Most RPGs ask you to win a fight. I wanted one that asks you to spend a day well, and then lives with it.
The core loop
The game runs on sixteen days. Each day breaks into four phases — Dawn, Day, Dusk, Darkness — and each phase belongs to a different kind of character.
- You plan the day up front, assigning your squad to diplomatic, exploratory, or defensive actions
- Actions resolve simultaneously within initiative tiers, so fast units move at Dawn, heavy units at Dusk, and the plan you made collides with the world all at once
- Darkness is not a phase you act in. Status effects resolve, crafting completes, nocturnal things appear, and relationship scenes trigger — the camera turns away from strategy and toward the people
- Then the day locks. It does not come back.
Failure as information
When a negotiation collapses or an obstacle stops you, the game doesn’t hand you a game-over screen. It reveals something — a shift in perspective that shows you the designer’s side of the pond — and then offers a choice of rewind scope: this phase, or the whole day.
The cost isn’t resources. It’s time, and the knowledge that you’re now playing a version of the day you already know the ending of. Failure is the tutorial, delivered exactly when you’re motivated to read it.
Declaring a philosophy before building systems
Before any mechanic existed, one question had to be answered: is this world fundamentally consolatory or consequential? Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, where a moral order exists and hope is justified — or Herbert’s ecology, where the universe runs on accident and error, honor saves nobody, and hope has to be earned.
Players feel that choice whether or not you make it consciously. Making it first is what keeps 158 features pointing the same direction.
Architecture
The technical side is deliberately unfashionable. Godot 4 with GDScript, a four-phase day state machine, resource-driven items and encounters, and a migration away from deep object hierarchies toward data-oriented layouts where the simulation actually needs throughput.
Every structural decision gets an ADR — a short written record of what was chosen, what was rejected, and why. Partly for me. Increasingly for the agents working alongside me, which need the reasoning far more than they need the code.
Related work
Godot MCP integration for editor automation, Blender for asset pipelines, and audio production under Alter. for the score.