Lost & Found - Connections Edition

*You run the lost-and-found counter at a small civic building. Over one shift, ten people come to the counter looking for things they've lost. Each lost item is a connection.*

---

## How to play

A single shift takes about 20 minutes. You play to the end in one sitting.

- **Mouse only.** No keyboard.

- Click a cubby on the wall behind the counter to inspect it.

- Click an item in the magnified view to pick it up.

- Click the held item onto an NPC's outstretched hand to give it to them.

- Right-click to put a held item back where it came from.

Each NPC at the counter asks for something they've lost. They give you a description, not a name — *"a pocket watch, the face is cracked across the seven."* You search the cubbies. You find it (or you don't). You hand it over before their patience runs out (or you don't).

If you find it, their story plays. If you don't, they leave.

There are no points. There is no win state. At the end of the shift you'll see who you helped and who you missed. That's the game.

## What this is about

The theme of the jam was "Connections." Every lost item in this game is a connection — between a daughter and her dead father, between two strangers who once stood next to each other at a concert, between a doctor and the patient who taught him how to listen, between a woman and the grandmother who told her things she had told no one else. Returning a lost item, literally, restores a connection.

If you finish a shift and feel that you've held ten small pieces of a town's grief and history in your hands, the game has done what it wanted to.

## Tech notes

- Web build only; ~25 MB. Runs in any current Chrome / Firefox / Safari on desktop or mobile browser.

- No save / load — one shift, played in one sitting.

- Built in [Godot 4.6.2](https://godotengine.org/), auto-deployed via [`barichello/godot-ci`](https://github.com/abarichello/godot-ci).

## Credits

**Art:** Generated via [Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image](https://ai.google.dev/) ("Nano Banana") using a single style-anchor reference workflow. The shop background, 10 NPC portraits, 15 item sprites, and cover image all reference the same painterly anchor so the look stays cohesive.

**Music:**

- Title screen — [*Novella — Emotional Piano And Strings*](https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-novella-emotional-piano-and-strings-294079/) via Pixabay.

- Shop loop — [*Reverie* by Scott Buckley](https://www.scottbuckley.com.au/library/reverie/), CC BY 4.0.

- Janitor's closing-story crossfade — [*Loneliness — Emotional Piano and Strings*](https://pixabay.com/music/modern-classical-loneliness-emotional-piano-and-strings-music-172242/) via Pixabay.

- Mercy-fail vignette crossfade (Yuki) — [*Cinematic Sad Emotional Strings And Piano*](https://pixabay.com/music/modern-classical-cinematic-sad-emotional-strings-and-piano-full-272796/) via Pixabay.

The shop music ducks from -6 dB to -25 dB during NPC stories, then tweens back. The closing janitor and Yuki's mercy-fail crossfade to their alt tracks. The mix is part of the storytelling.

**Sound effects:** Interface clicks from [Kenney's CC0 Interface Sounds pack](https://kenney.nl/assets/interface-sounds). Ambient room layer is procedurally generated (low-pass-filtered brown noise, ~60s loop, CC0 by construction). Per-character arrive/leave sounds (one per NPC) are procedurally generated — CC0 by construction.

**Voiceover:** Generated using [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/) free tier, in compliance with the jam's AI policy.

**Writing & design:** Steve Harlow. Initial brainstorming assisted by Claude (Anthropic).

> *Voices and visuals generated by AI; stories written by a human, slowly, by hand. The contrast is the point.*