What the road holds

The fight

• Auto-battles you author: the player picks, equips, trains and positions; the fight then resolves itself, turn by turn, speed-ordered. Winning feels like authorship. Losing is a lesson.
• Position, threat, taunt: three targeting layers. Rows decide who can be reached at all, a visible threat weight decides who is preferred among them, and one skill can force the issue outright for a round.
• Threat is a number you can read — and it is shown as the share it produces (“takes 71% of melee hits”), live on the formation screen, so moving a hero rewrites the table in front of you.
• Skills with real identities: an armour-ignoring nuke opens better, an execute finishes better, a hunter re-picks the most wounded body it can reach every single turn.
• Gear that changes behaviour, not only numbers: armour pierce, double strike, lifesteal, a finisher bonus under half health, and two pieces that simply make enemies want you more.

The road

• A fifty-round run with a real dramatic arc: a promise made at the fifth fire, a storm visible on the horizon for twelve rounds before it lands, and whatever is waiting at the end.
• Crossroads — three rare dilemmas, each with its own place and its own price. A stranger who will make the whole party stronger if you guess her number one-to-ten, and end the run on the spot if you don’t. A small man on a bridge who asks which hero is your favourite and leaves with them — and who, on a later run, will not simply believe the answer. And, late, one that just gives.
• The Storm: four rounds that strip the camp bare. One foraging trip beforehand, and you come back with less than you need. Fear rises or eases round by round, and the only thing that reads it is the last fight.
• A shop that accumulates: nothing unsold ever disappears. It waits on the shelf all run, a repeat drop is a price cut instead of a second copy, and old stock can go on offer at 50–80% off — this shop only, then gone.
• Press the drill — round fifteen, every run: pick a stat, then choose how far to push the session against break chances of 10, 22, 35, 48 and 62 per cent, every one of them shown before you commit. Going the whole way pays three times what walking away pays, and a break drops to the same floor however deep it happened. No timer anywhere — the tension is entirely in the decision.
• A dream at round thirty-one: something the parent legacy failed to hand down gets one more chance to arrive, mid-run. Every run has one, including the first, where it names what you are missing.
• A smith who re-tempers gear as a commit gamble, with a 7% masterwork on the long tail — and teeth on the walk-back, since an ordinary roll pulls a masterworked piece back down.
• Camp turns that cost something: one energy bar, and train, rest or an evening at the pond are the same turn spent three ways.
• Rarely, a hero is named — one a run at most, never inherited, and the name replaces theirs everywhere including battle. Named heroes are remembered after their legacy is gone.

What the road keeps

• A permanent legacy from every run, win or lose. The team is sealed with their gear, their look, the promise they kept or broke, the deeds the road counted.
• One heir, two strangers. Exactly one hero per run descends from the parent legacy; the other two are freeborn, and what they turn out to be can still enter the line at the seal.
• Inheritance with a real hunt: each legacy carries a crest, a boon and up to three echoes, and how hard you pushed a stat this run sets both which traits appear and how strong they roll.
• Cosmetic heredity, zero stats: eye and hair colour pass down, skip a generation like a grandmother’s eyes, and can be bred until a line runs true. It touches nothing the engine reads.
• Dyes — found, worn, kept: rare colours your heroes wear at the fire and in the fight. Found once, owned for good; a sealed legacy keeps the dye it wore, and whoever it fights later meets it dressed.
• A legacy fights with what it walked the road with — never with a lucky roll made after its run was already over.
• Deeds, not scores: the lifetime record counts named things that happened, each worth exactly one, revealed at the last fire and never previewed during a run. Nothing spends them.
• The parties record: all 220 trios, and the best road each one walked.

Where legacies go

• Five ways into the mountain, each its own opening cut into the dark: two wave modes that run as deep as a team can hold, two raid bosses, and the weekly boss below. A stage select lets a new legacy start at ground the account has already proven — while making the shortcut visible on the board.
• A weekly boss with one shared health pool, seven blows a week, one per legacy — so the depth of the roster matters more than the single best team.
• The Camp: seven fires in a clearing, your legacies at the cold ones until real campmates exist, a monthly contribution board and a feed of what the fires have done. No chat, by design.
• A local arena where two of your own legacies fight each other under one rule for both sides.

How it is built

• All art drawn in code: procedural pixel dioramas on a 5px grid, one ember accent, rarity as the only firework, and no portraits at all — the player’s imagination does the character work.
• Short, honest sessions: no timers, no pity meters, no execution skill anywhere. Odds are stated in words at the moment you decide, counted draws are never re-described as percentages, and missing data reads “unrecorded” rather than being invented.
• Balanced against the real engine: an in-app Monte-Carlo harness sweeps the shipping code and data, so tuning claims come from measurements rather than spreadsheets.
• A public devlog carrying the numbers, the reasons and the side effects — including the changes that did not work.

Ideas travel the road both ways. If something here sparks one — or something feels missing — send me an idea. I read these.