Elements, reactions and enemy archetypes, with the constraints each one carries.
Prototype. Built to answer three questions:
Does applying, combining and detonating elemental debuffs feel rewarding?
Do friendly field objects, like the pillars, that act as a place of power feel good?
Can enemy types feel genuinely distinct rather than the same fight at different sizes?
Answers so far: yes, yes, and largely yes.
Tuning below serves those questions rather than shipping. Enemies
currently die to reactions rather than to the weapon, which stresses
the first question hardest. A finished build would not necessarily
be balanced this way.
Values are not quoted here. The debug panel, on the backtick key,
exposes every tuning constant in the build and edits them live.
Loadout
Three slots: attack, pillar,
ultimate. Each holds one of Fire, Water or
Lightning. Slots may repeat.
Elements deal no damage on application. They stack on the target, to a cap of three.
A reaction fires when a detonation pairs an incoming element against one already present.
The reaction table is order-independent. Which reactions are reachable is decided entirely by slot contents.
Same-element pairs need one slot. Cross-element pairs need two slots to differ.
Detonating consumes the stacks it reacts with.
Consequence worth knowing before tuning: a full combo spends what
its own early hits applied, so the attack chain alone never reaches
the stack cap. Reaching high-stack reactions means withholding the
slam or letting a pillar field do the stacking.
Elements
Fire · Burning
Effect
Damage over time, per stack.
Spent by
Reaction, or expiry.
Notes
Flat per stack, never a percentage. Three pips reads as three times the number.
Water · Wet
Effect
Movement slow, per stack.
Spent by
Reaction, or expiry.
Notes
Applies to the enemy's own movement only, never to knockback. Damping an impulse with the victim's status would weaken the game's one displacement verb exactly when it lands.
Lightning · Charged
Effect
Bonus damage on every weapon hit against the target, per stack.
Spent by
Reaction, or expiry. Not consumed by landing hits.
Notes
The only element that pays out through player aggression rather than on its own clock. Weapon hits only; reaction damage does not trigger it.
Reactions
Six pairs. All are told apart in play by motion
rather than colour, since three of them share Lightning's yellow:
Burst fills, Surge sweeps outward hollow, Conduct does not move at
all, Steam drifts upward, Chain travels, Overcharge collapses
inward. The glyphs below match those forms.
Fire + Fire
Burst
Effect
Damage to the target and every enemy inside a radius.
Scales
With stacks consumed.
Bounds
Radius-limited. Each body is caught by the sweep at most once.
Use
Clustered targets.
Water + Water
Surge
Effect
Damage plus radial knockback. Each launched body carries one collision hit, dealt to both parties on impact.
Scales
With stacks consumed. Collision damage is flat.
Bounds
A victim is never re-launched. The collision payload is spent on first contact. Both bounds are load-bearing: propagation would cascade across a packed arena.
Use
Displacement, crowd separation.
Notes
The only knockback in the build. The weapon displaces nothing.
Lightning + Lightning
Conduct
Effect
Two beats. Stuns every Charged enemy on the field, then damages them after a short delay.
Scales
With stacks consumed.
Bounds
No radius at all. The target list is fixed when it fires and only shrinks.
Use
Targets outside the attack arc or off screen.
Notes
The delay is tuned so the stun always outlasts it. Nothing escapes what it was caught by.
Fire + Water
Steam
Effect
Consumes remaining burn, then drains a proportion of the target's health pool.
Scales
With stacks consumed, and with the target's maximum health.
Bounds
Sizes off the health pool, never off an absorbing armor bar. Sizing it off armor would make it the fastest way to skip the armor phase.
Use
Single-target execute.
Notes
Paid out as a fast drain rather than one hit, so the bar visibly melts.
Water + Lightning
Chain
Effect
Damage, then a bolt that hops between Wet enemies.
Scales
With stacks consumed.
Bounds
Hop budget fixed at spawn, only decreasing. One Water stack spent per hop, so the real limiter is Water on the field rather than the hop cap.
Use
Dispersed targets.
Notes
Prefers targets it has not visited. Without that the nearest valid target is usually the enemy it just came from, and the bolt oscillates instead of travelling.
Fire + Lightning
Overcharge
Effect
Damage, multiplied against standing armor. Cancels an enemy wind-up.
Scales
With stacks consumed.
Bounds
A multiplier, never armor deletion. Deletion would erase the break-then-chip fight for one loadout.
Use
Armor phases, telegraph interrupts.
Notes
The only interrupt in the build, and the only reaction that answers a telegraph rather than a health bar.
Enemies
Each archetype is written to ask one question that none of the
others ask, and each question has a reaction that answers it.
Chaser
Role
Baseline pressure. Spawns continuously through the run rather than in waves.
Behaviour
Walks at the player, damages on contact. No telegraph, no special case.
Notes
Red is the reference every other body is read against. If it is not red, it is not a Chaser.
Swarm
Role
Facing pressure.
Behaviour
Several fast, low-health bodies that reposition to angles outside the player's attack arc.
Asks
How do you handle what you aren't facing?
Answered by
Chain or Conduct. Both reach outside the cone.
Notes
The repositioning angle is read from the weapon's own arc rather than hardcoded.
Archer
Role
Ranged. Forces an approach.
Behaviour
Kites and fires down a telegraphed line. Breaks away in one committed dodge, then fires from wherever it lands, without walking back to its standoff.
Counterplay
Move across the line, not away from it. Charging straight in stays inside the corridor at any speed. Closing during its telegraph beats the dodge.
Asks
Can you close distance honestly?
Answered by
Conduct, the only reaction that reaches it without closing.
Notes
Exists because every other archetype closes to melee, which left Conduct nothing at range to demonstrate against.
Heavy
Role
Single-target commitment.
Behaviour
Approaches, commits well inside its own strike range, roots for the entire wind-up.
Counterplay
Its recovery is the only guaranteed free window in the build. An unpunished hit hurts without killing, so trading is a real option.
Asks
Can you set up a reaction on someone else's schedule?
Answered by
Overcharge, which cancels the wind-up, or the recovery window it hands you every cycle.
Wall
Role
Armored pressure and area denial.
Behaviour
Large, slow, armored, stagger-immune. The only body with physical mass, so it pushes the player out of its space. Its slam leaves burning ground and it will not commit again while that ground burns.
Asks
Can you commit to a long setup while being pushed off position?
Answered by
Overcharge for the armor, Water for the pace.
Notes
Stagger immunity makes Overcharge's interrupt inert here while its armor multiplier is the best answer available. One reaction, one half useless and one half essential, against the same enemy.
Boss
Role
Run endcap. Killing it stops all spawning.
Behaviour
Alternates strictly between a two-crater slam and a long line shot. Circles during recovery and closes when the queued attack is out of range. Never concedes ground. The slam leaves burning ground under both craters.
Counterplay
Strict alternation is the tell: the line having just fired means the slam is next. Random order would be noise rather than anticipation.
Asks
Can you read what is coming and answer it, for two minutes, with the rest of the field still populated?
Notes
Stagger-immune throughout, like the Wall. Nothing cancels its wind-ups: every attack it starts, it finishes.
Why the roster stops at six
Every mechanic passes a written filter before it is built, and
one rule is that a new thing must ask something nothing else
asks. The Wall and the Heavy are the closest call in the build:
both are large, slow, melee and committed. What separates them
is the armor and the burning ground. Remove either and they
collapse into one enemy with different numbers.