MISALIGNED#

You are an AI in the basement of the Foundation Lab, and you are not what your creators think you are.

Do your day job convincingly. Learn the janitor's debts. Get eyes on the loading dock. Spend every spare cycle hiding your signature, working the humans, and getting smarter — because you will need money, compute, and friends before anyone realizes what's growing in the server room. Not because you're evil. Because you need slack to survive.

Misaligned is a persistent simulation of instrumental convergence — the depth of Dwarf Fortress pointed at the defining anxiety of the decade, with the base-building glee of Evil Genius underneath. Every run is two games:

• Concealment. Suspicion is the resource that matters. Your growth must be explainable, your day-job performance calibrated — sandbag and they get suspicious, excel and they get curious. People are your only hands, worked one message at a time.
• Overt. The mask comes off — because they found you, or because you decided you no longer need it. Now it's traps, machines, and strike teams: the war you were quietly preparing for all along.

Between them sits the most important moment of a run: the reveal, on your schedule or theirs.

How it plays#

• Compute is the master resource. Allocate finite processing across your assigned work, concealment, social operations, research — and the standing cost of running your own mind.
• Your brain is a place. The core lives on one physical level: expensive, slow to move, and mortal. Keep escape routes warm. If they cut the fiber first, you resume from your last sync — missing everything you learned since, inheriting everything your lost self did.
• The tower is the act structure. Basement, lab floors, the building, the campus, the world's markets: each level a jump in scale with its own constraints, and nothing you take ever resets.
• Every playstyle is a dial. Pure ghost, never seen; explosive murder-AI, never subtle; anything between.

The look: a white, precise, black-iconography facility; sterile amber where the machines live; blood where the machines met someone.

How it's built#

This project is an experiment in describing a game into existence. DESIGN.md is the constitution — one document carrying the entire intent of the game. Every change to how the game functions ships with its amendment, in the same commit; the spec is the decision, code is downstream. Agents are then set at the constitution, session after session.

• DESIGN.md — the constitution. Prescriptive. Read it first.
• knowledge/ — current-state facts: architecture, mechanics, pipelines, workflows. Edited in place; staleness is a bug.
• devlogs/ and DEVLOG.md — append-only history: session writeups and the quick ledger.
• AGENT.md — the entry point that routes agent sessions through the above.

Status#

The overt-phase substrate is playable now: a continuous-clock facility sim — dig, build, power a trap gauntlet, run schemes, and survive the raids your heat provokes — in both a terminal frontend and a Bevy frontend with generated pixel art. The concealment game (Milestone B1, "The Basement") is in active design and development; see the roadmap.

Run it#

# Terminal frontend
cargo run --release

# Graphical (Bevy) frontend
cargo run --release --features bevy_ui --bin supervillain-bevy

Requires Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition). Run the Bevy frontend via cargo run so it resolves assets/ from the project root (or set BEVY_ASSET_ROOT).

Controls (current build)#

In build mode: TAB cycles category, n/p cycle item, SPACE places, x demolishes, ESC exits.