Embers already serve as experience and currency in Watchman. Making them expendable health as well means that taking damage can affect the next upgrade, purchase, and recovery. This prototype brings those budgets into one set of rules to test whether their interaction creates meaningful choices or a persistent burden.
The feature is an optional prototype, disabled by default. This record checks its design notes against the current implementation. It includes no in-game screenshot taken with the prototype enabled, and the website’s combat demo does not represent this system.
One resource, two places to keep it
Embers are either loaded into health or held as wallet reserves. Level determines a baseline health segment; attributes determine how much additional ember health can be loaded. The baseline can also be damaged and exhausted. It is a recovery starting point after death or rest, not an invulnerable minimum.
| Event | Effect on health and embers |
|---|---|
| Pickups and execution rewards | Restore health first; overflow enters the wallet |
| Damage | Reduces current health and consumes loaded embers |
| Manual channeling | Deducts wallet embers to increase current health |
| Upgrades and purchases | Spend reserves that could otherwise fund recovery |
| Bonfire rest | Restores at least the baseline without creating a full ember pool |
| Death | Clears the wallet and loaded embers; respawning returns health to the baseline |
Restoring health before banking rewards connects aggression to the economy. The same drop provides recovery when wounded and more readily becomes an upgrade budget when healthy. Executions use the same acquisition path rather than a separate healing currency.
Channeling turns recovery into a judgment about time
Recovery no longer revolves around a flask’s fixed amount. Holding the channeling input transfers reserves into health. Releasing it or being interrupted stops the transfer; the amount already transferred remains. The question becomes how much the present opening allows rather than simply whether to drink a flask.
An early fixed transfer rate was too fast at low levels and would change its meaning as capacity grew. The current rate scales with loadable capacity, with a default of 25% per second and a minimum rate. The aim is a similar time scale across capacities. Actual recovery time still depends on the deficit, available reserves, rounding, and interruptions.
Red healing flasks are retired in this mode. Mana and blue flasks remain independent: combining health and money does not require combining every resource.
Bonfires and condensation separate a safety net from insurance
Free full ember recovery at a bonfire would continually create a recovery budget. Rest instead guarantees baseline health without erasing the economic effects of damage. Avoiding an immediate death spiral is the design goal; whether the baseline withstands ordinary enemies still needs damage tuning and playtesting.
Condensation turns wallet embers into fixed-value ingots stored in inventory. The current death handler preserves those ingots while permanently clearing uncondensed wallet reserves and loaded embers. There is no corpse-retrieval loop; the earlier description of recovering a dropped pool does not describe the current behavior.
Bonfire condensation starts with a 10% loss, reducible through sanity. Field condensation defaults to a 25% loss and an interruptible cast of approximately 2.5 seconds per ingot. These are prototype parameters rather than final balance decisions.
Field condensation is implemented. Once health is full, continuing to hold the same channeling input starts condensation. Each cast creates one ingot; holding longer begins another. This avoids a new low-frequency key and makes each additional interval a fresh risk. The higher field loss preserves a reason to return to the bonfire.
The health bar has to explain the resource’s situation
The prototype distinguishes baseline health, the burning segment, a capacity marker, and wallet overflow. Baseline health uses a deeper red rather than grey, which could imply an unavailable segment. Loaded embers use fire and heat movement; wallet reserves sit outside the bar to distinguish resources already protecting the player from those still in reserve.
These are interface decisions in the prototype, not in-game imagery demonstrated here. The knight’s chest mark already carries a separate sanity meaning and should not become another health bar merely to save an indicator.
What passed, and what remains unanswered
The existing regression record reports 478 passes and zero failures with the feature disabled. It supports preservation of the previous behavior when the feature is off, not the balance or enjoyment of the enabled prototype.
Playtesting must establish whether damage consuming the growth budget encourages excessive caution; whether damage reduction, now protecting both health and money, dominates other attributes; and whether condensation costs create choices rather than a compulsory chore before every excursion.
Unifying resources removes several independent items and rules while binding enemy damage, ember rewards, and progression more tightly together. Those relationships need testing in a limited prototype before the system becomes a default.