"Jokes to find an excuse to use:
Achievement: Armed With Teeth - craft a weapon
Achievement: Armed To The Teeth With Teeth - craft EVERY weapon

And obviously all the weapons in this theoretical game are made of teeth,
for some reason I'm sure would be clear if it were a little less theoretical."
---- Me, making a one-off joke in 2021, or so I thought.

TO THE TEETH is a game idea which I and my good friend Wolf worked on in late 2021 and early 2022, which started with a joke and quickly built outward.
(not a whole game tho)
Wolf can be found on tumblr here! Some of the art and quotes around here are hers :)

The premise is this:
You are a little alien who looks somethng like a millipede or gastropod - nicknamed "Slug". You crash land very badly on a planet that, at some point in its past, was overtaken by a planet-scale meat-moss monster. The surface of the planet is all raw gore and viscera, as far as the eye can see and for leauges underfoot. Thankfully, at least, the thing is long dormant.
You're really not concerned with what happened, or why, or how. You have bigger things to worry about: your ship is wrecked. Beyond repair, not even able to signal for rescue.
Lacking much other option, you arm yourself with a makeshift spear and begin to make your way down to the old surface of the planet, in hopes to find something there to signal with. It's only anything biological that was assimilated, right? Buildings, electronics, those should all still be intact, more or less.

-----

A couple key points of the idea were

• playercharacter cannot jump, although she might have been able to climb.
• stupid puns and jokes + the gritty, self-aware deadpan of the og DOOM narrations.
• more puzzle based than combat based. There are things you can fight, but fighting your way through is not the goal.
• You are considered a stranger. Creatures treat you with curiosity, fear, or as a foreign body, but rarely as prey or with outright agression. This does not mean they won't kill you.
• unique failiure/death animations especially for certain creatures. Ideally funny enough that you're encouraged to die to them at least once.
• more goofy jokes

"First boss defeated:
achievement get: `stomaching the issue`"
---- Wolf, pingponging my joke

We worked out an idea of 4 layers; the surface, muscle, bone, and brain/buried city.
The Dream (tm) would have been to commission multiple artists to design the terrain/background of each area; I've noticed artists all seem to have different and distinct ways of drawing body horror, and I thought that would be really fun to showcase...
That didn't happen, of course, (although i did put together a looong piece of art that kind of captures it, [link go here])
The theoretical designs for the layers....
The Surface layer is somewhere between being the organism's respiratory system and digestive system. There are chambers like honeycombs and often pools of mucous ranging from harmless to acidic- which eventually all find their way to sinus drains and from there, to "stomach" chambers near the lowest point of this layer.

The game would be a sort of puzzle-y metroidvania, focused on learning how creatures interact with each other and with Slug so you can find a way to open a path, and occasionally coming across new tools/weapons you can use to more safely or effectively move forward.
Right now there are 5 areas. Surface->muscle->bone->brain->buried city. Though I might still split or readjust them. My goal is to have a chunk of a food web in each area, between a mix of creatures stranded from space, remnants from the original ecosystem, and things that the meat planet itself generates.
The plan is to mark the end of each area with a boss, and a little bit of a gradual change in scenery and company. but that might change as I, uh, flesh this out- snrk-
Being set in a planet-eating meat monster it'd have an overarching cosmic horror-y feel, of course.. but it definitely wouldn't be entirely horror. It'd also be wordplay and puns at every opportunity, and creatures doing ridiculous things- because, for the most part, you wouldn't be trying to kill anything. You're trying to avoid or distract or redirect, which very easily leads to some ridiculous situations. And also a murder animation for most creatures that's worth failing at least once to see. [end paste]