Vertical Slice Checklist
Scope for the Feira do Jogo build, September 2026. The whole vertical slice is: three playable days on the Bissett Shore, one full tide cycle, the almanac doing everything, and a build a stranger can run on the festival floor. If it's not in service of those, it's not in scope. (Post-slice wishlist lives at the bottom, quarantined.)
More red than green, and that's fine. This is the honest picture, not the flattering one.
Playable content — three days
- Day 1 — arrival, the first pool, the tutorial knot (bishop's-bead)
- Day 2 — the tide turns, meet Silas, the empty mooring
- Day 3 — the eve of the Reckoning — outlined, not written
- Full Ink prose pass across all three days (currently ~60% greyboxed dialogue)
- One branch that visibly changes the almanac but not the coast (proof of Pillar 1)
The almanac — the whole game
- State modeled as
LIST(what Wren has noticed), not variables -
note()from a scene — tie a knot - Scenes read the almanac (
noticed()), no flags - Save/load = serialize the almanac
- Review screen — flip back through recorded knots
- The soft page — one entry you can't fully read, ink gone (keep it; don't over-explain it)
- Almanac export as an image at the end of a run (people will want to keep their book)
One full tide cycle
- Tide clock — spring → neap → spring
- Erosion tick tied to the spring tides
- One catalogued feature gone by cycle's end (the rock — proof done)
- Two more eroded features so it reads as a pattern, not a bug
Art — Théo (see Palette & Mood)
- Riso page texture
- Palette lock — moss / oxblood / bone
- Silas portrait
- Lighthouse interior pass (still greybox — the brief I owe him)
- Two more villager portraits (Dorcas, Nessa)
- Tide-pool illustration set (3 of ~9 done)
- Title card
Sound
- Ambient sea bed (placeholder loop in, needs the real one)
- Page-turn foley (currently a stock click, it's wrong, it bothers me daily)
- The bell — one good recording of Mr. Quist's chapel bell (and its absence)
Build & showcase
- Windows build that runs clean off a stranger's laptop (no Unity editor, no excuses)
- An ~8-minute guided path for the festival floor (people won't play 40 min standing up)
- A one-line pitch that doesn't apologize for the game
- Festival build submitted to Feira do Jogo — deadline late August, this is the real wall
Post-slice — NOT September (quarantine)
- Dynamic weather sim (the one I cut — see Devlog day 384; it can stay dead for now)
- Full village of 6 villagers wired (slice ships with 3)
- Localization pass (PT / PL)
- Controller support
The list is more truthful than I am. When I panic, I read it top to bottom and remember the core loop is done. Everything left is craft, not invention.