Distracted Nomenclator (PiCoSteveMo 2026-11-01)

It's the very first day of PiCoSteveMo4!

I've got this hazy memory of what I THINK must have been a television adaptation of The Langoliers, (or maybe that's the title that was given to some short story?) and I can only remember the following:

• A plane gets hit by a storm that unsticks it in time or something
• Passengers land and wander around an airport trying to figure out their time-stuckness
• Flying horror mouth things that look like Final Fantasy enemies arrive
• They're like cleanup antibodies tasked with devouring material reality "behind" all the living things cruising through linear time I guess?

Regardless of how accurate any of the above may or may not be, I'm probably going to leave the inspiration at that and refuse to rewatch anything or do any real research about what I saw, in the spirit of the jam's somewhat lackadaisical dedication the the titular Steve...

The only problem with this restriction I anticipate is that maybe the theme song or something might make for musical inspiration? The idea of composing referential music is SO out of scope given I've never even used a midi tracker or whatever's built into PICO-8 before...

So why The Langoliers?

This sort of conceptually Pac-Man-like muncher entity should map really easily onto simple pre-existing game designs about eating stuff. (In fact, having not taken the time to audit the past three year's entries, it's likely a "low hanging fruit" theme that's been drawn upon before, but this is no time to let my originality complex get in the way of simplicity!)

I figure following a PICO-8 tutorial to make a simple "devourer" game like Snake should be attainable, and if it just winds up being like a reskin, that'll be lame but acceptable. Here's hoping I understand the pieces well enough to tweak or reconfigure things and arrive at a slightly novel take on a classic.

What's In A Name?

    When it comes to naming things, I strongly believe that titles and designations hold massive amounts of linguistic power over the things they're attached to. This means I can effectively noodle around with names forever; poking around thesauruses and weighing options until the pugs come home. I should theoretically be proud of the fact that I limited this process to a sleep-deprived mini-sprint after getting off a graveyard shift in the wee hours of the morning!
    Playing around with a simple two word structure, flipping the subject and descriptor around experimentally, and tumbling a few thematic words around resulted in a decent title:

Matter Muncher

Can't go wrong with alliteration, right? If I blew hours more on folded meanings and my usual nomenclative process, there's probably SOME way to fold the time stoppage element of the source material in there without bloating the heck out of it, but off the top of the dome, I don't think something like "ChronoStasis Chewer" is an improvement.

    For whatever reason, I'm not fond of punting on naming; working titles have always felt like a bit of a cop-out and a trap. If the creative vision is coherent, surely a fitting title is possible to arrive at, and personally, I find the right name to be just as much of a "North Star" as any mood board.

All this fluffy conceptual stuff is the easy crap that used to be my job when I was responsible for concepting and aligning a design vision in preparation for exposure to the likes of art directors and stakeholders... The smart play is to limit this preprod-esque phase as much as possible to get into the viability of the actual engineering that I'll have to learn on the fly.

Whoops; my partner would like to stream a game off the computer I'm writing this on, but perhaps some more word-based skunkworks related to this project can take place on a laptop, (since I don't have any sort of source control or project file syncing in place yet.)