What Ghostlight used to be
If you came to this website last week you might have gotten a different pitch. Idle RPG. Dungeon combat. iOS and Android. Base building, survivors to find, and a tagline about lights that should not be on. Store badges that did not go anywhere.
Of course, that wasn’t real. The page was marketing and the thing behind it was a prototype: a few hundred commits of a terminal, a company called Meridian, a planet called Luma, and a loop that ran while you were not looking. It was fine, I guess. It was not the thing that sparked joy, and I did not ship it.
What it is now
A survival RPG. You come up on a written-off planet with a slate that does not know your name, and the first hours are not unfamiliar: water, shelter, walking the road back to a depot somebody walked off from nine days ago. Then you teach a machine to do what you just did. Then another. The outpost starts running without you, and the game becomes about what you hold and what notices you holding it.
The planet notices. That is the whole premise: the ground is thinking, slowly, and your machines are among the only things on it that do anything, so it pokes at them, like a curious cat. The company that wrote the planet off notices too, eventually, from orbit. You lose by getting big enough to be worth “foreclosing.”
The terminal is still there. It is the character now: abandoned corporate firmware, drawn as a received page, that something is slowly getting into. The whole interface is a slate in your hand, and the site you are reading is the same slate receiving a different page.
It runs in a browser. It is still on your phone. It is just not in a store.
A love letter to my favorite games
I am not going to name them. You might recognize them.
A game whose skills you raise by doing a thing, ten thousand times, on a map I could still draw from memory. A HUD I have had open for twenty years: a portrait in one corner, a minimap in the other, a row of numbered slots, and a chat box that never closes. A colony that keeps going while you watch, and tells its best stories when it goes wrong. One supersoldier, marooned on a ring that turns out to be a weapon. A long walk alone, carrying too much, building a road for people you will never meet.
Probably more. There are always more. Ghostlight is where those ended up after twenty years of playing them, and in many ways,it is the game I have always wanted to build. It took a false start to find out what that was.
Well, it is one of two. The other is a hovertank game called Hollowpoint, which is a different love letter to a different shelf. They share a universe, built by hand: the same charter, the same ledger, the same companies doing the same things to different planets.
Where does this go?
There is no release date. When there is one it will be on this page, and in the feed. Everything else that changes will be written here, out of character, by me.