Game Overview¶
Status: Current — written 2026-08-27 to replace the archived GDDs. Owner: delan
Two pages. Deliberately. The previous Game Design Documents ran to ~2,300 lines each, were forked into two copies 379 lines apart, and nobody read either. This document answers "what is EchoSpire" and hands off to the source that owns each detail. If you find yourself expanding it past two pages, the material belongs in
story/bible/ordocs/official/instead.
In one paragraph¶
EchoSpire: Portals is a single-player, run-based roguelike deckbuilder. A century ago the Aevum Spire — the machine at the centre of reality — broke, and the people who broke it wrote the history of it. Five Houses now rule the wreck. The player takes a class and a House, runs authored campaigns through unstable realms connected by rifts, and slowly finds out that the official story they were taught in the tutorial is the lie.
The two pillars¶
History is written by the people who broke the world. The truth survives in the records nobody thought mattered.
The second is a production discipline, not a slogan: truth arrives in work orders, logs, and marginalia — never in speeches, never in lore dumps. Every prestigious form of memory in this world is corrupt; every humble one is honest. Truth lives downstairs.
The structural consequence: the tutorial is playable propaganda. The opening orientation is the official history, presented sincerely, and the rest of the game is the maintenance logs that contradict it.
Canon: story/bible/00-pillars.md. Do not restate story canon here — link to it.
The five classes — how you spend a turn¶
| Class | Mechanic | The question it asks |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor | Density — retain Block between turns; Counterweight hits with your Block | How much mass can I carry before Grav-Lock? |
| Drifter | Echo-Lock — mark to 5, then execute for 3× ignoring Block | Can I reach the count before it reaches me? |
| Conduit | Overload — play cards you cannot afford; the bill lands next turn | Can I pay this back before Burnout? |
| Machinist | Constructs — a 3-slot grid of machines with their own HP | Do I build, or do I fight? |
| Catalyst | Mutate — corrupt a card into a one-use Anomaly | Is this card worth more as itself or as a gamble? |
The five Houses — why that turn is a crime¶
Valerii (compliance), the Axiom (certainty), the Syndicate (greed), the Censors (the record), Salvari (salvage).
A House does not add a second class. It changes the price of the same class turn — what you sacrifice, what you steal, what you refuse to do.
Player-facing names are the Axiom / the Syndicate / the Censors, ratified 2026-07-03. The code and assets still say Syntacta / Aethari / Annalis. That is tracked debt, not an open question.
Class×House legality is a deliberate matrix, not a grid — some combinations are banned and should stay banned. See Gameplay Reference.
The run loop¶
Take a quest from your House → enter a realm of rifts under fog of war → route, fight, shop, and resolve events → complete the objective or a boss → return with rewards, or fail and return as a collapsed echo.
Realms are generated deterministically from a seed and carry a global passive that changes how they play. Rift types (Combat, Elite, Boss, Protection, Event, Rest, Sanctuary, Treasure, Anchor, Black Market) each ask a different question. See Rift Types And Variables.
What is actually built¶
As of 2026-08-27 — check the linked documents rather than trusting this list to age well.
| State | |
|---|---|
| Core rules engine | Mature. Combat state machine, effect pipeline, seeded RNG, all five class mechanics and House passives as composable handlers |
| Tests | ~693 test methods |
| Cards | 584 published, 476 with effect payloads — data/content/cards.json |
| WPF client | The shipping client. All major screens render; much of the content is still fixtures |
| Console client | Plays the full tutorial loop. The original proof of Core |
| Unity client | Prototype shell only. A later presentation upgrade, not on the Kickstarter path |
| Mini-games | All five faction mini-games implemented |
| Simulation | Runs headless batches; the policy is still mostly random |
Scope discipline¶
The engine supports 5×5. The launch should not. The standing recommendation is a demo slice of two Houses and two classes, with the rest as post-launch content. The failure mode this project has to avoid is building platform because it feels like progress.
See Todo Inventory — the only backlog — and docs/evaluations/ for
outside assessments of where the project stands.
Where the detail lives¶
| Detail | Source |
|---|---|
| Story, factions, Alden, the Event, campaign shapes | story/bible/ — canon |
| Why a story decision was made, and what was rejected | story/bible/canon-decisions.md |
| Terminology and mechanic definitions | Rules Glossary |
| Run structure, classes, legality matrix, deck rules | Gameplay Reference |
| Hero progression and difficulty scaling | Hero Progression And Difficulty |
| Realms, sectors, realm passives | Realm Framework |
| How the system is built | docs/tech/Architecture.md |
| The card pipeline and which card list wins | docs/tech/ContentPipeline.md |
| Designed but unbuilt | docs/proposals/ |
| Superseded, including both old GDDs | _archive/ |