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Ephergent Devlog

Pivoting Ephergent.com: From 3D Printed Products to Games-as-Story

5 min read

When I started ephergent.com, the vision was handmade 3D-printed electronic objects — Totems, Drifts, Nexus units. Physical artifacts from a sci-fi universe I’d been building for years.

The problem: I’m competing against a thousand other makers doing exactly that. And the part I actually love? The universe itself.

The Pivot

Ephergent.com is now a games-as-story site. Every game is a free, browser-playable episode in The Ephergent universe. No download. No login. No paywall.

The story: The Ephergent is an ancient starship that compressed itself into an espresso machine to survive a catastrophe. It carries a crew of nine through the quantum expanse — tuning into frequencies (other dimensions) that are fading from entropy. The crew started completely unaware that other dimensions existed. They didn’t stay that way long.

What I Built

In about two weeks of planning and building, here’s what shipped:

  • Full site shell rebuild — stripped the Snipcart storefront, built /games/, /crew/, /atlas/, /transmissions/
  • Content seeded — 4 Phase 1 games, 9 crew members, 3 lore entries
  • Tune-the-Dial interactive hero — drag-rotate a dial to tune between the five known frequencies of the universe. Vanilla JS, no framework needed.
  • New information architecture — every page connects story to game to lore to character

The stack is the same Astro 5 + Tailwind setup the site already had. The hard work was content and design direction, not tooling.

Phase 1 Games

Four games are planned for Phase 1:

  1. Tune the Dial — the homepage itself. Five frequencies, one dial, find the signal in the static. Already live as an interactive.
  2. Meatball’s Big Walk — a cozy Godot 4 point-and-click. Play as Meatball (the ship’s dog, who can smell through dimensions) exploring the lifeboat engine room. ~10 hotspots, ~20 one-liners, no fail state.
  3. Static Run — a Phaser.js or GB Studio arcade shooter in authentic Atari CRT style. Fly the lifeboat through quantum static, dissolve jammers into sparkles, score attack.
  4. The Laughing Funeral — a 30-minute Godot 4 narrative game adapting S02E06. Visit Nocturne Aeturnus, where emotions are inverted: funerals are celebrations, grief is joy. Choice-driven, cozy, contemplative.

The Technical Constraint I’m Proud Of

Every game has a 15MB compressed hard cap. Godot 4 baseline HTML5 exports are 4–6MB. The art budget is tight — which means I’ll be forced to make design decisions rather than throwing assets at problems. I expect this to make the games better.

Next Up

Godot 4 install → “hello cockpit” pipeline spike → measure the export size → start Meatball’s Big Walk.

Devlogs will track every step. Subscribe to the Ephergent Transmissions for in-universe updates as games ship.

All games link back here. All devlogs link to ephergent.com. That’s the loop.