tgame/docs/16-engagement-layers.md

Engagement Layers (Crafting Feel)

Crafting is the primary action of the game — not seasoning on a meta-game like Stardew or Minecraft. That means the bar is higher. Drag-to-station with a strategic input layer is enough for thinking engagement, but it's not enough for feeling engagement. Three additive layers fix that:

Layer	What	Status
Layer 1: Juice	Visceral feedback on every interaction (drag-snap, particles, audio, haptics)	Recommended, not formally accepted
Layer 2: Master's Touch	Brief skill-timing mini-game per craft, opt-in, difficulty-scaled	Designed (this doc)
Layer 3: Adjacent-station synergy	Passive bonuses for thoughtful parallel-craft scheduling	Recommended, not formally accepted

References for "primary-action games that feel amazing": Vampire Survivors (almost no decisions, every kill is a tactile pop), Forager (click rock → satisfying), Cookie Clicker (literally just clicking, juiced perfectly), Slay the Spire (cards already chosen, but each play feels meaningful).

Layer 1: Juice (recommended)

The single biggest miss in vanilla drag-to-station crafting. Make the act feel like bubble wrap:

• Ingredients drag with weight. They snap into station slots with a small particle burst, audio per placement, brief haptic
• Stations have idle animations that intensify when you hover ("ready to receive")
• A small visual countdown / heartbeat as the craft "thinks"
• Workshop ambient SFX layer up briefly during craft action
• Card lift-out at completion uses the reveal choreography (already designed in 13-reveal-choreography.md)

Forager and Vampire Survivors are mechanically simple games whose secret is all in the juice. Worth taking that lesson seriously — this layer carries the moment-to-moment feel for every player whether they engage with the others or not.

Layer 2: Master's Touch (designed)

Inspired by the dart mini-game in Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Serrated Scalpel — two-axis energy meters, simple input, difficulty-scaled. Brief skill-timing per craft that nudges outcomes without dominating them.

The mechanic

After the player hits Craft, the result auto-resolves over the craft's duration. During that window, two energy meters appear in sequence:

• Meter 1 — Quality: horizontal bar with a moving indicator and a green zone. Tap to lock. Hitting green nudges the quality roll up.
• Meter 2 — Critical: appears after Meter 1 locks. Same mechanic. Hitting green increases critical-success chance.

If the player ignores the meters, the craft auto-resolves on its timer with the engineer's roll alone. No penalty. This is the foundational rule — engagement is opt-in.

Difficulty scales meter behavior

Faster meter + smaller green zone = harder timing. Difficulty is a function of:

• Recipe baseline — Crude Pickaxe = slow; Lapis-Infused Moonsilver Falchion = fast
• Target quality vs. engineer skill — attempting Masterwork roll with a journeyman narrows the zone further
• Critical-attempt toggle (opt-in) — further narrows the zone in exchange for bigger crit bonus

A player attempting ambitious crafts is leaning in, timing carefully. A player banging out 20 Crude pickaxes for sale hits Craft → wait → done.

Themed skinning per station

Universal input mechanic, station-specific visual:

Station	Skin
Forge	Hammer-strike rhythm — meters are timing of two hammer falls
Alchemy Table	Stir-and-pour — stir tempo + pour-in moment
Loom	Shuttle-pass timing
Carpenter	Plane-stroke + chisel-tap
Glassworks	Furnace-pull + blow-rhythm
Jeweler	Setting-press + polish-stroke

Same inputs, recognizable craft motions per discipline. Players develop favorites without learning new mechanics.

Reward magnitude (bounded)

The nudge matters but doesn't dominate. Working numbers:

• Hit both green → +1 to quality-band roll, +5% critical chance bump
• Hit one → small partial bonus
• Miss both / skip → engineer-skill roll only, no penalty
• Critical-attempt toggle → +15% crit chance if both hit, smaller margin for error

Engineer skill remains dominant. A Master Engineer with both meters missed should beat a Journeyman with both meters hit on average. The mini-game polishes the result; it doesn't replace the strategic layer.

Trait integration

Roster traits become visibly meaningful in the meter:

• Lucky — widens green zones for that engineer's crafts
• Steady — slows meters slightly
• Hasty — narrows zones (penalty), small speed bonus to craft duration
• Drunk — meters wobble erratically; high variance

This is how traits become felt during play, not just stat numbers in a tooltip.

Tie-ins

• Onboarding (12-onboarding.md) — the forced-crit Lantern moment is "you nailed both meters." Player feels they earned it. The earlier Crude Pickaxe craft gently introduces the meter on slow speed with a wide green zone (essentially impossible to miss) so the mechanic is taught before it matters.
• Reveal choreography (13-reveal-choreography.md) — critical-success mid-flip fires both from lucky engineer rolls AND from perfect Master's Touch timing. Same dopamine moment, different earnings paths.
• Veteran auto-craft — toggle in settings to skip the meters by default for queued bulk crafts. The mini-game is for the items that matter, not for filling sale queues.

Accessibility

• Auto-craft toggle (skip meters always) — no penalty
• Larger green zones option (motor-impairment / casual mode)
• Visual feedback for meter timing strong enough that audio-only or visual-only players can both engage
• Pause-during-meter-tap for cognitive load (no tight reflex pressure)

Layer 3: Adjacent-station synergy (recommended)

Reward thoughtful parallel-craft scheduling without adding a new active mechanic. Pure rule additions to the existing system:

• Shared-warmth — two parallel crafts sharing an ingredient type (both use iron) → both get a small quality bonus
• Chained refining — one craft's output is the next queued craft's input → small efficiency bonus, faster turnaround
• Engineer cross-assist — same engineer assigned to two adjacent crafts → fatigue cost, small bonus to both
• Discipline pair — Smith + Jeweler crafting at the same time → set-piece bonus when their outputs combine into one final item later

This is a thinking hook that emerges from existing systems. Players who optimize feel clever; players who don't still get fine results. No new UI, no new mini-game.

What we're explicitly NOT building

• A mandatory mini-game per craft (kills veterans, hates the loop)
• Skill bars / mastery numbers per craft type (deliberately cut earlier)
• Real-time combat or twitch-action elements (wrong game)
• A sticker-album of mini-games (one per station with totally different mechanics is fragmenting; the themed-skinning approach keeps the input language unified)

Summary

The combination — Juice everywhere, Master's Touch as opt-in skill nudge, Synergy as opt-in optimization — gives crafting viscera + skill + strategy without any single layer having to carry alone. Players who want to button-mash get satisfying button-mashes. Players who want to optimize have meaningful levers. Players who want to roleplay just craft and equip and admire.

Open questions:

• Visual representation of the meter — vertical / horizontal / pendulum / circular dial?
• Sound design per station's themed meter (hammer-rhythm vs. shuttle-click vs. pestle-grind)
• Critical-attempt toggle — is this a craft-time choice, or a default setting per item type?
• Layer 1 and Layer 3 — these are recommended but not yet formally accepted. Worth pulling on each as separate threads later.