Concept: a dungeon-crawling sci fi game, except instead of wandering space pirates, you play as a crew of legitimate salvage operators retrieving valuable goods from abandoned or evacuated cities on formerly populated planets that have been rendered uninhabitable by various civilisation-ending disasters. The different “dungeon types” would reflect whatever disaster killed that particular planet: plague, increasing solar intensity, nuclear war, continent-shattering meteor, etc. Long-dead worlds have already been picked over by your competitors, of course, so in most cases you’re going in while the world-ending catastrophe is recent – and in some cases still ongoing! – offering plenty of opportunities for potentially fatal misadventures. If you need an overarching plot, maybe you eventually discover that all of these apparently unrelated disasters have some sinister common thread.
A few of the odder fates that might befall a world, as well as salvage operators’ slang terms for such worlds:
Deadworld: A world whose inhabitants have been rendered irretrievably non-sapient by a contagious neurological disease, parasitic fungus, basilisk meme, or other similar vector. Though in many cases their bodies are alive and kicking, they’ve been declared legally brain-dead, leaving the world open for salvage. Describing these unfortunate remnants as “zombies” is considered both unscientific and insensitive, which stops basically no-one. Sometimes an apparent deadworld turns out to actually be a nascent planetary-scale hive mind, which just gets awkward for everybody involved.
Eight-Ball: A world that‘s experienced a hard-takeoff singularity, a sudden asymptotic acceleration of cultural and technological development that certain worlds undergo for reasons which remain unclear. Nobody’s 100% sure what happens to the inhabitants of such worlds; some believe they transform into beings of pure information, transcend to another dimension, or simply die off, their civilisation achieving its zenith, decline and extinction in a matter of hours. Whatever the truth may be, one thing’s for sure: they don’t need any of their stuff anymore. Eight-balls are highly sought after by salvage operators because of all the physics-defying Weird Shit the planet’s former owners tend to leave behind in the wake of their apotheosis, and are among the most dangerous assignments imaginable for the exact same reason.
Locker: One of the oddest fates that can befall a world, a temporally locked civilisation – or “locker”, for short – is literally frozen in a single moment, usually as a result of some damn fool messing around with time travel. With fewer than a dozen known cases in the whole of galactic history, lockers present a unique salvage opportunity: the retrieval not of property, but of people. No means of reversing a temporal lock exists, so the world’s inhabitants must be rescued one at a time, by crews equipped with containment suits that allow them to move about in frozen time – a task frequently contracted out to established salvage operators. Lingering on such worlds is not recommended; though there’s no scientific proof of their existence, rumours persist that temporal locks are known to draw the attention of things that live sideways in time.
Grey Tech: Grey Tech worlds are treasure troves of highly advanced Technology but with a zero population. Nine times out of ten, it is the very tech, which the population made, that also removed them from the food chain.
They were either removed by a rogue AI that saw the meatbags as a waste or danger to itself, which means the salvage team will not be welcome at all.
Or some other high tech monster, like Nanites, after all.. they need carbon, and most everyone is made up of Carbon, so the salvage team might just wind up being “New Parts.”
“We drew a lot of inspiration from other artists and art history. What we are doing is something similar to an artist’s interpretation of something else. To change the meaning and make it our own.”
Poster for Modern Vampires of the City by Vampire Weekend, designed by Rostam Batmanglij.
“This is a record that I have at home. I wasn’t looking at this while making it, but it was in the back of my mind. These are things we all carry with us.”
Poster for Saint-Raphael La cote d’azur by Tom Morel De Tanguy.
“Sometimes we carry these things from a holiday, like when I visited in Pompeii a couple of years ago.”
Kim Chi “This level was inspired by Kim Chi from RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
London’s National Theatre, designed by Denys Lasdun.
“We drew a lot of inspiration from other artists and art history, like Bauhaus posters and Brutalist architecture.”
Video for Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass”, directed by Sanaa Hamri.
“One of the other artists in the team (Lauren Cason) really likes Nicki Minaj music videos.”
Concept art for Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, by Mary Blair.
“This illustration by Mary Blair for Disney’s Peter Pan is one of Lauren’s favourite pieces of art and a huge inspiration throughout her career.”
Liquorice allsorts.
“This level was inspired by the colour palettes of candy.”
“We wanted everyone in the team to be immersed in the art style of the game. So we printed out loads of reference pictures and we used these foam boards with inspiration for the levels that we could carry around with us when we hot desk. We also printed out every single level. We started doing this with Monument Valley 1. This gave us a really good understanding of the overall shape of the game.”
Locked in her one-room apartment, Maggie Mallowne must uncover the
mysterious celebrity conspiracies of the outside world by talking to her
neighbors through her apartment walls…
Maggie’s Apartment is an upcoming point and click mystery adventure game about the dangers of glamour, love, and who knows what else.
Check it out on it’s Steam page or Website to watch the trailer!
Inspiration Haven 