Brinebound: Idle ARPG

The sea is owed a debt

A king bargained with what lives under the water, and then he stopped paying. In one night the sea came over the wall, and it has never gone back. You are the Castaway: you wash up on what is left of his kingdom, at the foot of a lighthouse, and the sea will not keep you. Every death washes you ashore again. The story is about why.

Brinebound: Idle ARPG is a Lovecraftian idle action RPG. The Castaway fights without you: at your desk, in another window, or with the game closed. What you decide is everything else: what they wear, what you craft, which bargains you strike and where you send them next. Nothing is ever put on for you and nothing is marked as better. The game tells you exactly what would change, and the choosing is yours.

Out of the old stories

This is fantasy, and not the nineteen-twenties: there are no detectives here and no revolvers. Brinebound takes what H. P. Lovecraft wrote about, and the older weird tales he was reading, and turns it loose on a drowned kingdom of swords, harpoons and tithe-priests.

• Tithewater, a harbour town the sea spared because it never stopped paying, and the Deep Ones it pays.
• The Hollow Hills, where something fell from the sky into a farm well and left a blasted heath, where a witch-house keeps its familiar, and where a hill keeps a brother nobody can see.
• The Dreamlands, down a stair you can only walk asleep: zoogs in a glowing wood, ghasts and gugs in vaults without light, night-gaunts overhead, and the moon-beasts' black galley.
• The Deep, behind a chained door in the lighthouse itself: the city it was built over, shoggoths that learn how you are hurting them, and at the bottom the thing its lamp was lit to keep asleep.
• Through portals, places the story never goes: Carcosa under its two suns, where the masque is still going on; Yuggoth at the rim, where the Mi-Go are always short of hands; a many-columned city that was old before the coast had a name; and a dead city under the ice, with its great blind penguins, the Old Ones who built it and the shoggoths they made.
• In your own hands: Pages of the Necronomicon to work rites from, crafting Salts named for the "essential Saltes" of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, idols of Nodens and of the King in Yellow, and a night sky whose constellations are the Black Goat, the Crawling Chaos and the Daemon Sultan.

What is borrowed is borrowed from Lovecraft's own stories and from the writers before him: Carcosa is Ambrose Bierce's, and the King in Yellow and the Pallid Mask are Robert W. Chambers'. The drowned kingdom, its debt and everyone who went under with it are our own.

What you decide

• Ten kinds of weapon, each remembered by use. Sword, dagger, mace, great axe, glaive, harpoon, bow, wand, staff and censer fight differently, and each is the memory of someone the sea took: the king's headsman, a cutpurse of the fish market, a whaler who struck something that was not a whale. Use a weapon and their habits come back to you, and then their signature move.
• Gear that changes the fight and shows on the character. More than 200 base items and 118 uniques, every one with a painting of its own, and what you wear is what the Castaway is seen in; the uniques burn, drip and glow. Every unique does something no ordinary item can: a ring that makes every thirteenth blow far heavier, a belt that lays your mending by for when you need it, a crown that gives your Ward back at each turn of the tide.
• Ten secret societies. Wear two pieces of one society's regalia and its rule wakes; wear four and its second does. The King's Household kept the feast going as the water came in. The Keepers of the Lamp have kept it lit for longer than there has been a tower to keep it in.
• Crafting with depth. Nine Salts that roll, add to and unmake an item's modifiers; 76 modifiers in tiers, the best of which are only ever found and never made; and five rites out of the Book that bind the one you want and name their price.
• Sanity is a budget. Forbidden gear, eleven tinctures, eleven idols and six mutations are stronger than anything honest, and each holds back some of your mind or takes something else from you. Spend too much and the world hits harder, pays better, and starts to change you.
• A sky of pacts. A star for every level, and eight constellations drawn as a star-reader's atlas. Each ends in twin stars, of which you keep one, and in a pact with a real cost. Three may be sworn at once.
• A lighthouse that takes work off your hands. A loot filter you write as rules, salvage, a stash you can search, residents you send on expeditions in real time, bounties that pay themselves, and something patient that borrows your body while you are away.
• It tells you what you need to know. An item's card says exactly what would change if you wore it. The chart says what a place deals, beside how much of it you resist. Every stat you have is on one page, with where each one comes from.
• Five acts, forty-four places, forty-nine bosses, and portals behind them: keys you craft like gear, fifteen tiers deep, and seven uniques that each come from one boss alone, which owes you a little more every time it pays nothing.
• The Change. Finish the story and you may begin again on the first strand at a deeper tide: harder and richer, with your lighthouse, your stash and everything you have remembered kept. Swear a Vow first, if you like: one kind of weapon all life long, or never a Draught.

Version 0.1

All five acts are in, with the story's ending: eight to ten hours of it, with the portals and the Change behind. This is 0.1, the first build we call stable. It will still change, its balance most of all, and the last act is new: so far it has been played only by our own testing tools. Saves have carried over from one build to the next so far, the test builds before this one included, but that is not promised yet.

If something goes wrong, or feels wrong (a boss you cannot pass, a number that looks off): open the Menu and press Write a report. It writes one text file with what your character wears, where you have been and how you died there. Send that file with your notes. There is nothing in it about you or your computer.

Come and talk. Problems, ideas and word of each new build are on the Discord: https://discord.gg/sJ72jEQUtQ

In your browser, or on Windows. Play it here in the page, or download it. They are the same game, with one difference: in a browser the fight stands still while its tab is hidden, and the time is paid as time away when you look again; the download keeps fighting behind your other windows.

Keep your Castaway safe. In the browser it is the browser that keeps your save, and a browser can lose what it stores. Menu, then Castaway to a file, writes it out whole. That file is also how a Castaway goes from the browser to the download, or to another computer: Castaways, on the title screen, brings one in. (A private window, or a browser told to store nothing for a game shown inside a page, keeps no save at all: the game says so in red on its title screen when that is so.)

The download is not signed, so Windows will warn the first time you run it: choose "More info", then "Run anyway". Its save is kept in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Brinebound, not beside the game, so a new build picks it up.

How it is made

Brinebound is made by one person working with AI tools, and we would rather say so than have you wonder. The pictures begin as AI-generated paintings, which a pipeline written for the game cuts down into its pixel art; the code and most of the words in the game are written with an AI assistant. What the game is and every decision in it are a person's. People play it to test it, and programs of our own also play it through from the first strand to the last door, to measure its balance. The sound effects are synthesised by a program of our own. The music is recorded, by a person:

"Lightless Dawn", "Ossuary 6 - Air", "Ancient Rite", "Echoes of Time v2", "Shadowlands 1 - Horizon" and "Unseen Horrors" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Each was re-encoded and made quieter or louder for the game.