ZERO HOUR

YOUR SHIFT

The year is 1954. The Bureau of Shelters buried something under the country, and it is your shift. You and up to three other operators ride a vintage subway rail car down into a civil-defense installation that goes down forever. The Bureau built these rooms to be impressive first and useful second — monumental board-formed concrete coffers, brass gauges, and Cyrillic enamel signage.

Your real voice is a core game mechanic: proximity chat is always live. Whisper and only the crewmate beside you hears it; shout and everything on the floor knows where you are. One of the things down there banks your spoken words in memory and says them back. Every texture, 3D model, and sound effect is synthesized at runtime by pure Godot code — zero asset packs, all the way down.

THE MUSTER DECK

Before descending into the dark, crews assemble in the networked staging hub. The Foreman reviews the Shift Manifest Board (Difficulty, Map Directive, Entity Report, and Door Policy) and checks THE PLAN chalkboard before pulling the heavy red drop lever.

Down the concourse sits the Social Club. Behind the brass counter stands THE KEEPER, dispensing coffee, scrip requisitions (felt-soled boots, high-drain torch cells, flares, survey charts, and radiation dials), alongside the rec-lane tournament dartboard and the Test Your Nerve shock machine.

THE JOB · HOW TO WIN A FLOOR

The war-room chalkboard says it best: READ THE SITE BOARD — THE FLOOR DEALS A CARD. The card may reorder steps 1–3.

1. 1 POWER

   Find spare fuses (amber-beaconed pickups) and feed each sector's breaker panel. Dead breakers mean dead card readers ("NO POWER").

2. 2 PUNCH

   Hold [E] on each of the three Bureau time clocks. Mid-punch the reader grinds — hold through it or the card jams, loudly. Every punched card pays +35 to the shift fund.

3. 3 VENT

   Hold the boiler valve wheel until pressure vents. On UNION floors a second crewmate holds the bleed lever — solo operators crank at about a third speed.

4. 4 ARM

   Cards + pressure bring the platform dispatch console live. Pressing it rings a real station bell and starts a 60-second alarm window (12 seconds on drills). Everything on the floor hears it.

5. 5 RIDE

   Be on the platform. The rail car slides in under cubic braking. Riding out wins the floor, banking fund, salvage, and rank. Anyone left behind is lost.

CHAIN CARDS & DEPTH THEMES

Every floor deals one card that rewires the order of the work. The PA announces it; the site board in the booth prints it.

WHAT WALKS THE FLOOR

First contact is shuffled per floor. The first minute is quiet. Grace shrinks with every level you descend.

THE OVERWATCH BOOTH

One crewmate can stay behind in the glass overwatch booth at the platform. The booth operator sees what boots on the floor cannot:

• 5 Hz Live Radar: A green CRT display mapping the entire sector layout, active breaker conduits, crew positions, and moving entity signatures.
• Bulkhead Control (BOLT): Slam heavy steel blast doors to cut off charging entities or buy a running crewmate three precious seconds.
• Auxiliary Power (POWER): Reroute juice to dead sector lights or force-charge a stubborn time clock.
• Geiger Sweep (SWEEP): Run an acoustic pulse through ventilation shafts to pin stalking entities on the radar.
• The Lie (ONE PER FLOOR): Trigger a synthetic boot-step echo in any room to pull the sound-hunters away from trapped teammates.

THE CONTRACT · NAMED AUDITS

Fail the audit and the contract is TERMINATED: fund seized, gear repossessed, run reset. Rank survives — and seeds a service rider so veterans restart with a cushion. Rank is worth something down there: quieter boots, a stronger wrist on the valve, a faster hand pulling a crewmate off the floor.

The facility remembers, too — sectors that burn stay sealed ("THE BUREAU DOES NOT REOPEN GRAVES"), wreckage waits where it fell, and if you return to a depth on record, the hunt starts already knowing your habits. You can shred the file. The foreman decides.

CONTROLS

WASD  move        SHIFT sprint      CTRL crouch
SPACE jump / hold breath (while hiding)
E     interact — HOLD to punch clocks, vent valves, or DRAG bodies
F     torch      G flare (PX kit)  1-5 hotbar slots
ESC   settings   V push-to-talk (only if PTT is enabled)

The mic is open by default. Rebind keys in ESC → SETTINGS → CONTROLS. Accessibility options (FOV, Reduce Flashes, View-bob, Brightness) and per-crew voice sliders live under ESC → SETTINGS.

• Body Dragging & Rescues: Caught operators drop. Crewmates can DRAG bodies (hold E) into cover or away from patrolling entities before pulling them back up. Un-pinned downs stand after 15 seconds.
• Dead-Player Haunting: Fallen operators spectate surviving crew eyes with SPACE. Once per floor, press E to spend your haunt — flicker a work lamp or rattle a locker door to aid your team or bait hunters.
• 5-Slot Hotbar: Persistent bottom-center HUD (1 HANDS, 2 CHART, 3 GEIGER, 4 FLARE, 5 FUSE). Draws item glyphs only once owned or carried.
• PX Scrip Economy: Spend earned shift funds at the Commissary for felt-soled boots, high-drain torch cells, flares, survey charts, and rad meters.

REPORT A FAULT

Something broke? That's the job. Report it with three things:

• Your build — the window title reads ZERO HOUR — FIELD BUILD 0.5.0, and BUILD_INFO.txt beside the exe carries the date and commit. Quote both.
• What happened and what you expected — a sentence or two, plus a screenshot if it's visual.
• Your log file, grabbed right after:
  %APPDATA%\\Godot\\app_userdata\\Zero Hour\\logs\\godot.log

Most wanted right now: how the voice feels at distance, whether the mimic ever said your words back, downs and rescues, whether the booth is worth living in, and anything that made you say "wait, what?" — write that down, it's gold.