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e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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# Hold The Flood — Rooms
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**Owner decision, 2026-09-19.** After reading the inventory of the rooms as they were built, the owner found a pattern of things to interact with that gave the player no reason to care (the ward window photograph, the fault lamp, the bridge rack, and more), and said: "it seems like the best solution is for me to design each room manually." Asked how to begin, he answered: "let's start with an empty station and add the rooms as I design them", and "I will write them here. you will transfer them both to code and the wiki."
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So this page is the home of the station's rooms from now on. **Every room below is the owner's own card.** The implementer builds exactly what a card says, and asks where a card is silent instead of filling the gap. The older room pages of this wiki ([Station Room And Module Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Station%20Room%20And%20Module%20Inventory), [Encounter And Mechanism Placement Inventory](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Encounter%20And%20Mechanism%20Placement%20Inventory), [First Expedition Options](/Hold%20The%20Flood/First%20Expedition%20Options)) describe an earlier design. They are not what the game contains.
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## Why
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The first slice built the set-ups of the old design and not the pay-offs that made them matter. The fault lamp was the sign of a power leak that cost the player nothing. The isolation bridge was the fix, and fitting it was meant to let the ship find the ward behind the window, which was meant to start the rescue; in the game it changed one line of text. The window photograph had no use even in the design. A thing the player can use, with no reason to use it and nothing visibly different afterwards, reads as a broken game. The record of the old rooms, in plain words, is here: https://claude.ai/artifact/YE2xxDvC7nCt2eNqCqboC5
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## The room card
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One card per room, in the manner of the owner's item card on [The Pack](/Hold%20The%20Flood/The%20Pack).
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- **Name and size.**
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- **Why the player goes there.** One sentence.
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- **Doors.** Which rooms it joins.
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- **Things in it.** For each: what it is; the key; how many seconds; what is needed first; what is different afterwards that the player can see; once, or every time.
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- **Items to find.**
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- **Enemies.** Kind; how many stand in the room; how many hide, and behind what; what lets them out; how fast they come; how to stop them.
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- **What is different when the player leaves.**
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## What already exists to build a room from
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Anything outside this list is new code, which is fine; its size is stated before it is built.
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4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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- **Rooms:** any size; doors on any wall; a raised floor with stairs; a window with a scene behind it; a doorway with no room behind it shows as a sealed doorway, unless the room card describes it as a door; a side that is a force field onto open space instead of a wall; a sign on a wall that is only there to be seen (it can blink).
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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- **Actions:** press E for something instant; hold E for a job of any number of steps, each with its seconds; a step can be loud. A job can need: an item in the pack, power from a control board, another job done first, free pack squares. A job can: lock an opening for ever, give or take an item, put a photograph in the journal, pass or leave an oxygen tank for a survivor, make a trigger harmless.
4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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- **Doors:** a room card can describe any doorway as a door with a name: open, or locked. A locked door answers E with words of the card's choosing, shown for a moment at the door itself. A locked door stays locked until something in the game opens it, and then stays open for good, through trips, deaths and saves. Doors slide open and shut.
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- **Control panels:** one panel, kept as one prefab, for every wall panel in the game. E on it brings up its screen and the game waits. A panel's screen shows a few short pages, then asks for a password; a wrong one is refused and asked again, the right one opens one door. What a panel says, its password and its door are content; its look is the prefab.
19dd1c Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:59:05
Dock: always safe (owner): no enemy is set there, none can enter, nobody there can be hit
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- **Safe rooms:** a room can be marked safe: no enemies may be set in it, none can enter it, and nobody in it can be hit.
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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- **Enemies:** three kinds (Presser: slow and strong; Flanker: fast and weak; Caller: stands and calls a hidden crowd). Bodies standing in the room, bodies hidden behind an opening, what lets them out (walking in, a loud job, a Caller's call, holding a job for some seconds), how many come per second, which job locks them in for ever. A crowd that is not locked is back at full strength on every new trip.
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- **Also:** a survivor who waits in a room and walks to the ship when the way is safe; items lying in a room; which rooms join which, in one layout or several.
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- **Rules that hold everywhere:** every press of E answers; the only text in a room is the prompt on the thing the astronaut is locked on, and the box on the left that says in plain words what it is and what can be done with it; every job shows a bright bar while E is held; every word the player reads is plain.
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## The station today
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4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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One room: the Dock (the owner's first card, below). Its west door stands open, its east door is locked and nothing opens it, and its north door is locked until the password is typed into the panel beside it. No room has been designed behind any of the three yet, so an open door shows a short dark passage and the astronaut cannot go past the door frame.
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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The player starts with the owner's two items, the Oxygen Tank and the Service Gun. Ship storage is empty.
e8bf86 Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:10:59
New page: the owner designs each room as a card; the station starts empty
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## Room cards
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5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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### Dock
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**The owner's card, 2026-09-19, in his words:**
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> - we are going to make it very large square room, with doorways on the center of the north, east, and west walls.
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> - it's south wall should look like a force field blocking the way to empty space. this is where your spaceship came from.
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> - the dock contains your spaceship. it should generally look like a space shuttle (we'll probably change it's look later). it should be large enough to make sense to be a spaceship for the character, but small enough to allow free exploration of the room. pressing E while locked on the ship is the same effect as currently using the so called "ship airlock".
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> - On the north wall, to the right of the doorway, we are going to have a large neon sign with the text "Emergency Lockdown" blinking in red. This cannot be locked / interacted with.
19dd1c Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:59:05
Dock: always safe (owner): no enemy is set there, none can enter, nobody there can be hit
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>
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> Added the same day: "the dock is always safe. Enemies cannot spawn here, nor can they enter here from other rooms."
4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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>
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> **The doors, 2026-09-20:** "before we move to the next room, we need to handle the doors. The west door is always open. The east door is currently always locked. trying to press E when locked on it will give the message "this door seem to be blocked from the other side" The north door is currently locked. Next to it (on its left) there is a control panel. make sure to keep this control panel as a prefab as we are going to use those panels a lot during the game. When pressing E while locked on the door it will simply say "LOCKED". When doing the same thing with the control panel, we will open a control panel mini-game. we can call this specific one "control panel mini game security door 1". In this panel we will be able to get our very brief and simple exposition, but at the end, we will be required to enter a lockdown override password. This cannot be found in this room, and will require the player to first explore the west wing of the station. once the correct password is inserted, the north door will open."
5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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**As built.** Where the card gives no number, the number is the implementer's choice and is marked so; change any of them by saying so.
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- **Size:** 30 by 30 metres *(my choice for "very large")*. It is still the room every trip starts in, and the only room that never moves.
4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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- **Doorways:** one in the middle of the north wall, one in the middle of the east wall, one in the middle of the west wall, each 2 metres wide, each a real sliding door in a frame. Each can be locked on, by its name.
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- **West door:** always open. Locked on, it says "West door · open". No room is designed behind it yet, so what shows through it is a few metres of unlit passage fading into the dark, and the astronaut can stand in the doorway but cannot go past the frame *(a stand-in of mine until the west wing has its card)*.
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- **East door:** locked, and nothing in the game opens it. **Press E:** the door answers, in red, at the door: "This door seems to be blocked from the other side." *(The card's words, with "seem" corrected to "seems" and a capital and a full stop added; say so if you want them exactly as typed.)* Nothing is shown behind it.
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- **North door:** locked. **Press E:** it answers "LOCKED", in red, at the door. When the right password is typed into the panel beside it, the two leaves slide apart into the wall and the door stays open for good: through going home, dying, saving and loading *(staying open for good is my choice; the card says only that it opens)*. The game saves at that moment.
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- **The control panel:** on the north wall, to the left of the north door as seen from inside the room, 2.3 metres from the middle of the doorway. A wall terminal about one metre wide and a metre and a half tall, hung 0.8 metres above the floor: a dark metal body, a glowing screen with lines of writing and a blinking cursor, a lamp bar above the screen, a keypad with a red and a green key, a yellow and black strip along the bottom, and a cable running up the wall towards the door. Screen, lamp and the light it throws are **red while its door is locked and green once it is open**. It is **one prefab**, `Resources/Prefabs/ControlPanel`, with its own small script; every panel in the game will be this prefab, and what a given panel does comes from the content, not from the prefab. *(The look is mine; the prefab can be edited by hand in Unity, or rebuilt from the menu Flood > Rebuild Control Panel Prefab.)*
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- **Press E** while locked on the panel: its screen comes up over the game, and **the game waits** while it is up, as it does for the pack and the journal *(my choice; the card does not say)*. **Esc** steps away at any moment.
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- **The mini-game, "control panel mini game security door 1":** a terminal screen headed SECURITY DOOR 1 with a blinking LOCKED lamp. Short pages are typed out one after another, Enter for the next; then it asks: "Enter the lockdown override password:". The player types and presses Enter. Capitals do not matter. A wrong password: the screen shakes and flashes, says "Wrong password. The door stays locked.", and asks again; there is no limit on tries and no cost *(my choice)*. The right password: the screen turns green, "Password accepted. The north door is open.", and the door slides open. Using the panel again afterwards shows a green screen saying the door is open.
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- **The exposition pages are placeholders of mine, made only of what the cards already say:** page 1, "Emergency lockdown is on. All security doors are locked."; page 2, "This door opens only with the lockdown override password." **The owner writes the real ones.**
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- **The password is a placeholder too: TEST.** The card says it is found in the west wing, which has no card yet; the owner names the real one. Nothing shown in the Dock contains the password (a test checks this).
9d9456 Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:00:46
Dock: one unbroken force field, and a neon sign made of bent tube (owner's two corrections)
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- **South side:** no wall. A force field instead: **one unbroken sheet** of faint blue light from end to end, as tall as a wall, between a glowing rail at the floor and a thin one overhead, with a post at each end. The light is brightest at the rails and a faint grain drifts up it, so it reads as energy and not as glass. It is solid: nobody walks through it. Beyond it there is nothing but stars. It is never lowered for the camera, because it is see-through. *(Owner, same day, on the first version, which had upright lines every three metres: "the force field should not be separated to panels. it should be one long force field.")*
5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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- **Your ship:** a small space shuttle, about 12 metres long and 8.4 metres across the wings, standing in the south middle of the room with its nose to the north and its tail 3 metres from the force field it came in through *(size and position are my choices)*. It is made of plain shapes for now. It is solid, and there is room to walk all the way round it.
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- **Press E** while locked on the ship, from any side of it: go home. The trip ends, you keep all you carry, your health and air are refilled, the game saves. Exactly what the old "ship airlock" did.
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- A trip starts with the astronaut standing beside the ship's hatch steps, on its left side.
a0b59e Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:50:18
Dock: the alarm sign hangs flat on the wall, clear of the floor (owner: it looked placed on the floor)
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- **The sign:** on the north wall, to the right of the doorway as seen from inside the room, in the middle of that stretch of wall. It is an alarm sign, not a shop sign. The words are set one to a line, **EMERGENCY** over **LOCKDOWN**, in heavy block capitals with cut corners, about 0.7 metres high, made of thick bars of red light. They sit on a black face inside a metal housing, about 5.9 by 2.4 metres, bolted **flat against the wall with its lower edge 0.8 metres above the floor**, so wall shows beneath it; its top stands a hand above the wall's top, where the beacons sit. Yellow and black hazard stripes run along its top and bottom. The whole message flashes hard, full on and full off, about once a second, and throws red light on the floor in front. A rotating red beacon stands on each end of the housing, half a turn apart, and sweeps the room the whole time. It cannot be locked on or used. It hangs on the wall, so it drops out of sight with that wall when the view is turned to look from the north.
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- *How it got here (owner, all 2026-09-19).* First version, flat lettering in a plain frame: "I am sure you can make the neon sign look better. Give it a proper font, place it better on the wall, that kind of thing. right now it looks almost like a 16 bit game." Second version, letters of bent glass tube on a dark board leaning out on brackets, with a soft glow and a stutter like a struck tube: "they both looks much better, but the neon sign now looks a little bit too much like a commercial sign. Like it's from Las Vegas brothel or Broadway Street. I want it to look more like a panic sign." Third version, the alarm sign, in a deep housing that stood 8 centimetres off the floor and leaned out at the top: "it now looks much better, but last small problem: the sign looks like it's placed on the floor, not on the wall." Two faults of position: its foot was so low and its box so deep that, seen from above at a slant, its lower edge was drawn in front of the line where wall meets floor; and it leaned the wrong way, turning its face down and away from a camera that looks from above. This is the fourth: flat on the wall, hung clear of the floor. The capitals, the two lines, the hazard stripes and the beacons are the implementer's choices.
19dd1c Anonymous 2026-09-19 18:59:05
Dock: always safe (owner): no enemy is set there, none can enter, nobody there can be hit
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- **Always safe.** The Dock is marked as a safe room, and the game holds to it three ways. No crowd can be set in it: the game refuses to load content that tries. No enemy can step into it, take a way that passes through it, or be pushed into it by the crowd behind: an enemy that is after you comes to the doorway, stops a body's width outside the line, and waits there for as long as it can see you. And nobody standing in it can be hit: an enemy at the doorway does not even wind up. *(The last of the three is the implementer's reading of "always safe": without it an enemy at the doorway could still reach a player standing just inside.)*
5d314c Anonymous 2026-09-19 17:44:48
The Dock: the owner's first room card, and how it was built
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- **Nothing else:** no enemies, no jobs, no items.
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4a321e Anonymous 2026-09-20 11:37:24
Dock doors (owner's card, 2026-09-20): west open, east blocked, north locked with a control panel and its password screen
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**New building blocks this card added:** a side of a room can be a force field instead of a wall (a side like that has no door); a wall can carry an alarm sign of any words in capitals, with its hazard stripes and rotating beacons, that is only there to be seen; a large thing can be locked on from anywhere around its body, not only near its middle; **any room can be marked safe**, with the three guarantees described under the Dock; **a doorway can be a named door, open or locked, that answers E in the card's own words; doors slide; the control panel prefab and its password screen.** **For the whole game:** light that is brighter than white now glows (neon tube, force field rails, lamps, stars) while ordinary lit surfaces stay as calm as they were, and edges are smoothed.