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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.