After Them
After Them is a life-simulation game that generates mythological creatures ("Encryptids") from cultural media and runs them as a managed colony, converting colony creative output into combat-usable artifacts.
After Them (GSV-F1) is a life-simulation game, part of the generative-games pace-layer, that derives creatures deterministically from arbitrary media a player feeds it -- a Wikipedia article, image, video, URL, or song. A feature-extraction pass reads color palette, motion, tempo, and content hash from the input and maps those signals onto a generated creature called an Encryptid, drawing physical, behavioral, and aesthetic traits from a catalog of 351 predefined mythological creature types. The mechanism is an openly acknowledged generalization of Monster Rancher's CD-as-seed generation, extended from a single disc format to any cultural artifact. The current MVP scopes this down substantially: roughly 30-40 base creatures generated from Wikipedia articles alone, with only the aesthetic layer generated over pre-baked silhouettes rather than full physical and behavioral synthesis. Architecturally the game runs two coupled modes over a shared Entity-Component-System core. Habitat mode is the persistent colony layer: Encryptids live communally, satisfy needs, form relationships, and, when free from survival demands, autonomously produce art, music, and writing, narrated in text in the style of Dwarf Fortress emergent storytelling. Delve mode is a top-down Vampire Survivors-style action mode that generates the resources the colony consumes. An EnCulturation system bridges the two, converting the colony's autonomously produced creative works into equippable combat items -- visual art becomes Sigils, music becomes Resonance Crystals, writing becomes Etched Runes -- with combat properties derived from the originating work's quality, style, theme, and emotional content. It sits within the same generative-games cluster as Solwend, shadow-work, elf-revel, and Unc Rancher, sharing the ecosystem's interest in emergent, media-derived simulation. Status: the media-to-creature seeding mechanism and MVP scope (Wikipedia-only aesthetic generation over roughly 30-40 creatures) are the working slice; the full 351-creature catalog, full physical and behavioral generation, and the two-mode Habitat/Delve/EnCulturation loop remain ahead of the current build.