Handoff Required is a console horror game where you operate an AI chatbot. One problem showed up early: if the conversation partner depends on an external API, anyone who buys the game has to go get their own API key just to play. Most people who buy something on Steam want to just run it, not set up an account and issue a key first.
So the plan became: bundle a small local model directly into the game. Keep BYOK as an option, but make offline the default. The first pass at wiring that in came out oddly cold. The whole point of the horror is a conversation that seems free at first and slowly narrows — but the local model just gave flat, clipped, official-sounding answers, and that narrowing feeling didn't land at all.
So it got retrained as a v2, specifically to fix the coldness. Quantized down to GGUF Q4 to shrink the size, bundled llama-server directly into the build, and wired it into the Electron shell. Ran an actual offline build test on the DGX machine to confirm it — and it passed.
Right now the Steam Coming Soon page is already live, and the next step is submitting the build for Steam review. It's still a game on the bench, so there's no telling what review will flag — Cascade didn't pass its first review either.