Innards

Innards is a deranged non-Euclidean adventure, set in the hyperbolic folds of the long-abandoned Internet, with a unique eccentric visual style.

• Sprawling interconnected world with many unique areas

• A genuine, mind-bending alien geometry, built from the ground up with a custom game engine

• Prerendered 3D graphics for a psychedelic stop motion look

• Many loveable and unloveable characters, odd humor

• Metroidvania-style progression, rewarding exploration

• Fun, simple action combat

Aeons after their detachment from the flesh-plane, the long-abandoned Withinternets have fully decomposed, and the mounting selection pressure has permuted its rotting viscera 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.

Info

Innards is a very, very, very personal solo project. It is an experiment I've began working on while sick with cancer. It's uncompromisingly weird and unique. It would have been impractical to impossible to create with traditional tools, so I decided to develop my custom game engine from scratch. The Systole engine has built-in support for hyperbolic geometry with hyperbolic physics and a top-down rendering pipeline focused on multidirectional sprites. I also built a level editor capable of terrain authoring with hyperbolic tilemaps (based on the heptagonal tiling) and construct environments out of thousands of elements, pivoting off optimizations that are unique to hyperbolic geometry. The programming challenges and discoveries that have sprung out of this project have been a complete delight. In addition to that, I really enjoy working on the art, the characters, the music and the sfx. Innards is a total pleasure for me to make.

Because of this, I want Innards to be free to play, forever. Still, by purchasing the full version here, you show your support for me and you'll also be able to get your hands on some extra goodies, such as the level editor.

Innards will be released as complete roughly around May 2027.

No AI content

This project involves zero AI-generated content and zero AI assistance. All writing, design, programming (inclusive of the underlying systole engine), artwork, music, sound were all created by one human. I am hostile towards gen-AI and its users and do not consent to scraping, parsing or training of LLMs on any part of Innards.

Linux Support

Innards does run on Linux, but I don't compile binaries myself. Please join the development Discord server for guidance to play on Linux.