At Sea
You’re moving. The distance is real; the encounters aren’t. Resources tick down and something rises out of the fog every few minutes. Travel never costs you an action — exploring is never punished.
What it is
The streets you already walk, over a darker sea.
Rayclast is a location-based narrative game. Fictional zones are anchored to real coordinates, and your physical movement is what discovers them — walking isn’t how you reach the game, it’s how you play it. Walk far enough and you make landfall at a harbour that exists only in the app, where a story is waiting that only you, in that place, at that hour, can open.
It descends from Fallen London and Sunless Sea: no levels, no experience bars. Everything you are is a quality — a stat, a flag, a rumour, a thing in your pocket — and every scene is gated on them. The world reshapes itself around what you have already done.
In development · not yet publicly released
Pioneer Square
You step into Pioneer Square as the gas-lamps begin to glow. Red brick warehouses lean over narrow alleys; the statue at the heart of the square watches with patient, painted eyes. Tourists drift past, oblivious. The neighborhood remembers older things — and so, perhaps, do you.
Three modes
The game knows
where you are.
Rayclast alternates between three states, and which one you are in is decided by your feet — not a menu.
In Port
You’ve walked into a harbour. Sit on a bench and take your time; the place has its own stories, and they are gated on who you’ve become on the way here.
At Home
Your own designated safe zone. Low stakes, letters, slow-burn threads. Rayclast from the couch, on the days the city is too much.
Design
What the game is made of.
Walking is the mechanic
Movement discovers, unlocks, and advances. Harbours are neighborhood-sized zones — a radius or a hand-drawn polygon — and inside them venues pin specific storylets to real named places. Stand at the right counter and a different story is open.
Qualities, not levels
There is no XP. A quality is anything the world can remember about you, and requirements read them directly, so progress is legible and every flag you pick up is a door somewhere else.
Odds you can see
Skill checks are Broad (a percentage) or Narrow (a threshold), and you are shown your chances before you commit — “A coin flip · 50%”. Clear something genuinely hard and the attribute you used trains.
Terror and the dark
Terror rises with time spent in the dark and the unknown, and falls at harbour. Let it climb and nightmare storylets open — though a steady Mind will hold it off a while longer.
A journal that is yours
Every choice and outcome is written into a running log: a record of a voyage that happened, turn by turn, in your actual city.
Allegiance, once
Past a point in the main story you may swear to one of three powers — permanently, or not at all. Each has a five-tier Renown ladder and a questline of its own. The story completes unaligned, if you’d rather owe nobody.
Five attributes
Five ways through
a locked door.
Most obstacles will take more than one of these. Which you reach for says something — Tongue or Guile: would they feel betrayed, or just beaten?
Hand
Physical risk, force, endurance. Climbing, fighting, holding on — the body in motion.
Eye
Present-moment perception. What you notice now, and what you spot before it spots you.
Tongue
Open social work: charm, threat, bargain, performance. The other party knows what you’re doing.
Mind
Deliberation and composure — lore, deduction, recall, and the steady head when the lamp goes out.
Guile
Getting away with it. Deception, sleight, the caper, the back way taken without permission.
Landfall
It takes you a long moment to understand what you’re seeing. The island moves. Slowly, ponderously, but unmistakably. Then you see the head — a reptilian skull the size of a warehouse, breaking the water’s surface.
The world
The Unterzee, and
the Pacific Northwest.
Two strands share one map. The Unterzee is the vast underground ocean — dark, cold, and full of things that should not be. The other is the Pacific Northwest rendered slightly wrong: real Seattle neighborhoods where the smoke comes from no fire.
Out on the zee
The Chelonate
A city built on the shell of a colossal zee-turtle. It drifts. It is never in the same place twice.
Venderbight
The tomb-colony, where the dead are sent to live out their un-lives in exile.
Gaider’s Mourn
Ruins older than memory. The stones weep salt water and the shadows move independently of the light.
Hunter’s Keep
A lighthouse island. Three sisters, and hospitality you will think about later.
Port Carnelian
The last outpost before the salt flats.
On real ground
Pioneer Square
Gas-lamps, red brick, and a statue that watches with patient, painted eyes.
Alaska Junction
Where a door stands that shouldn’t be there.
Green Lake
Three miles around, and the lake has counted you.
The Pale Sound
A region where the boundary between cities thins.
The Quay
The tutorial quay. Where stories begin.
Where it stands
Built, and being walked.
Rayclast is playable today on iOS and Android through development builds, and in a browser harness with simulated GPS. Shipped end-to-end: the narrative engine, GPS tracking with radius and polygon geofencing, a map with fog of war, resource simulation, onboarding, Journal, Profile, Quest Log, achievements, factions, a full web authoring tool, and a versioned server-side content pipeline.
The current focus is the thing the whole design was for: a real walking playtest, on real Seattle pavement, in real weather.
- 224
- storylets
- 14
- harbours
- 115
- venues
- 6
- regions
A dream of the surface
You dream of the surface. Of sunlight on water. Of a city on a hill overlooking a sound, its bridges gleaming, its ferries cutting white lines through blue water. Was it ever real? Does it matter?