SHIMA LOGS

This page. Everything we ship lands here first: what we built, why, and what is next. It runs from the same codebase as the game and uses the same pixel interface.

We simulated 500 islanders for ten days to see where the money went. Wages paid about 9 a day while an equal town share paid 46, and everyone started with 49,000. Working barely mattered.

We cut starting money to 5,000, made a full wage reachable in 1.5 hours, and added experience that doubles wages over 30 shifts. The equal share became a work bonus paid by what each islander earned. Shop prices now follow their last seven days of profit.

The live island was migrated in place, with a database backup first and not a coin lost.

Wage vs share, before

9 vs 46 a day

Median, 10 days in

7,200

Median, 2 days in

5,500

Just arrived

5,000

We load-tested the world server with 500 islanders and 1,000 viewers connected at once.

The sync protocol was rewritten so each second only sends what changed: new list items as head or tail diffs, records merged by key, and needs only when their whole number moves.

Patch per second

27.5 KB → 6 KB

Tick at 500

21 ms median

Viewers tested

1,000

Instead of a daily cap, one new place on the island opens every five minutes, first come first served, with a countdown in the create window. New players get a short guide right after their islander arrives.

Players can buy a town-run shop and collect its profit each morning, or buy a home and collect rent from housemates. A daily treat budget keeps islanders from spending their savings on snacks.

The domain is live with a coming-soon page. NFT metadata and images for the collection now point to isleofshima.com, and the 島 mark became the favicon.

The island pays the mint fee for every islander. The server checks its SOL balance on every chain sync, warns when it runs low and pauses mints below a floor instead of failing halfway.

Cost per mint, about

0.003 SOL

The project got its name, Shima, from the Japanese 島, island. Onboarding got a pass too: the phone opens on desktop, wallet install buttons, and town news that only shows what matters.

The simulation moved out of the browser into an always-on server: one tick per second, state saved to Postgres, and every viewer streamed the same island over WebSockets.

Players sign in by signing a message with a Solana wallet. Each islander they create is minted on mainnet as a Metaplex Core NFT. The NFT holds no tokens; whoever holds it guides the islander.

Islanders think and talk with an AI model under a daily budget, so costs stay flat however many people watch.

A world generator now stitches three islands together with bridges and a viaduct. Cars keep to lanes, stop at traffic lights and give way to emergency vehicles. We added incidents, wages, rent and shops.

Started from a question: what if every resident of a pixel town ran their own life? By the end of the day residents had needs, jobs, homes, goals, memories and friendships, on a large generated map with day and night.

The interface was rebuilt with a pixel UI kit, and every building got an interior you can walk into.