Demon Tamagotchis

This is about two games that never happened and probably will never happen. I find their mechanics somewhat interesting and I wish I could play them myself. But they died early, buried under a pile of more useful projects. A partial inspiration for those games was my work in ad-tech, and stories about fantastically insatiable Czech demon-tree-babies (more on that in the footnotes).

<unnamed detective game>

A short detective game relying on object recognition. It went roughly like this: you’ve found yourself in the service of a demon who communicates with you through your phone and requires small sacrifices in exchange for fame and wealth – letting you live deliciously. Perhaps you found him by accident, one night, slightly inebriated, getting a cheeky kebab on Old Street, receiving a business card from a tech bro working nearby, via AirDrop.

Your errands involve collecting the souls of people and things around you (Everything is Alive). These errands will be shared through a daily message, often those messages will contain a dossier of the victim: a photograph, plus a few lines about them.

In practice, this means going outside with your phone and taking a photo of an object related to your quest, for instance: a black cat, a flower, a photograph, a knife, etc. Taking a photo means capturing their soul. Mobile as a multi-tool not a peephole.

Technical note: in my implementation images were processed using the Google Cloud Vision API, now you can do most of it on-device.

To summarise, the game progression looked roughly like this:

  1. Set up your character: a selfie, plus 2-3 lines about you.
  2. Receive the first assignments, pretty innocent (almost cheesy) at first: I need the soul of a rose, I need the soul of the colour blue.
  3. The assignments gradually become more sinister, ethically dubious: I need the soul of a squirrel, a cat. If sent the dossier of a person, you need to collect some objects belonging to them, tied to their story (e.g. a hat, a stethoscope, see sympathetic magic). (important: none of that involves taking pictures of real people)
  4. The final dossier arrives. This time with your own name and face.

Demon Tamagotchi

The Tamagotchi game is based on a simplified version of the <untitled detective game>:

You plant a little seed on your phone, let it hatch and grow. Let's call it Pickles. Yeah, Pickles has a good ring to it. You feed it by showing it pictures of fruit, food, perhaps some unusual stuff like pickles.

Then, those requests start getting a bit weirder: "show me a cat", "show me a picture of your facebook feed". Pickles, now calling himself úkuš (cucumber in Sumerian), needs you to take a selfie.

Pickles is an ancient Mesopotamian demon, named after the holiest of all vegetables. He eventually steals your data, your soul, and replaces you with a doppelganger.

References, inspirations:

Imaginary, non-monetisable projects I'd like to build having infinite time or having won a lottery

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.