Game Design

Aetheria’s oldest design ambition joins cockpit-scale action to strategy-scale production, logistics, and institutional power. A pilot experiences a shortage as a dangerous route, failed repair, or contract they cannot afford to refuse. A corporation experiences the same shortage as procurement pressure, market leverage, or a reason to send somebody else into danger.

This branch contains current design owners, developed drafts, prototypes, and historical scope cuts. Those statuses matter. A detailed note can preserve useful mechanics without constituting a release plan, and game design does not overwrite the setting notes that own shared history, technology, factions, or physical constraints.

Current Design Owners

• Design Pillars owns the durable playable values: material systems, consequential scale, ship identity, economy, failure, and accessible depth.
• Playable Layers owns the optional, bounded exchange between embodied action and corporate strategy.
• Aetheria Client and Modes describes candidate cross-mode shell, player-continuity, runtime boundaries, and the distinct status of each proposed mode. None of those statuses is a release commitment.
• Aetheria: Starbridge is a developed draft GDD for asymmetric cooperative defense: one commander operates the base while pilots fight, recover material, and perform field work in the same crisis.

Long-Horizon Direction

Persistent Universe and Reset Loop owns Aetheria’s intended final form: a shared persistent history repeatedly ended by human extinction, with player knowledge and community institutions carrying the real progression between branches. It is a design north star rather than a claim about the current release target or implementation state.

Design Invariants

• Cockpit-scale play and strategy-scale play must create pressure the other can understand.
• Ships remain material assemblies shaped by heat, maintenance, cargo, manufacturer doctrine, and access; see Ship-shape and Up to Specs.
• Production history matters. Economy and Production owns commodities, fabrication, quality, and supply relationships.
• Travel and combat remain legible through Galaxy and Navigation, Gravity and Locomotion, and Heat, Stealth, and Detection.
• Narrative and Missions owns mission admission, local occurrence, evidence, and consequence handoff without requiring procedural placement or a particular authoring runtime.
• Implementation is evidence, not authority. Implementation Signals preserves an unverified report about an older codebase; it establishes neither current implementation nor design requirements.

Historical Scope Cuts

Aetheria: Terminus was a reduced rogue-lite action-RPG proposal about a hostile crossing. The destination named Terminus is not established here as canonical geography. Call of the Void cut further toward curated cases, station life, taxi work, and a private investigator, but used an obsolete colonization-fleet premise; its protagonist and cases remain developmental.

Both preserve design history rather than active release targets; older planning documents carry the same limit.

Contribution Boundary

Use this branch to make playable consequences explicit. New mechanics should identify the player decision, state owner, inputs, outputs, failure mode, and setting constraints the mechanic assumes. Keep speculative features labeled as candidates until adopted by the relevant design owner. A playable interpretation may compress lore for a scenario; it does not silently establish universal canon.

For setting pressure, begin with Introduction, Narrative Themes, the Timeline, and Restrictions on Warfare.