walrus.mome

A vignette in three windows.

It's 10:14 PM on a Saturday. Your colleague Rory has emailed you a small game he made — a .mome file, four kilobytes, attached to a message that just says "made you something / nbd."

He wants you to play it. He wants to know what you think.

The game is The Walrus and the Carpenter, rendered in Mome-1 — a tiny fantasy console for tiny walking games. Three colors. Eight-by-eight tiles. Two-frame sprites that gently breathe. A cozy lullaby plays in the background.

You walk the Walrus along the beach. The Carpenter walks alongside you. Oysters are scattered on the sand. There are four rooms. There is no losing. There is, in a way, no winning either — the poem ends the way the poem ends. You know this. Carroll wrote it in 1872.

When the game finishes, Rory pings you on MSN Messenger.

Rory: hey.
Rory: so.
Rory: what did you think?

This is where the real game starts.

What's in the bundle

• A complete tiny game, walrus.mome, playable in the Mome-1 fantasy console
• A small vignette wrapping it: an email, a chat conversation, three response paths, two endings, and a surprise after
• About 8 minutes start to finish
• Original cozy lullaby that loops while you play (mute button included)
• Made entirely in Plaza.exe — a small studio for desktop vignettes

Controls

• Click the game window to give it focus
• Arrow keys to walk
• Z to talk to anyone you bump into / advance dialog
• X to dismiss dialog
• Click the title bar of any window to drag it around

What is Plaza.exe?

walrus.mome is the first public game made in Plaza.exe — a small studio for building desktop vignettes that look like they came off a late-90s operating system, and feel like small private things made between two people. Plaza is currently in development.

The vignettes are interactive: stories told across multiple windows on a fictional desktop. You read an email, then chat appears. The terminal opens when you need to write code. A Notepad fills in with notes as the story progresses. A fantasy console (Mome-1) loads small tile-based games. The narrative is told through the desktop, not displayed on top of it.

Currently working:

• Branching dialog with custom buttons and free-text input
• Real Notepad you can type into
• Real Terminal that runs scripts in a couple of simple languages
• Paint widget that produces saveable PNGs
• MSN-style Messenger for chat-driven story beats
• Email widget with a persistent inbox (Outlook Express register)
• Mome-1 fantasy console for tiny walking games (the engine inside this engine)
• Draggable windows, taskbar, period-correct chrome
• Five swappable wallpapers including the vaporwave gradient you see here

Coming next:

• A Mome-1 editor — you'll be able to make your own .mome games inside any vignette
• A music maker for Mome-1 jingles
• A node-based authoring view for branching scenes
• More widgets (calculator, file explorer, more period-faithful apps)
• More example vignettes

The aspiration: a tool for making small weird interactive things that feel like they came from a softer, smaller internet. Game-development-as-game. A vignette where the player is given a tool and asked to build something — where the making is the story.

The project lives at outgrabe.itch.io. Follow that page to see what comes next, or to make a vignette of your own when Plaza is ready. The mome raths outgrabe.

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Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (1872) is in the public domain. Rory is fictional. Marcia is fictional. Plaza, Mome-1, and the melody are mine.