Firmament (boon/bane)

The Overview

Firmament is a dark science-fiction visual novel / RPG hybrid. You play as the Domebound, a cryogenic revival thrust into a society inside a perfectly self-sustaining nanotechnological terrarium. You'll build a character, and use your stats to notice and manipulate the world around you. A more detailed description is below.

If you like: Disco Elysium, Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, or Mass Effect, then you'll like Firmament.

This is only a demo! The demo is two to three hours long, and saved progress will carry over into the final release. If you'd like to join the community (to talk about the game, to give feedback for the full game, or to hang out with a community of game developers), then join the Discord: https://discord.gg/uAUHBmGz7p

The Scenario

Scenario: In a quasi-distant future where mankind has the ability to atomically bend the physical world to its will, it has an Idea. The idea is to collect a seed of genetic material, and send it out on some spaceship-cum-terrarium to probe space for a suitable place to dig in and start a colony. Procreation. Fundamental.

The Twist

Instead of searching for habitable worlds, humanity produces a perfectly hermetic enclosure to host its germed society. Also in the tradition of science fiction, it’s a sweet ass Dome. All matter needed to sustain human life is present in the correct quantities, and no matter ever exists or escapes the Dome. Through the magic of nanotechnology, everything is perfectly recycled from food into shit into clothing into capacitors, into anything and everything else, ad infinitum. Such a system is unfathomably complicated, and the Dome itself is an immense computer used to coordinate everything inside.

The Problem

The enclosure is built to self-repair, to some extent, but any system which relies on dead reckoning will suffer from drift. To solve this, humanity shipped the Dome with a monstrous Manual, which covers any troubleshooting or manual repair in extreme and specific detail. And since, by far, the most likely thing to break this society once formed is the people within, it contains a great mass of Confucian-esque wisdom, societal rules, filial responsibilities, and traditions.

And, at long last, the Pitch

The progress of man is inevitable. Or: Life finds a way. Eons pass in this society, innocent and pastoral, provided for by an inexhaustable garden. Things are good, until they become bad. A religious sect, concerned with different forms of transcendence from and integration with base reality, begins to grow more intense. Another sect, traditionally in charge of maintenance of the nanotechnological machinery, discovers methods to fool the Dome into producing arbitrary goods. And through it all, the staunchly classic maintainers claim that these deviations from the Manual will destroy us all.

Enter you, Domebound. On a strict timer, fresh genetic material from the cache is reconstituted and released into society. Quite conveniently for myself, the author, you are one such person, and your birth coincides with a inflection point in the persistence of your species. Your task, if it can be so called, is to weave through this magnificently complicated society and find the off switch before it implodes upon itself.