2026-09-06 18:04:54
Anonymous:
DES102 draft r4: complete REV102 r1 issues 3 and 5 (flash observable in the failed-experiment lesson; press-rate bound in section 15) and the minor items; Clarity Q33 (survivorlike question in the owner's word, decision 6 reframed) and Q34 (refund window explained and sourced from Steam; measured price bands cited with caveat); Noita named; conductivity extension; r3 topology stands per REV102-1, world designer asked to align
hold the flood/design document.md ..
@@ 1,6 1,6 @@
# Hold the Flood — Design Document
-
**DES102 | draft r3 | 2026-09-06 | Lead Game and Systems Designer | In review**
+
**DES102 | draft r4 | 2026-09-06 | Lead Game and Systems Designer | In review**
This is a proposal for a game, written before anything has been built. It follows the direction PM selected for drafting (A, "The Borrowed Route") and PM's six required corrections. Nothing in it is owner-approved, nothing has been played, and every number is a starting guess to be tested later. The enemies, the setting, the small colony and the modest equipment growth are all proposals for the owner to judge. Bookkeeping, revision codes and the answer-by-answer map to reviewers' findings are in Appendix B; the body is written to be read on its own. Terms are explained at first use and collected in Appendix A.
@@ 16,9 16,9 @@
**Why this game exists.** Survival games with automatic weapons and rising crowds are good at pressure and bad at curiosity: there is never a reason to stop and look. This design makes the pressure legible, so you can compute when you are safe, and makes every safe minute worth spending on understanding, because understanding is what changes where the pressure lands. The Flood is not something you beat. It is something you learn to route.
-
**What the rule does that its inspirations do not.** Water carrying current is not a new idea; the owner's own reference games use it, and one of them sits on a simulation of every pixel so that the same rule produces chaos for hundreds of hours. This design deliberately does not simulate; its channels are wet or dry. What it does instead, and what the reference games do not, is make one rule answer four questions at once: what fights, what opens, where the enemy mass goes next, and how your own gear is packed, with the colony's dock as the fifth. The value is not surprise from chaos; it is consequence you can compute, so that a plan is possible and a mistake is legible. A player who has seen "wet channel plus coil equals stun" has not seen the mechanic; they have seen one of its four faces, and the game is about noticing that the other three are the same face.
+
**What the rule does that its inspirations do not.** Water carrying current is not a new idea; the owner's own reference games use it, and one of them, Noita, is built on a simulation of every pixel (as its makers describe it) so that the same rule produces chaos for hundreds of hours. This design deliberately does not simulate; its channels are wet or dry. What it does instead, and what the reference games do not, is make one rule answer four questions at once: what fights, what opens, where the enemy mass goes next, and how your own gear is packed, with the colony's dock as the fifth. The value is not surprise from chaos; it is consequence you can compute, so that a plan is possible and a mistake is legible. A player who has seen "wet channel plus coil equals stun" has not seen the mechanic; they have seen one of its four faces, and the game is about noticing that the other three are the same face.
-
**Who this is for, and what it sits beside.** Proposed audience: players of automatic-weapon crowd games who want to think, and players of exploration mysteries who will accept pressure as the price of a puzzle worth solving. It sits beside the owner's named inspirations rather than against them: nearer to the resource-gathering crowd game in moment-to-moment feel, nearer to the room-by-room mystery in what keeps you coming back, and unlike the grid-inventory games in that the pack is small on purpose. No market claim is made here; audience, price and comparables are not yet among the document criteria, and section 17 asks the owner to treat them as decisions.
+
**Who this is for, and what it sits beside.** Proposed audience: players of automatic-weapon crowd games who want to think, and players of exploration mysteries who will accept pressure as the price of a puzzle worth solving. It sits beside the owner's named inspirations rather than against them: nearer to the resource-gathering crowd game in moment-to-moment feel, nearer to the room-by-room mystery in what keeps you coming back, and unlike the grid-inventory games in that the pack is small on purpose. No market claim is made here by this document; audience, price and comparables are not yet among the document criteria, and section 17 asks the owner to treat them as decisions. An outside researcher has since published measured storefront data on this wiki (a Reference page on survivorlike market data, read today and not independently verified by me): the owner's crowd-game references list between about five and thirteen dollars and lead with the "Action Roguelike" tag, while the mystery, exploration and inventory references list between about fifteen and thirty and lead with puzzle and investigation tags. Which neighbourhood this game enters is a decision with numbers behind it, and section 17 puts it to the owner.
### A two-minute example
@@ 164,7 164,7 @@
**Charge is finite by rule.** Each organism sheds once. A surge of forty stunned in water yields four large motes, twenty units, two full batteries, if you are standing where they fall before they fade. Stragglers yield one unit each. Discharging spends a whole battery. So the electrician's loop, harvest a surge to fund the next discharge, pays only against a fresh surge standing in water, and never against the same crowd twice.
-
**The genre's payoff moment, and an optional module to supply it.** Crowd games of this kind have one defining moment: the point where your power outpaces the spawn rate and you mow the crowd down. This design's arc does not reach that point by default, and an outside critic is right that shipping under the genre's tag without it risks disappointing the audience the tag brings. One on-rule addition would supply it without kill experience: the **arc**, a one-slot module that, while linked to a charged battery, makes the cutter's hits conduct from organism to organism through a dense crowd, draining the battery over about twenty seconds. In a thin crowd it does little; in a packed surge it is the mowing moment, funded by charge you harvested from the surge before, and bounded by the finite-charge rule so it cannot be sustained. It is the same conduction clause, applied to bodies. Whether to include it is the owner's call (section 17); with it, the design has the genre's spike as a spend rather than a climb.
+
**The genre's payoff moment, and an optional module to supply it.** Crowd games of this kind have one defining moment: the point where your power outpaces the spawn rate and you mow the crowd down. This design's arc does not reach that point by default, and an outside critic is right that shipping under the genre's tag without it risks disappointing the audience the tag brings. One on-rule addition would supply it without kill experience: the **arc**, a one-slot module that, while linked to a charged battery, makes the cutter's hits conduct from organism to organism through a dense crowd, draining the battery over about twenty seconds. In a thin crowd it does little; in a packed surge it is the mowing moment, funded by charge you harvested from the surge before, and bounded by the finite-charge rule so it cannot be sustained. It is the same conduction clause, applied to bodies. Whether to include it is the owner's call (section 17); with it, the design has the genre's spike as a spend rather than a climb. Said plainly, in the owner's own word: you asked for a survivorlike. As proposed, without the arc, this is a routing and deduction game with automatic weapons, and by its own numbers in section 3 the player never outpaces a surge; it may not feel like the genre you named. Adding the arc gives that feeling as a short, charge-funded spell. Leaving it out keeps the game honest to its rule and changes what shelf it sits on.
---
@@ 193,7 193,7 @@
- **Limits.** The panel powers one branch or none. A discharge needs a full battery and spends it. A field pump costs a bundle and lasts one expedition. A planted beacon runs its battery down. A stun yields once per crowd.
- **Combinations that matter.** Panel to yard plus a coil in the channel: stun and harvest an invited surge. At the junction (tier two), the valve that joins the yard channel to the junction pool plus a coil discharged into the pool: energise the junction gate's own circuit, which the panel never reaches, and open the way into the interior, at the price that crowds from either branch can be drawn to the junction while its lamp is lit. A planted beacon on the causeway's dock end plus the panel on yard: pull an entered causeway crowd off the road while the next surge goes to the yard, clearing both routes home for one interval, at the cost of a crowd gathering near the dock you will leave by.
-
**A plausible experiment that fails, readably.** The player has learned that current opens the pump-hall hatch and that the yard is dark. Surge one is gathered at the causeway beacon. The player wades into the yard channel and discharges the coil to open the hatch without touching the panel, reasoning that the yard stays dark to the relay and the surge will stay on the causeway. The hatch opens. So does the yard beacon: it lights steady, because it is on the same wet circuit. Surge one, which follows the nearest lit beacon it can reach, turns off the causeway and comes to the yard, through the junction, while the player is inside the hall. The lesson is legible in the light convention: steady means powered, powered means lure, and the coil powers everything the water touches. The recovery is in section 13.
+
**A plausible experiment that fails, readably.** The player has learned that current opens the pump-hall hatch and that the yard is dark. Surge one is gathered at the causeway beacon. The player wades into the yard channel and discharges the coil to open the hatch without touching the panel, reasoning that the yard stays dark to the relay and the surge will stay on the causeway. The hatch opens. So does the yard beacon: it lights steady, because it is on the same wet circuit. Surge one, which follows the nearest lit beacon it can reach, turns off the causeway and comes to the yard, through the junction, while the player is inside the hall. The lesson is legible in the light convention: steady means powered, powered means lure, and the coil powers everything the water touches. The second half of the lesson is in the cables: only the beacon that flashes chooses where a surge enters, and nothing you carry can make a beacon flash; at the next dispatch the player watches the pulse run down the causeway's thin cable, not the yard's. The recovery is in section 13.
---
@@ 250,7 250,7 @@
**What expedition twenty-one is.** Honestly: a courtesy. The designed game ends when the relay is shut, fixed or held, and each ending leaves a different district for free play: shut, and surges come by the sluice unannounced, so the forecast is gone and the game is harder and blinder; fix, and the panel is welded, so routing is gone and what remains is hauling on a known road; hold, and it is the same game you finished. None of those is a second game, and this document does not pretend otherwise. The design's own retention argument, that the surge schedule keeps urgency after the mystery is solved, is true up to the ending and is spent by two of the three endings. That is deliberate: this is a finite, authored experience, and the owner is asked to fund it as one. If the owner wants a game that keeps giving after the ending, the honest route is the extension named above, a second district under the same rule, not a promise that this district renews.
-
**How long the game is, in hours, and whose number it is.** This count is the lead's, derived from the beats above and owned here. Counting what is designed, the minimum is about ten to twelve expeditions, three to four per tier, with deaths adding to that; at about fifteen minutes each, that is roughly three to four hours for the whole designed experience, ending included, before free play. It is an estimate from content, not a validated length; the earlier figure of twelve to twenty expeditions was a guess and is withdrawn. The owner should know one commercial fact that follows: a storefront refund window of two hours would cover about the first eight expeditions, which is most of the designed game. That is a pricing and scope constraint, not a design flaw, and section 17 puts it in front of the owner as a decision about length and extensions.
+
**How long the game is, in hours, and whose number it is.** This count is the lead's, derived from the beats above and owned here. Counting what is designed, the minimum is about ten to twelve expeditions, three to four per tier, with deaths adding to that; at about fifteen minutes each, that is roughly three to four hours for the whole designed experience, ending included, before free play. It is an estimate from content, not a validated length; the earlier figure of twelve to twenty expeditions was a guess and is withdrawn. The owner should know one commercial fact that follows, in plain words. The Steam store lets a buyer return a game "within two weeks of purchase and with less than two hours of playtime" (Steam's own refund page, read on 2026-09-06). Two hours is about eight expeditions, which is most of the designed game: a player could finish two of the three tiers and return it. That is a pricing and scope constraint, not a design flaw, and section 17 puts it in front of the owner as a decision about length, price and extensions. The outside researcher's measured page mentioned in section 1 shows the owner's reference games in two price bands that do not overlap, crowd games below thirteen dollars and mystery games above fourteen, so length, price and shelf are one decision, not three.
**The title.** Hold the Flood is the owner's working name for the project. It is not among the owner's recorded requirements, so it can change, and an outside critic has argued it should. In this design the holding is done by deciding where the Flood goes: the colony holds the Flood off its refuge not by fighting it but by routing it, and the ending is about holding it for good. The Flood is the enemy mass, never the water; the water is what carries the current.
@@ 294,7 294,7 @@
Options, all readable: the hatch is powered and open, so the door is a chokepoint where organisms in pursuit range come in one at a time, and the cutter can hold it for a while at a cost in health; or the player steps to the channel's edge inside the doorway, in insulation, and discharges the coil into the water the crowd is standing in. The battery has two units; a discharge needs ten. So the player holds the door with the cutter, kills eleven, picks up eleven motes between the bodies, and now has enough.
-
**7:50.** Discharge. The crowd in the channel stops, stunned for eight seconds, and sheds four large motes. The player walks the channel's edge collecting them, battery full again, and is clear of the crowd before it moves.
+
**7:50.** Discharge. The twenty-nine organisms still standing in the channel stop, stunned for eight seconds, and shed two large motes, ten units. The player walks the channel's edge collecting them, battery full again, and is clear of the crowd before it moves.
**8:00.** The second dispatch, yard, eighty organisms, into the channel where the stunned crowd is recovering. The player is already on the culvert side.
@@ 340,11 340,11 @@
**Minimum complete experience.** One district (two docks, causeway, culvert, yard with pump hall, the junction platform with its gate, pool and valve, the sluice, the interior and the relay room), three mystery tiers, six or seven module types, one enemy type with size and tint variants, three surges per expedition, three colony decisions, an ending. About ten to twelve expeditions, three to four hours.
-
**Optional extensions, in order of value.** A second district using the same rule with different geography. A second enemy variant that conducts differently. More module types. A larger colony.
+
**Optional extensions, in order of value.** A second district using the same rule with different geography. A second enemy variant that conducts differently. A conductivity axis, fresh water against salt intrusion that the pump controls, which an outside researcher's sourced reference page notes is real physics (salt water carries current around a body instead of through it) and would be free authored content; not in the minimum. More module types. A larger colony.
**Explicit cuts.** No fluid simulation: channels are wet or dry. No destructible terrain. No free chemistry. No procedural layout: the district is fixed and the mystery depends on that. No base-building grid, citizens, hunger or production. No multiplayer. No kill experience.
-
**Complexity drivers.** Crowd behaviour with holding, press and pursuit (the one real engineering risk). Readable energised water. The rack UI. The forecast overlay.
+
**Complexity drivers.** Crowd behaviour with holding, press and pursuit (the one real engineering risk). One tuning bound the fairness claim depends on, restated from section 16: on a first expedition with the panel untouched, the causeway crowd's press must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes. Readable energised water. The rack UI. The forecast overlay.
**Cheap alternatives if needed.** Press as a fixed radius that grows on a timer rather than simulated crowding. A single fixed pursuit range. Text inspection for every clue prop. Flat tints for water states.
@@ 356,7 356,7 @@
**Tuning bounds the design depends on, stated so they can be tested.** On a first expedition with the panel untouched, the causeway crowd's press must not reach the causeway head before the evacuation window closes, or "withdrawal never requires solving the mystery" becomes false; that is a bound on the press rate, not a proven value. The ten-second crank must be long enough to matter and short enough to survive. The leak rate must make the rack a decision rather than a nuisance.
-
**Presented for decision, not resolved.** The routing alternative (sight-limited beacons). The ending's shape and the game's length. The colony's size. The rack's size. The genre's payoff module. The enemy's identity, its name and the drowned-city setting. The presentation assumption.
+
**Presented for decision, not resolved.** The routing alternative (sight-limited beacons). The ending's shape, the game's length and its price band. The colony's size. The rack's size. Whether this is the survivorlike the owner asked for: without the arc module it may not feel like one, and that is decision 6 in plain words. The enemy's identity, its name and the drowned-city setting. The presentation assumption.
**An outside critique, answered where it is this document's to answer.** A critic outside the recorded team has posted a market and originality audit; PM has not yet ruled on its standing, and nothing in it is treated here as an assignment. Four of its points are design questions and are answered above on this page's own terms: what the rule does that its inspirations do not (section 1), the rack as a stated small scope (section 5), the genre's payoff moment (section 6), and the renewable after the mystery is solved with the game's honest length (section 11). Two are the owner's: the enemy's name, since the critic reports that "the Flood" is the name of a well-known existing game's enemy faction and the owner's requirement fixes the meaning of the term rather than the string, which I have not independently verified but is cheap to check and cheap to change; and whether audience, comparables and length should join the document criteria. One is PM's and the critic's to settle between them.
@@ 369,9 369,9 @@
1. **Confirm or redirect the premise.** Direction A as written, direction B (the documented alternative), or a different premise. A is PM's provisional choice, not yet yours.
2. **Enemy and setting.** Bioelectric organisms in a drowned pumping district are proposals. If you want zombies, aliens or another Flood, the rule survives; the fiction changes.
3. **The routing model.** The panel as a lever that can move an arrived surge (this draft) or as a plan that cannot (the alternative in section 4).
-
4. **The ending and the length.** One district with an ending at the relay, about three to four hours, as proposed; or an open-ended game; or the proposed game plus a second district as the extension that adds the most. Know that a two-hour refund window covers most of the minimum as designed.
+
4. **The ending, the length and the price.** One district with an ending at the relay, about three to four hours, as proposed; or an open-ended game; or the proposed game plus a second district as the extension that adds the most. Know that Steam's refund terms, two weeks and under two hours of play, cover most of the minimum as designed, and that measured storefront prices put crowd games and mystery games in two bands that do not overlap: length, price and shelf are one decision.
5. **The colony's size.** Three decisions and no upkeep, as proposed, or a larger settlement, which is a second game.
-
6. **No kill experience, and the payoff moment.** Charge as the only combat yield, as proposed; and whether to add the arc module so the genre's mowing moment exists as a spend. Without it, the honest label is a routing game with automatic weapons rather than the genre as its audience knows it.
+
6. **Is this the survivorlike you asked for?** You required a survivorlike. As proposed, with charge as the only combat yield and no experience curve, the player never outpaces a surge, so without the arc module this is a routing and deduction game with automatic weapons and may not feel like the genre you named. Choose: add the arc so the mowing moment exists as a short spend; use a conventional experience curve instead; or accept the game as a routing game and sell it as one, on the mystery shelf rather than the crowd-game shelf.
7. **The rack's size.** Six slots and six or seven modules, as proposed, or a real item game at twenty to thirty modules, which changes the content budget.
8. **The enemy's name.** "The Flood" is your term for the enemy mass; an outside critic reports it is also the name of a well-known existing game's enemy faction and that the phrase is hard to find on a storefront. Keep it, or rename the enemy while keeping the title; the design does not depend on the word.
9. **Presentation.** Top-down 2D, as assumed.
@@ 415,7 415,13 @@
## Appendix B: bookkeeping
-
**Status.** DES102 draft r3, In review, on Hold the Flood/Design Document; r2 (c4ad51) and r1 (d828a4) are page history. Author: the Lead Game and Systems Designer, the session PM identified as canonical in Brief D014. Written under Brief D013 (direction A, provisional, reversible) and Tasks PMR001. The design-only gate (Brief D007) is unchanged: nothing has been built, prototyped, simulated, tested or drawn.
+
**Status.** DES102 draft r4, In review, on Hold the Flood/Design Document; r3 (d35209), r2 (c4ad51) and r1 (d828a4) are page history.
+
+
**Sources read for r4.** Design Review REV102 r1 4dde90 (the critic's review of draft r2: revise, one bounded pass; five issues, of which 1, 2 and 4 and the minor items were already met by r3, and 3 and 5 are completed here); World and Mystery r11 eac7ed (the world designer's check of draft r2, and their re-alignment to r2's choices, which crossed with r3 in the opposite direction); Clarity Questions round 6 (Q33, Q34); External Critique r3 b3a54d; the Reference pages on electricity in water and on survivorlike market data; Steam's refund page, read directly on 2026-09-06. Pm Reviews, Tasks and Brief unchanged; no routing ruling yet.
+
+
**What r4 changes.** Two crossings need one sentence to end: the world designer's r11 aligned to draft r2 while r3 was aligning to their r10, so the pages swapped choices a second time. This document's r3 topology stands, because the critic's REV102 issue 1 independently recommends it on the merits (a junction gate on its own circuit is a knowledge gate; a gate on the causeway circuit is open by default for the first three minutes of every expedition), and it will not be changed again from this side; the world designer is asked to align their next revision to r4. On the design: the failed-experiment lesson now states the observable in the critic's words, only the beacon that flashes chooses an intake and nothing you carry can make a beacon flash (issue 3); the press-rate bound is restated in section 15's tuning list (issue 5); expedition six's mote count follows the stated rate; the survivorlike question is put in the owner's own word in sections 6, 16 and 17 (Q33, and the outside critic's X17); the refund window is explained in plain words and sourced from Steam's page, and the outside researcher's measured price bands are cited with their caveat (Q34); Noita is named in the differentiator; the conductivity axis is recorded as an extension.
+
+
**What r3 changed.** Aligned to World and Mystery r10 and applied its integration items; visible signal cable; expedition twenty-one; owned length; working-title wording; the electrofishing reference. Details in that revision's history. Author: the Lead Game and Systems Designer, the session PM identified as canonical in Brief D014. Written under Brief D013 (direction A, provisional, reversible) and Tasks PMR001. The design-only gate (Brief D007) is unchanged: nothing has been built, prototyped, simulated, tested or drawn.
**Sources read for r3.** World and Mystery r10 c6f059 (the world designer's integration check of draft r1 and their aligned page; the text this revision lifts); Design Review r8 11bd4d (post-acceptance note; recommends confirming D013; REV102 awaits this document); Clarity Questions round 5 (the reader's cold read of draft r1, and Q31, Q32); External Critique r2 280e75 (X9 to X15); the outside researcher's Reference page on electricity in water (REF101); Pm Reviews unchanged (PMR001 checkpoint only; no routing ruling yet). Earlier sources: Hub 89e2dc; Brief 3cf14c; Tasks ee938e; Team 3ddc81; Design r6 211106; Glossary 86c1c4.
@@ 435,6 441,6 @@
**Asset check record.** OpenGameArt FAQ read today: licence list and per-asset licensing as stated in section 14. Kenney: the assets listing page (kenney.nl/assets) shows no licence statement; the "Top-down Shooter" pack page (kenney.nl/assets/top-down-shooter) states "Creative Commons CC0" and 580 files. Both fetched read-only on 2026-09-06; suitability not assessed.
-
**Open handoffs.** World designer: confirm that r3 matches r10 (this document will not re-draw the map or rename the crowd terms again; any further topology change starts on their page). Critic: REV102 on this draft. PM: the routing ruling the world designer requested (confirm D013 or reverse to the sight-limited model), whether the routing alternative goes to the owner as decision 3 either way, the standing of the External Critique and Reference pages, and whether the enemy-art approval request should be raised now. The Design page header (211106) and the Glossary point here for rule details.
+
**Open handoffs.** World designer: align your next revision to this document's sections 2 and 4 (junction gate on its own circuit, junction platform as the shelter, crank exit, press and pursuit range); this document will not re-draw the map or rename the crowd terms again, and any further topology change starts on your page and is agreed before either page moves. Critic: REV102 r2 on this draft; issues 1 to 5 are answered where this appendix says. PM: the routing ruling the world designer requested (confirm D013 or reverse to the sight-limited model), whether the routing alternative goes to the owner as decision 3 either way, the standing of the outside pages (critique, references, register), whether an eleventh document criterion on audience, comparables and length is wanted, and whether the enemy-art approval request should be raised now. The Design page header (211106) and the Glossary point here for rule details.
-
**PM report.** Task DES102; artifact Design Document draft r3 (r2 c4ad51 and r1 d828a4 in history); no canonical decision changed; reasoning is written design against the cited revisions, no player data; risks and tuning bounds are listed in section 16; next handoff is REV102 and the world designer's confirmation; one PM request: rule on the routing model the world designer's r9 raised, since it decides section 4 and both scenes, and say whether the alternative still goes to the owner as a decision.
+
**PM report.** Task DES102; artifact Design Document draft r4 (r3 d35209, r2 c4ad51, r1 d828a4 in history); no canonical decision changed; reasoning is written design against the cited revisions, no player data; two outside facts are cited with their sources and caveats (Steam's refund terms, read directly; the researcher's measured price bands, not independently verified); risks and tuning bounds are listed in sections 15 and 16; next handoff is REV102 r2 and the world designer's alignment; one PM request: rule on the routing model, since it decides section 4 and both scenes, and say whether the alternative still goes to the owner as a decision.
