Character select
ShippedNew Game asks who is walking. Two tiles, and a locked one draws as a silhouette that says how to find that character without naming her.
cards 89
characters 2
enemies 23
schools with cards 5 of 9
updated 2026-08-28
In flight
What is moving right now
What shipped in the last week, and what is waiting on a decision or a look.
The Country duel
ShippedLose a run and Country starts waiting at every poker table, playing for health instead of gold. Win and she joins the roster; lose and the run ends there.
Rock gets a verb
ShippedDirect Strike is implemented, and Overdrive is the first card authored against it. Rock had three cards and no system of its own until this landed.
Music
ShippedFive looping cues behind an audio director that crossfades between them, reachable from every screen, with music and sound sliders that reach silence.
Animation
PlannedNothing in this game moves. No tween, no particles, anywhere. The plan opens on combat feedback, because a hit landing has no motion at all today.
The form
Why counting to four works
A twelve bar chorus is three four bar phrases, which is why counting to four produces the shape without being told about it. Each cell is one card played.
Shipped: every 4th card, and bars 11 and 12 are the turnaround
free card
the turnaround, both bars free
Free cards run 4 per 12 rather than 3, a real 50% increase over the naive count, taken deliberately. The chorus carries across fights, so a run ends mid bar rather than resetting at every door.
Character rules
Two characters, two rules
A character declares a rule by name on its resource. Two exist, and both are now reachable without a debug build. An unknown rule id fails loudly rather than quietly doing nothing.
Twelve Bar
ShippedThe wanderer. Every 4th card played costs nothing, and the last two bars of a chorus are both free. Surfaced on the player panel as a strip, and on every card in hand as a gold zero.
Hard Luck
ShippedCountry. Stomp rises as health falls, stepped at 75%, 50% and 25%. It rides on the stat itself, so display and damage cannot disagree.
The Picker
ShippedHow Country is earned. She sits at a poker table at life stakes, and busting her out is what puts her on your roster. Lose and the run ends there, with her last word on the summary screen.
Rule effects
Not startedNothing marks the moment a rule fires. Split out of the turnaround work into its own plan, because Twelve Bar has moments to mark and Hard Luck only has band changes.
Card pool
Eighty-nine cards, five schools started
Eighty-nine card resources in total, of which eight are upgraded versions of a card already in the list. Thirty are neutral and draftable by anyone, and the other fifty-nine sit across five of the nine schools. Nothing filters offers by school yet, so a wanderer is dealt Country cards at the same rate as anything else.
| School | Status | Cards | Upgrades |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neutral | No school, draftable by anyone | 30 | 0 |
| Blues | The wanderer's school, and the starter deck | 24 | 5 |
| Country | Country's school, drafts as one school now | 15 | 0 |
| Folk | Linger and Stance live here | 15 | 3 |
| Funk | Compulsion, barely started | 2 | 0 |
| Rock | Direct Strike, and the first card authored against it | 3 | 0 |
| Jazz | No cards | 0 | 0 |
| Hip Hop | No cards | 0 | 0 |
| Gospel | No cards | 0 | 0 |
| Classical | No cards | 0 | 0 |
| Total | Thirty neutral, fifty-nine across five schools | 89 | 8 |
Battle mechanics
The systems a school is built around
Twenty-five effect handlers exist. These are the bespoke ones, the systems a school is built around rather than a number on a card.
Resonance
ShippedBlues. Accumulates from cards and is spent by consume effects. Persists across rounds, and only cards move it.
Linger
ShippedFolk. Multi-round persistent stacks, extendable and refreshable. Several cards scale their output off the total, and a card now says which total it reads.
Stance
ShippedFolk. Fingerpicking adds stacks to Linger applications, Flatpicking adds duration. Persists until overridden.
Breath
ShippedWhat a card costs. One name across the battle layer, the card face and the level up screen, replacing three that disagreed.
Sustained Drain
ShippedBlues. Applies a status that ticks at round end, so the drain outlives the card that created it.
Charge
ShippedEnemy side. A wind-up that breaks if it takes enough real damage, tested against health actually lost rather than damage aimed.
Compulsion
ShippedFunk. Forces a change in enemy behavior. The system works, and only two Funk cards exist to use it.
Sample
ShippedHip Hop. Reads the previous round's resolution queue. The handler is live and no Hip Hop cards exist yet.
Direct Strike
ShippedRock, and the school's first verb. Damage that Block does not absorb. The stub it replaced specified high damage with no secondary effect, which is an authoring rule rather than a behavior, so building it that way would have produced DamageHandler under another name and left Rock with nothing of its own. The Block is left standing for the next card in the queue, which keeps this an answer to a blocking enemy rather than a universal setup tool, and the multiplier lands on the final number, after Strength, Weak and Vulnerable, so the figure the player was shown is the one that doubles.
Systems and plans
The larger pieces
The larger pieces, and what each is waiting on.
Run structure
ShippedMap, battle, shop, rest, treasure, event and poker nodes, across two acts, with a seeded generator and save-safe node resolution. The act 2 ending has been reached and pinned.
Poker tables
ShippedA table rolls a tier, then seats somebody eligible out of that act's roster, seeded off the node id, drawn and named with a house stack for their tier. A speaker window gates the controls until their line has been read.
The Country duel
ShippedShe is won, not chosen. Once a run has been lost, Country replaces the act's house at every poker table and offers a second game where the chips are the player's health. Her stack is a fixed 75, the ante drops from 10 to 2, the gold staked for the money game is returned, and the Leave button is removed. Bust her and she joins the roster. Lose and the run ends at the summary screen. Health is written back and saved after every hand, so a duel cannot be force quit out of mid loss.
Distribution
ShippedCI exports a signed debug APK and publishes it, stamped with the build so a bug report can name one, and the saved file carries the same stamp as the title screen.
Audio
ShippedThe light version: five flat looping cues, an audio director that owns two players and a crossfade, and volume sliders in Settings. The layered version, where Resonance drives how many stems play, is deliberately deferred.
Animation
PlannedNo motion exists anywhere in the game. It opens on combat feedback, since a hit landing currently produces nothing at all. Frame rate has also never been measured on a device, and the two are no longer independent.
School-weighted offers
Not startedRewards and shops draw from one undifferentiated pool, so a Blues wanderer is offered Country cards at the same rate. A spec exists.
Encounter balance
DeferredEnemies and encounters are known to be too easy. Held deliberately until there is enough content to tune against.
Billing
BlockedBlocked on a pricing decision, and downstream of the app name, which becomes permanent at the first Play Console upload.