Dialogue · Item text · Fragments of humanity

Hell Galaxy

Italian Games Factory · 2026

Nothing here is human. Not even you.

The player is a raider: a human brain extracted from a prisoner and installed in the cockpit of a ship, which becomes its new body. Raiders are exiled to Neterun, a dangerous galaxy. The story is built on three thematic ingredients: space opera, post-apocalyptic and dark sci-fi.

In space shooters you play as a ship. Hell Galaxy asks who is inside it: what is still human in a machine that remembers it was once human.

Dialogue

Homerus is the AI of the player’s ship. Over the opening of the game he goes from a tool built to assist to an accomplice.

The protagonist is the player, and has no voice. He cannot tell Homerus what he wants: he has to show him through his own actions, while Homerus reads his mind. The lines below are a condensed version of that stretch of play, not a single scene. Each one lands at a different point, and together they make a small arc of their own: not only the whole story, but every mission and every stretch of play needs a beginning, a climax and an end.

BeatThe player doesStory function

1Takes control of the ship, which is now the raider’s body, through simple first actions.Setup. Homerus introduces himself to the raider, that is, to the player.

2Keeps playing, while Homerus scans the raider’s mind.Refusal of the call. Homerus does not yet know whether to help the raider break the rules, and his own directives with them.

3Takes on harder and harder actions, and shows more and more skill.Escalation. Each action reveals more of the raider’s will to escape, and of his past: as a human, he already tried to break out of a prison.

4Defeats a miniboss.Climax. The proof Homerus was waiting for.

5Goes on into the game, now with Homerus on his side.Resolution. Homerus decides to help. The real adventure begins.

Writing sample · Dialogue · Homerus, the ship AI · condensed

Setup

Homerus: Ship AI 40-126, name: Homerus.

Homerus: I’m going to scan your mind to ensure I can assist you in the best way possible.

Refusal of the call

Homerus: I think your parameterization is clearer to me now. You continue at all costs because you still want to escape, but this time from an entire galaxy.

Homerus: I was created to help my raider, but you want something that’s forbidden to any raider… I don’t know what to do…

Escalation

No lines. The player shows Homerus what he wants through his actions alone.

Climax and resolution · After the miniboss

Homerus: There are stories of other raiders who tried to escape and became dust in the universe. They were not strong enough. And they didn’t have me. Now I know what to do. Helping you in the best way possible means showing you the way to the power.

Homerus: The power to escape this galaxy.

“In the best way possible” comes back, turned: helping now means leading the raider to the one thing forbidden to raiders.

How the story reaches the player

In a space shooter the player rarely stops to read, so the story travels through many channels. I wrote all of them as the sole writer. Two of them, highlighted, are the game’s own objects and the traces of what the raiders used to be.

Main questsThe story of the Nameless Raider, the protagonist. In a space combat game the ship grows more and more powerful, and this becomes part of the story: the only way a raider can escape is to grow stronger by upgrading his own body. His story is woven into the past of Neterun, the game’s galaxy.

Side questsThey widen the other stories of Hell Galaxy: other raiders, exiled machines and their forgotten stories, and the galaxy’s past and its secrets.

Item descriptionsEvery module of the ship, the raider’s body, has a short description. I wrote each as a piece in its own right, and some as parts of a set that the player assembles by playing. All of these texts are in the released game.

Fragments of humanityFragments written in line with the game’s lore, standing for what is still human in the raiders.

Item descriptions

Writing sample · A set across four modules · The Mhafek

Sharp like a Mhafek’s pain. · cockpit fitted with cutting blades

Silent like the Mhafek homeworld. · engine

Iridescent like a Mhafek’s thoughts. · laser with a prism-like, iridescent beam

Brutal like the Mhafek’s memories. · gatling

Four different modules, four descriptions, one exterminated population. Each adjective also fits the module it describes. The player discovers who the Mhafek are only in a side quest; put together, the four lines become a portrait of a lost people.

Writing sample · A set across two modules · Project One Record

Project One Record. The subject’s mind has vanished; we don’t know how. Fortunately, we have other Raider Ones, and the Imperial Family was pleas…

Project One Record. …ed. We’ve bottled minds as messages, cast into a sea of stars. May that sea welcome my memories.

One record, cut mid-word across two modules. It reads whole only if the player has installed both, and it explains what the raiders are.

Writing sample · Single modules

The first, glorious K&B model. All raiders started with a gatling of this type, compact and easy to mount on their ship. “Freedom spree. K&B.” · a slogan that sells violence as freedom, to minds that have lost their bodies

The HomeInSpace Company designed the Bios for their Mugai mining raiders, seeking durable bodies. They later became the Empire’s main problem in the Mining Soul Revolution. · world history

When Kin suggested improving their gatling, Behl doubted him. Then Kin showed a slaughter test, and the name. Behl was sold. · a story in three sentences

“Old Joe reaches where Isaac Greyling does not.” This heat sink proves it. · a character in one line

An evolution of the RaidGun, created by Isaac Greyling Foundry using low-grade orichalcum. Some claimed it interfered with brainwaves. Greyling called it jealousy. · a rivalry in a few words

Each description is a story in its own right. Recurring names, such as Isaac Greyling and Old Joe, tie unrelated modules to one another.

Fragments of humanity

Writing sample · Fragments of humanity · Tonath, a bounty that turns

Fragments of humanity are pieces of memory: the only human thing a raider, a brain-ship hybrid, leaves behind.

The action. A quest sends the player to hunt Tonath, a raider with a bounty on her head. The player fights her to cash in.

Tonath: Day 0, New Colony Era. […] We are immeasurably small compared to these gigantic monuments, like insects.

Tonath: Correction: the comparison to insects is inaccurate. We are bacteria. A human infection in an unknown galaxy.

The reversal. Then Tonath’s memory surfaces:

Tonath: Day 3653. Last family visit. I met my father and told him about Project Raider One. He said it was better than a death sentence, then kept quiet. I see him get on the transport that will take him back to Earth.

The fight is the action; the memory is the reversal. A father who says nothing, a transport home, a project that turned a woman into a ship: the same project is named in the module texts above.