Innards

What?

Aeons after their detachment from the flesh-plane, the long-abandoned Withinternets have fully decomposed, and the mounting selection pressure has permuted its rotting viscerae into strange, hungry machines, self-assembling digital natives that inhabit its hyperbolic folds. Junkbags vary in form, in size, in ambition, and some are even smart/stupid enough to open mortgages.

The radiculating networks of Junkbag society striate the surface of the digital anti-planet, carrying passengers, capital, violence, and other metabolites along ultraparallel lines of flight. Crime is but yet one more bodily function of the world-corpse, or at least that's what Dex tells himself. A low-life, a "functionary" of a big crime syndicate, no-muscle for hire, Dex would much rather do the bare minimum to afford to entomb at home and play with his Personal Computer.

But slithering rumors of a quickly-metastasizing cult trickle from the bowels of the hyperlands, the worshippers of a purported avatar of the late Mother Carrion, whose cadaver birthed the electric territories. The cult is a threat to the bottom line of Dex' employer and his source of rent. To make ends meet and not meet his end, Dex will have pick up his mouse-pointer cursword and slash his way deeper within, facing friends and foes, losing himself in the tangle of negatively-curved geometry.

Why?

Innards is an action game set in hyperbolic geometry and employing pre-rendered graphics. I'm developing it solo, it is my latest passion project. I don't care about money nor acclaim anymore, so this game is and will remain 100% free. I also intend to keep it as unconventional, disorienting, and confusing as it currently is, if not more. I've began working on it while sick with cancer; it is the culmination (not termination, hopefully) of all my scattered threads of thought on math, metaphysics, regular physics, spirituality, biology, psychology. Nothing better embodies my distorted vision of the world than hyperbolic geometry - brain folds are hyperbolic, color spaces are hyperbolic, language is hyperbolic. Moreover, it's an experiment in a unique art-style (pre-rendered clay-like 3d graphics),  in programming a game engine and toolings for real time hyperbolic gaming, in designing a large interconnected world within that very alien non-Euclidean space, in designing writing characters (an absolute pleasure), in music-making. 

How?

In short, I probably enjoy making Innards more than you ever will playing it, it is that personal, although I do recommend giving the alpha a try. I think it's rather fun, or at least funny. The best way to describe the gameplay is that it's basically Spyro the Dragon but with 3D replaced with hyperbolic.

Innards runs on its own, custom engine. (It's simply too weird for any existing game engine). Therefore, there may be a few or even many serious issues. Please, if you feel magnanimous, lend me a hand and give me some feedback on bugs you've encountered or even suggestions you might have on the testing Discord server.