Save a failing art and rare-books gallery with HexTracker's jobs, while the six species of the Haunted Space Hotel buy and bid.
HexMenagerie is being built for Android, iPhone, iPad and Mac. A whole game plays from the first day to the last, it is not on either store yet, and there is no date. The playtest list hears about it first. HexTracker, the app it is built on, has its own page on our Tools shelf today.
You own the Space Menagerie, a human art and rare-books gallery in the desert. Twenty years of stock nobody ever wrote down, a back room full of overage books, damaged copies nobody graded, and a bank loan with a payment due every week. You are in dire straits.
Then the six species of the Haunted Space Hotel start walking through your door. They have never seen human art, and you hold the only human trove they can reach. They come to look, to buy and to bid.
It is a game about real work. You save the gallery with HexTracker, the inventory app we built for businesses with real things on real shelves, and every quest is a real HexTracker job: find this, count that, grade these, label here, research that, ship this order. You can only sell what you have found, and you can only price well what you have graded and researched.
Count a place and record what is really in it. Find a piece. Label the shelves so every later count is faster. Grade a lot A, B, C or D. Research a work's provenance. Hang it, price it, ship the orders. Every move goes into a record that only grows, and in minus out always equals what is inside.
The Heron gallery, where the patrons walk, and the Fox, Badger, Turtle, Lynx and Kudu warehouses; two of them stay locked until you rent them. The 3D warehouse is HexTracker's own, and a box nobody has counted says so: "not yet counted". In the gallery every work hangs framed on its wall, and you can walk right up to it.
Every labelled shelf, box, crate and pallet wears the label HexTracker prints: its animal or shape, its name, a QR code and a Code 128 barcode. SCAN opens a hand-held viewfinder on it, and the label shakes and blurs the way a phone in a hand does until you hold still. About eight times a second the frame on the screen goes to ZXing, the open-source barcode reader HexTracker's camera uses, and it only reads once the picture is sharp. What it reads goes through HexTracker's own code classifier, the one a camera, a scanner gun and a typed code all go through. No read is faked: a test prints all 145 labels in the six buildings, and ZXing must read every one of them back when it is held still, and none of them while the hand shakes.
In the 3D warehouse, pick a shelf or a box and SCAN it: a minute, plus the walk there. The scan tells you what the record knows and nothing more. A shelf says how many boxes are on it and how many nobody has counted yet, a counted box says what is in it, and an uncounted one says HexTracker does not know. A box with no label cannot be scanned at all: label it first, or count it by hand, which takes twice as long as counting a labelled one. So when a patron asks for a work your records hold, it is one walk and one scan away. When they do not, you hunt with what you have: the last owner's old ledger, the boxes you have already counted, and what kind of box a painting or a book would be in. Every box you count stays counted, so the next hunt is shorter, and finding it in fewer boxes pays more XP.
Scientists pay for provenance and love books and maps. Vanguards bid hard at auction. Thespians pay for fame. Bar patrons buy prints and never stay. Worshipers are loyal to their school. Seekers want the rare and the found-again. Each one makes an offer: accept it, counter it or decline it, or watch an auction climb to the hammer.
Every species wants different art on different days, school by school, and the news moves it. Every news event names its real human parallel: Salvator Mundi at $450.3 million at Christie's in 2017, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990, the Mona Lisa stolen in 1911 and found in 1913.
Grade honestly and you earn XP. Over-grade, and the buyer finds out and brings it back. Research can uncover a forgery, and reporting it honestly pays the biggest XP bonus in the game. XP is never money.
Public-domain photographs of public-domain works, from Vermeer and Hokusai to Van Gogh, and rare books from Newton's Principia to Darwin's Origin of Species. Beside them hang Drew's own Haunted Space Hotel homages to the masters. Sell enough of one school to one species and they paint their own answer to it.
