About
Gravity is not physics. It is homesickness.
In the beginning the universe was one enormous, very lonely rock. Then it sneezed. Everything that exists is a piece of that sneeze, and every piece has been trying to get back together ever since. That is why things fall. That is why things stick.
01 / The worldCanon
A hug is not a making. A hug is a remembering.
The pieces are called Humlets. Two Humlets that were touching inside the first rock recognise each other on sight, and recognition is what a hug is. That is why only identical Humlets can hug: identical means we were one thing, we were touching, and I know your edges because they used to be mine.
So when two Dustys hug, a Pip stands up where they were, because a Pip is who those two were before the sneeze. Not a stranger who ate them. The older shape they came out of, put back. Ask that Pip who it used to be and it says both their names, every time, for as long as it exists.
This is the load-bearing rule of the whole thing and it is why the game is safe for a five year old. Nothing here is destroyed, eaten, crushed or killed. Things are only remembered at a larger size. Climbing the ladder is not levelling up, it is walking back up a family tree.
At the top of it two Galaxies hug, the first rock is whole for one instant, and finding itself surrounded by every piece of itself it is so happy that it sneezes again. That is the Big Bang. Not an explosion. A family reunion that laughs so hard it starts everything over.
The jar is a pair of hands
Open sky is too big to bump into anybody in. A Humlet can fall for an age toward everything it misses and never arrive at anyone, because the average of everywhere is nowhere. So somebody made a smaller sky. Grandma Galaxy cupped her hands around a piece of the dark so the little ones would have somewhere to land near someone. Every board you ever play is inside it. The walls are her fingers. The floor is her palm.
The Hollow
When the first rock sneezed it made two things, and everybody only ever counts the first one. It made the pieces, and it made the space between the pieces. The pieces became the Humlets. The space became the Hollow, who feeds on distance and grows fat on loneliness.
He never destroys a Humlet. He only keeps them apart, whispering that they are better off alone. He is terrified of the Big Bang, because a reunion means he stops existing. He is also the reason the ceiling presses down: the danger line is the Hollow leaning on the sky.
And the hero is Dusty, the smallest Humlet there is. Every Humlet in the sky is bigger than him and every one of them has told him so. He is the one who starts the chain that ends in a Big Bang, because nothing is too small to start something.
02 / The familyTwelve, in order
Each one is the grown-up version of the one before.
They are individuals, not one shape at twelve sizes. Different silhouettes, different faces, different weights in the physics, so a jar full of them reads at a glance and still reads in greyscale.
| Humlet | Rung | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Dusty | Dust | The smallest, the bravest, never stops trying. |
| Pip | Pebble | Dusty's best friend. Asks a question about everything. |
| Chip | Asteroid | Lumpy, chipped, and delighted with both. |
| Zoom | Comet | Cannot sit still. Arrives before you finish asking. |
| Luna | Moon | Steady and quiet. Keeps everyone from panicking. |
| Rollo | Planet | Big, cheerful, and slightly too enthusiastic about hugs. |
| Ringer | Ringed | Wears rings, knows it, and is normal about it (not really). |
| Bigsby | Giant | Enormous, gentle, and extremely silly about both. |
| Nebby | Nebula | Half asleep, speaks in weather, and is usually right. |
| Twinkle | Star | Bright enough to hurt, generous to a fault, needs applause. |
| Blink | Pulsar | On, off, on again, and definitely up to something. |
| Grandma Galaxy | Galaxy | The oldest thing in the sky. She remembers the first hug. |
Beyond the twelve there are 120 collectible Humlets in the Machine, all of them cosmetic. A collectible changes what your Humlets look like and carries at most one small trait, and every trait is switched off in competition.
03 / How it is builtChoices, and the reasons
Small decisions that add up to the thing you are holding.
- No account, ever There is no sign up, no email, no password and nowhere in the game to type. Your name is generated for you from a curated word list. That is not a missing feature, it is the privacy design: nothing to breach, nothing to profile, nothing to sell.
- It plays offline All of it. The physics, the levels, the collection, the Garden. Network calls are optional, they time out, and they fail quietly into a retry queue. The bus, the plane and the basement all work.
- Drawn, not photographed There is not a single image asset in the game. Every Humlet, every planet, every award crest and every story postcard is drawn by code, which is why the whole thing is a few hundred kilobytes and looks correct on any screen at any size.
- Fair by construction The Humlet Machine cannot take money and cannot hand you a duplicate. Character traits are switched off in the Daily Drop, in duels and in leagues. Those are rules in the build with tests behind them, not sentences in a policy.
- Colour is never the only channel Every Humlet differs in size, silhouette, pattern and face as well as colour, and you can turn on tier numbers if you want them. Reduced motion is honoured and keeps every gradient and face, dropping only the movement. Everything is reachable with one thumb, and there is no clock anywhere.
- A real sky The constellations in the collection are real constellations, each carrying one true, checkable fact, and the seasonal events are tied to real sky events: the Perseids in August, the Geminids in December, the equinoxes. Anything we could not verify was cut.
04 / ElsewhereWhere to go next
More, if you want it.
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