Waterline
What it is. A stepwell town in a drying age. Water is the only resource that matters — food, people, shelter, and defense are all just water in another shape. You draw from a finite aquifer to expand, but every draw lowers the water table, and a lower table means slower recharge, deeper wells, and a harder next year. The game is the long tension between growing now and having water later, punctuated by dune-storms and raiders who come because you have the well.
Player fantasy / why it’s fun. Not “manage resources” but “I am living on borrowed water, and every field I plant today is a well I can’t dig tomorrow.” The dread is the waterline — a gauge always on screen, always dropping a little faster than you’d like, and the knowledge that the choice keeping you alive this season is the one that dooms you three seasons out.
The brief
Frostpunk but the generator is an aquifer you’re draining — one master resource, except spending it degrades the source, so the pressure compounds.
The spine
Water is the single currency under everything, and drawing it to grow now is exactly what dries the table you’ll need later.
| Part | This game |
|---|---|
| Objective | Sustain the town through the dry years (or dominate the basin) |
| Superpower | Draw water → fields, people, walls, cisterns — grow anything |
| Scarcity | The aquifer: a finite, slowly-recharging table. Drawing lowers it; a lower table recharges slower and costs more to reach |
| Obstacle | Dune-storms that bury infrastructure + raiders drawn to the well — plus the deferred obstacle of your own drawdown |
| Renewal | Maps differ primarily by water-table depth & recharge rate; survival mode escalates dry-season sieges |
Resonance
Every element traces to the spine — the coherence proof (see process-the-spine).
Note that death-handling here is the opposite of recipe-emberfall‘s, and
that’s correct: the spine derives it.
| Element | Arrow back to the spine |
|---|---|
| Verb: draw water to grow | The single agency; everything you build is water reshaped |
| Power creates the problem | Every draw lowers the table you depend on → growing is the drought engine; greed now is death later (passes the gate) |
| Scarcity: the aquifer degrades as you spend | Makes each draw a deferred trade, not a flat cost — the spine’s signature |
| Renewal: maps vary by table depth/recharge | The one variable that matters is the variable that changes — like anchor-frostpunk‘s cold, one axis owns the difficulty |
| Death-handling: a run can collapse to drought, and loss stings | Spine is survival under scarcity; a cheap respawn would be dissonant (antipattern-dissonance) — the loss must land |
| Setting: a stepwell town in a drying age | The objective made physical; the well is the town’s life, dug deeper each year |
| Theme: living beyond your means on borrowed water (civilizational drawdown) | The mechanic (spend the source to survive) is the metaphor (a society outrunning its aquifer) |
| Raiders come because of the well | The obstacle is caused by your success — pressure scales with the thing you’re protecting |
| Feel: the ever-present waterline gauge, dropping | Makes the deferred scarcity legible and dreadful every second (pattern-readability) |
No decoration; no dissonance. The gate holds: the only way to survive this season is to make next season harder.
The twist applied — mechanic-swap (deferred consequence)
The bend that found the spine (via process-the-twist, the sub-tool of
process-the-spine): take a single-master-resource survival game and make
spending the resource degrade its own source. Frostpunk’s heat is a flat drain;
water here is a drawdown — the cost is paid in the future’s scarcity. That one
swap turns steady-state management into a slow-motion tragedy you author yourself.
The three pillars
Fall out of the spine — see process-pillars.
- One resource, everything. Food, people, defense are all water. If a system
can be paid for without water, it’s off the spine — guard
antipattern-feature-soup. - The trade is deferred, and legible. The player must see the table dropping
and understand today’s draw as tomorrow’s drought, or it’s
antipattern-fake-choicedressed as tragedy. Surface it:system-telegraphs,pattern-readability. - Scarcity, not grind. Difficulty comes from the drawdown curve, never from
busywork hauling buckets. Guard
antipattern-grind-wall.
Scope & first playable
Ruthlessly minimal. One well, one dry-season cycle, a visible table.
| Layer | First playable | Deliberately deferred |
|---|---|---|
| Resource | one aquifer with a level + recharge rate | multiple wells, aquifer geology |
| Verb | draw water → build field / house / cistern (each a water cost) | trade, research, cistern chains |
| Drawdown | every draw lowers the table; lower table = slower recharge | salinization, collapse zones |
| Obstacle | one dry-season siege of raiders; storms deferred | dune-storms, faction politics |
| Renewal | 3 maps differing only in table depth/recharge | system-procgen-design basin generator |
| Show | the waterline gauge, always visible, dropping | full weather VFX, portraits |
The beat the first playable must earn: the season the player realizes the draw
that saved them is what’s killing them — the tragic turn. If that recognition
doesn’t land in one dry cycle with one well, more systems won’t add it. Avoid
antipattern-content-desert: prove the drawdown tragedy, then widen the basin.
Determinism is the hard constraint. Aquifer recharge, storm timing, and raid
composition all roll through the world’s deterministic RNG so a seed replays the
same collapse — a survival tragedy is only fair if the run is reproducible. The
waterline gauge is state (it’s in world.hash()); its rendering is cosmetic. See
system-resource-loops for the draw/recharge model and system-weather-and-time
for the dry-season clock.
Handoff
A design isn’t done until it names its proofs.
design/FUN.mdlaw 8 — the ablation proof. Build the basin twice:coupled(draws lower the table) andablated(static aquifer). Run a skilled steward and a lazy one over both;assertLoadBearing({ coupling: 'aquifer drawdown', coupled, ablated, skilled, lazy })must show the skill-gap collapse when drawdown is removed. If flat-aquifer plays the same, the deferred tragedy was never in the loop and the spine is a lie.system-resource-loops— verify the coupling: a draw must measurably slow future recharge, and the player must be able to see it. If the table is static under the hood, you built Frostpunk, not Waterline.- Coherence gate — the Resonance table stays complete; every new system earns a
row to the spine or it’s
antipattern-decoration.
Then design your own deferred-scarcity spine from the mechanic — don’t reskin this
one. See process-refine-and-handoff.