This is the initial design assignment for the registered [team](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Team), not settled game mechanics or permission to implement anything. No previous design settles the brief’s undecided systems.

The design lead will own one short player-experience proposal, supported by a systems comparison and reviewed independently. Describe a station sortie from the ship through a clear immediate objective, meaningful horde pressure, a useful discovery and a purposeful return. Include a concrete human consequence involving an authored survivor. For this initial comparison, use a representative sortie to recover useful station salvage and return. This is a proposed design exercise, not a mandated opening mission; its exact fiction remains open.

Compare **two materially different build approaches to the same objective**: what the player acquires, chooses and sacrifices; how power grows; what limits or failure cases remain; and how a learned interaction remains useful beyond one specially prepared room. Preserve the desired tradeoff between equipment and salvage. Enemy manipulation may contribute without becoming the main subject of experimentation.

- The two approaches create materially different player decisions and power payoffs beyond a single scripted event. Describe actual costs and limits without requiring symmetrical weaknesses or weakening spectacular builds to fit a template.

Lead and Systems draft in parallel, with one writer per article. Before review, reconcile shared assumptions about carrying burden, extraction conditions and relevant hazards. PM resumes Lead for an integration pass once Systems is ready, then gives the reviewer the exact reconciled revisions. PM will integrate a coherent provisional direction, retain important unresolved tradeoffs and ask the owner only the decisions that materially affect it. Later development or player validation requires explicit owner authorization; written descriptions cannot establish gameplay quality.