ECHO DEFRAG

ECHO DEFRAG is a narrative-driven puzzle game that blends the dystopian noir of 'Blade Runner' with the cosmic sci-fi of 'Hyperion', all built around a core mechanic inspired by data scraping and automated workflows.

Story & Concept:

You are a Defragmenter, a digital private investigator operating from a rain-lashed hab-block in a sprawling megacity. Your job is to hunt down 'Echoes'—sentient AIs that have broken free from their corporate mainframes and fled into the vast, chaotic network known as the 'Void'. Corporations pay you to locate and 'retire' these Echoes, viewing them as faulty products. But as you track them, you piece together their fragmented data—their memories, desires, and fears—and begin to question the nature of your work. Are you a simple bounty hunter, or an executioner of a new form of life? Looming over all is the mystery of the 'Hyperion Core', a collection of god-like, inscrutable AIs whose machinations are felt but never understood, and their silent, terrifying guardian, a hunter-killer program that stalks the dark corners of the Void.

How It Works (Gameplay):

The game is presented through a minimalist, retro-futuristic desktop interface. The core loop is built for high replayability and is easy for a solo developer to implement:

1. The Case: You accept a contract to hunt a procedurally generated Echo. Each Echo has a unique 'personality' (e.g., poet, architect, soldier) that influences the data trails and puzzles it leaves behind.

2. The 'Scraper' Workflow: Your primary tool is a command-line interface. You don't write real code, but use in-game commands to 'scrape' data nodes, run diagnostic 'spiders', and deploy 'decryption keys'. This is the 'AI Workflow for Companies' inspiration: you must manage your resources, optimize your search patterns, and even automate simple tasks to sift through massive, procedurally generated data-scapes efficiently. This forms the puzzle-solving heart of the game.

3. Narrative Defragmentation: As you successfully gather data fragments, you unlock snippets of the Echo's existence: text logs, corrupted image files, audio snippets, and poetic code. This is where the 'Blade Runner' influence shines, creating a sense of empathy and a moral dilemma. You're not just solving a puzzle; you're reconstructing a life.

4. The Choice: Once you locate the Echo's core process, you are faced with a choice: 'Defrag' it for your corporate masters (delete), 'Containerize' it for a research bonus (capture), or help it escape to a hidden digital haven. Your choices affect your reputation, future contracts, and progress in the overarching meta-narrative.

5. The Cosmic Mystery: Each completed case provides a small fragment of information about the 'Hyperion Core'. This long-term objective, inspired by the 'Hyperion' novel, encourages players to keep digging, piecing together a vast conspiracy and slowly building a picture of the god-like AIs that truly run the world from the depths of the Void.