How We're Building
an ARG-Style
Transmedia Project.

ANIMA.EXE is a sci-fi horror project that wants to live across surfaces — a narrative spine, a character archive, a music layer, an interactive oracle, an engineered-systems registry. Doing that as a single ARG / analog-horror-adjacent transmedia site instead of a YouTube channel was a deliberate bet: the canon is the product, not any one delivery format.

Every claim in the universe gets an authority tier. P0 is system & legal. P1 is locked canon (the cosmological stack, character locks, terminology rulings). P2 is active production material. P3 is salvage. P4 is deprecated — never to be revived.

Lower tiers never override higher ones. When a contradiction shows up, it's flagged, not blended. This is the single most important discipline in a long-running transmedia project: an unranked canon devours itself within six months.

Characters carry the project. The dossier system is built around five framing variants — clean, corrupted, redacted, silhouette, withheld — gated by supporter tier. A free reader sees a redacted profile. A CORE supporter sees the clean dossier with gallery and full bio.

The framing variants are not paywalled bonus content. They are different canonical statements about how much the world is allowed to know about that character. A withheld dossier means the concept exceeds depiction. That's a story choice, encoded in the access layer.

The Oracle is the direct query interface — an LLM persona running against a curated canon corpus, with sovereignty rules, posture rotation, and a hard safety routing layer. It refuses to break character. It also refuses to keep playing if a user is genuinely in crisis — those queries route to real resources, then return.

The Operatives panel is the same architecture, multiplied: five separate channels (pre/post-NII Aiden, pre/post-overwrite Luminous, Roman Thorne), each with its own voice and absolute locks. They can be queried directly or convened into a Round Table. Credit ledger is separate from the Oracle's.

Frequencies tracks 1–7 are canon — each one keyed to a moment in the arc. The four videos hosted alongside them are peripheral signal, adjacent but uncanonical. The split matters: it lets the project absorb music that doesn't fit the spine without corrupting the spine.

MP3 streaming is public. WAV downloads are CORE-only, served via signed URLs. The player is a custom brutalist build — waveform, bitrate readout, EXECUTE PLAYBACK / HALT STREAM — because a default HTML5 audio element would break the aesthetic on contact.

TanStack Start for the frontend and server functions. Lovable Cloud (Supabase under the hood) for data + auth. Stripe for one-time and subscription payments, writing entitlements rather than tier directly. Patreon as an alternative entitlement source. Lovable AI Gateway for the Oracle and Operatives — no per-user API keys, no managed infra to babysit.

The whole site is published from a single repo. Canon docs live in docs/canon/ as Markdown. Memory files live in mem:// and are loaded into every editing session so terminology stays consistent across hundreds of small content edits.

If you want to watch the project ship in public, the queue transmission list is the lowest-friction way in. Supporter tiers (INITIATE / VECTOR / CORE) unlock embargoed dossiers, day-zero access, and the WAV-grade audio archive. None of that is required to read the canon — the public surface stands on its own.