tgame/docs/19-concepts-player-and-ui.md

# Player & UI Concepts — 2026-05-12 brainstorm

Continuation of [17-foldins](17-foldins-2026-05-12.md) and [18-expedition-engagement](18-expedition-engagement.md). Format is a scannable concept glossary — one short paragraph per idea. Categorize / prioritize later.

## Player identity

**Omnipresent observer.** The player has no avatar, no name, no in-fiction position. They watch the cast, occasionally intervene. Closest reference is Black & White's spatial framing (third-person, disembodied) — but not the deity-role implications. The cast doesn't worship or defer to the player.

**Player as character volition.** When the player makes a decision for Brom, they *are* Brom in that moment. No "override" friction, no compliance dialogue, no resentment system. The character just does it. Player intervention is a lever on the cast's mind, not a command from above.

**Three engagement levels are all valid.** Lean-in (read every bark, weigh every fork). Check-in (drop in periodically, intervene on what matters). Walk-away (launch and read the report). The party self-completes regardless; the player picks their depth per session. Honors the morning-after test.

## UI pivot

**Context-switched screens, not persistent HUD.** Each screen is a complete composition: hall, workshop, world map, expedition view, library, etc. No always-on portrait bar across all screens — UI elements belong to the screens they serve. Notification glow on the hall scene signals "there's something to look at" without forcing constant visibility.

**Eye-of-the-Beholder portrait bar.** Persistent UI element *within* the expedition view. 4–6 framed portraits along the bottom: status overlays, expression shifts (4 fps), speech banners. The portrait *is* the character to the player's mental model. Same vocabulary as the hall's roster wall.

**Journey graph (Oregon Trail × FTL).** Expedition view's central artifact. Branching node graph: round = flavor, square = decision, diamond = leg-end. Party-marker advances node-to-node, stepwise. Branches visible — decisions are *forks*, geographically committing. Past nodes stay on the graph as visited history.

**Not a card game.** Cards-the-genre signifier is overloaded. The game uses illustrated artifacts (portraits, journal pages, dispatches, maps, item cards in inventory) but never has cards "in hand," a deck to draw from, or a discard pile. No mana, no hand management. The art format is honest; the gameplay framing is not card-game.

**The "alive hall" stays first-person.** Existing 09-art-style discipline preserved. In-fiction reframe: the observer hovers close to the hall (peers into it as a doll's house) rather than standing in it as guildmaster. Minor revision to 08-ux-ui language needed.

## Voice & content

**Character voice is the personality channel.** The latent matrix (the MBTI-adjacent 4-axis system from [18-expedition-engagement](18-expedition-engagement.md)) expresses through *how each character speaks*. Bark library + journal voice + decision phrasing all flow from the character's latent profile. Players develop favorites by mouthfeel, not by stats.

**Mixed addressing dynamic.** Characters chatter among themselves, narrate their own observations, occasionally address the player during decisions. Loose, not rigid. Texture difference between flavor (overheard) and decisions (directed) is natural.

**Chronicler is a party role.** A character with the right traits (Lettered, Scholar, Cartographer) chronicles the run — produces journal entries. No chronicler in the party = sparse, garbled updates. Knowledge of the run is a capability gate, not a free service. The chronicler's voice shapes the journal's prose style.

## Mechanism

**Auto-quests with loot tables.** The whole expedition system reduces to a quest catalog with conditional triggers and weighted loot tables. Each auto-quest is a small state machine — nodes, decisions, branches, outcomes. Bounded, simulatable, AI-batchable. 90s CRPG mechanism dressed in modern surfacing.

**In-character play is rewarded by access, not bonus.** No "stay in character +10" score. Decisions just route which content branches actually fire. Brom-played-Bold walks into the fight chain; Brom-played-Cautious walks past it. The triumphant-fight loot table doesn't roll if there was no triumphant fight. The system doesn't measure coherence; it routes content through actual decisions.

**Out-of-character runs feel thinner, not punished.** The texture flows either way — a Cautious-Brom run still has flavor and outcomes, just less signature texture. Player learns experientially that letting characters be themselves produces richer runs. No tooltip teaches it.

**Sim-tractable shape.** The Python sim ([17-foldins § Data pipeline](17-foldins-2026-05-12.md)) can now model expeditions concretely: party + decision policy + quest catalog → run outcomes (drops, character state, narrative arcs). Monte Carlo runs measure content variety, loot balance, in-character outcome gaps. Tunable before game code exists.

## Content envelope

**Quest catalog target.** ~200–500 auto-quests across all zones/tiers for v1. ~5 nodes each, 2–3 branches per fork. Tagged with axis affinities, capability gates, zone+leg constraints. Loot tables hang off the existing materials taxonomy.

**Bark catalog target.** ~50–100 lines per character, latent-vector-shaped, context-tagged (route start, encounter, decision-pending, ration-low, wounded, etc.). AI-batched per character at crystallization.

**Illustration target.** ~1000 quest-node images, AI-batched against the palette/dither pipeline. Plus per-character expression sets. Plus per-zone backdrops.

## Glossary format trial

This whole document is the proposed format for the broader idea glossary. One concept per blurb. Short. Cross-linkable. Sortable into categories (must-have / nice-to-have / parking-lot / future). If this format works, the next move is to back-fill the existing 00–18 docs by lifting their concept anchors into a single index file.