Parley Hatch 2abfe4abd1 Initial commit: design docs

Working title 'tgame' is provisional. Top-level samples/ and
docs/samples/ are gitignored; visual/art pipeline lives outside
this repo.

2026-05-17 11:16:07 -06:00

Open Questions

Parking lot for things to come back to. Not blockers, just decisions to make eventually.

Identity & flavor

Working title — tgame as placeholder, real title deferred until the game has more shape. When implementing: route the name through a single config constant, never hardcode tgame anywhere.

Time-of-day cycling for Guild Hall backdrop: real time vs. game time vs. fixed sequence?
Richness of "alive hall" minion overlays — do equipped weapons show, do they animate?
Push notifications for AFK expedition completion — opt-in granularity?
Accessibility: color-blind palettes for quality bands and effect auras.
How "discoverable" is the scene navigation — do players figure out the forge corner is tappable, or do we add subtle UI hints?

Where does the composition QA step live in the asset pipeline?
Do non-card UI uses (inventory icons, list views) re-render at low detail or use a baked thumbnail cache?
Expose composition recipes to players (layer breakdown panel) or stay opaque?
Color-clash policy: gameplay-prevent dissonant combos, or embrace them as feedback?
Shader budget on mid-tier mobile — how many simultaneous focused cards with full shader stack?
Atmosphere layers: ever animated (scrolling UVs) or static + shader animation only?

Scrap / salvage mechanic — break a finished card for partial refund?
Quality progression curve — does the Crude floor rise with zone tier?
Special material properties beyond quality (moonpetal is fundamentally magical regardless of band)?
Pocket gating — are gnomish/necromantic materials zone-locked or do they crosscontaminate?
Total material entry count for v1 (~30 raw / ~25 refined / ~20 components target).

Mechanical depth of minion relationships (pure flavor vs. real meta-game).
How recipe book is surfaced without becoming a spreadsheet.
How aggressive experimentation penalty is for wasted rare ingredients.
Quality cascade rules — can a great engineer rescue a Crude component?
Destination granularity for expeditions — region/zone/encounter or just region/zone.
Real-time progress bars vs. silent timers vs. push notifications for expeditions.
Chained expeditions (24h follow-ups)?
Hire pool: daily refresh? Cost to reroll? Special "fated" hires?
Workshop parallelism — how many concurrent crafts allowed at each Guild Rank?