Game Design

Aetheria

The setting is a machine. The playable problem is deciding which gears the player gets to touch first.

Playable Layers

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Playable Layers

Status: historical design synthesis. This note preserves the intended relationship between embodied and corporation-scale play. It does not define a release sequence, current roadmap, or implementation architecture.

Aetheria has explored two game fantasies at different distances: the operator inside a ship and the institution shaping the conditions around it. Each layer must work as a complete game without the other. Their useful overlap is optional and bounded: one produces regional pressure the other can understand.

Cockpit Layer

The action RPG layer covers ship control, travel, combat and avoidance, contracts, trade, salvage, docking, and crew-facing narrative. Its decisions are immediate and embodied: which route to risk, what to carry, which system to overheat, whose claim to recognize, and whether the repair bill still leaves a reason to continue.

Corporate Layer

The corporate strategy layer lets players operate an institution that allocates labor, capital, infrastructure, production, research, and security. Its decisions create shortages, surpluses, vulnerable routes, contested facilities, prototype equipment, labor disputes, and contracts. The layer remains playable through those strategic consequences even when no cockpit player visits the affected region.

Optional Pressure Exchange

The layers may exchange periodic or regional snapshots rather than share one continuously simulated universe.

Corporation-scale play can provide the cockpit layer with:

  • prices, shortages, and available equipment;
  • route access, patrol density, and local security pressure;
  • infrastructure condition and production provenance;
  • contracts, faction influence, and prototype availability.

Cockpit play can return:

  • purchases, consumption, cargo movement, and losses;
  • salvage, discoveries, and recovered technology;
  • completed or failed contracts;
  • damage, rescue, sabotage, and changes to local claims or reputation.

A scenario owner validates the strategic snapshot admitted into a cockpit session. During play, that scenario owns its local projection. Consequences return only through the named durable owner for the affected market, asset, route, claim, or faction state. Entering or observing cockpit play must not silently repair damage, duplicate goods, reroll committed events, or overwrite strategic history.

The exchange may be delayed, summarized, batched, or absent. Its purpose is to create legible pressure and consequence, not to make either layer wait for the other to become a game.

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