Design principles

Authored transformation

Player choices should accumulate meaning throughout the campaign. They need not culminate in a final dialogue-box choice. Ninsi increasingly becomes the author of the world, and the player increasingly enforces that authorship through action.

Place carries argument

Areas are not neutral arenas. Real geography, theological history, ruined infrastructure, enemy ecology, and encounter structure should express the same dramatic idea.

Systems become symbols through use

Symbolism should appear in consequences: how death changes the player, how a weapon casts, what destroying a station costs, or how a boss and a city destroy one another.

Density over sprawl

The project is made by a small team. Prefer a limited number of deep, recombinable systems and authored areas over broad catalogs of shallow content.

Mystery must reward attention

The player should be able to follow the immediate stakes without understanding every historical reference. Deeper interpretation should reorganize what the player already experienced rather than merely adding trivia.