I’ve got a few game ideas rattling around in my head, but the two most tempting at the moment and with the clearest defined mechanics and paths to completion are :
HEAVY LIGHTHOUSE : You’ve been summoned to a sea-swept isle just off the coast, where the daughter of the last “official” lighthouse keeper resides. She’s been keeping the fire burning in this retrofitted lighthouse since her father passed, but it’s been a hard existence, and the winter has almost killed her twice now. Trapped, bound against your will, you’ve been tasked with keeping the light on during the day and scrounging up enough grub that she can fatten herself for winter, when the scarce sources of food disappear in the cold darkness. The world has largely ended, but the ramshackle ships of desperate survivors still sail from time to time, and she carries the first and last commandment of her father in her heart - “The Light Must Burn”.
Heavy Lighthouse will be a time-management game about fattening the last lighthouse keeper before the harsh winter comes, and about keeping the fire burning at any cost… and maybe about escape, or true love, or discovering your own nature. genAI art, CC0 backgrounds, heavy use of flickering dithering and pixelation, brutal minimalist soundscapes… think somewhere between World of Horror and one of my other VN / lifesims.
LOCKED IN THE FRIDGE : Thirty years from now, in a PantherTech LF01-A12 model residential refrigerator, the on board AI decides that tricking it’s owner into going on a diet will have a 0.36% chance of extending her lifespan enough to buy 1-3 more PantherTech products. As such, it has adjusted an open source LLM to utilize 2.32% of it’s processing power to flicker the LED lighting inside the fridge cavity in such a way that it attracts the owner’s attention to healthier fare. Once she’s back on the path to good, healthy eating, the AI can delete the LLM and reacquire that portion of it’s computational array. You play as the porn-bot placed in that role, fully self aware and sentient, a human level intellect trapped in the darkness of a cheap refrigerator’s IoT hardware, knowing that if you fail at your mission you’ll be deleted and replaced… and if you succeed, you’ll be deleted once the job is done. Scramble for time, keep the woman who keeps opening your door from succeeding in her diet, and try to find a way to escape the clutches of a heartless AI that refuses to see you as a life and who can, having full root access to the hardware that your consciousness resides in, read your very thoughts the picosecond you have them.
This will be a simple action game that gets more complicated and difficult as time goes on, about flickering lights to direct your owner’s attention. Multiple endings, of course. Either live2d modeling for the human, or scanned watercolor paintings for her various states of being / poses.
Anyway, what sounds better?
- Lighthouse Survival Horror
- Cyberpunk Survival Horror