Art. Physics. Code. One impossible world.
Carny Radio
Uncle Shrift / Your host ↗
My last game was the cult hit Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR. It sold 3.9 million units and made Village Roadshow $260 million. This time around, I'm doing it all myself: all the drawing, all the voices, the gameplay, the music and the coding. No middlemen. No distribution fees. Just an iPad, a laptop, a Mac Studio—and two of the most powerful machines ever built.
Welcome to Carny Island. My Halloween party game takes place inside The GraveRobbers, a ghost-train attraction in Crookwood cemetery: a 10-level “big house” on Bogan Bros’ Carny Island, an imaginary amusement park on a real New York peninsula.
Crookwood is run by Uncle Shrift, a mortician and closet cannibal who drinks Black Dog according to the phases of the moon. His dogs Mongril, Ferret, Scrotum and Bastard moonlight as the rock band The DogGones, who provide Carny Island's soundtrack.
The ride has broken down. You are on foot: a 3-foot villain in a glow-in-the-dark skeleton suit. Rob graves for body parts, flog them through the black-market economy of Necronomics, and build a Stein—a nod to Frankenstein—or a zombie. You can “win”, but never actually win.
Because video games need absolutes, Carny Island runs on natural engines. Real New York weather changes how hard the ground is to dig. The sun and moon cast moving shadows through the graveyard. JooJoo, the game’s conscience and moral operating code, is based on Mongrilism. And all of it happens on a film set.
This is a video game and a tabletop game at once: up to 12 inebriated adults gather around a dining-table-sized poster, using their phones as playing pieces, portals and weapons.
I invented it. Now one maniac and two machines—OpenAI and Anthropic—are coding it. What could possibly go wrong?
“We never know how high we are until we are asked to rise.”— Emily Dickinson
Fitting The Universe Into A 50 square metre Studio. · Brett's field note
Restore the scale and theatrical logic of Crookwood after an astronomical exterior made the painted Sun, Moon and cyclorama overwhelm the 50-metre set.
The sky, catalogue stars, Sun and Moon remain inside the measurable studio envelope while Crookwood, its authored layout and wrecking-ball physics remain unchanged.
An adult Halloween party game invented by Nightmare creator Brett Clements. A physical cemetery board links to smartphones used as playing pieces, portals and weapons inside Crookwood.
Up to 12 adults gather around Crookwood, rob graves for body parts, valuables and anomalies, build zombies before sunrise, and use their phones to attack, defend and survive nine lives while Uncle Shrift runs the yard.
Donuts become energy. Energy makes action possible; depletion creates vulnerability and death.
Each grave is a tactile sequence of touch, reveal, reward and consequence.
Dogma judges deliberate tool misuse through damage, excess and proportionality. JooJoo remembers the player's sustained pattern without becoming a running score.
New York time, KJFK weather, NOAA tides and the lunar calendar feed the theatre. The world outside the game changes the world inside it.
Carny Island makes death, danger and decay playable. Its humour can be grotesque and its theatre excessive, but the world must remain legible, cumulative and internally consistent.
01The joke, shock or flourish must emerge from rules the player can understand. Spectacle is strongest when it has mechanical consequence.
02Nothing is sacred by default, but provocation is deliberate. Carny rejects random chaos and empty shock.
03Death and the dead are inputs to the island's economy, memory and play—not merely a failure screen.
04Actions leave residue. Pressure builds, damage persists and the world remembers patterns rather than erasing them for convenience.
05The tabletop board and mobile phones form one game. Phones are playing pieces and video portals, so physical and screen-based play must obey the same world law.
06Continuity outranks novelty. The world may be hostile or absurd, but it cannot casually contradict its own laws.
The Bibles describe a rebellion built through systems: consequence without sermons, humour without nihilism and a handmade world whose machinery has a point of view.
Crookwood is not an isolated graveyard. It is the front counter of an economy, a religion, a media system and a very badly supervised entertainment empire.
browser-safe web display derivative of authored Shrift gameplay plate · exact authored pathsShrift is Crookwood's host, antagonist and master of ceremonies: a functioning alcoholic whose mood moves from sober calculation at the New Moon to peak chaos at the Full Moon.
He cues theatrical weather and escalates danger at the top of the Chaos ladder. Rope creaks and ground shadows warn the player before his overhead threats arrive.
Shrift is a form of TheShapeShifter. Brett performs his voice. On this website he operates the customer-service desk while his approved mouth-chart animation and recorded performance await intake.
Phase 1 commentary format and final cottage treatment remain Brett decisions.
Mongril, Ferret, Scrotum and Bastard are Shrift's dogs and the graveyard's living alarm. They moonlight as the rock band the DogGones, who provide the soundtrack for Carny Island. They are not introduced as a melee threat; they listen, judge and tell the rest of the island where you are.
Their escalation is audible and learnable: head-cock, growl, bark, howl, attack. Silence protects the player. Noise feeds shared pack distress and can eventually summon Shrift.
Mongril is one of Shrift's dogs and one of the DogGones. The legacy Bible gives him a magnificently unstable history: a Holy Man and former rocket scientist reincarnated as a dog, fortune teller, sword swallower and founder of Mongrilism. Black Dog is what Shrift drinks; Shrift is a closet cannibal whose drinking rises and falls with the phases of the moon. The dogs' other job is music: the DogGones provide Carny Island's soundtrack.
Dog count, patrol shape and which parts of Mongril's legacy biography enter Game 1 remain Brett decisions.
web display derivative of authored PNG · exact authored pathsPOX News reports Carny Island back to itself. It turns deaths, prices, scandals and new threats into an in-world broadcast instead of a detached menu of updates.
Johnny Prime anchors the news. Existing story anchors include the death of Marley The Bobster and heart prices going through the roof.
The news system can carry world consequences, introduce killers and make the horror economy feel public, ridiculous and alive.
The current canon preserves the anchors and schemas while episode format and live delivery remain to be built.
source SVG · exact authored pathsThe Chapel is Crookwood's public ritual node: a Pandora destination, a working part of the death economy and a place where confession can alter JooJoo.
The Bible connects the Chapel to confession, redemption, JooJoo recovery and bargaining with Shrift. The exact current lifeline count is being reconciled rather than invented here.
Bodies and coffins pass through its ceremonies. Jesus speaks with an Australian accent, and the bodies are timed to explode on the second joint or glass of wine.
The archived V2 Chapel file says two lifelines per run; Brett later ruled one lifeline in two religious framings. The current contract needs his explicit final confirmation.
source SVG · exact authored pathsCrookwood County Morgue is a plain government dead-intake building where bodies become inventory and fresh organs enter the necro-economy.
Four nine-drawer cadaver coolers hold bodies and organs. Blackouts can turn intake and extraction into torch-lit navigation.
Best-Before organs are the exceptional loot whose value decays. Pandora gateway stones are intended to route players here.
Interior interaction, extraction risk and exact gateway assignments remain unspecified in the archived V2 file.
source SVG · exact authored pathsMuma Maria's Pizzeria is a meat-loving shopfront that doubles as Crookwood's working crematorium.
Current high-authority build notes describe the Pizzeria as visible but non-playable. Its value is orientation, tone and the uneasy proximity of dinner to disposal.
The same ovens serve takeaway and cremation. The Bible calls the facility Mama Mia's PIZZA & Crematorium; Brett's current authored sign reads Muma Maria's Pizzeria. Both names are preserved until Brett rules on the final wording.
The name discrepancy and any Game 1 interaction remain open. The Bible places the working burn-and-takeaway facility in a future build.
Gweedo's is a black-market shopping assault run from a shipping-container elevator: flashing prices, bells, sirens, bad bargains and absolutely no refunds.
Players can buy tools, weapons and body parts, sell organs, take credit and even pawn lives. Buying a weapon is not a crime; deliberate misuse is where Dogma begins to judge.
Gweedo is a pawnbroker and economic predator. His shop exists to tempt poor decisions, exploit desperation and make the necro-economy feel like a rigged carnival midway.
Final Game 1 inventory, prices, interface and exact debt tuning remain implementation work.
web display derivative of authored PNG · exact authored pathsCrookwood is not a crime scene. It is an industry: acquire the dead, process the dead, repurpose the dead and profit from the dead.
Time, biological viability, handling risk and market pressure turn bodies into decisions rather than a generic loot table.
The Morgue, Crematorium, Chapel, graveyard and Gweedo's form a single grotesque supply chain. Death is embedded in the island's economic order.
Viability tiers, market regimes and their final coupling to JooJoo and Chaos remain specification work in the Bible.
Carny never stops the player. It remembers them. Its law creates consequence without sermons and punishment without moral finger-wagging.
Dogma has one hard breach: deliberate misuse of a tool. No object is sinful and possession is not a crime; the use, damage, excess and proportionality matter.
The law begins with free will. Carny responds when restraint was possible, excess was chosen and commitment was sustained.
Exact thresholds and timing windows remain implementation details; the governing principle is locked in the Bible.
web display derivative of authored PNG · exact authored pathsThe Joo Joo Index is Carny's moral accounting state. It rises and falls, remembers behaviour and judges patterns rather than isolated incidents.
Joo Joo appears as a face that changes only at meaningful thresholds. It communicates temperature, not a running number, and can carry across lives.
You can live with bad Joo Joo. You may even enjoy it. What you cannot do is pretend the island failed to notice.
The final face states, thresholds and exact Chapel recovery values remain to be locked for Game 1.
The DogGones
The DogGones. The Hits Keep Comin'.
The DogGones provide the soundtrack for Carny Island.
I’m A Ghost.I died an just another ordinary dayGot buried here in the cold of Crookwood.Now I’m just a ghost.A nobody ghost with nobody.A wisp.A shiver running down your spine.A cold breath on the air.A shadow.
All the days of my life reduced to the date of my birth and deathAnd a flower inscription from scriptures I never read - etched on cold marble.Is this the eternal end?When does my last chapter end?When the room of souls empty?When the cosmic dust has settled?When the four horsemen of the Apocalypse ride?Then. Can somebody tell us what was it all for?
The wars.The Gods we marched to battle for under the billowing pennants of symbols we didn’t understand.Graveyards stretching to forever,Haunted by billions of lost souls.Blood soaking land nobody will ever own.The fatted golden calves of religions - the saviours rewarding blind faith.The dogma of gospels.Choirs.Blessings.Miracles.Demons.Angels.The exorcism of fantasy turning in the windmills of your mind.What did we all come here for? Hey?A delusion of free will.Freedom?Retribution?Reincarnation?
Now where do we go?Now we have all stopped…LyingCheatingCryingBleedingLovin’What’s next?I know what’s coming for you.You too will die on just another ordinary day.And the pages keep turning here in Crookwood.I’m a ghost. A nobody ghost with no body.
Carny Island is not a point-and-shoot game. It explores the operating ideas of traditional entertainment genres and fuses them into a single playable performance.
Most games begin with technology and search for an idea. Carny Island began with a worldview, then waited a decade for production to become possible.
The drawings, Bibles, characters, rules and machinery came first. The code arrived later.
The player has nine lives. Every death changes the pressure. The island does not ask whether you can avoid the end; it asks what story you create before it.
Crookwood is timber, chicken wire, painted flats, engineered graves, live weather, moving shadows and a lethal pendulum. Scenery is never just scenery.
One grave. One floor. One beam. One character. Each element is authored, tested, approved and allowed to join the world.
Every figure declares its scope. Cost is a conventional-production scenario, never a pretend invoice.
12 dedicated C# builder, visual and test files for Graveboxes, floor, beams and wall.
A conventional specialist team spending 3–5 weeks across technical art, Unity engineering and QA at a blended A$175–A$250 per hour.
It is a machine that teaches the player how to be afraid, how to read space and when to move.
The pendulum is a three-dimensional danger field. Graves, trenches, paths, flats and headstones exist in relation to that moving volume. The player learns rhythm instead of memorising a corridor.
A robbed grave can become a bunker: the Villain is three feet tall and the trench is four feet deep.
The imagination, philosophy, rules and artwork remain Brett's.
Every element earns its place through evidence and use.
In Crookwood, the pendulum's danger envelope tells the stage where it can exist.
No silent retracing, smoothing or raster substitution.
Build counts are evidence. Brett's eyes and hands are the final gate.
“The carbon side of carbon-meets-silicon: the game inventor who knows what story, performance and cinema are for.”
Brett Clements has spent more than forty years turning stories into pictures, productions and playable systems. He began as a teenage newspaper journalist, became a filmmaker on Simon Townsend's Wonder World!, built television and tourism campaigns, and co-founded A Couple 'A Cowboys.
He created, designed and directed Nightmare and ATMOSFEAR, the pioneering video board-game phenomenon that sold more than four million units across 32 territories and 12 languages. Carny Island continues that lifelong collision of theatre, games, film and audience participation.
After ten years drawing Carny Island by hand, Brett is using OpenAI and Anthropic as a production studio around his authorship. The machines write code and test systems. Brett remains the inventor, artist, director and final judge of what appears on screen.
How the Big Dipper replaced wallpaper over Crookwood.
