//Also, There Is A Game

I said in the last entry that the first post wasn't going to be about the game yet. That was #001. This is #002. We're finally doing the game now.

Fair warning: this is a long one. I've been sitting on this for five or six years and now I have a website and a devlog and a complete absence of self-restraint, so you're getting the full version. Get comfortable.

▸What nu-Eden Actually Is

nu-Eden: Sundered Skies is a narrative-driven tactical RPG set in a vertical, hyper-corporate, neon-dystopian city called nu-Eden in the year 2357.

The short pitch is: imagine a city where the 1% literally float above the law in gleaming arcology spires called the Cloud, while the rest of humanity grinds away in the dense, cel-shaded urban labyrinth beneath them known as the Stacks, and below that — underground, irradiated, and almost completely ungoverned — is the Heap, where the city dumps everything it doesn't want to deal with. People, technology, failed experiments, crimes that were inconvenient to prosecute. All of it.

Seven mega-conglomerates control essentially everything in this city. Every job, every service, every piece of infrastructure, every piece of media. They don't cooperate; they coexist in mutually assured economic destruction, propped up by a meritocracy so aggressive it makes the real world look like a rest day. The meritocracy isn't a bug. It's load-bearing. The whole structure depends on the fiction that anyone can make it if they try hard enough, which keeps the bottom tiers too exhausted to organize and the top tiers too paranoid to stop competing.

The story is about dismantling that fiction, one very poorly-planned operation at a time.

▸The Player Character Situation

You play as Conrad McGuire-Sun, callsign Xenos, which already tells you something about the general energy of this project.

Conrad is a time-fractured operative and the seventh surviving version of himself. He dies. Multiple times. In the same plane crash, inside an extradimensional void called the The Interstice. Six times, specifically. And every time he dies, he wakes up in the same place, with the same people, and the same mission. The only difference is that every time he dies, time dilates around him, creating a new timeline that branches off from the moment of his death. So there are now six collapsed timelines where he died, and one active timeline where he's still alive, but all of them are happening simultaneously.

The mechanism for this is a Casio-style military watch he wakes up with after the first death, which is cursed with a space-time manipulation ability that costs him part of his lifespan every time he uses it. So the watch is keeping him alive by handing him time loops while also actively eating the remainder of his life every time he activates it. The watch measures his remaining life expectancy. It is not doing great. And neither is he.

He carries the weight of five collapsed timelines and leads with the paradoxical clarity of someone who has already seen every possible failure. His temporal abilities — time rewinding, fracturing, collapsing — define both his gameplay and his narrative arc. Conrad is not the sharpest person in the room. He is also not the most tactically restrained, the most emotionally available, or the most charismatic. What he is, is relentlessly stubborn, weirdly perceptive about things that don't matter and completely oblivious to things that do, and operating on a timeline that should by all rights be measured in weeks or months rather than years.

The central dramatic question of Act I is basically: what do you do when the person you're watching fumble through a world-ending conspiracy against a hyper-corporate monopoly spent most of his lifespan trying to avoid doing exactly that, and then finally just gives up and does it anyway?

▸The Team

Conrad leads Lumicon — the vanguard cell of the nERF, the tip of the spear. They are the first team deployed into hostile territory, the first to breach corporate defences, and the first to face the consequences. Lumicon operates as a balanced strike team with no plan surviving first contact, so they train for chaos and adaptability.

The roster is:

Lydia Lau — callsign Nova. A former pop idol whose career ended in a catastrophic Maborite event. Now she channels atomic fury and raw martial skill as Lumicon's frontline combatant. Her fighting style is a fusion of explosive power and performance flair. She is the deuteragonist — the tactical leader when it counts, and her atomic-type abilities are the most powerful on the team, which means she's also the most likely to cause collateral damage when things go sideways. Her parents are complicated. Do not ask her about it.

Yumiko Saito — callsign Saiko. A chaotic speedster who thrives in mayhem, accompanied by her companion bot Rodis. She is the team's saboteur — her electric abilities and Rodis's autonomous strikes create cascading disruptions across the battlefield. Operates on an internal logic that is entirely consistent within its own rules, but those rules are invisible to everyone else. Also she won't tell you where the bot came from. It's a mystery. Probably she found it in the trash. Probably it's just a robot she built in her garage. Who knows.

Clement Tran — callsign Makina. A post-human tactician encased in a chrome battleframe. As Lumicon's Commander, he is the team's immovable anchor. His metal-type abilities transform the battlefield terrain itself, creating walls, platforms, and killzones. He is the most disciplined and strategic member of the team, but his rigid adherence to protocol can sometimes clash with the more impulsive members. He has a complicated relationship with Conrad, who he both respects and finds exasperating.

Dakota Yau — callsign Kinema. A former Triad runner with a rebuilt body, she serves as Lumicon's strategist. Her berserker fighting style belies her tactical mind — she maps the battlefield through movement, using her electric-fighting hybrid abilities to create openings. She is fiercely loyal to the team, but her past with The Triad and her personal vendetta against MabTech add layers of tension to her interactions with the rest of the group.

Lyndsey Park — callsign Lunox. Not officially part of Lumicon, but deeply woven into Conrad's story from the beginning. They grew up together in the Stacks as orphans, forging their bond through survival and music — Conrad taught her bass, she taught him drums. Together they formed an underground band at the University of nu-Eden called the nuHedz.

She disappeared for years, only to resurface as a dual-identity enigma — a high-profile social media influencer by day, and the fierce underground bassist for Eko:Chamber by night. Now a veteran field operative with light/dark manipulation abilities and a brash, cynical edge, Lyndsey appears and reappears throughout the narrative, driven by a personal mission that keeps intersecting with Conrad's.

She's who keeps showing up in the middle of all his trauma and reminding him that he's not actually alone, but also is not actually there for him because she's got her own drama and her own mission and her own life that she is not going to put on hold for him.

She is the thread that binds the strange and the familiar, the past and the present. Every time she resurfaces, the game reminds you that Conrad is not alone — but he might be the only one still holding onto what they were before everything broke.

Which tells you something about the emotional core of the story, and also about how much of a loser Conrad is in general. The whole part where he has to keep watching his own death over and over again is not exactly a confidence booster.

And that's the team. They're the ones you play as, for the time being.

Oh, and did I mention about Aoi Matsuno? Because I should mention Aoi. She's the one who runs the nERF, the one who recruited Conrad, and the one who sends him on all these missions that he keeps trying to avoid.

▸Act I: Avaritia (Greed)

The game opens with Lumicon discovering that Maborite scarcity — the resource that powers everything in nu-Eden — isn't natural. It's manufactured.

Maboroshi Technologies, led by Director Otis Goldman, controls the maborite supply entirely. They don't trade in the resource openly; they trade in the illusion of scarcity. By hoarding refined maborite and restricting access to extraction technology, Maboroshi consolidates absolute power over every other conglomerate and every citizen in the city. The entire economy depends on their stranglehold.

Conrad and Lumicon stumble onto evidence of an Artifact — a piece of pre-Sundering technology that suggests maborite was once far more accessible. That maborite scarcity could be eliminated. That the whole system is built on a lie.

The first seal breaks when that truth becomes impossible to suppress. The market destabilizes. Other conglomerates scramble to secure their own maborite sources. The Board — the council of Directors who maintain collective dominance — fractures for the first time. And Lumicon, the vanguard cell of the nascent nERF, realizes they've just started something much larger than any of them intended.

This is Avaritia — greed as the foundational sin. Not just Otis's greed, but the entire system's hunger for control, for resources, for power. The game is about what happens when that hunger finally consumes itself.

There's six other acts planned, each one focused on a different sin and a different aspect of the world. But Avaritia is where it all starts. It's the spark that ignites the fire, the first domino to fall, and the lens through which we explore the consequences of unchecked greed in a hyper-corporate dystopia.

▸Why This World

I should be honest. nu-Eden didn't come from nowhere. I started building it roughly six years ago, and the original impulse was straightforward: I was watching the real world accelerate toward something that felt increasingly unhinged, and I wanted to make a game that took all of that ambient dread and made it containable. Finite. Something with edges I could define.

The hyper-corporate meritocracy, the resource monopolies, the communities fragmenting, the exhausted masses grinding under structures designed to never let them stop grinding — I didn't invent all of that from scratch. I noticed pieces of it. I assembled them. I added thirty-seven years of extrapolation, a neon color palette, and some Vectorships because I have aesthetic sensibilities and needed this to also look good.

The result is a world that is legible as sci-fi while being uncomfortably close to the present in its bones. I know this because the parts I thought were most outlandish when I started have the worst habit of becoming topical. And the parts I thought were most grounded have the worst habit of becoming dystopian, which is the feeling when you spend like 9 hours a day doomscrolling and then look up and realize that the world is actually doing the thing you thought was a joke.

The goal was to make something where you could see the systems clearly — because fiction creates distance — and then use that clarity to ask the hard questions. What does it mean to resist? What is the actual cost of resistance, and who pays it? What happens to the people at the bottom when the people at the top stop cooperating? What survives the collapse?

I don't have clean answers to any of these. Neither does Conrad. Neither does Lyndsey, or Team Lumicon. That's sort of the point.

▸The Mechanics, Briefly

The gameplay is tactical, squad-based, and with a weird character swap mechanic. It's like playing a hero shooter where you can swap between characters mid-match, but it's also a turn-based tactical RPG, so the swapping is more about strategic positioning and resource management than it is about reflexes. You have to think about how each operative's abilities interact with the environment and with each other, and then decide when to swap to the next operative to keep the momentum going.

Each operative has a class that determines their role and resource profile, an elemental affinity that determines their ability interactions, and a relationship system with other operatives that modifies how they perform together in the field.

Conrad's watch mechanic adds a second layer onto this: time manipulation abilities let you rewind turns, force replay segments, or alter the order of events — but every use costs from his lifespan resource, which doesn't recover. There's no "grind until Conrad is fine" solution. The watch eats time no matter what.

The environments are vertical. The Stacks, Cloud, and Heap all function differently as tactical spaces: the Stacks are cramped and dense, with commercial infrastructure that can be turned into cover, hacking targets, or hazards; the Cloud is open, exposed, and guarded by corporate security with significantly better equipment than you have; the Heap is irradiated, partially unlit, and full of things that don't care what side you're on.

There's an economy system, weapons with rarity tiers and mod slots, an Interstice layer for story and ability tree progression, a crafting system that's mostly consumables and weapon customization, and an achievement/milestone structure that's more about documenting what happened than gating rewards. Full mechanical documentation is in the GDD.

I'm going to be upfront: not all of this is implemented yet. The prototype demonstrates the interface language, navigation system, and a small section of world-space interaction. The full tactical combat prototype is in progress. The Interstice visual system is designed and partially built. The Skylift/metro navigation is mapped out in the codex and the interactive map infrastructure is live, though not all stations have content yet.

▸What The Site Carries

The reason the site exists at this level of detail is that nu-Eden doesn't operate well in summary. The world is load-bearing. The characters are load-bearing. The systems reference each other. If you only have the pitch, you have a decent setup for a game. If you have the full GDD plus the codex plus the conlang plus the language used in the interface, you start to see that this is a cohesive thing, not just a collection of cool ideas I haven't connected yet.

That's what I spent six years building, apparently. A cohesive thing. While failing engineering. I'd call it a poor allocation of time if the result wasn't sitting right here.

▸What Comes After This Post

The devlog will move into more specific territory from here: particular design decisions, the reasoning behind systems, development updates, prototype progress, the parts that aren't working and why, the parts that finally clicked. Less autobiography. More game.

There's a lot to document. Eventually, the codex will be complete enough to be a standalone resource for the world, with entries on everything from the history of nu-Eden to the mechanics of maborite extraction to the biographies of minor characters. The interactive map will be fully populated with lore and points of interest. The conlang will have a dictionary and grammar guide, since the Cursed Conlang Circus is coming up in July or something, and I know it will be due in October, so I need to get on that. Obviously the GDD will be updated as development continues, and I'll be posting about that process in the devlog as well.

The GDD has sections on acts, systems, mechanics, the Interstice, faction dynamics, the six types of operatives, the elemental affinity grid, the weapon and mod trees, the crafting economy, and the endings. Each one of those is either a section in progress or an entry I intend to write at some point.

I'm not going to pretend I know when any of this ships. What I will say is that it's in the works, it's been works for years, and now it's somewhere you can actually look at, which is a huge step. The prototype is technically playable, but it's not a demo. It's a proof of concept. The next step is to build out the full tactical combat prototype, which will be the first time you can actually play through a mission with all the systems in place. After that, it's about iterating on that prototype, building out the rest of the content, and eventually getting to a point where we can talk about release timelines.

I've had enough typing for one day. I'm going to go work on the prototype now. Thanks for reading this far. I hope it was worth it.

See you in the next one.

— Nexo