Join us
We need people who can do the parts we can't.
Ten regions are planned, one of them is playable, and the other nine are greyboxed and empty — rooms at their real size with nobody in them. That gap is why this page exists. Gigabit Arcade makes it, the team is a small volunteer group, and Adjacent Interactive is the one place you sign up.
Four are written. Two say three lines and stop.
Every conversation is a plain JSON file with a branch table, so you can write for this without touching engine code. Xander gets 47 lines across fifteen nodes and Chris gets 45. Bob Lazar and Travis Walton, in the diner booth, say three lines each and repeat them forever — the physicist and the abductee, which makes them the two easiest characters in the game to write and the two nobody has. You'll spot them inside five minutes. Pick one and write him properly.
There is also a first act written end to end in the repo — every scene from the cold open to the road out, in both orders you can meet the two men in, and the words people say rather than a summary of them. Every invented line is marked as invented and every line already in the build is reproduced verbatim and marked as shipped, so you can see where the writing stops and the guessing starts. None of it is implemented. The first job on it is crossing out what shouldn't survive.
Nine regions with a floor plan and no paint
Rooms are hand-painted and quantized to 32 colours — a shared CORE 24 plus eight that belong to the place you're standing in, and fourteen of those eight-colour banks are fitted already. That's more banks than there are regions, because four of them are towns you drive through rather than stops on the route: Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, the LA valley and San Diego. The other nine regions aren't blank: nineteen more places and the eight roads between them are greyboxed and walkable today, with the floor plan, the doors and the scale settled. What's missing is paint, not a decision. The greybox editor is role-gated, so we switch it on for you once you're in.
The open questions
Nine regions are greyboxed and empty — real rooms, real dimensions, nobody in them. What the player does there is the open question, and there's a draft in the repo to argue with rather than a blank page: a beat sheet pulled out of the twenty-six story flags the save file already declares, with the invented parts marked as invented. Read in order they are a plot — and the credentials at the end of it, the badge and the uniform and the ticket, are flags nothing in the game sets yet. Combat has a committed answer on paper too: real time on the map, one hand-authored set-piece per region, no experience points, clearance instead of levels. None of it is built, so the first job is to take those answers and tell us where they break.
Play it and tell us
The lowest-commitment way in, and the one we need most right now. Fifteen minutes, in your browser, no download. You can play signed out, but signed out we record nothing at all and the note box in the pause menu needs an account — so if you're testing rather than looking, sign in first. The most useful sentence you can send us is the one about the moment you got bored.
This is unpaid volunteer work today. Full credit, a real say in the thing, and a revenue share if it ever ships commercially — which nobody has sat down and worked out, so read that as an intention and not a number. Adjacent Interactive's recruiting page has the specifics and the actual sign-up.
A different ask
Should you be in it?
Above Black is built out of positions people have actually taken: memos that exist, hearings that were held, files that came back out of government custody shorter than they went in. The characters are people who've spent real time in that record and didn't come out of it in the same place.
So a character here needs a record: a body of work, testimony, research, reporting, a case they worked. Something someone can go and look up. Fame isn't the test. Several of the people we most want have small audiences and long records. What we're testing for is material, and it cuts both ways: if there's nothing on the record, there's nothing for the game to represent honestly, and inventing it is the one thing this game is built not to do.
Being in Above Black is a commitment. Your name, your likeness, and words written for you — which you get to read, and approve, before anybody plays them.
Put a name forward
Yourself, or someone whose work belongs in this. We read everything and reply to what we can. For a role rather than a name, use the sign-up button above.
Sign in first, so we know who sent it and have a way to answer.
Sign in to submitWhat you've sent
Only you and Justin can see these — a pitch naming someone else is never visible to other players.
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A pitch we don't take isn't a verdict on anyone. The only thing being weighed is whether there's enough on the public record for this game to build a character honestly — and where there isn't, inventing it is the one thing we won't do.