Resting World: Building a Time-Split, Rogue-Lite With Scared (But Brave) Heroes




This week our dungeon-crawler transformed from a cool prototype into a living world with purpose. We locked the core loop—top-down, mobile-friendly runs launched from a cozy Resting World hub—where terrified, summoned NPCs gather, calm down, and gear up. On the gameplay side, we stood up the AI agency stack (Suggestion → Accept/Decline → potential Revolt), fear/nerves hooks, and clean combat scaffolding (underwater penalties, solo-kill detection, mastery triggers). Navigation and puzzles are in—with laser traps, pressure pads, guarded doors, off-mesh links—and we’re shipping to Unity 2022.3.37f1 with tidy prefabs, scenes, and style-compliant code.


The world and story finally clicked: a time-shattered campaign across past/present/future slices of plains, castles, mansions, drowned cities, skybridges, foundries, and ancient forests. Every 10 floors caps an arc boss (Dragonid warlords, assassins, leviathans, wights, storm matriarchs, iron tyrants, eidolon weavers, abyssal heralds) on the road to the Chronophage. We drip-feed narrative through whispers, echoes, and codex pages; each arc grants a Relic that upgrades systems (fast-travel, ambush skip, objective reroll). Heroes aren’t faceless units—they’re scared people ripped from the world, and the Resting World hub (Hearth, Workshop, Dreamwell, Tactics Board, Portal Ring) is where they heal, talk, and become brave.


Progression got a big upgrade for mobile: ★1–★10 stars, level caps per star, promotion via materials (Echo Shards, Relic Cores, Time Silk, Abyssal Pearls, Dragonid Sigils), and an Altar of Echoes that lets you sacrifice one NPC to empower another—powerful, but it dents Trust. We added a proper BaseManager economy (Gems, City Level, Trust with events and clamping), home states (Resting, Working, Training, Injured, Panicked, Assigned), and a promotion/sacrifice flow that plugs straight into skills like Berserker, Guardian Instinct, Amphibious Fighter, and Weapon Masteries. Next up: FloorMaster’s 100-floor curve, ObjectiveManager’s full set (Survive/Key/Escort/Assassinate), encounter/boss tables, and a StoryDatabase pass for the first two arcs so every run delivers another piece of the world’s truth.

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