Hollow Shells started life as a one-page RPG. At the time, it was a tight little experiment about scavenging bodies in a dead world, bolting on parts, and seeing what survived longer: the machine or the memory inside it. It was intentionally spare. A few rules. A few tables. Enough structure to generate strange outcomes and let the table do the rest.

But even in that first version, there was a problem I couldn’t ignore. The game wanted to be about bodies, but the format forced those bodies to stay abstract.

As I played with it, what kept coming up wasn’t combat or challenge in the traditional sense. It was configuration. Shape. What it meant to exist with three arms and no legs. What it meant to graft something organic onto something that was never meant to feel again. The one-page format was good at suggesting ideas, but it couldn’t carry the weight of what the game was actually about.

So Hollow Shells started to grow.

The current direction treats the character not as a bundle of stats, but as a physical system. Cores define mass and tolerance. Limbs define silhouette and movement. Mods define capability. Damage isn’t just loss of hit points, it’s parts becoming unreliable, then broken, then burdensome. You don’t “level up” so much as outgrow the body you’re in and face the cost of changing it.

A big shift in design was separating what a body can do from how it is seen. That’s where things like cosmetic casings, faces, flesh overlays, and presentation layers came in. Looking human, industrial, monstrous, or unfinished doesn’t make you stronger, but it changes how the world reacts to you. I figure it also allows the player to understand what they are.

Another core decision was leaning hard into memory as a physical substance. Memory Engrams aren’t clean skill downloads. They are fragments of other lives. Installing one means you gain capability, but you also inherit experience and perhaps trauma. You might know how to perform surgery, but you don’t know if it was you who learned it. Over time, the line between what you experienced and what you remember experiencing starts to erode. That uncertainty is deliberate.

Organic grafts pushed this even further. Flesh is powerful, adaptable, and familiar, but it rots, bleeds, and dies. Installing living tissue means accepting decay and sensation. Supporting it properly means committing to flesh as infrastructure, not just decoration. There are systems in the game that exist solely to keep meat alive inside a machine that was never designed for it.

At this point, Hollow Shells is no longer a one-page game. The design direction is about giving players a body they can reason about, damage they can anticipate, and choices that feel physical rather than numerical. It’s still a game about survival in a ruined world, but more specifically it’s about deciding what you are willing to become in order to keep going.

The irony is that the more detailed the system has become, the clearer the original idea feels. You are not trying to win. You are trying to remain functional, recognisable, and coherent for just a little longer.

And sometimes, that means growing or bolting on another head because the one you have can’t hold everything anymore.