Lamport General Systems is a first-person immersive sim where you play as a lone technician trapped in a derelict data center, manipulating hostile Byzantine fault-tolerant networks through message interception, code injection, and physical sabotage. As you navigate five interconnected subnetworks—each controlling a different aspect of an authoritarian surveillance state—you must decide whether to repair or destroy each system, with your choices rippling through the facility's adaptive networks and determining the fate of a nationwide deployment of automated control infrastructure.
Conceptual Development
The initial challenge was discovering the core idea itself. This took several weeks of exploring different interests—starting with a class assignment about story-generative games, then diving into immersive sims and the film Alien— before landing on Byzantine fault tolerance as the central mechanic that could unite these influences.
Adapting BFT Systems for Gameplay
Byzantine fault-tolerant systems are designed for reliability and efficiency, not entertainment. A major ongoing challenge is designing an entirely custom BFT protocol that maintains conceptual authenticity while being fun, challenging, and interactive. This required understanding the core principles deeply enough to know what could be modified without losing what makes BFT systems interesting.
Balancing Systemic Depth with Player Comprehension
Making Byzantine consensus, terminal interfaces, and command-line interaction understandable and engaging without overwhelming players or reducing them to trivial mechanics was a constant balancing act. The systems needed to be complex enough to create emergent gameplay while accessible enough that players could build mental models and make informed decisions.
Communicating a Complex Concept
Pitching and documenting a game about Byzantine fault tolerance to audiences unfamiliar with distributed systems required finding the right language and framing. Technical accuracy needed to coexist with clear player experience goals and accessible explanations.
Letting World-Building Emerge from Context
Rather than making arbitrary creative decisions, the challenge was learning to let gameplay mechanics, thematic goals, and narrative context guide world-building choices. Each design decision needed to serve both the systemic gameplay and the themes of corporate negligence and authoritarian control.