You are a tinker-weaver. You find threads in a shifting world — each thread is a fragment of something: a personality, a material, an event, a rule. You bring them back to your loom and connect them together. Where threads cross, something happens — not because you programmed it, but because the threads' natures demanded it.
Then you watch your tapestry come alive.
Threads have natures — trait-structs like {volatile: true, bright: true, liquid: false}. When two threads are adjacent on the loom, their natures unify. The unified result is matched against a hidden archetype catalog. There are no crafting recipes. No synergy tables. You learn what traits do when combined, not what specific pairs produce.
Players who want safety weave harmonious tapestries. Players who want power court tension. Players who want discovery chase paradox.
When a crossing resolves to an archetype, it emits cascade traits that flow into adjacent unresolved crossings — potentially changing what they produce. The loom resolves center-outward, so thread placement becomes programming.
Wander — Explore a procedural, shifting world. Find threads. Visit shrines for archetype clues. Choose your path through a node-map.
Weave — Place threads on the loom. Drag connections. In wire mode, draw directed edges between threads to build a dependency graph — a DAG. Thread placement now programs a real topology with layers, critical paths, and blast radii.
Activate — Pull the lever. Energy flows through threads in topological order, resolving dependencies layer by layer. Cascade chains propagate downstream through your DAG. Paradox at a high-dependency node degrades everything below it. Watch your infrastructure come alive — or fall apart.
Hidden in the weave are epics — narrative arcs that evaluate against your weaving history. Each epic is a sequence of beats with constraints: "a crossing with tension and volatile traits, then a cascade of depth 2, then a paradox that produces an archetype." Sixteen epics weave through three projections — different lenses on the same history. Four of these are graph-aware: they track topology depth, single points of failure, blast radius, and layer resolution from real DAG structures.
When the music, the visuals, and the narrative text all align with a crossing's stability — when every axis says the same thing — that's a golden moment. The game doesn't tell you this is happening. You feel it.
At the end of each run, the tapestry speaks: completed epics are revealed, partial matches show how close you came, and hidden epics remain for next time. The same weaving history can satisfy multiple epics to different degrees. New projections, unlocked through discovery, retroactively reinterpret everything.
The project's design decisions, research insights, and patterns are stored as CUE-validated knowledge entries — typed, queryable, and federated across projects via quicue.ca schemas.
Luck Be a Landlord — Cascade watching. Add symbol, spin, chain reaction, scream.
Blue Prince — Discovery of hidden connections. Open door, impossible room, revelation.
Balatro — Build a scoring engine, watch it multiply. Joker composition, exponential chain.
Cultist Simulator — Unknown combination graph IS the content to discover.
Opus Magnum — Build a machine, watch it run. Purest graph-as-gameplay.