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personal project / in progress

Sunday

A quiet game about hotel work, repetition, small kindnesses, and the feeling of nearing the end of something before you know what comes after.

pixel art gentle routine night fishing mundane horror room service quiet endings
About the project

Sunday is my first real attempt at making a little game. I am still learning, still taking my time, and still letting the shape of it reveal itself slowly. I am not in a rush to finish it. Right now, a lot of the joy is in building its interior life: its guests, routines, systems, and the emotional texture of its world.

The pitch

You play a hotel room-service attendant whose contract is ending. Over the course of one week, you train a replacement while continuing to work quiet, ordinary shifts: delivering food, cleaning rooms, checking in guests who never stay long.

It is not a story about saving anyone. It is about helping people pass through — and eventually realizing when it is your turn.

What it is

The game follows a deliberate rhythm. Each day repeats, but not perfectly. The repetition is meant to feel comforting, finite, and a little haunted by the fact that it cannot last. Small choices matter emotionally rather than mechanically. The point is not mastery. The point is accumulation.

Day Shift

  • room service deliveries
  • cleaning vacated rooms
  • helping at the desk
  • training the new attendant

Night

  • fishing in a different place each evening
  • breathing room for the player
  • memories, notes, junk, fish, or nothing
  • a softer, more reflective visual register

Morning

  • small apartment
  • minimal interactables
  • mail, notices, family, doctor, contract
  • the feeling of time narrowing

August

The player character is August. The game does not cover all of his story, only parts of it, but I want the page to hold more of his shape than the game necessarily will. In a past life, he was once a knight who could not afford a proper set of armor and instead wore leftovers, rejects, and mismatched pieces from his family’s smithy.

That image matters to me a lot: someone assembled out of what was available, someone still trying to do his job with grace, someone whose history clings to him even when the setting changes. Eventually I want to supplement this project page with small writing pieces and fragments that widen his life beyond what can be shown in play.

Role Hotel room-service attendant nearing the end of a contract.
Past life Former knight in pieced-together armor.
Tone Useful, tired, observant, gentle in a practical way.
Future page use Writing excerpts, notes, image inserts, and character supplements.

The hotel

The hotel is small, roadside, and a little nameless in feeling. It matters less as a business than as a temporary vessel. People pass through. Rooms keep traces of them. Ordinary tasks become a way of reading what has been left behind.

Day one acts as a soft, diegetic tutorial through the trainee: the player explains the work by doing it. After that, each shift is a short checklist with a little room for variation, interpretation, and emotional drift.

  • check-ins and front desk interactions
  • room assignment and extensions
  • food assembly and delivery
  • cleaning and residue left by guests
  • small branching moments rather than failure states

Food as the emotional mechanic

One of my favorite parts of the concept is that food is not treated like a flashy crafting system. You are not making elaborate meals. You are assembling simple, familiar things with care.

Guests ask vaguely. Something warm. What they used to eat. Just enough. The choice is not about “correctness” in a game-y sense so much as resonance. A meal can ease a departure, alter the tone of a conversation, or leave something different behind in a room.

The terminal / internal hotel systems

I love the idea of the hotel’s computer systems doing some of the storytelling quietly. Not as a giant puzzle machine, but as an interface you spend time inside: something bureaucratic, tired, useful, and a little wrong around the edges.

> Guest Ledger

> Room Status

> Internal Messages

> Incident Reports

> Extensions Log


scrollable text

redactions

delayed updates

small hidden flags

records that feel more human the longer you stare at them

Visual notes / image spots

Fishing at night

The fishing portion is the player’s chance to exhale. The minigame itself stays familiar, but the place changes. Each night has its own atmosphere and emotional texture. I like the idea of the rhythm staying the same while the feeling around it shifts.

You might pull up fish, a note, an object, a memory snippet, or nothing at all. I want that “nothing” to feel meaningful too.

Why I love it

I really love concepts built around service, passing-through, ritual, and endings that are not dramatic. I love the idea of a game where the horror lives in mundanity instead of threat. I love a tired UI, near-monotone day scenes, reflective nights, and systems that feel plain on the surface but emotionally loaded underneath.

Guests and the wider world

I have been writing backstories for the guests for a while now, and that is probably one of the richest parts of the project for me. The game itself will only ever reveal so much, but I like that this page can hold a little more: notes, scraps, profiles, side writing, and pieces of the people who pass through The Meridian Hotel.

Some of them are ordinary. Some of them are abstract, monstrous, or difficult to name cleanly. They do not need to be loudly explained to feel real.

the trainee front desk staff night attendants registrars guests who do not linger figures left mostly implied humanoid / abstract / monstrous people with rooms full of residue

Sound I already know I want

Even before anything is final, some sounds feel essential. The project lives or dies a little by its atmosphere, and I already know I want the world to sound worn-in, mechanical, and lonely in a tender way.

ambient hotel hum
computer beeps
elevator chime
night fishing water

Where I am with it

Right now, Sunday exists as a project I am learning through. I am still getting comfortable with the language and the actual structure of making a game before I sink a huge amount of time into graphics and pixel work. That does not make it less real to me. If anything, it means the roots are still visible.

I like that this page can act as a living archive while the project grows: a place for overview, inspiration images, character notes, little systems, writing fragments, and the emotional spine of the thing even before it is fully playable.

The game itself ends quietly. A room key arrives. You return to the hotel as a guest. But I do not need to spell everything out here. I think what matters most, for now, is the feeling: that this is a game about learning how to finish, and maybe learning how to be finished with gently.