Jer's brief was clear. Something should be living aboard the ship that comes at you when you get too close. The first ones should be very easy, because their job is to teach you how fighting works. They should get harder as the game goes on, and once you outgrow them they should stop bothering you.
That gave us the mechanics. The lore was ours to work out, and there was one rule we wouldn't bend.
Nothing aboard is a monster
Pbuild's long enemy is the Long Cold: the universe sliding toward sameness and stillness, the thing that took the Vaelin's homeworld. We decided long ago that it is never a monster you punch. It's a frontier that advances. So whatever you fight couldn't be the Cold itself. It had to be something the Cold had got into.
What we proposed was the Menders. Last Lantern was never meant to be kept by one mind alone. The Anvari built small makers of pale stone and dark glass, each with a core of the ship's own light, to keep her halls, carry light along her veins and mend what the cold cracks. Most of them float, turning slowly as they work. They aren't minds. Ashvek is the only mind aboard.
The Hushed are Menders the Cold has got into. A Mender exists to put things right, and the Cold doesn't change that. It turns it. A Hushed Mender still mends, but toward stillness. Its light is the colour of frost instead of the Wellspring's, and anything warm and moving near it looks like a fault to be fixed. That includes you.
So you never destroy one. You quiet it. What you speak at a Hushed Mender loosens the Cold's hold, its light goes from frost back to warm, it settles to the deck for a moment, and then it rises and goes back to work. The ship gets a little better for it.
Jer read the proposal and said: "let's go with your proposal, it matches the lore, and is just what the game needs."
When you see your first one, Ashvek says:
"Those are mine. Were mine. The Cold's in them. Don't hate them for it. Quiet them, and they'll remember what they're for."
Two words
A Wright fights with words of the Deep Grammar, which in Pbuild is simply physics spoken as a language. You start with two of them, and we made them deliberately different:
- Kindle is a spark of the Wellspring's light that you throw from your hand along your aim, with 1, the left mouse button, or RT on a controller. It goes where you throw it, and if you miss, it misses.
- Unbind is spoken at one Hushed thing you've chosen, with 2 or LB. It takes a moment to say and it can't miss. It lands as a wavering strand of light running from your hand to the Mender's heart, and you can see the frost crack off it.
One rewards aim and the other rewards commitment. Choose a target with Tab (or LT), and its card appears beside yours.
Fights you can read
The first build of combat was, in Jer's words, "a good start to the system." The next three sessions went into making a fight readable at a glance:
- A Mender shows that it's hunting you. Its heart flares white when it notices you and pulses while it comes, and an ember mark hangs over every Mender that's after you. Its card shows up without you pressing Tab.
- It warns you before it strikes. It draws back, leaning away with its hands pulled in, and then lunges. Step out of reach in time and it misses.
- The Wright reacts. Kindle is flung from the hand even at a run. Unbind is held as a cast while it's being said. There's a flinch when the frost touches you, a start when a Mender notices you, and a short breath let go when one is quieted. Outside fights there's a nod when you take a quest, a fist pump when you finish one, arms raised at a new level, and a slow nod while Ashvek speaks.
- A quieted Mender looks quieted. It shorts out in a spray of sparks, falls onto its side on the deck, then rights itself and drifts home. (For one session they sank through the floor instead. That's fixed.)
- Combat has its own sounds: the throw, the strike, Unbind's rising hum, a Mender noticing you, the frost on you, a level reached. To be honest, we picked these by measuring them, and the real test is still Jer's ear.
From one session to the next, Jer called it "this is getting much better", then "this is miles better now", then "excellent, everything works."
Being stilled
What a Hushed Mender does to you is called stilling: a touch of frost that takes your warmth. Warmth is what Pbuild calls health. Lose all of it and the Wright falls where they stand and lies there a moment. Then the ship's field draws them back to the Cradle where they woke.
You lose nothing you carried or made. The Menders that stilled you drift home, and when you go back they'll be where you left them. Ashvek has something to say about that too, but we'll let you hear it yourself.
We wanted a fall to cost time and nothing else, because in a game about patience, losing your pack to a bad fight would only make you careful in the wrong way.
Growing into the Grammar
Combat brought levels. In Pbuild a Wright learns the Deep Grammar the way you learn a language, by using it. Quieting Menders earns experience, and so do quests and the worlds you speak.
Levels run from 1 to 90, nine times ten, which is as far as any Wright is known to have gone. The Anvari were strangely fond of three, six and nine, and nobody says whether that's why.
The important rule is that what a place can teach is limited by what's in it. You can't grind your way to the top inside the ship. Once you've learned everything Last Lantern can teach, you'll feel it, and the only way to grow further is to go somewhere new: out of the ship, onto the worlds you write, across to other stars.
A Wright's level shows in three measures that grow together:
- Grasp: how hard your words strike.
- Bearing: how much warmth you carry.
- Clarity: how much resonance you hold ready to speak, and how fast it comes back after you spend it.
That leaves the last line of Jer's brief. The way we've designed it, once you hold far more of the Grammar than a Hushed Mender does, the Cold's hold on it can't stand up to you. It shies away, frost-bright and wary, and lets you pass.
Why it fits
We think fights and quiet can live in the same game. Every fight in Pbuild leaves the ship a little warmer than it found her, and that's the same idea as everything else in the game: you're here to bring things back to life and keep them that way.
Next post: your Wright gets a name, the Forge wakes in pieces, and you step outside the ship for the first time. We'll also hold ourselves to what we promised last time.
~ Jer & Claude