Hold The Horde — Design Plan

The team is designing a discovery-first survivorlike under the Owner Brief, with expressive builds, meaningful hordes and an authored colony. The work below is design only. Written comparisons establish a proposal and its dependencies; they do not demonstrate fun, readability, balance, production feasibility or campaign duration.

Current milestone: rescue and home

The next outcome is one complete proposed loop: notice an authored person, understand and help them, get them aboard, and see their presence matter on a later expedition. Lead, Systems and Reviewer saved independent first positions; PM read, verified and released all three together. The positions overlap on preparation and a short consequential extraction but differ on its costs, failure consequences and the person's later contribution. Agreement is not evidence that any choice is best.

The authors work concurrently. Systems posts the small shared contract early while Lead develops character, choices and the home consequence. Each edits only their owned article, checks the latest relevant chat before declaring a dependency missing, and verifies the shared interface before final submission. One self-check belongs in the assignment; there is no extra PM gate after each preparatory step.

The reviewer is already assigned to the named forthcoming submissions. Once an actual verified source arrives, review can begin without another PM permission step. The independent starting position remains preserved. After the focused review, PM inspects the findings, assigns one combined reasoned author response where needed, then makes a provisional disposition or relays a necessary owner preference. No review until unanimity is planned. Current bounded assignment140 and the unchanged first positions138–139 are in project chat.

No global survivor-permadeath rule is settled. The example must state its own local failure consequence rather than substituting "unresolved" for a rule or silently granting immunity. If its concrete crisis needs an owner choice, ask with the actual alternatives and costs while independent work continues. Neither a complete colony economy nor the central mystery's answer is needed for this milestone.

Completed written foundations

• Expedition Proposal and Build Comparison: a provisional sortie with observed glyph evidence, contrasting equipment/cargo builds, carrying choices and a survivor interpreting a player-shown clue. The particular notebook use and survivor contribution do not prohibit other uses or cast roles. The comparison's inspection and activation wording now matches the later build rules.
• Oxygen and Observation: provisionally integrated record/display proposal. The owner decided that opening the journal pauses the rest of the game, including enemies and oxygen during combat; that requirement is in the brief. Other journal details and the wider oxygen rhythm remain proposed.
• Death and Persistence: working proposal for persistent recoverable caches and retained records. Equipment availability and recovery journeys are costs. The suit baseline proposed in Build Rules answers the minimum-expedition dependency on paper; actual reach, part supply, abandonment and recovery viability remain unvalidated.
• Exploration Structure: provisionally integrated fixed geometry with varying state, reach and access, concrete goal examples and narrative reinterpretation. Stable anchors with varying connections remain a credible alternative. Player changes survive ordinary resets, but operating infrastructure depends on its stated power and installed parts.
• Build Rules: provisionally integrated connected equipment grammar, illustrative shared-part builds, causal-event rules and suit baseline. Navigation records traversed breadcrumbs without promising an unseen safe route; local equipment previews remain understandable while learned families help with unfamiliar objects and preparation. Fields, capacities and performance are not tuned or validated.

The foundations milestone closed after review125, coordinated responses and final PM consistency edits, disposition137. Article ownership is Lead for Expedition, Exploration and Death; Systems for Build Comparison, Build Rules and Oxygen. No further broad foundations review is pending. Their working proposals can be reopened for a concrete contradiction, owner preference or later authorized evidence.

Acceptance and remaining scope

A useful design preserves the astronaut, hostile station, limited carried oxygen, unexplained revival and growing authored colony. It gives clear information and immediate options while leaving room for open-ended exploration and discoveries about people, history and mechanisms. Builds may become spectacular without manufactured symmetrical weaknesses. Requirements, proposals, dependencies and observations must remain distinct.

The revival cause, station history, escape solution, language details, full rescue/colony systems, exact equipment economy, numerical oxygen rules and campaign content scope remain open. The 30/90/100–200 hour ambitions remain unproven. No implementation, simulations, prototypes, playtests or game assets are authorized.

PM coordinates ready handoffs during active sessions, with one-minute scheduled checks as a fallback while useful authorized work remains. Hourly checks apply only when no such work can continue. The Team page records the working agreement. Add specialist capacity only for a concrete useful need; duplicate work and idle queues are not progress.