Parley Hatch
2abfe4abd1
Working title 'tgame' is provisional. Top-level samples/ and docs/samples/ are gitignored; visual/art pipeline lives outside this repo.
29 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
29 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# Concept
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A mobile game where the entire game is the **crafting half** of an MMO. No exploration, no avatar walking around a world, no real-time combat. You run a polymath crafting guild from a single screen and everything you see and do feeds back into making things.
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## The pitch
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You're the master of a guild that does *all* the trades — alchemy, smithing, weaving, enchanting, glassblowing, cooking, jewelry, beast-taming, cartography, and more. You hire named adventurers, equip them with gear you craft, send them on AFK expeditions to gather materials, and run the workshops that turn raw ingredients into finished goods. The adventurers are your employees; you never leave the guild hall.
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## Design pillars (working set)
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- **Always something shiny.** Every interaction — completed craft, returned expedition, new applicant, level-up, discovery — produces a moment worth a tap. The game pulses.
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- **No grindy skill-ups.** No "craft 300 daggers to level Smithing." Progression comes from *unlocks* (recipes, stations, regions, hires) and *quality bands* (Crude → Common → Fine → Masterwork → Legendary), not repetition.
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- **Crafting is the engine.** Every other system exists to feed crafting better inputs or give crafted output a destination.
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- **Breadth over depth-per-skill.** Many trades, lots of variety, broad recipe catalog. Pick paths to chase.
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- **Pre-rendered, fully offline runtime.** AI tooling lives in production (asset generation on the workstation), not in the shipped game. Game has no network calls except cloud save / future bazaar.
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- **Pixel art aesthetic** with Floyd-Steinberg dithering and a palette-locked visual vocabulary — see [09-art-style.md](09-art-style.md).
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- **Confident fantasy stylization with muted weight** — WoW × Quake × Machinarium triangulation; substantial enough for adults, accessible enough for anyone — see [10-tone.md](10-tone.md).
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- **Generic medieval fantasy setting** with two flavor pockets (gnomish steampunk, dark elf necromancy) for variety without worldbuilding burden — see [11-setting.md](11-setting.md).
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## Reference points
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- **Melvor Idle** — tradeskill breadth and the idle/active hybrid pacing
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- **Little Alchemy** — the "what does X+Y make?" discovery loop
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- **Shop Heroes / Recettear** — you craft, NPCs adventure
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- **Holy Potatoes! We're In Space?!** — crafting for a roving crew of named characters
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- **Darkest Dungeon** — named characters with traits/relationships you grow attached to
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- **Shadow of Mordor/War** — the roster screen and Nemesis-style relationship texture
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- **Merge Mansion** — the tactile mobile satisfaction
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- **Crusader Kings** — templated procedural event reports
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