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.

1. 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.
2. The station is hostile. Zombies and other strange creatures attack on sight. Taking enough damage kills you. “The Flood” means massed enemies.
3. Death is not the end. You wake up aboard your ship after dying. The explanation is hidden somewhere in the station.
4. Survivors become your colony. You can send rescued humans to your ship, where a small community grows.
5. 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.

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 cause of revival, the station’s history, the escape solution, death losses and persistence, oxygen quantities, starting equipment, build systems, rescue logistics, colony mechanics, map structure and the languages’ details all require design. No previous team proposal settles them.