Breath, not energy

Until yesterday the wanderer had no rule of his own. Country, the only other character, already had one, Hard Luck, which raises her Stomp as her health falls.

Twelve Bar

I picked Twelve Bar out of five candidates. Every fourth card played is free, and the four was measured. One counted fight had run three turns with seven to ten cards resolved. At three per turn, with most cards costing one, a free card every fourth play works out to one extra card a turn. A suggestion to drop it to three was retracted, because it ignored that a free card leaves the resource unspent for more cards.

Two details went in the same afternoon. Zero cost cards advance the count too, because anything else is a hidden penalty that nothing on screen explains. And a free card looks free. The panel carries the count, and when the next card is free every card in hand prints its cost in warm gold, because the next card is whichever you pick.

Then I played it. My note from that session says I play blues harmonica myself, and it felt like "going through the blues bar progression." The rule only counts to four. But a twelve bar chorus is three four bar phrases, so counting to four three times is one chorus, and the form had been sitting in the arithmetic without a name.

The turnaround

That evening the count stopped resetting at every fight and runs through the run. A fight boundary is not a musical one, and a second reason holds up better. A chorus lasted about one fight, and fights will get longer once encounters are retuned, so a chorus tied to fight length would need re-deriving after every retune. A chorus tied to the run does not care. The cost is that a free card can now land on the first card of a fight, carried in from the last, which is less earned.

Then bars 11 and 12 were both made free, because in a twelve bar blues the turnaround is a two bar figure, the lick that walks back to the top. The free bars are now 4, 8, 11 and 12, one card in three instead of one in four, a buff taken on purpose. Drawing a card, Resonance or healing on bar 12 were each rejected as a fine effect that is not a turnaround.

Playing the act 1 boss on the merged build turned up something nobody designed. The gaps between free bars run 4, 3, 1, 4, so the payout speeds up into the turnaround and then releases. The densest stretch, three free cards in six, straddles the chorus boundary, from bars 11 and 12 across to bar 4 of the next chorus. That window exists only because the count runs through the run, and it is what I noticed in play, "the combo potential" out of the turnaround. Nobody has checked yet whether it is balanced.

That screenshot is from a later build, with the count as a strip on the left.

Breath

Today the resource got its name. It had two. Save files and card data called it Inspiration, and the battle called it Energy. A run stat called Inspiration is planned, and next to it a field named InspirationCost would read as a cost paid in that stat, the opposite of what it means.

Both became Breath. The game is about a harmonica player, and breath is what a harp player spends. It runs out mid phrase, and every phrase is shaped by how much is left. "3 breath" says what kind of game this is in a way "3 energy" cannot.

The rename touched 83 of 208 card files and 64 references in scripts, and exactly one string a player had ever seen, a level up line that now reads "+1 Breath". A run saved before today loses its level up gains when resumed. The only save that old is mine, and a shim to read the old key would be dead code the day after it shipped.

The order mattered. Character select is the screen that teaches the vocabulary, so the vocabulary had to settle first. Character select merged this evening.