Halvesper

Working title. A side-scrolling MMORPG for desktop, web and mobile.

Carry fire home on the backs of walking gods: every lamp you light is a step they cannot take.

Mossback carries Lantern Town through the long dusk

The sun has been setting for three hundred years. It never quite goes down, and it never comes back up. In the deepening dark rise the Lampghosts, things made of absence that put out every light they find.

Only the titans walk freely in the dark: colossal, ancient beasts with a fire in their hearts the Lampghosts cannot bear. When the old cities fell, people climbed onto their backs and built towns there. The titans wander, and the towns go with them.

You are a Lanternbearer. You carry a lantern lit from a titan’s heart, go down into the dark to hunt, explore and bring back what was lost, and climb back up to a town that has moved while you were gone.

What makes it different

Towns that walk. Every hold rides a titan on its own route. The world map rearranges itself on a schedule, and a titan is always on the horizon.
One ledger for the whole world. Every lantern lit spends the titans’ vigor; every mote that goes home pays it back. The server’s shared total, the Sunline, decides how far the titans walk each week and which routes and places open. The story runs as server-wide Acts, and when Morrow is born the sun finally starts to rise, for everyone, for good.
Light is the game. Your lantern is your lifeline and your weapon. Lampghosts are weak in light and strong in the dark; two lanterns together sear them. Some paths exist only in light, others only in shadow.
Every region goes down. Below each region’s surface lie darker strata, and below those, the Deep: seeded expeditions the whole world races each week. Up top the grind is MapleStory’s; down there the lantern burns and every mote must be carried out.
A secret at its heart. Why the sun stalled, what the Lampghosts really are, and what your lantern costs the titan who carries you.

At a glance

Genre	Side-view 2D MMORPG: hand-built platform maps, parties, guilds, raids
Classes	Warden, Kindler, Ranger, Shade, chosen at creation; a branch of three at 30
Scale	1–5k concurrent players at launch, one world across all platforms
Content	Acts I–II at launch, to level 60: five regions, three living titans’ holds, two dungeons. Acts III–V follow as major updates to level 120, ten regions, four dungeons and a raid; each Act opens server-wide on a published date
Look	Hand-painted-look HD sprites, warm lantern light against violet dusk
Business	Free to play; cosmetics, convenience and a subscription. Never power

A gameplay map with Mossback walking in the distance

The bible

The documents below are the plan. 00-canon holds the fixed decisions; every other document builds on it. Every name and number has one owner, listed in 09-glossary. Open questions for Foster are in 07-decisions.

Document	Owns
00 Canon	Pitch, world rules, time, classes, shared numbers, pillars
01 World	The truth, history, titans and holds, factions, NPCs, story Acts, writers’ style
02 Atlas	Regions, maps, strata names, monsters, bosses, dungeons, the raid
03 Systems	Combat, classes and skills, light and motes, progression, economy, controls
04 Architecture	Servers, netcode, persistence, tick budget, ops, cost
05 Art and audio	Art direction, palette, HUD, AI pipeline, music, licenses, art budget
06 Roadmap	Phases, launch scope, what Foster sees when
07 Decisions	Open decisions and the settled list, D1–D23
08 Scale	The Sunline, strata, the Deep, world state, density, anti-farming
09 Glossary	Every term in one line, and which document owns it
10 Operations	Go-to-market, community, moderation, first-time experience, metrics, localization, accessibility
11 Prologue	The prologue’s beat sheet, its instance, the first beacon, fail-safes and tech needs

The asset catalog is generated from the repo on every deploy: each asset’s thumbnail, size, footholds, the maps and scenarios that use it, and whether anything uses it at all. 05-art-audio.md lists the Phase 1 art still to make.