Wuxia game (working title)
An action RPG won by reading the enemy's pattern rather than out-reflexing it. The only slot in the studio still moving.
Unity 6 · URP · toon shading. Forty-four forms and twenty-six artifacts. You win by reading the enemy’s pattern, not by reacting faster.
When an enemy starts a form, a telegraph appears. Read its lineage, answer with the countering one, and you take zero damage while the enemy is stunned for 1.6 seconds and takes double back. The wrong lineage takes 60%; no response takes a clean hit. So what the player accumulates in this game is not reaction speed — it’s knowledge.
Six parts
One project, but the problems differ by part. Mixed into one piece, none of them survives.
| Part | The problem it has |
|---|---|
| Design | Turning “win by reading the pattern” into an actual rule |
| Spec | The rule itself — one page of the form system |
| World | Where factions, identity and chapters cross into systems |
| Client | Where code handling time and hit resolution leaks |
| Art | Building solo, the real bottleneck isn’t code |
| QA | What a passing test isn’t looking at |
Client is here and absent from the two empty slots — that part only exists where there is code. And one more: spec is split from design. Design is why it was decided that way; spec is what was decided. Keep them in one document and the reasoning gets interleaved with the rules — so when a single value changes later, nothing tells you what else has to be read.
This game is where the teardowns land
The rules that come out of Teardowns need somewhere to land, and this is it.
The Elemental Sandbox teardown produced exactly one rule worth taking: record dimensionless, resolve every frame. Measuring this project then found 43 WaitForSeconds calls against 22 fraction loops — built precisely the wrong way round.
Telegraph duration is this game’s difficulty dial, so that means turning the dial doesn’t reach any telegraph currently in motion. The way the game gets balanced was blocked at the mechanism level.
The mark it left is still visible in Spec. The counter window computes its end time once, when it opens, so lengthening a telegraph mid-run closes the counter window early. It was left unfixed on purpose, with the condition for revisiting it written down: “when balancing work that actually adjusts telegraph length at runtime comes up.”
That loop — take something apart, measure my own thing, change it, show the diff — is the part of this site I actually care about. Teardowns alone are commentary; measurements alone are bragging.
Not yet
It has never been playtested. Everything above is verified only as far as does the design hold together; is it fun has not been looked at by anyone. The 60% figure for a wrong answer comes from “it must differ from a clean hit,” not from a measurement.