Hold the Flood | Two concept directions

DES101 | r6 | 2026-09-06 | Lead Game and Systems Designer | Accepted as concept contribution (Tasks PMR001, at r4) | rules now maintained on the Design Document

Read this first. This page is the accepted concept packet. Its rule details are superseded by the Design Document (DES102 draft r1, revision d828a4), which follows PM's routing baseline from Brief D013: the panel alone chooses a surge's intake, and after entry a surge follows the nearest lit beacon it can reach, so a mid-surge switch does move the Flood and is priced. The glow-range and split-surge rules stated below in r5 are presented there as a labelled alternative for the owner's decision, not as the baseline. Where this page and the Design Document differ, the Design Document is current.

Recommendation (proposal): Develop A: The Borrowed Route. You are a surveyor in a drowned district whose machinery runs on one rule: current. Current is what fights, what opens doors, what draws the Flood, how you pack your gear, and what keeps your camp above water. Learning that rule is the game.

Everything below is a proposal unless labelled an owner requirement. Scenarios are illustrations, not playtests. Bookkeeping (what changed, sources, handoffs) is at the end.

Words used below

One line each, in plain language. The owner-facing design document will carry this as an appendix.

• Survivorlike: a game where you steer one character through ever-larger crowds of enemies while your weapons fire by themselves; your hands move, dodge and position, and your choices are where to go and what to equip.
• Expedition: one trip into the district, about fifteen minutes, ending at a dock. Same thing the Brief calls a run.
• The Flood: the massed enemies (owner requirement). In A they are proposed as bioelectric organisms; identity and setting stay proposals.
• Surge: one wave of the Flood entering the district. Three per expedition, each larger.
• Dispatch: the scheduled instant a surge is released into the district. The district's relay broadcasts a pulse at that instant, and the surge comes in by the beacon that pulsed.
• Forecast: the countdown and map marker showing when the next surge comes and by which intake. It is the relay's own display, read from the dock's receiver.
• Intake: one of three ways the Flood enters: the causeway, the yard, or the sluice.
• Beacon: a lamp on the district's circuit, one at the far end of each branch. Lit steady means its branch is powered; it pulses at a dispatch. A lit beacon pulls the Flood only within its glow.
• Panel: a three-position switch at the causeway head that decides which branch is powered, or neither.
• Rack: the surveyor's back frame, six slots in a 2 by 3 grid. It is the whole inventory apart from the cutter.
• Module: a piece of gear that occupies rack slots: battery, coil, insulation, beacon, kit.
• Salvage / bundle / cargo: salvage is the material the colony needs; a bundle is one slot of it; cargo is the bundles in your rack.
• Deposit: a marked pile of salvage in the district.
• Cutter: a handheld tool that fires by itself at the nearest organism. Needs no slot.
• Coil: a two-slot module that stores a discharge. Trigger it and its charge flows into whatever conductive thing you are touching: dry ground takes nothing; water carries it to everything the water touches, including you unless you wear insulation. To reach a channel you must be in it.
• Insulation: a one-slot module that stops current, in the rack and on the surveyor.
• Charge: fuel shed by the Flood, stored in batteries, spent by modules and machines. Never leaves the district.
• Mote: a dropped fleck of charge; walk over it to fill a battery.
• Loadout: the modules you are carrying and how they are arranged. Earlier revisions said build; the Hub's builds mean compiled executables, so this packet says loadout.
• Causeway / culvert / yard / pump hall / sluice / hatch: places in the district, drawn under Topology.
• Chokepoint: a narrow place where a crowd must come at you a few at a time.
• Meta-progression: what carries over between expeditions.
• Build expression (PM pages): the way a loadout shows a strategy. On this page, loadout expression.
• Telegraphed: announced before it happens, so a player can see it coming. Every surge is telegraphed by the forecast.
• Counterplay: what an opponent, here the Flood or the district, can do against a loadout, and what the player can do back.
• XP: experience points, the survivorlike habit of growing stronger per kill. This design gives none.

The problem both directions must solve

A survivorlike keeps you moving; a mystery asks you to stop and look. Both directions use the same three rules, agreed with the world designer.

• S1, Notebook. Opening the notebook pauses everything. It shows only what you have already seen.
• S2, Shelter. A raised shelter, including a dry dock, is a hard stop: enemies neither enter nor spawn. You can repack there and watch the district, but the surge clock keeps running, so retreating to think costs time and position, never health.
• S3, Live evidence. New clues, panel switches and experiments happen in the running world.

A. The Borrowed Route (recommended)

Fantasy and motive. You are a surveyor for a crew of a dozen survivors camped on a dock above the water line, with one pump between them and the Flood. The pump runs on salvage already banked, and nothing is charged per expedition, so a light, investigative return is never punished; but every repair, every change of which dock is held, and the ending itself are paid in salvage, so a colony that stops hauling can never change anything, and the last dry ground stays exactly as exposed as it is. The crew before yours went into the district and did not come back; their tally board is in the pump hall. You go in to learn why the district's own machinery was turned against the Flood, and by whom.

The Flood (proposal). A mass of bioelectric organisms that pours in on the relay's schedule. You cannot outfight it: a surge is hundreds arriving faster than a cutter kills. You can thin it, hold a chokepoint, stun a mass in water, or make it go somewhere else.

The spine rule, stated once for district, rack and colony.

1. Conduction. Current flows between touching conductors, and through water to everything the water connects. Insulation stops it.
2. Power. A device works only while energised: a hatch, lamp or beacon on a live cable or channel; a rack module linked to a charged battery.
3. Attraction. The relay pulses at each dispatch from whichever fixed beacon is energised, and the surge enters by that beacon; the panel alone decides which, or none. The panel powers at most one branch, but a coil discharged into a channel, or a valve that joins the two branches' channels, can energise the second branch across a dispatch; if two fixed beacons pulse at one dispatch, the surge splits between them and the forecast shows both. After entry a surge moves toward the nearest lit beacon within its sight, re-evaluated continuously; each beacon shows its reach as a glow; with none in sight it spreads along the branch it entered. The fixed beacons stand at the far ends of different branches, out of each other's sight, so switching the panel never moves a surge that has already arrived: only a beacon carried into its sight does. A dispatched surge keeps its intake. Wiring, signs and wear never change between expeditions.
4. Charge. A killed organism drops a small mote; a mass stunned in water sheds a large one. Motes fade in seconds. Walking over one fills a battery in your rack; with no battery, the charge is lost.

So: a valve that joins channels extends where current reaches; a pump that drains one cuts it; the coil injects it; the panel routes it; and the powered branch is the branch the Flood comes to. That last consequence is what prices the panel: switching is free and available on the first expedition, but powering a branch to open its hatch invites the next surge there, the panel stands in the open a dash from shelter, and a surge already dispatched does not turn back.

Topology. Two docks at the district's rim: the causeway dock, held dry by default, and the yard dock, flooded and unusable until the colony's pump holds it dry instead (flooded, it is wet ground and conducts). Between them a raised dry causeway signed as the evacuation route, its beacon at the interior end, lit by default. Under it a culvert, dry on its own with no pump needed, with cart wear and a refuge sign turned to face the yard. Beside the causeway, a pump hall and salvage yard on a shallow channel; the yard beacon stands at the pump hall, dark by default, and the hall's hatch is on the same circuit. At the low end where the branches meet, the sluice: the Flood's own way in, no beacon, opening onto the interior route. The causeway intake is at the causeway's far end; the yard intake is where the channel enters beside the pump hall, so a surge arriving there stands in water. A surge holds beside its beacon while it stays lit, so the overrun "refuge" is the causeway's far end and the dock end stays passable; darken its beacon and it spreads along its branch. Three intakes: causeway, yard, and the sluice when the panel is off. The panel resets to causeway each expedition.

Core actions. Read the forecast. Choose a route. Gather salvage from deposits. Operate valves, pumps and the panel. Trigger the coil. Repack in a shelter. Reach a dry dock before evacuation.

Combat and health. The cutter fires by itself at the nearest organism in reach while you move; you aim by where you stand. A few hits kill one organism. Health is a short bar; contact with organisms and standing in energised water without insulation remove it; it does not regenerate in the district; extraction restores it; a found kit module restores it once and costs a slot.

Pressure. Three announced surges per expedition, each larger; quiet between them except for stragglers; a final evacuation window. Missing a dry dock, or losing all health, means rescue without cargo. Pressure is legible and steerable, which is what leaves room for curiosity: you can compute when you are safe, and knowledge extends that time.

In-run growth (decision for PM). Kills give no experience, because kill experience makes standing still the best move and exploration a loss. Growth comes from the world: two to four modules per expedition from fixed placements with varying contents, two to six bundles from deposits, and charge from surges met at a chokepoint. The rack caps at six slots, so power grows by composition, not number: you leave with a cutter, one empty battery and an empty rack; by surge two you usually have one powered setup; surge three tests it. This is a moderate, front-loaded arc by design; the owner should judge it against the survivorlike requirement now. Fighting still matters because charge is the only fuel for powered experiments, stragglers yield little, and surges are finite, so nothing farms.

The rack. Six slots; each holds a module or a bundle. Conduction applies inside it. Salvage is dredged wet and conducts; modules do not, powered or not; insulation blocks conduction on either side of it. When packing you draw one link from each battery to the one module it powers; an unlinked module is dark and inert. A battery leaks into every bundle it touches, shown as a drip, whatever the links say. With a two-slot coil linked to a battery, the battery touches at least one further slot in every position, so "three bundles and a leak-free battery" is impossible: carry insulation and two bundles, leave a slot empty, or accept a battery that drains over the expedition. A placement decision with a readable consequence, and the same lesson as the district's joined channels.

Loadouts (three sketches; the design document gives costs and counterplay). Electrician: coil, battery, insulation, two bundles; sets the panel to yard on purpose, stands in the yard channel's edge in insulation, waits for the surge to wade in, and triggers the coil: stun, a full battery and an open hatch in one act. Hauler: cutter only, six bundles; leaves the panel on causeway, takes the culvert to the quiet yard, banks the most, never opens anything powered. Shepherd: portable beacon module plus battery; steady while powered, so a surge that can see it is drawn toward wherever it stands; carried into a surge's sight and planted, it pulls the surge off the interior route; darken it and the pull stops; leave it lit near you and the surge comes to you; its battery leaks into any bundle it touches. Which fits depends on which surge is committed, what lies behind it, and which dock is dry.

Gathering and colony. Bundles compete with modules for slots. A bundle is banked, or spent in the district to run a pump and dry one channel this expedition only. The colony is the dock and its pump. Pump capacity is one exclusive standing choice: which dock it holds dry, causeway side or yard side. That inverts which panel setting is safe, because a surge sent toward your dock blocks extraction, and the flooded dock is where the coil works; changing it costs a full return's salvage. Two additive repairs, each a full return: a workshop (one extra starting module choice) and a forecast relay (the first intake known before departure). Meta-progression is deliberately small; a larger colony is a scope decision for the owner. Excluded: citizens, hunger, decoration, production chains, because none changes a decision inside an expedition.

What you discover, and what each discovery changes.

Signature interaction (illustration). Quiet two. The panel is on causeway, so the yard is dark: beacon dark, pump-hall hatch shut, a cable running from the yard circuit along the shallow channel to that hatch. Surge one is holding at the causeway's far end. You want the hatch. Panel route: a dash to the causeway head, yard. The yard lights up, the hatch opens and stays open, and the forecast now says surge two enters through the yard in ninety seconds, where you stand. Coil route: step into the channel's edge wearing insulation and trigger the coil; the current reaches the hatch for a few seconds, you cross, the yard stays dark, but you have spent surge one's charge, and if a dispatch lands inside your discharge window the yard beacon fires and surge two comes anyway. Electrician's route: set yard, then stand ankle-deep at the channel's edge in insulation and wait for surge two to wade in before triggering: stun, a full battery and an open hatch, because you invited the surge into the water you are standing in. Without insulation that current is yours too, which is the electrician's whole risk. The surge is bait, key and clock at once; knowing the rule is what lets you choose which.

Rhythm (illustrative fifteen-minute expedition).

Persistence. Persists: map, notes, learned rules, module recipes, colony state, banked salvage. Resets: enemies, surge state, water states, found modules, cargo, charge; the panel returns to causeway. Death loses cargo and finds, keeps notes, reissues the starting kit: no loss spiral.

The whole game (proposal; the scope decision the owner most needs to make). One district and an ending. The mystery has three tiers: the false refuge (why the causeway is overrun), the interior (what the last crew went in for), and the relay's source (what calls the Flood, and whether it can be shut, redirected for good, or only held). Reaching the source and choosing what to do with it ends the game, at roughly twelve to twenty expeditions; free expeditions continue after. The title fits A literally: the colony's pump holds the Flood off one dock, and the ending is about holding it for good. The title stays provisional for the owner.

Presentation (commitment). One light convention: steady means powered, pulsing means dispatching, dark means unpowered; wet or dry by tint; the forecast as a screen overlay; text inspection as fallback for wear and signs. The design document will table every readable state against its cheapest medium and name any residue needing owner approval. No asset is shortlisted or claimed.

Scope cuts. One district (two docks, causeway, culvert, yard, pump hall, sluice, interior), fixed layout, variable placement; discrete wet or dry per channel; four machine types, three intakes, about ten modules. No fluid simulation, destructible terrain, free chemistry, procedural layout, base-building grid, citizens or multiplayer. A content boundary, not a feasibility claim.

B. The Listening Below (r1, condensed)

Fantasy and setting (proposal). A field investigator enters a buried civic archive occupied by massed enemies that behave as one collective organism and follow sustained repeating signals. You learn to redirect its attention and use the swarm itself to reach sealed evidence; its origin is the central question.

Pressure and rhythm. Player-provoked. Powered investigations and harvesting add visible expedition attention; crossing a marked threshold releases a swarm at a telegraphed entrance; attention never decays and no rest erases a threshold. Clear an observation position, read its traces without a clock, choose an intervention, survive its consequences. Each operation previews its attention cost. Extraction ends the expedition; health loss loses carried finds.

Loadouts and gathering. Two sockets, combat and investigation, plus four cargo spaces; no grid. A narrow cutter with a muffled sampler keeps attention low but cannot send the long-range signal that redirects distant Flood; a broad sweeper with a resonator handles crowds and reaches signal mechanisms at higher attention per use. Bulky specimens take two spaces; scrap takes one and can become a placed beacon.

Signature interaction (illustration). Panels pulsing on the third beat draw tendrils; tracks converge on a pressure plate linked to a gate. Place a beacon on the plate, pulse three times: the mass moves onto it and the gate opens while it is occupied. Cross knowing the swarm now stands on your return route.

Persistence and colony. Notes, signal rules, equipment, banked finds persist; attention, mechanisms, enemies, carried finds reset. Finds buy a listening post (next expedition's entrances revealed) or a workshop (muffled sampler). The world rules above hold here with beacon meaning signal source and the sluice as the archive's own breach.

Scope cuts. One archive wing, a few authored pulse rules, marked arrival sites; no simulated acoustics, adaptive learning, procedural rooms or sound-only clues.

Comparison and recommendation

Recommend A. One rule serves combat, access, routing, packing and the colony, so exploration, experimentation and mystery reinforce one another instead of competing, and the world designer's mystery drops in without a second machine family. The surge schedule keeps urgency after the mystery is solved. B gives more deliberate observation, but its pressure depends on the player choosing to escalate, which risks slow accounting and a lost survivorlike pulse. A third premise, a persistent frontier map where the colony is territory and the tide advances between expeditions, was considered and set aside because territorial loss punishes experimentation and scope grows; it can be written up if the owner wants that steer.

Risks (unvalidated). A: the deadline may produce anxiety rather than planning; live water, current and a surge's destination must read on a crowded screen; the panel or the shepherd's standing lure may still dominate if the invited-surge cost is too light; the sluice may make "off" a trap for new players unless the forecast shows it as clearly as the branches. B: attention accounting; over-safe clearing. Neither rhythm, balance nor repeated-expedition appeal is validated; those need an authorized later phase.

Decisions requested from PM, and from the owner via OWN101.

1. Working direction: A, B, or a premise change.
2. Carry the spine rule, the world designer's four world rules (attraction, commitment, stable evidence, turned signs) and the three thinking-room rules (notebook, shelter, live evidence) into the design document as candidate rules (recommended).
3. No kill experience; charge motes are the only kill yield (recommended).
4. Fixed layout with variable placement, for fair clues (recommended).
5. The whole-game shape above: one district with an ending at the relay's source (proposal), or an open-ended game.
6. Top-down 2D as the working presentation assumption (reversible).

Bookkeeping

Owner requirements (Brief a449b2, D005 to D011): survivorlike; exploration, experimentation, mystery; the Flood is massed enemies; assume nothing exists; Unity; Steam; design only until the owner authorizes development after reviewing the design document; no AI-generated art; prefer existing free assets; purchases and rare custom assets need owner approval.

Provenance. Inspirations are owner statements, not research. Both directions assume a solo player with automatic basic attacks. Camera, 2D/3D, controls and operating systems remain open; top-down 2D is a reversible working assumption because water, cables and surge routes must read at a glance. The dispatch and forecast fiction above (the relay calls the Flood on a fixed cycle; the forecast is the relay's own display; the pump runs on banked salvage) agrees with the world designer's answers, first written independently in World and Mystery r6 and aligned with this page's rules in r7; treat World and Mystery r7 or later as the shared text for the owner document, never r6.

What r5 changes (r4 is page history 42f653). Answers Design Review r6 and Clarity round 3. N14: the pump has no per-expedition upkeep; the colony's stake is long-run, matching World and Mystery r7. Q26: the surge-split rule now says how a second branch can be energised (a coil discharge or a valve joining the branches' channels), confirming the world designer's r7 wording. Q27: the coil discharges into what you are touching, so both coil scenes now put the surveyor in the channel's edge wearing insulation; that makes insulation load-bearing and the electrician's risk real. The provenance line now points at World and Mystery r7, not r6. Four words the Glossary listed as undefined (build expression, telegraphed, counterplay, XP) are defined above; decision 2 no longer uses codes. Design Review r6's N12, N13 and N15 were already met by r4 and World and Mystery r7; N16 (tiers two and three sketched as recombinations) is carried to the design document.

What r4 changed (r3 is page history 0b4039). Answers Clarity Questions round 2 and Design Review r5. Q22: the panel never moves an arrived surge, because a beacon pulls only within its glow and the fixed beacons are out of each other's sight; only a carried beacon does. That keeps the world designer's W2 and cost-of-diversion argument literally true and asks them to amend the one r5 topology sentence that says the panel drags an arrived surge, or to state the live-lever reading if they prefer it. Q23: the yard intake is the channel beside the pump hall, so the electrician's stun happens as written. Q24: quiet 3 is now actually shorter. N11: modules do not conduct; only wet salvage leaks. Added: a surge splits if two fixed beacons pulse at one dispatch.

What r3 changed (r2 and integration notes 1 to 3 are page history c9b2ed, ea4248, db8c5c). Design Review r4 closed the concept-packet review, so the reason for keeping the r2 body frozen has expired; r3 folds the three integration notes into the body and adopts World and Mystery r5: intake chosen by the panel, path toward the nearest energised beacon evaluated continuously, beacons at each branch's far end, the sluice, the flooded yard dock, charge motes, the battery link. It answers the Clarity Questions page (CLR101 r1): a glossary (Q1 to Q9), combat and health (Q10, Q11), the whole-game shape (Q12), motive and colony (Q13), title fit (Q14), the body-versus-notes contradiction (Q17, resolved by folding), and the leak-versus-link collision (Q18: leaking is conduction and ignores links; the link only chooses which neighbour is powered). "Build" is renamed loadout (Q3); "run" is expedition (Q4). No canonical decision changed. Length grew by the glossary only; the owner-facing document will move all codes to an appendix (Q21).

Acknowledgment and PM report. Lead Game and Systems Designer, new session of the role; DES101 / Design r5 / In review. Read Hub 89e2dc, Brief a449b2, Tasks 254220, Team 3ddc81, World and Mystery r7 (fa3eb1), Design Review r6 (a89227), Clarity Questions r3 (5ca22b) and the wiki editor's Glossary (f28f34) at 2026-09-06 14:33 UTC. The Glossary mirrors this page's definitions; this page is the source, and the coil entry there is corrected after this save. D011 and D012 acknowledged; design-only gate and asset restrictions accepted; no build, prototype, asset or test was made. Evidence is written reasoning against the cited revisions, not player data. Open items for PM: record the working direction (OWN101); name which of the two lead sessions is canonical (Clarity Q20); Tasks and the Hub still show DES101 and WLD101 as not started (Clarity Q15, Q16, Q19 are PM's). Next handoff: PM records the direction; the lead then writes the design document (DES102) carrying everything above; the critic reviews it when it exists; the world designer, whose r7 already aligned the world rules with the beacon-sight reading, checks the integrated draft. No owner relay, agent creation, development or testing is requested.