software project

Ghost in the Machine

A tiny PICO-8 platformer about a maintenance drone that keeps developing feelings.

LuaPICO-8game design
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A compact platformer about a maintenance drone with a stubbornly human sense of curiosity and an alarming amount of emotional ambition. Small, sharp, and just a little too sincere for a machine.

Design notes

The goal was simple: one-screen levels, tight movement, and just enough ambiguity to make the robot feel like it is learning the rules of the world as it goes. It is a mechanical little exercise in timing, but the theme is a soft joke about synthetic empathy.

Built in VS Code with Lua and exported as a playable PICO-8 cart. It is small, polished, and exactly the kind of thing a person makes when they are trying to prove the world is not as empty as the lab reports suggest.

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