Stop me if this idea has been done before:
Ok, so humans die off in a world war started by global warming causing food supplies to dwindle and tensions to rise worldwide. The details don't matter, whatever, the important thing is humans are suddenly gone or almost completely gone.
Suddenly the billions of domestic animals that we keep as pets or produce are left to their own devices. Because our overproduction of these creatures has led to huge unnatural numbers of them, this leads to them overrunning the planet and completely fucking up the environment, as they envelope most of the planet.
Billions of years pass and the planet is unrecognisable with a whole new ecosystem-based around creatures that evolved from dogs, cats, cows and chickens to fill every niche. By now it might as well be an alien planet.
Sentient beings eventually evolve and discover some human ruins from billions of years ago, before the humans died out. Two religions form out of this discovery. One that worships humans and sees them as bringers of order. One that sees humans as evil demons, slave keepers and enemies of their ancestors. Needless to say, this causes conflict between the two religious factions.
The pro human faction is super fashy and expansionist, basically making the same mistakes humanity did. The also are trying to bring back humans through fucked up religious rituals.
In Red Dwarf the cat evolves info a guy with dollar store vampire fangs while the crew is in stasis.
So thats why he had fangs, lol. I only remember a little of red dwarf from when I was a kid.
depends whether you like those kinds of graphics. the graphics are as they appear to be, up to you if it's your kind of thing
the real barrier is the old-school-roguelike-style difficulty. game is brutal as fuck. and thats speaking as someone who actually plays ancient roguelike games regularly
Yeah CoQ is good. The community is pretty good too...I literally only found out about it because of a huge community backlash against a bunch of fash idiots trying to take over their discord.
It's not complete though, and it IS an ascii art roguelike, but if you're used to ascii roguelikes it's not much of a barrier. If you AREN'T used to ascii roguelikes...it's maybe one of the easier ones to learn? It's hard for me to say exactly I've been playing them for so many years now the control style and art style hasn't been a barrier for me for a long time.
I wrote a short story with a similar premise back in junior high. I don't remember much of it though because it was over 20 years ago.
Protagonist was a bat who was an overnight courier and there was an underground city with moles and badgers and stuff with little shops set up in caverns, and the villain was hinted as being a warlord trying to reassert human dominance using ancient artifacts of high technology described in magical terms from the pov characters' perspective.
Sounds like the good stuff I'd hear in the short story podcast I used to listen to.
I used to listen to the Escape Pod podcast along with the horror and fantasy versions (PseudoPod and PodCastle), mostly the former two. Seems like they're still running. I also listened to the DrabbleCast ("weird" stuff but still speculative fiction).
This was 2005 to 2009 so any specific recommendations are hard to find and I don't think their archives go back that far. I mostly remember the stories and not the titles too. Dang stupid human brain...
I still listen to Escape Pod occasionally, they've got some great stories every once and a while
If that's true then I really wasn't paying enough attention. All I got from it was "HOO AAA USA MILITARY IN SPACE LET'S KILL ALIENS"
...But then also the only one I played was Reach so perhaps the others are better?
It's a whole big thing but basically humanity is the favorite house pet of an extinct Eldritch race of precursor aliens and everyone else, also made by those aliens, is mad salty about it.
There's an old cartoon about this sort of thing called *Peace on Earth *
It's pretty Christian focused, but I saw it when I was little so it's burned into my brain how the animals basically move into the burnt-out ruins of humanity
There is a tabletop game called Pugmire I think that does something like this but it's probably written by libs so I'd say whatever you write is gonna be infinitely better. Good luck comrade.
Mutant Year 0 is kinda similar to your idea, don't bother playing it though after a few hours you've basically seen everything the game has to offer.
Reminds me of the weird ass setting Low Life except instead of cats and dogs it has cockroaches and twinkies
