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Narrative Game × AI Art Pipeline · Self-initiated
Work in progress
You never ride
the bike.
Vertical slice live at rush-mauve.vercel.app
← Back to work
Narrative Game × AI Art Pipeline · Self-initiated
The game
RUSH is a narrative dispatch game. You play Eli. He used to be the best bike courier in Calder. Now he's washed up, stuck behind a radio, running dispatch for The Pigeons, a courier crew slowly dying in a city that never stops raining.
You never ride. You sit in the chair. You pick who goes out, and then you live with whatever the streets do to them.
Think Premium Rush meets Telltale. The whole thing plays out on a dispatch board.
What I did
Concept, story, game design, UI, frontend, art direction, sound. All of it, on my own. My team is a toolchain. Claude Code is my engineer and writing partner. Nano Banana 2 makes the art, run in bulk through PRESSRUN, the tool one project back in this portfolio. Gemini TTS gives everyone a voice.
The mechanic
There are no dialogue trees in RUSH. Every decision happens on a live map of Calder. A job drops in. A timer starts burning. You click the rider who takes it. The interface isn't wrapped around the story. The interface is the story.
The board in play. Storm over the cut, 02:47 on the clock, a $12 flower run, seven riders waiting.
In play
A dozen roses across town for $12. Or rent money. $4,200 for an unmarked package and no questions asked. Every ticket tells you the pay, the risk, the deadline. The clock keeps running the whole time you think.
Riders talk back over the mic, in character. Whoever you put on the road, that's the story you get.
The rent job. $4,200, high risk, no questions. There's always a refuse button.
Jay, two blocks out, on the mic. Rider file on the left.
The HUD rule
The whole HUD is grey, and I only let myself use two colors. Magenta means act now. Timers, riders you can send, anything on the clock. Yellow belongs to one person only. Eli, the voice in your ear.
So the color tells you what the game wants before you even read the words. That's Hawk on the left. Riders carry the signal color too. When she lights up, she's ready to ride.
Keeping AI art consistent
Here's the problem nobody warns you about. AI image models redesign the whole set every single shot. So I stopped asking them to imagine. First I generate canonical reference plates: the empty dispatch office, each rider's bike, every helmet and radio kit. Then every scene prompt points back at those plates plus the character sheet.
Now the model copies instead of inventing. The loft has the same six monitors in every shot because the six monitors are canon.
The loft plate. Six monitors, every shot.
Hawk's bike plate, signature magenta rims.
Space as character
Pigeons HQ is a real place. It has a location bible, like a film set. The dispatch nook where Eli sits alone. The common room where the crew actually lives. The garage. The stairwell where soaked riders come crashing in. The pigeon coop up on the roof.
Every beat in the story renders in the exact room where it happens. The building remembers.
Hawk, soaked, hitting the stairwell door.
Eli on the roof, with the pigeons.
Where it's at
Episode 1 key art. Generated through PRESSRUN, like everything else in RUSH.
The same art, in the chair. Title screen of the build you can play.
Full story, full art, voice over, sound. The whole first episode, start to finish. Episodes 2 through 5, rider voice acting, and deeper consequence systems are all still in progress. Last updated June 2026.