OVERCLOCK — Milestone 1: the grammar slice

Codename only. The title is an open decision (GDD §25.1) and lives in exactly one place: src/branding.ts.

The design document is overclock-gdd.md. This milestone builds the part of it that carries all the design risk — the effect grammar, the Cycle economy, and the cascade physics — and deliberately does not build the look. Implementation decisions and open questions are in DECISIONS.md.

Run it

pnpm install

pnpm dev

Then open the URL it prints. A run starts immediately — no menus yet.

Key	Action
WASD / arrows	Move
Space	Dash
Tab	Pipeline editor (freezes time)
E (hold)	Channel a Wave Beacon
1 / 2 / 3	Pick a draft card
R	Reroll
Enter	Open a deferred draft
Esc	Pause, or defer the current draft

The arena is larger than the screen — the camera follows you. Chevrons at the screen edge point to Beacons you cannot see; channelling one calls the next wave in early and enriched, and permanently raises Threat.

Seed and Axiom come from the query string, so any run is reproducible exactly: ?seed=demo&axiom=circuit. Axioms available: ignition, circuit, feedback (see DECISIONS D-1 before trying that one).

The other two commands

pnpm test

pnpm sim -- --runs 6 --minutes 12 --axiom ignition

pnpm sim is the headless balance harness. Because the simulation is fully deterministic and renderer-free, tuning the [T] curves in GDD §23.2 is a measurement rather than a guess — it reports draft cadence, EPS, cascade depth, overheats and survival against the design targets. It found every balance problem fixed so far.

Where it runs

The build is live at https://overclock-game.web.app. A push to main deploys there through GitHub Actions once the suite passes; a pull request gets its own preview URL instead. The hosting config, the one-time setup and the caching rule that is easy to get wrong are in DEPLOYMENT.md.

What works

• The Engine — ordered Programs of Trigger → Modifier ×3 → Action, evaluated left-to-right within a row and top-to-bottom across rows. Order changes outcomes: Split → Amplify and Amplify → Split produce different numbers, asserted in tests. Reorder a chain in the editor and watch the output multiplier move (×0.98 → ×1.15) at identical Cycle cost.
• A world larger than the view — The Heap is 4200×2400 with structure ruins for cover and herding, a following camera, and off-screen indicators.
• Wave Beacons — the greed line: call waves early and enriched, permanently raising Threat.
• Cascades — events carry depth, Actions emit events, loops form and are stopped by the Cycle economy rather than by the depth cap.
• Cycles, Heat, Overclock — static reserve, dynamic spend, deficit-to-Heat, instability tiers, misfires, corrupted projectiles, Overheat stall.
• Fuel — three hues, gauges, fuelled fires at +50% output.
• Draft — three cards, auto-slot, reroll, purge, deferral and queueing.
• Pipeline editor — live per-row Cycle cost, output multiplier, instance and execution counts, events/sec and share of total EPS; reorder and Scrap.
• Enemies — Mote, Drifter, Charger, Splitter, plus the pressure roster: Bulwark (shield arc), Interceptor (eats your projectiles and grows), Suppressor (switches your triggers off), Leech (drains fuel), Lancer (telegraphed beam), Warden (mini-elite with affixes).
• Pressure that attacks the build — adaptive resistance taxes whichever hue you overuse; Interceptor spawn weight rises with your live projectile count.
• The run's three acts — Recompile, Meltdown at 20:00, the three Containment antagonists, Extraction, and a Results screen built around the EPS run-trace.
• Determinism — same seed and inputs reproduce a run bit-for-bit.

Nodes so far: 4 Triggers (Clock, On Hit, On Kill, On Pickup), 4 Actions (Bolt, Nova, Arc, Field), 3 Modifiers (Split, Amplify, Echo) — one per hue and one per action primitive (projectile, burst, chain, zone). The remaining v1 roster in GDD §22 is mostly data entry against those same primitives.

What is deliberately missing

The visual language (§16) and game feel (§17), audio (§18), Recompile (§9), Meltdown and Containment (§13.2, §11.4), the Mirror (§10.4), adaptive resistance and suppression (§11.1–11.2), Convert (§7.4), Discoveries and the Library (§15), menus (§19.1–19.3) and settings (§20). Full list at the end of DECISIONS.md.

The renderer is a placeholder — flat shapes, no bloom, no trails, no decomposition. It exists to make the grammar legible, not to look like the game.

Layout

src/
  sim/         deterministic core — no DOM, no renderer, no Math.random, no clock
    engine.ts    Programs, modifier chain composition, Echo expansion, Scrap
    world.ts     entities, collisions, director, the event loop
    cycles.ts    Cycles / Heat / Overclock
    draft.ts     deterministic draft rolls
    rng.ts       seeded, serialisable PRNG
    tunables.ts  every [T] number, separated from load-bearing ones
  content/     declarative data artifacts + schema and cross-reference validation
  app/         Pixi renderer, HUD, overlays, input, game loop  (placeholder layer)
  harness/     headless balance sweeps and the reference pilot

The dependency rule: sim imports content and nothing else. app and harness both drive sim. Content is data; the engine is dumb.

Invariants under test

• A seed reproduces a run exactly (world.test.ts).
• Modifier order changes output (engine.test.ts).
• Cascade depth never exceeds 12, and self-feeding loops are stopped by Cycles, not by the safety valve.
• No enemy ever spawns within 260 units of the player.
• No single Cycle spike, however large, can cross the whole Heat band — Overheat requires sustained greed (§6.3's "dial, not a line").
• A greedier engine always costs more Cycles and runs hotter than a lean one.
• Content with a dangling reference, duplicate id, or typo fails loudly at load.