Objectives
- Decisions under tension.
- Directed gameplay loop. Gather → Craft → Survive
- Abundant incentives.
- Rewards for success and failure.
- Not about babysitting meters.
Every time the player solves (or fails to solve) a basic survival problem it advances the story of damnation.
Failure States
Chore Fatigue. Too many low value actions to manage, like “drink water every 30 seconds.”
Spreadsheet Fatigue. Too many mechanics that require detailed balance of number-play, overshadowing interesting choices.
Rapid Failure Cascades. Binary fail states that resolve too quickly into success or failure.
Can’t Benchmark the Clock. Players should have a roughly accurate sense of when certain needs will go critical.
No Emotional Content. The lasting hook is not raw survival, but colonist drama. Mechanical competence is not the goal ala Sim-City, but steering the colony toward dramatic pay-offs.
Mono-Failure. Colony wipe isn’t always interesting. There should be a variety of outcomes (sickness, insanity, desertion, equipment loss, etc) that lead to varying levels from annoyance to crippling, but all creative.
Design Guard Rails
Elastic Decay. Needs decay faster when over-satisfied, slow at the edges - maintain tension without needing to constantly top-off.
Need Compression. Bundled needs and severity states. Hunger → Malnutrition. Cold → Hypothermia.
Macro Affordances. Player interaction at the macro level. Sleep scheduling, clear thresholds, etc. AI handles micro.
Litmus Tests
- Can a brand-new player keep everyone alive through N days? (Generalized difficulty test.)
- Does a new player trigger at least one interesting corruption path in their first playthrough? (Thresholding test.)
- Does a tester relate an anecdote (”my best farmer turned into a ghoul and ate the bishop”) instead of describing mechanics?
- Is it fun to play with limited initial starting resources?
Experiential Rewards
Frame outcomes in terms familiar with the OSR gaming experience.
Starvation → Cannibalism → Road to Undeath. Characters may become ghouls or vampires due to taking damned, short-term paths to satisfy needs.
Death → Haunting or Resource. Characters that die may be raised into service, or eaten. Their souls may haunt the colony. Death is not the end.
Disease → Plague. A variety of diseases and causes which may scar colonists or lead to new powers.
Close calls with unfulfilled needs (starvation, thirst, etc) should have a chance of leaving scars or creating new character traits.
Transformations shift, but do not necessarily remove, constraints. Ghouls still need to eat. Vampires need to sleep, etc.
Early transgressions are an emergency hack. Only later do cascading costs appear.
Reversibility is a story - multi-day quest-like events or a morally questionable ritual - not a UI toggle.
