Monster Lab

Most creature-collection games separate the collecting from the place: the lab is a menu. I wanted the laboratory itself to be the progression system — a facility whose wings, machines, and layout gate what you can discover, with a social campus around it for showing off what you made.

The game is a 48-discovery content graph over twelve base families, four tiers, five machines, six catalysts, and four scheduled events — all data-driven, with gameplay, economy, and progression gates frozen while the world is built. A Central Campus social hub (transit, discovery hall, observatory, supply, directory, exchange) surrounds a Personal Lab that grows from a warm improvised Garage through Research and Mutation wings to a dark Forbidden chamber.

Profiles are deterministic and fenced (leases, crash recovery from committed checkpoints, bounded offline progress), and travel between the two places uses destination-bound tickets with cancellation recovery. The current art phase builds a reusable environment kit first — chunky modular industrial-science forms, restrained PBR surfaces — and applies it to both worlds, with native Studio captures and independent review at every checkpoint rather than author judgment alone.

Gameplay systems are implemented and exercised with two-client Studio fixtures (admission, travel cancellation, production, events). The environments are an honest gameplay blockout / advanced programmer art — native captures, frame samples, and walking fixtures are recorded as evidence, and full-world art acceptance stays open until the kit application passes review. No experience publication yet.