Game design
What the player actually does. Much less settled than the engine — this section exists so that game decisions have somewhere to live before they are made implicitly by whatever the engine happened to need.
State of this section. Early. The engine is well ahead of the game: there is a world to dig, materials to dig through and a tool that wears them down, and above that almost nothing. What is written here is what has been decided as a side effect of building the terrain — which is exactly the kind of decision worth writing down before it hardens.
The pages
Decided, as a consequence of the terrain work
These came out of the engine design rather than from a game decision, but they are game decisions and they are made. The reasoning for each is in the engine section.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does digging terrain feel like? | The surface visibly shrinks under the tool, hit by hit, until the cell is gone. Damage is the density — there is no separate health bar behind it |
| What does damaging a built block feel like? | Its shape never changes. Damage shows as cracks, progressing through stages until the block breaks |
| How is a cell's toughness expressed? | Strikes to break, per material. See materials |
| Can the world be dug through? | No. Bedrock is always present at the base and is unbreakable by an explicit rule, not by a number so large it rounds to nothing |
| How does the player find ore? | By recognising the rock it lives in. Each seam occurs only within a specific host rock, and the rock bands sit at their own depths |
| How big is a voxel? | One metre |
| Is the world finite? | Yes, with an invisible wall at the edge and only sky beyond it. The size is a parameter, not yet chosen |
Deliberately deferred
| Topic | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Tools and inventory | One tool, dispatching on whether it hit terrain or construction, explicitly "for now". The intended model has several tool types with per-material modifiers — a shovel for loose soil, a pickaxe for rock, a sledgehammer for brick — which needs an inventory to mean anything |
| Player attributes | Nothing yet. A stronger character removing more density per swing is anticipated, which is why per-strike damage is kept as one function rather than an expression scattered through the edit ops |
| Liquids and gases | Wanted, and deliberately not designed. The fork is large: a pocket that is merely a material that looks like oil costs one table entry, while a fluid that flows when the cap rock is breached is a subsystem that pulls underground rivers in with it |
| Structural integrity | In scope for both terrain and built structures, design deferred. Undermine a wall and what it holds up should come down |
| Building | Placing cubes works. A shape palette — wedges, ramps, corner pieces — is what makes built structures read as buildings rather than boxes, and is the natural follow-on once construction is otherwise done |
| Progression, threats, objectives | Entirely open. Nothing in the engine assumes any of it |
The one loop that exists today
Aim at a cell, swing, watch it wear down and break; place cubes to build with. That is the whole of it. Everything above — why you are digging, what you do with what you find, what makes a place worth going to — is unwritten, and the material table is the first piece of it that has any shape.