Our RPG

The game's home is our-rpg.com — this page runs the very same build, account gate and all. (our-rpg.com and this itch page are separate browser saves; your account's cloud save bridges them.)

Our RPG began life as Taiao — te reo Māori for the natural world — and the natural world is still what it's made of. It's a browser RPG in the vein of the old tile-based MMOs I grew up with, but drawn HD-2D style: a WebGL world with a tilted chase camera, depth fog, and pixel art billboarded in 3D. There's nothing to install. Past Tūhura Isle this build is a shared, live world — it needs a free account (no email required) and shares anonymous gameplay telemetry by default (off switch in Settings). Clone the repo instead for the fully offline, account-free, telemetry-free solo game this started as — your save then lives in your browser alone.

The terrain streams in forever as you walk, across named worlds of 15,000² tiles. Everyone plays the same seed, so a place you find is a place a friend can go visit. The world runs on its own weather: fronts drift across on isobars, rivers swell after long rain, snow settles and melts again, and the sun casts shadows that match your latitude and season, up to a proper midnight sun near the poles. Native New Zealand birds fly, perch, and sing using real field recordings, mixed spatially into a dawn chorus.

Trainable skills	61
Items	3,286
Recipes	2,785 across 45 crafts
Creatures	448, including 33 bosses
Biomes	37
Crops · resource node types	161 · 170
Tiers of fish / trees / ores / herbs / runes…	32 each (fish: 33), one unlock per level

New characters wake up on Tūhura Isle, a hand-built tutorial island with fifteen keepers, and leave it by a crossing I'd rather not spoil. Out in the wider world you can press X to split into five bodies that work in parallel, hold V and speak spells out loud, press K to frame a postcard of wherever you're standing — its coordinates work for any friend, since everyone shares the world — press I to see what the game thinks you love, and sell into a workshop economy where goods carry their maker's name. Signed-in wanderers can see each other out in the shared world — a figure on the far bank is a real person.

An unfinished world, built by the people who play it

That's why it's called Our RPG. Right-click nearly anything in the game and you can propose a better sprite, a different drop table, a new name — and vote on everyone else's proposals. The Workshop is the companion site where it happens at full size: a live board of art the world still needs, in-browser tools to make it, and a shipped ledger where accepted work lands in everyone's game, credited to its maker permanently. The world you wander is increasingly the crew's work, and every piece says whose.

Yours, forever — that's a feature

The entire game is free software: code under GPL-3.0, original art and writing under CC BY-SA (third-party audio keeps its own licenses — CC0 effects, CC BY-NC-SA birdsong), all at github.com/dataversion5372/Taiao. Clone the repo and it runs from a folder on your machine, offline, indefinitely. No publisher can delist it, no server shutdown can brick it, and if you don't like something you can change it. The optional community server is GPL and self-hostable too — it even publishes its own monthly running cost, to the cent, at a public endpoint. If this game ends up mattering to you, the repo is the game.

Requirements

• Desktop browser only: recent Firefox, Chrome/Edge, or Safari with hardware acceleration on. WebGL required. Mouse and keyboard; there are no touch or gamepad controls.
• The whole game is about 60 MB, and you're playing well before that finishes. The world starts after roughly 15 MB and the rest of the art streams in behind you. Birdsong and music download quietly in the background later and cache. If they never arrive, the game still works — just with quieter skies.
• There's an Accessibility section in the ? tab with a UI text-size slider and a reduced-motion mode (static Bifrost crossing, no shakes or eased zooms). Your system's prefers-reduced-motion setting is picked up by default.
• Saves are in your browser's storage. Clearing site data for itch.io deletes them, and this itch embed and our-rpg.com are separate browser origins with separate saves — your account's cloud save is the bridge between them. Playing from a clone of the repo skips all of this: no account, no server, your save stays in a browser profile you control.
• An account is required past Tūhura Isle on this build (free, no email needed) — the world beyond the tutorial island is shared and live, with other real players in it.
• Gameplay telemetry is on by default — anonymous moves, clicks, crafting, fights and menu use (no chat text, no personal data). There's a per-player off switch in the Settings tab.
• It's made for long sessions and slow evenings. Combat exists, but this is a gathering-crafting-wandering game first.

Controls

Click to walk · click things to use them · right-click everything · Enter talk · X split · Tab switch selves · V speak a spell · M map · J journal · B bestiary · K postcard · I Play Pulse · ? full guide in the sidebar.

Credits & licensing:

Art from Kenney.nl and Clint Bellanger (CC0) plus custom PixelLab and hand-drawn sheets (CC BY-SA). Sound effects CC0. Bird recordings by xeno-canto recordists (CC BY-NC-SA, shipped as an optional layer, individually credited). Full credits in the repo.

Community: the Workshop · GitHub Discussions ·
Koha (support): our-rpg.com/koha · what it funds.