMORPG", a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.[1] The same step names Maxine's Quest among the things the Playground will show.
Both promises are in the first commit of the company's code repository, made on May 4, 2026, and no later commit has changed them.[2] The avatar the tour points at is the picture that represents the member. A member who has uploaded none receives one of 393 drawn portraits, described in Default avatars of EQBio-OS. No text says what the scientific or the artistic purpose of the finished avatar would be.
2024
Company records place the first work in the summer of 2024, on the web platform of the Molecular Streaming Services Corps, which became the Molecular Streaming Corps. The platform was to be an MMORPG for the corps's volunteers, with a tile-based world in it. A prototype called a "tileworld alpha" dates from mid-September 2024. A working session of September 30 is titled "reboot sans tileworld", and work on the platform restarted without it.[3]
Another project of the same year concerned the avatars. The skwint format, 16 by 16 pixels in 16 colors written as strings of hexadecimal digits, was intended to animate the drawings of players into sprites on the platform's dashboard.[3]
Tiles
In a tile-based game the map is a grid of small square pictures, and a few dozen of them can be arranged into a world of any size. Role-playing games of the early 1980s drew their maps that way, among them the Ultima series, which the company's 2022 memo names as an influence on a different title.[4]
Status
The company's list of unrealized projects records the tileworld under 2024. By October 2026 none had been deployed, and the tour still says that one will be.[1]
See also
References
- ^ a b "EQBio-OS tour". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
- ^ "Initial commit: epicquest.bio production app" (commit
5c2be10). epicquest.bio web application. May 4, 2026. - ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.