Hold The Horde — Owner Brief

Premise

You are an astronaut whose broken ship forces an emergency landing at the nearest space station. The station is unofficial. Its emergency signal says “stay away!”, and it refuses to answer your hails. You have no choice but to dock.

Oxygen limits exploration. The station’s artificial atmosphere is broken. Away from your ship, you carry a limited supply of oxygen and can find additional canisters. The ship can produce unlimited oxygen, but your carrying capacity is limited. Running out kills you.
The station is hostile. Zombies and other strange creatures attack on sight. Taking enough damage kills you. “The Flood” means massed enemies.
Death is not the end. You wake up aboard your ship after dying. The explanation is hidden somewhere in the station.
Survivors become your colony. You can send rescued humans to your ship, where a small community grows.
The station holds mysteries. Puzzles, traps, mechanisms and at least two alien languages offer clues to what happened, why you revive and how you can leave. Survivors can help you understand what you find.

Intended experience

A survivorlike focused on exploration, experimentation and mystery. The owner’s priorities are “I discovered something incredible,” followed by “I made a ridiculous build work.” Fighting hordes and developing powerful combinations must be meaningful parts of the game.

Discoveries can reveal a larger world, change the meaning of something already seen, or expose history while the player searches for power. Deep secrets and personal note-taking are welcome. Revisits should offer a changed environment, enemies, understanding or ability to interact.

Equipment competing with salvage for inventory space is a desired tradeoff. Enemy manipulation can be useful, but should not be the main subject of experimentation.

The shipboard colony should grow into a home: an authored, non-procedural cast the player knows, helps and cares about. It provides upgrades and an emotional reason to explore and defend people. Its exact management systems remain undecided.

The player needs clear immediate goals and understandable controls and survival information. Mystery must not depend on bad UX. Encoded songs are rejected. The former city-depends-on-creatures twist is rejected.

Journal pause — owner decision, 2026-09-07: while the journal screen is open, the rest of the game pauses, including enemies and oxygen consumption, even during combat. The journal's detailed design remains open; see Oxygen and Observation for the current proposal.

Firing controls — owner decision, 2026-09-08: ordinary combat uses mostly automatic firing, with manually activated special abilities. Target-selection details, optional aiming assistance or overrides, input bindings and particular equipment exceptions remain to be designed.

Owner reactions to the proposed additions — 2026-09-08

Keep connected equipment combinations. The owner accepted assembling builds from reusable linked parts. Particular parts, numerical rules and the complete equipment catalogue remain proposals.
Keep shared carrying space. Spare oxygen competes with equipment and loot for carrying capacity. Since 2026-09-17 that space is a grid of squares holding shaped items, not a count of units: see The Pack.
Bring carried property home on death. The owner rejected recovery caches: “let's bring home what we carry when we die. otherwise it's just frustrating.” Carried equipment and newly acquired loot return aboard with the astronaut; recovering a death cache is not part of the design.
Keep practical clue-based exploration. Repeated markings can suggest an opportunity to investigate, with observation and survivor context helping interpretation.
Keep the proposed horde rhythm. Hordes contest travel and selected noisy work; completed work persists and an overpowering build may succeed.
Tentatively keep equipment loans at home. The owner's response was “keep. I think.” This is a tentative preference for the described cooperation, not approval of a complete colony-management system.
The station shifts after each death. The owner wants the mystery of what is where to stay alive. Some changes the player makes persist through shifts; a door they unlocked can remain unlocked. This supersedes the team's fixed-layout proposal. Which features move, which changes persist and how prior records help remain to be designed.
Selected connections persist, with a station-wide late puzzle. From the three shift proposals, the owner chose Option 3: certain actions connect rooms into groups that stay connected through shifts. The owner added: “one of the deepest and latest puzzles of the game should be to connect this way the entire station.” This is a direction to develop, not approval of the comparison's particular binding mechanisms, rescue exception or puzzle solution. How links are discovered and made, how unconnected areas keep shifting, and what completing the station-wide connection does to later shifts remain to be designed.
Preferred opening: one part, two kinds of machine. The owner chose Option A of First Expedition Options: discovering that a reusable equipment part can operate station machinery and choosing whether to deploy it for safer extraction. This selects the opening direction, not every illustrative room, starting item, number or story detail.
Keep cooperative rescue short. The owner accepted the cooperative rescue direction on the condition that it does not become a long escort quest. The detailed route, length and wider survivor-loss rules are not thereby approved.

These reactions apply to the concrete additions presented, not every detail of their linked design articles.

Expedition power — owner decision, 2026-09-10

Temporary combat upgrades earned during an expedition reset whenever the astronaut returns home, whether by walking back alive or reviving aboard after death. The owner selected this as the genre-appropriate direction. Physical carried equipment, components and loot remain retained under the existing return rule. Particular upgrade effects, award pacing, quantities and interface details remain proposals to design.

15 September 2026 — expedition renewal and combat growth

Combat areas refill with enemies for each new expedition after returning home. Permanent changes, including unlocked doors and joined rooms, remain. This applies to living returns and revival; the existing station-layout shift on death remains. How renewed crowds occupy the altered station requires design.

Temporary combat power grows regularly through fighting, with larger transformations at major horde milestones. This replaces the proposed stage-only award rhythm. The exact growth meter, pickups, choice frequency, milestone conditions and rewards for avoiding a fight remain to be designed. Temporary power still resets whenever the astronaut returns home, while physical carried equipment and loot are retained.

16 September 2026 — first review of the playable slice

Implementation of the first slice (the first three expeditions) was authorized by the owner on 15 September 2026 ("start working on code, but assume changes are still coming"); the "Design only" bullet under Scope is superseded for that slice. The owner is now reviewing the build. Each report is classified first — implementation problem, design mistake, design decision, or a choice the design never made — and only then acted on. Owner decisions from the first two reports:

Text scale. The proposed text-scale option is adopted: default Medium (1.0), range 0.8–1.6; every style is 16 px or larger at 1080p and scales with screen height, so the smallest setting never draws below 12.8 px at 1080p-equivalent. This replaced a placeholder that drew fixed 15 px text on a 4K display.
Fixture appearance. Use free existing assets where they fit: the ship airlock door and the observation window now use CC0 pieces from Quaternius' Modular Sci-Fi MegaKit. Every other fixture keeps a silhouette per kind with its name drawn at the object, so two fixtures never differ by colour alone.

Closed as implementation gaps, not design changes: the Dock Mouth window (painted R-3 label, lit indicator with its state word, repeated knock, recordable) and the collar back-feed trace described in Station Room And Module Inventory were missing from the build, and the context prompt is now drawn at the physical object as What the Astronaut Sees and Controls already proposes. Team convention, not an owner decision: a human-made label, lit indicator or named sound on a fixture is recorded as a sign, separate from the alien inscriptions, and joins no language comparison.

Second review, same day (owner decisions): the view turns a quarter turn per press of Q (Shift+Q turns it back), keeping E for interaction and F for talk/signal after the owner found E on rotation confusing, and the wall nearest the camera drops to a kerb so the turned view is not blocked; fixture names show only within a few metres of the astronaut, while painted marks stay visible; a threshold with no neighbour in the current arrangement is a sealed, braced bulkhead, labelled unbound when near; the text-scale range widens to 0.8–2.0 and the overall scale never drops below 0.8, because the owner's Game view renders at 4K into a small pane. Closed as implementation gaps: unbound thresholds were open gaps the astronaut could fall through, and the floor light spill under the window, an implementer's stopgap, was removed.

Third review, same day (owner decisions): no text is drawn in the room except the one prompt at the fixture the astronaut is locked on, which carries the fixture's name and either its action or its state; alien inscriptions and crew paint are painted into the world on their plaques, and state words and sound subtitles live in the HUD box. A finished mechanism keeps a state word ("gantry hatch dropped; service run sealed"), so a completed seal is never silent on revisit, and the lock prefers a fixture with something to say over a bare pillar. Closed as implementation gaps: a module door the room does not map was an open gap (the Stair Vestibule's north side); the ward behind the Dock Mouth window is now built and lit behind real glass, as The Game describes it. The art pass (textured modules and props from the same CC0 kit) followed as its own step.

Fourth review, same day (owner decision): every press of the interaction key answers; with nothing in reach or nothing to do at the locked fixture, the notice says so, so the player always knows the input registered. Closed as an implementation gap: a closed door blocked only from the room behind it, which does not exist in the scene until entered, so the astronaut could walk into the sealed R-3 ward and be trapped; a doorway is now shut for both rooms when either side is closed.

Fifth review, 2026-09-16 (owner reported the first departure of a fresh save meets an unwinnable horde and asked whether that was designed; it was not, and the owner said go ahead): the opening is tuned to be won from the dock doorway with the starting rig and lost by walking into the aisle, and a scripted play of the real simulation (Flood.Tests.Core, OpeningBalanceTests) proves both before every commit. Pressers are the slow majority: 1.0 m/s, sight 9 m, a 0.9 s draw-back, 0.1 condition per strike, 1.6 s recovery; the Projector readies in 0.6 s; ordinary fire is heard only within 4 m while loud work still carries 40 m; the Caller's sight is local, 6 m. The aisle holds two separated Pressers just inside the dock door (the teaching pair the opening page already asks for) and twenty past the bend, one band, placed by authored standing groups rather than scattered over the room; a notice on first entering Cargo Turn names the pair, the Projector and the Barrier. Two decisions on questions Combat Rules left open: the Threat Sensor ranks a Caller mid-call first, then anything already coming, then standing bodies, nearest within each rank, so "focus it" is possible while the crowd stands nearer; and a body that is shot knows where from, so a shot pulls one body rather than waking a room. The catalogue for this slice cycles opening, rescue, language: the Release Walk layout had nothing to do in it and is out until it carries an objective. Open for the owner: a living return keeps the arrangement, so the rescue and language expeditions are reached only through a death; and the R-3 ward door opens only during the crossing, so the Arc Emitter behind it cannot be reached.

Sixth review, 2026-09-16 (owner asked whether the inventory system matched the wiki; it did not: the numbers did, the player's actions did not; owner: fix the save bug first, then the station property pass): a part that leaves the rig (unmounted, stored, put down, installed or handed over) takes its links with it, and a save whose links point at an unmounted part now loads with a note instead of starting the game over. In the station the pack (I) is a live panel, not the journal: the world keeps running while it is open. Mounting (3 s), unmounting (2 s) and putting an object down (1 s) are timed acts that need the astronaut to stand still and are interrupted by walking; capacity and rig space refuse before any time is spent. A put-down object lies where it was left, as a small prop in that room, reads "Take" within reach, and keeps its point through a save. A carried canister is coupled from the pack and feeds the suit while the world runs; a manual special, station work or pack work interrupts the transfer, and losing the canister ends it. The manifest shows Worn (suit tank, journal, navigation; no cutter exists yet), Active rig with its links, Inactive cargo and Elsewhere; the ship screen lists Elsewhere too, and the journal opens aboard so a rig can be linked at home. The Fork reclaim and the bridge pickup refuse before they begin when the pack has no room. Still open from the same review: the worn cutter, salvage to find, the once-only rescue handover and reserve, and the automatic choice of which canister is handed over.

Seventh review, 2026-09-17 (owner decision): the owner had pictured a distinct inventory from the start and found it neither in the game nor in the design: "a Backpack Hero style grid with shaped items". The design had reduced it to a count of ten carrying units and four rig spaces, and the game followed the design, so the gap opened at the design stage. The grid is now the design. The Pack holds the decision and a full proposal: an eight by five grid, four squares to an old unit, a lit block as the harness, links made by touching, and a floor strip for putting things down and picking them up. The unit-count manifest and the text pack panel built on 2026-09-16 are superseded once the owner has answered that page's open questions; nothing of the grid is built yet.

Same day, the owner's first answers on the pack: it can be opened "whenever no enemy is around + when gaining a new item", and "the bag should have plenty of ways to grow". Both are recorded as decisions on The Pack; the page now proposes six ways to grow and recommends dropping the older limit on how many parts can be switched on at once, which the owner has not yet decided.

Same day, the owner's template for every item: "make it simple: simple FoF detector: 1x1 object. self-activate 1 per second. when active: if locate enemy unit exist with 500, all adjacent items get activated. cooldown: 1 second." The Pack is rewritten around that card: every item is a size, a way of being activated, one effect and a cooldown; neighbours activate each other; every square works. Read from the example, not yet confirmed by the owner: arrows, ports, the link list, the power supply, heat, charge and the limit on switched-on parts all fall away.

Same day, two more answers: the detector's range is 15 metres, and adjacency has a range: 1 by default, which means squares sharing an edge and not corners, while some items will have range 2, which reaches around the corner.

Same day, the owner said "build it": the grid pack replaced the unit-count manifest and the port-and-link rig in the game. The Pack lists what is built and what is not. The ports, links, power supply, heat, charge and the limit on switched-on parts are gone from the code, as that page proposed; the owner has not separately confirmed each of those removals, so they remain reversible design choices rather than owner decisions.

Leading story draft — explicitly open to change

The owner is leaning toward this variation of the hospital direction:

Long ago an alien race used the station for an experiment to reach godhood, then abandoned the experiment for an unknown reason.
Humans discovered the station and made it a hospital because healing was extraordinarily fast there, and even the dead returned to life.
Hospital researchers investigated the effect and discovered an alien god captive in the station's core. This knowledge drove the crew insane; machines that healed became harmful. Repeated resurrection can turn people into the zombie-like creatures.
Most monsters and traps are remnants of experiments by these two generations of occupants, whose goals differed.

The owner's instruction is explicit: “this is an extremely early draft. every single detail in this premise can and should be open to changes.” This is the leading narrative hypothesis to develop, not fixed history or an approved ending. Its causal links, the nature of the captive being, why the experiment was abandoned and what the player can change remain proposals.

Whether resurrection corruption affects the player, and what gameplay consequence it could have, remain undecided. This draft does not by itself establish a player death counter, transformation deadline or penalty; the confirmed carried-property return rule remains in force. The station-shift direction, at least two alien languages and the other confirmed requirements also remain.

Scope and constraints

Design only. No game code, builds, prototypes, implementation, simulations or playtests until the owner explicitly authorizes the relevant phase.
Unity and Steam are selected.
Prefer free existing assets. Purchases and rare custom/authored game assets require owner approval. No AI-generated art, including concepts and placeholders.
Desired scope: about 30 hours to apparent credits, 90 hours total to the real ending, and 100–200 hours total for the deepest optional secrets. These are ambitions, not demonstrated duration or feasibility.
Inspirations: Noita, Backpack Hero, Pathogenic, Cult of the Lamb, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Blue Prince, and the owner’s example of Magcraft’s spectacular combinations. They inform experiences, not a checklist of copied systems.

Still undecided

The leading hospital/godhood draft needs causal development; the cause and limits of revival, escape solution, rules for station shifts and persistent changes, oxygen quantities, starting equipment, detailed build rules, short rescue logistics, colony mechanics and language details still require design. No previous team proposal settles them.