A prologue with weight

The prologue of EREME, my narrative roguelite of voyages, is not a tutorial bolted on the side: it is a bare voyage. The same engine as any voyage, but the flight plan is fixed: six nodes, four events pinned one by one, outside the pool that regular voyages draw from. The clocks are generous on purpose: the prologue teaches, it plays neither famine nor deadline.

The setup fits in two lines: a fresh licence, a worn freighter, and an agent pushing over a sealed dispatch, asking that it arrive closed. Then five scenes: a stowaway under the false-bottom hatch, the dispatch you may break open, a leak at the reactor, a checkpoint along the way, the handover at arrival. Each dilemma names its decider: the medic for the stowaway, the pilot for the dispatch, the mechanic for the leak. The first hour is a guided tour of the ship's stations.

A prologue teaches the rules by example. Mine taught the wrong one: eleven of the fourteen options led to outcomes with no effect whatsoever. Three options did charge a cost at the moment of choosing, and one risky option could leave a mark: strictly speaking, eight options out of fourteen cost nothing at all. The commit message that settled the matter does not spare me: the prologue "taught that choosing costs nothing".

A playtest showed it, not a re-read. You cannot see this flaw by reading the data: every option has a text, every text is plausible. You have to play while counting what changes.

The August 6th rework makes every gesture weigh: resources, morale, or a mark that will follow the character. The closing assessment stops being fixed: it splits depending on whether the dispatch arrives intact or broken, and the difference fits in one chilling line from a desk agent.

The dispatch is my favorite piece. Under the seal, a blank sheet: "it weighed trust, not cargo". You only learn that by breaking it. Early versions of the text announced the consequence at the moment of choice; they were removed precisely because they killed the tension. And an old choice weighs on a present one: at the checkpoint, a "hide the broken dispatch" option only exists if you cracked the seal two scenes earlier. The previous day's commit, the one that moved the dispatch's handover to arrival, calls that "the most useful lesson a prologue can give".

The prologue does not close at arrival. The assessment, the title and "The line is yours." are read at the undocking of the first real contract: you learn what your first voyage was worth at the moment you commit to the second. Technically, that moment is recognized by a property that is already there, the voyage register still empty: no new counter to serialize, and a resume after a cut lands exactly right.

And until its Binding, the prologue writes nothing to disk. No autosave: quitting mid-prologue means replaying it, and that is owned, the seed is enough to replay the path. The only write is the final Binding, where the crew that came out of the first hour becomes, in one stroke, the official starting point of the saga.

Until August 6th, the stowaway was called Sel. Eight mentions in the first hour, zero in the rest of the game: the most-named character of the opening existed nowhere else. Even hidden at the price of a mark, he evaporated at the end of the prologue.

As Bastien, he comes aboard if you kept him, as a real recruit, and he is three different men depending on what you did to him: fed, loyal; confined, resentful; sent to chores, resourceful. Handed over to the agents, he comes back once, in uniform, on the other side of a checkpoint. Then the scene never plays again.

Two days before that rework, another commit told the technical side of the same neglect. The session contract queried the saga without checking that it exists; but the prologue is a bare voyage, its session plays without one. The result, quoting the commit: "64 runtime errors on every prologue played, and a crew sheet amputated, with no message saying so. This is the first hour of the game."

Nothing saw it, for a precise reason: the test harness played the prologue headless, never in the scene. Four green paths out of four, and 64 errors per real playthrough. The fix came with its instrument: a harness block that plays the prologue in the view and counts script errors. The commit's measure: 64 before, 0 after, and removing the guard makes the block fail with 48 errors, proof that the net bites.

Two distinct debts slept in my first hour: a design debt (choices without weight) and a measurement debt (a zone the harness did not play the way a player does). Each hid the other: as long as nothing measured the prologue in real conditions, nothing forced me to see that it lied about the heart of the game. The day the first hour was instrumented like everything else, it had to become as honest as everything else.