Field Log

Lowtarn empties every dusk. That sentence was on the first page of the pitch, and for two years we treated it as a clock: the sun touches the ridge, the water starts to fall, you have until dawn. It tested badly. Players raced. Nobody looked at anything.

So we stopped timing it. The water now falls in steps, and each step waits for you to finish something: take a sounding, read a carved post, knock on a lit door. Stand still and it holds. Walk back up and it follows you, a little.

The lake doesn't drain on a timer. It drains when you stop looking at it.

The hard part was making that feel like weather rather than a menu. We gave each step a sound from the bell, a little flatter each time, and let the fog thin by one band of dots as the level drops. The readout in the corner of the screen moves in whole metres only, never smoothly, so that each one lands.

The side effect we did not plan for: players started mapping. Some of the notebooks people sent us after the demo have the depths of every post in The Posts, to the half metre. Two of them found the post with their own name on it before we told anyone it was there.

Next log: how Oda's sluice decides when you have seen enough of a room. It is less clever than it sounds, and we are keeping it that way.