AfterHours — Some Signals Should Never Be Heard.

AfterHours - Some Signals Should Never Be Heard. This AI-powered haunted shortwave radio mystery game was created for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine theme. The game simulates switching on an old radio at night, hearing strange broadcasts amidst static and interference. As players tune into different frequencies, transmissions contradict one another, hinting at a forgotten story in the fictional town of Blackwood in 1988.

Players become radio investigators, manually tuning across frequencies, detecting hidden transmissions, collecting evidence, and piecing together the mystery behind the town's disappearance. Four radio stations – Blackwood Weather, Civil Defense, Police Dispatch, and Station Zero – each contain clues leading to one of two possible endings.

Interpreting Ghost in the Machine as technology becoming a vessel for something mysterious, AfterHours presents an ordinary radio as the medium through which forgotten stories reach the living. The demo showcases the cinematic opening screen, frequency tuning, signal detection, hidden transmission discovery, clue collection, and experiencing both endings.

The project, open source and built with Python and Streamlit, utilizes Gemma 3 4B language model through Ollama for generating atmospheric radio fragments, procedural audio for radio static and effects, and ElevenLabs for optional text-to-speech narration.

The core mystery remains deterministic, while AI-generated atmospheric content keeps the radio experience unpredictable. Open innovation allowed experimentation with AI without depending on a closed API, providing control over game mechanics and understanding of AI integration. The most compelling aspect is when players realize broadcasts are interconnected, leading to a decision on revealing or burying the truth. Some secrets refuse to stay silent.