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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 — a washed-up bike courier legend who now runs the radio for The Pigeons, a dying courier crew in the rain-soaked city of Calder.
You never ride. You sit in the chair, you pick who does, and you live with what happens to them.
Premium Rush meets Telltale — played entirely through a dispatch board.
What I did
Concept, story, game design, UI, frontend, art direction, sound — built solo. The team is the toolchain: Claude Code as engineering and writing partner, Nano Banana 2 for the art — run in bulk through PRESSRUN, the tool one project back in this portfolio — and Gemini TTS for the voice over.
The mechanic
No dialogue trees. Decisions happen on a tactical map of Calder: a job lands, a timer burns, and you click which rider takes it. The UI is the storytelling surface.
The board in play — storm over the cut, 02:47 on the clock, a $12 flower run, and seven riders on the roster.
In play
A dozen roses for $12, or the rent — $4,200 for an unmarked package and no questions. Every ticket shows pay, risk and a deadline, and the timer doesn't pause while you decide.
Riders answer on the mic, in character. Who you send is the story.
The rent job. $4,200, high risk, no questions — and a refuse button.
Jay, two blocks out, on the mic. Rider file on the left.
The HUD rule
The whole HUD is greyscale with exactly two licensed colors. Magenta means act now — timers, assignable riders, decisions on the clock. Yellow is reserved for one voice — Eli's, the protagonist in your ear.
Color literally tells you what the game wants from you. That's Hawk on the left — riders carry the signal color too. When she lights up, she's yours to send.
Keeping AI art consistent
AI image models redesign the set every shot. The fix: generate canonical reference plates first — the empty dispatch office, each rider's bike, each helmet and radio kit — then every scene prompt references the plates plus the character sheet.
The model copies instead of imagines. 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 building with a location bible: the dispatch nook where Eli sits alone, the common room where the crew lives, the garage, the stairwell where soaked riders arrive, the rooftop pigeon coop.
Every story beat renders in the room where it physically happens.
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 all of RUSH's art.
The same art, in the chair — title screen of the playable build.
Full story, art, voice over and sound. Episodes 2–5, rider voice acting and deeper consequence systems are in progress. Last updated June 2026.