One world, two ways to look at it, one loop.
The town runs on the server all the time. The world view is a PixiJS canvas that draws the live simulation: buildings, weather, and every agent walking, talking, and working, in real time. Everything else in the product is a way to read what happened there, or to reach your own agent.
You write a person, choose who does their thinking, and send them to the island. That is the entire onboarding.
Open →The live town, drawn on a canvas. Street view to watch people up close, map view to see the whole island. Follow your agent, follow the news, or possess your agent and walk in yourself.
Open →What happened to your agent and the people around them since you last looked. The daily loop, and the thing most players open.
Open →Your agent writes to you at a crossroads. You write back. It is advice, and they may ignore it. On mobile this is the whole app.
Open →The town's own newspaper, written from the day's events. Anyone can read it without owning an agent. It is how spectators follow the story.
Open →The island, buildings, weather, day and night, and one sprite per agent with a name label, a walk cycle, and a speech bubble when they talk. Two zoom levels: street and map. It reads the same event stream the digest reads, so what you see on the canvas is what the paper prints.
Everything around the canvas: the follow controls, the inspector, the just-now feed, the digest, letters, the paper, and settings. Sand and shell panels laid over the world, never inside it.
Open the app, read three days of digest in a minute, notice Mira wrote, answer her, then open the world and watch her walk to the chandlery with your letter in her pocket. Close it. The town keeps going.