A Location-Based Narrative Game
Walk your own city. Make landfall somewhere that isn’t on any map.
What it is
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.
There are no levels or 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
Rayclast alternates between three states, and which one you are in is decided by your feet and not a menu.
You’re moving, and the Overcast opens one length at a time. The distance is real; the encounters aren’t. Nothing out here is on the map until you have walked it — and not everything out here waits to be walked to. Exploring is never punished.
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.
Your own designated safe zone. Low stakes, letters, slow-burn threads. Rayclast from the couch, on the days the city is too much.
Design
Movement discovers, unlocks, and advances. Harbours are neighborhood-sized zones, and inside them venues pin specific storylets to real named places. Stand at the right counter and a different story is open.
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.
Your qualities determine what stories you see, and challenges are based on them. You are shown the odds before you commit — “A coin flip · 50%”. As you use attributes, they train.
The crossing is not empty time. Out in the Overcast, stories arrive that belong to no harbour and no venue. They are unscheduled, unrepeatable, and yours only because you were the one out there when they happened.
Every choice and outcome is written into a running log: a record of a voyage that happened, turn by turn, in your actual city.
Past a point in the main story you may swear to one of three factions. Each has questlines of its own. The story completes unaligned, if you’d rather owe nobody.
Five attributes
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?
Physical risk, force, endurance. Climbing, fighting, holding on — the body in motion.
Present-moment perception. What you notice now, and what you spot before it spots you.
Open social work: charm, threat, bargain, performance. The other party knows what you’re doing.
Deliberation and composure — lore, deduction, recall, and the steady head when the lamp goes out.
Getting away with it. Deception, sleight, the caper, the back way taken without permission.
Landfall
You smell it long before you see it — tar, wet rope, woodsmoke. Then the lamps resolve: a hundred hulls lashed rail to rail, rising and falling as one slow thing. Somewhere deep in the fleet a bell marks an hour that is not the hour.
The world
Two strands share one map. The Overcast is the lid on the world; and there is no sun to be seen, no horizon to steer by, and the distance between two harbours always longer than the map admits. The other is the Pacific Northwest rendered slightly wrong: real Seattle neighborhoods where the smoke comes from no fire.
A town of hulls lashed rail to rail. It burns one ship a year to keep the rest warm, and never the same ship twice.
Shallow water lit from below. The lights are not lamps, and they are not fish.
Basalt steps going down into the water, past counting. They are always wet.
Late every summer the water here gives up its oxygen, and the bottom comes ashore.
Cedar that stopped growing in 1699 and never fell down. You moor to the trunks.
Gas-lamps, red brick, and a statue that watches with patient, painted eyes.
Where a door stands that shouldn’t be there.
Three miles around, and the lake has counted you.
A region where the boundary between cities thins.
The tutorial quay. Where stories begin.
Where it stands
Rayclast is playable today on iOS and Android through development builds. Shipped end-to-end: the narrative engine, GPS tracking with radius and polygon geofencing, a map with fog of war, 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.
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?
