Black Commission

Black Commission is a 1–4 player co-op commission-running game about a nearly bankrupt agency scraping by on increasingly bizarre outsourced jobs.

Current MVP core loop:

1. Start a solo session or create/join an online room.
2. Spawn in the run-down agency office.
3. Accept a job via the office computer.
4. Enter the mission site (current: Abandoned Tower — Earth Coast 01), retrieve the sealed bio-column, restore power if needed, and avoid the Echo Mold (an infected fungal host that stalks the site).
5. Return to the office, settle rewards (money / reputation / XP), then spend on gear, consumables, office upgrades, or future buyout pressure.

Full MVP design, story background, squad configuration, and Phase 1 implementation plan: docs/mvp-core-loop.md.

2098 Mars/Earth world-building, license progression, representative commissions, and ending conditions: docs/world-background-2098.md.

Current art direction is locked in the Art Bible: design/art/art-bible.md.

Core Loop Diagram

flowchart TD
    A[2098: Mars colonization complete<br/>Wealthy emigrate to Mars] --> B[Earth left with debtors, contract workers,<br/>and low-migration-value population]
    B --> C[MRC-7 return-pathogen spreads<br/>Earth develops infection zones and abnormal ecology]
    C --> D[Martian elite no longer returns in person<br/>but still wants authentic Earth goods]
    D --> E[Surface Retrieval Agency established<br/>takes Martian commissions via license]

    E --> F[Start: Temporary Retrieval License<br/>rundown office, old CRT, secondhand van, debt]
    F --> G[Accept assigned commissions]
    G --> H[Buy gear / form crew / board and depart]
    H --> I[Enter the exclusion zone<br/>find target, evade infected, retrieve specimen]
    I --> J[Return to agency for settlement<br/>pay, deductions, reputation, evidence, debt pressure]

    J --> K{Progress}
    K --> L[Full Retrieval License<br/>more Martian clients and stranger targets]
    K --> M[Orbital Shipping Certification<br/>unlocks free salvage]
    K --> N[Special-Specimen Transfer Permit<br/>exposure to the Black Commission truth]
    K --> O[Immigration Review<br/>decide whether to go to Mars]

    M --> P[Free Salvage<br/>scavenge scrap, replenish resources, repair van, maintain agency]
    P --> J

    L --> G
    N --> G

    O --> Q[Ending 1: Go to Mars<br/>become Earth Heritage Procurement Advisor]
    O --> R[Ending 2: Stay on Earth<br/>refuse decorative banquet commissions]
    N --> S[Hidden Ending: Truth Transmitted<br/>send evidence to the Martian network]

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For New Artists — Read This First

New to the project? This is the fast on-ramp: what the game is, how it plays, and the visual rules your work must follow. Deeper canon lives in the linked docs at the end.

The World — Setting & Tone

The year is 2098. Humanity has colonized Mars, but only the wealthy emigrated — Mars is a clean, closed, expensive world. Earth was left to the underclass: the indebted, the contract workers, the people the system judged as having "low migration value."

When Martian elites briefly returned to Earth, they brought back a Mars-adapted pathogen — officially MRC-7, known on the street as the Noble Guest Plague. It infected people, animals, plants, and fungi, turning whole regions into lockdown zones full of abnormal ecology: infected humans, spore mists, fleshy plants, and fungal colonies that mimic sounds.

Mars won't come back in person — but it still wants Earth's things. Not resources (Mars synthesizes those) but the real Earth: genuine specimens, old-ecosystem remnants, things that can't be replicated or legally bought. So Martian clients issue collection commissions to Earth through gray-market platforms.

You run a nearly bankrupt Surface Retrieval Agency — not heroes, a broke company. Half the office lights are dead, the computer is a secondhand Mars-cast-off CRT, the van is second-hand, the debt is enormous. You take jobs because the bill is due.

Tone — "Municipal Debt Noir": light-hearted on the surface, uncomfortable after the laugh. The darkness is never delivered by villain speeches — it leaks out of contracts, deductions, and settlement notes. The signature image: Earth people risk death to retrieve a thing; a Martian client uses it as a dinner-table centerpiece.

How It Plays — Mechanics

• 1–4 player co-op, first-person, host-authoritative (Netcode for GameObjects).
• The ritual loop: broke office HQ → office computer (accept a job / buy gear) → crew boards the dispatch van → in-van transit → mission site → objective + a partial-return choice → van return → HQ settlement.
• Progression = 5 license stages (Temporary → Full Retrieval → Orbital Shipping → Special-Specimen / Black Commissions → Immigration Review). The only number the player sees is money. The moral slope runs through three mission tiers: Free Salvage → Commissioned Jobs → Black Commissions — the higher the pay, the darker the cost. The endgame is a moral choice (do you still want to go to Mars?), not a money threshold.
• Proximity voice is a mechanic, not a convenience. It is open-mic by default, and infected things eavesdrop and replay your voice to split the team — speaking is a deliberate risk.
• Current playable mission — Abandoned Tower, Earth Coast 01: a derelict pre-sale property tower. Restore power to open the upper floor, then two-hand-carry a heavy sealed bio-column (a live coastal-ecosystem display) back to the van.
• Monsters — one sense, one counter (LC-style). The MVP monster is the Echo Mold: an infected humanoid fungal host that hears you and replays your teammates' voices from the wrong direction. Contact = HP damage → Downed; whole team down = mission Failure.

Visual Identity — Art Brief

Identity = "Municipal Debt Noir." The world is neglected public / civic infrastructure run by underfunded outsourced contractors. Brand colors: civic teal, dead-rubber black, aged paper, sodium amber, restrained dispatch green, stamp red.

Fidelity = lo-fi, PS1-era low-poly (per style-lock-v2): low-poly meshes, ≤256px visible-texel textures, ~2 m world-space tiling, albedo-only (no normal / AO / metalness maps), high roughness (smoothness ≤ 0.3), point filtering. (The Art Bible's older "semi-realistic" fidelity is superseded — build lo-fi.)

Lethal Company is a production-method reference ONLY — strong repeatable rituals, readable low-cost staging, co-op extraction tension, navigable darkness. Do not copy LC's assets, UI, monsters, ship, item list, or maps. Our identity is our own.

Surface palette (material color before light):

Family	Hex	Use
Concrete gray	#5E5E5E / #707070 / #4A4A4A	Walls, slabs, pillars
Military green	#55624A / #68745C / #475040	Cabinets, van body, lockers, steel furniture
Old wood brown	#6B5440 / #7C624A / #8A7158	Desks, crates, floorboards
Rust	#7B4B2A / #8C5937 / #A36842	Pipe joints, worn metal edges, bolts

Every surface carries 20–40% weathering — scratches, tape, dust, chipped paint, stains are the primary surface language, not a polish-pass afterthought.

Accents & signal colors (used sparingly — each one carries meaning):

Signal	Hex	Means
Primary accent — warm tungsten amber	#FFAB40	Inhabited space / interactable nearby
CRT green — electronic screens only	#6CFF5F	A powered, processing device (not "safe")
Mission objective material	#D4A020	The one object in the scene with this warm gold
Threat presence	#FF6A00	Amber-orange eye pinpoints in cold light (e.g. the Echo Mold's spore eye)
Hazard edge	#C8A020–#A87E10	Aged warning yellow at stairs / drops / barriers
Civic identity dressing	teal #3F5F5C · paper #D6CCAE · stamp red #C23A2B	Debt notices, seals, signage — stamp red on paper/signage only

Lighting grammar (silhouette-driven darkness): three light families only — warm tungsten 3000K = human habitation (the HQ); cold industrial 5000K = mission sites (failing, flickering, some dead); CRT green = powered devices. Players navigate dark spaces by flashlight + light anchors, and the exit path is always lit. No colored point lights, no neon, no chrome, no clean plastic.

Authoritative art docs: design/art/art-bible.md (fidelity amended by docs/art/black-commission-style-lock-v2.md) · world canon in docs/world-background-2098.md · entity stats in design/registry/entities.yaml.

Requirements

• Unity version: 6000.4.7f1 (Unity 6). You must open the project with this exact version — Unity is version-sensitive and a mismatch will force an upgrade or throw errors. Install it via Unity Hub.
• Git LFS: Large assets (models, textures, audio/video) are managed with Git LFS. Install Git LFS before cloning and run git lfs install.
• Automatic package restore: This is a Unity C# project — there is no requirements.txt (that's Python). All package dependencies are pinned in Packages/manifest.json (Netcode for GameObjects 2.11.2, URP 17.4, Input System, Relay/Authentication, etc.) and are downloaded automatically when you open the project in Unity. No manual installation needed.
• Do not commit generated directories: Library/, Temp/, Logs/, blendermodel/, and GeneratedAssets/ are generated locally by Unity, Blender, or AI tools (already in .gitignore). They are rebuilt automatically on first open after a fresh clone — this may take a few minutes.

Cloning

Full clone with all assets:

git lfs install
git clone https://github.com/DarkGameHub/BlackCommission.git

If your connection is slow, clone the code first and pull LFS assets later:

GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://github.com/DarkGameHub/BlackCommission.git
cd BlackCommission
git lfs pull
git lfs checkout

If textures, FBX models, or scene assets are missing after opening Unity, LFS assets likely did not download completely. From the project root:

git lfs install
git lfs pull
git lfs checkout

Verify LFS is working correctly:

git lfs fsck
git lfs status

If a .png, .fbx, or .glb file is only a few hundred bytes and its first line reads version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1, it is still an LFS pointer — run git lfs pull and git lfs checkout to hydrate it.

Opening the Project

First-time setup (run once after cloning):

1. Tools > Black Commission > Art > Setup ASV4 Art For Play — imports and configures art assets.
2. Tools > Black Commission > MVP > Tower > Rebuild v8 Whitebox (slab plan) — procedurally generates the Tower Earth Coast 01 level geometry inside Tower_EarthCoast_01.unity.
3. Tools > Black Commission > MVP > Tower > Bake Tower NavMesh — bakes the NavMesh for AI navigation.

Playing:

4. Open Assets/_Project/Scenes/HQ.unity and press Play.
5. Click Create Agency (host) or Join Agency (client with a room code).
6. Interact with the office computer and accept the Earth Coast 01 commission.
7. Board the van — it departs automatically to Tower_EarthCoast_01. Retrieve the sealed bio-column and return.

Play starts from whichever scene is currently open. Use Tools > Black Commission > MVP > Play Current Scene Once to run a specific scene without switching your default.

Multiplayer

The game supports two connection modes:

• Online (Relay): Click "Create Agency" in the main menu to use Unity Relay. A 6-digit room code is generated — share it with teammates. Requires the project to be linked to a Unity Cloud project in the editor (Edit > Project Settings > Services) with anonymous login enabled; otherwise it falls back to local mode and cannot be joined over the internet.
• LAN Direct (LAN): The "LAN Direct" entry in the main menu lets you host or join by IP + port. Ideal for local and same-network testing with no dependency on online services.

Local multiplayer testing: Use one Editor instance + one standalone Build, or install ParrelSync / run multiple Editor instances. Supports up to 4 players (host + 3 clients).

Generated Art Workflow

1. On Windows with Blender installed, run:

   blender --background --factory-startup --python D:/BlackCommission/docs/art/blender_outsourced_civic_commercial_v4.py
   

2. In Unity, run Tools > Black Commission > Art > Import Generated Blender Kit.
3. Imported prefabs are placed in Assets/_Project/Prefabs/Art.