A proprietary, non-commercial alpha — built solo, still finding its shape, and not for sale.
A single-player-first survival RPG set on a real, simulated Earth — actual elevation and climate data, a real day/night and season cycle, and a planet that keeps turning whether or not you're watching.
Walk these woods in autumn and every birch is going gold at its own pace, leaves catching the wind on the way down in a way nobody keyframed by hand. The path underfoot is there because feet wore it in, one crossing at a time. A kingfisher holds its perch over the river because the water holds fish and the bank gives it a ledge to dive from — not because a designer decided a kingfisher belonged there. Snow comes and goes with the season it belongs to, not a switch somebody flips.
Built solo/part-time in Godot 4 (GDScript), strict test-driven development throughout — come see what that looks like after a few hundred nights and weekends.
- Features
- Overview
- Playing the Game
- License Key
- Private Alpha Use
- Ownership and Contributions
- Disclaimer
- Contact
- License
A taste, not the whole menu:
- A real planet underfoot — rivers, coasts, and mountains carved from actual elevation and climate data, not hand-painted
- Seasons that actually commit — leaves turn and drop on their own clock, snow melts only once the calendar agrees
- A food web nobody's puppeteering — ants haul dinner home, boars live only where boars could actually survive
- Forests that age for real — a hundred-year oak earned its size one century at a time, not a slider
- Farm, forage, fish, tame a horse, or skip all that and just eat the horse
- Crafting from real physics — combine real materials and shapes and let the simulation decide what you made
- Villages, trade, and NPCs quietly living lives nobody scripted for them
- Combat, magic, and the occasional world boss pulled from actual regional folklore
- Step on the wrong bug and karma keeps score, whether you're watching or not
- ...and plenty more we're leaving out on purpose
Aleph Alpha is a game about poking at a real, running world and seeing what happens — less a story you're told, more a place you're let loose in. It's a living alpha: the mechanics, content, presentation, and balance you see today are a snapshot, not a finished picture.
There's no single correct way to play. Experiment, watch, adapt, and draw your own conclusions — that's the actual game. In practice, that means:
- The world is a real, running simulation — terrain, climate, seasons, plant growth, animal populations, and (increasingly) NPC society all keep happening whether or not you're watching. Walk far enough and you're not loading a new hand-placed area; you're looking at the same simulation running somewhere else on the same planet.
- There's no invisible spawn table deciding what's around you. A boar is where boars can actually thrive right now — enough vegetation, enough water, a mild enough season — and that can shift as the world does.
- Crafting, combat, magic, and even how NPCs are instructed all reduce to one shared idea: compose small primitives, let deterministic simulation resolve what they produce together. Nobody enumerated every possible sword; the physics of the materials and shape you chose did.
Design docs live in docs/concept/; the honest,
mechanism-by-mechanism implementation status is
docs/progress.md, and the phase plan is
docs/roadmap.md.
- Grab the latest Windows build from the
Releases page
— download the
AlephAlpha-vX.Y.Z-windows.zipasset. - Extract the zip anywhere and run
AlephAlpha.exe. - Windows will likely show a "Windows protected your PC" SmartScreen prompt — that's just an unrecognized-publisher warning, not a virus flag. Click More info > Run anyway. (The executable already carries the game's own internal signature, checked at startup — see docs/licensing.md — just not a paid Windows code-signing certificate, which is what SmartScreen actually checks for.)
- The first launch shows the in-game license screen — paste the key below into it.
Requires Godot 4.7 (the standard, non-.NET build -- the project doesn't use C#). From the repo root:
godot --path .The very first time you open the project, Godot spends a while importing
every asset before anything shows up — that's normal, not a hang. After
that, the command above opens a play window directly on the main scene. If
godot isn't on your PATH, call the binary by its full path instead, e.g.
"C:/Godot/Godot_v4.7-stable_win64.exe" --path .
The first launch shows the in-game license screen -- paste the key below.
The game refuses to build the world without a valid license: an invalid or
missing key shows an in-game "enter your license key" screen instead. Paste a
key below into that screen and it saves itself, no file to place by hand. (A
license.txt holding just the serial code, in Godot's user:// data
directory or next to the running executable, works too.)
An extended key, valid through 2027-12-31, base game only:
040G0000000000020000106E2SPS9ZQ7ZMY5Z6BN
FKS1YAGH03CPYZMF1QGR0JP33S1W3S3FETB4EARA
MPFYQYGJK2MRB6S8T9BCV4HBDJRVS3KZ48QA3WA1
WE0D86WGZ924388T3ZD9QEV52GS83SWYZPFA3GZJ
YX9FK5KZ80EGGA3D1Z9Q83F9Y6YH0FA792TQZBCH
4SNDYS3W1B49VV6P044KT24CSTBBZY6XAK7MHATG
1HRKYMANZ8BZHKQYPQYSK5GHMEF1SF1X9047ZF9R
0SCCYHBT5EWQ7ZDT85ARYGTKVM96XCXM7E316XBK
KFN68JF1XFDVDBWTYRWYW8ECKRKD6B6MBRCW1STQ
0V5DH0RFVKGG1KFKVK6D636VXYTA0G5EEAQXBW3S
60K69MG8ETM352FY523FCSQP5HXPZV28FFR9C
The game also verifies its own files haven't been tampered with at startup (see docs/licensing.md). Removing or bypassing this signature verification is expressly prohibited under the license terms below, in addition to being enforced technically (see docs/licensing.md's "Key-swap resistance" for what happens if you try).
The copyright holder grants private individuals a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to download, install, and play the alpha solely for personal, non-commercial purposes.
You may not sell, rent, sublicense, publish, publicly distribute, commercially exploit, or use the game, its content, code, assets, characters, story, audiovisual materials, trademarks, or branding in connection with any commercial activity. You may not remove, disable, circumvent, or attempt to defeat the game's license key or signature verification checks. You may not modify, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or create derivative works except where applicable law expressly permits it.
This permission does not transfer ownership or any intellectual-property rights. All rights not expressly granted are reserved by the copyright holder. Please do not redistribute alpha builds; share the repository or an authorized access method instead.
Unless a separate written agreement says otherwise, all original game code, artwork, audio, writing, designs, characters, lore, trademarks, and other materials in this repository are proprietary and remain the exclusive property of the copyright holder. Third-party materials, if any, remain subject to their respective licenses and are not covered by this license.
By submitting a contribution, you confirm that you have the necessary rights to submit it and grant the copyright holder a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, publicly display, perform, and commercially exploit that contribution as part of the game or related products. If you do not agree, do not submit contributions.
Repo write access is by application, not open to unsolicited PRs — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to apply and what's expected once you're in.
THE GAME IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER IS NOT LIABLE FOR DAMAGES ARISING FROM USE OF THE GAME, EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT LIABILITY CANNOT LAWFULLY BE EXCLUDED.
For permission requests, licensing inquiries, or bug reports, open an issue or contact the copyright holder through the repository owner's GitHub profile.
See LICENSE.md. This is a custom proprietary license, not an open-source license.