Playable alpha ยท active development
A painted 2.5D occult action-adventure set in 1935: two parents enter an ancient Egyptian horror to recover their nine-year-old son, while every weapon, wound, spell, and shortcut can change what they are willing to become.
Lord Eugene Compton and Lady Alice Compton are distinct playable bodies, not mirrored skins. His war experience, her medicine and borrowed magic, their marriage, ammunition, wounds, fear, and every shortcut carry narrative meaning through consequence. The project now exists as a playable Windows alpha, a custom runtime and editor, a public production stack, and a complete illustrated prelude.
The project sits where Prince of Persia's readable movement, Darkest Dungeon's expedition pressure, and 1930s occult pulp meet. Its north star is simpler: two parents willing to go through hell for their child. Every system exists to sharpen that journey, not compete with it.
The production path is hand-directed, high-resolution painted frame animation. Every action starts as 8+ key poses under a strict realism canon, then becomes 16-24 frame cycles checked in a live playback bench for weight transfer, foot contact, and equipment continuity. AI interpolation is treated as a diagnostic helper, not a production authority.
Eugene is older, larger, war-marked, and brutally protective. Alice is aristocratic, brilliant, faster, physically distinct, and increasingly tied to a dangerous African ritual power. They are not mirrored builds; their mechanics follow biography, sex, trauma, class, love, and supernatural cost.
Rooms are explored as dangerous spaces rather than abstract tiles. Supplies, medicine, fatigue, sanity, ammunition, route choice, and the cost of pressing on matter. The London-to-Cairo journey is planned as a route-and-refuel layer before the tomb descent begins.
If Eugene dies, Alice can resurrect him automatically. The player is not asked; Alice chooses him. Each resurrection advances her transformation by one step. The early playable build tracks this with tokens rather than full transformation sprite sets, so the game can prove its structure first.
.moadmap importer reports unsupported content instead of silently pretending it works.These are not random moodboards. They are accepted or current working references: the quality floor, the prologue, the protagonists, and the movement grammar.
The whole opening film in one sheet: Valley of the Kings, the Great War, Alice's field medicine, the family before the loss, the black stone, the route to Cairo, and the final tomb approach.
Lord Eugene Compton stands roughly 20-25 cm taller than Lady Alice. The difference matters in animation, combat rhythm, composition, and emotional read.
The accepted motion benchmark: anticipation, compression, launch, rise, apex, descent preparation, impact, recovery. Human body first, game convenience second.
Alice's current run proof is not final paint, but it shows the target direction: high-resolution frame animation rather than pixel art or a wooden puppet rig.
The public character tone: not superheroes, not teenagers, but English high nobility caught between war memory, family love, and an occult expedition.
No hired expedition army. No guide party. Just Eugene, Alice, the half-track, the tomb entrance, and the decision to go in for their boy.
The project is also a proof of a new small-studio workflow: a human art director/designer working with named AI collaborators as artists, engineers, animators, reviewers, and continuity keepers. The output is not "one prompt." It is thousands of decisions: pose, silhouette, timing, body mechanics, lighting, prop continuity, level readability, and whether the image still belongs to the same world.