# Thanatograph ## Core Idea A brutally difficult dungeon crawler with permadeath where every failed attempt becomes part of the next run. When you die, the dungeon resets, but your previous self returns as an **echo**: a real-time reenactment of your past attempt. That echo follows the same route, fights the same battles, uses the same gear, and does everything it can to reach the exact eventuality where it died. You do not gain permanent stats. You gain history. The dungeon becomes increasingly haunted by your own failures. ## Prior Art Positioning The game belongs near time-clone games, corpse-recovery games, and permadeath dungeon crawlers, but the intended identity is distinct. This is not a time-rewind puzzle game. This is not “be your own teammate” as a power fantasy. This is not a persistent-world roguelike where old changes accumulate. The unique hook is: **Every death creates a doomed actor trying to reach the death-event that created it.** The player does not create clones intentionally. Failure creates them. Each echo is useful, dangerous, and emotionally legible because it represents something the player actually did. ## Core Hook **You crawl the dungeon alongside your past lives.** Past selves can scout ahead, distract enemies, trigger traps, soften bosses, reveal routes, or lead you to lost gear. They are not abstract ghosts or UI replays. They are physical actors in the dungeon, moving in real time, vulnerable to the same dangers as you. The player’s main skill is learning how to route around, exploit, protect, or avoid previous attempts. ## Run Structure Each run starts from the dungeon entrance. The dungeon itself resets: enemies, traps, doors, bosses, and loot sources return to their initial state. The only things that persist are: - echoes of past lives - death-events - recoverable corpses and gear - the player’s knowledge of routes and timing The dungeon remains understandable while the timeline grows more haunted. ## Echo Behavior An echo is mostly deterministic. It attempts to repeat the previous run exactly, but can react locally if the current world interferes. If blocked, attacked, displaced, or saved, it tries to recover and continue toward its recorded fate. Its primary goal is: **reach the place and situation where it originally died.** If it dies before then, it dies. That echo’s story ends. If it reaches its original death point but no longer dies, it resolves into one of three outcomes: 1. **Evaporates** — the echo vanishes, its timeline complete. 2. **Corrupts** — the echo becomes hostile and hunts the real player. 3. **Allies** — the echo joins the player temporarily. Evaporation and corruption should be more common than alliance. Allied echoes should feel rare and exciting, not something the player can farm. ## Loot and Gear Loot is random per live run. Chests, elites, bosses, and rare rooms can produce different rewards each attempt. However, when a player dies, the gear they were carrying is recorded as part of that death-event. On future runs, the echo uses **remembered gear**. It can swing the sword it found, wear the armor it equipped, and drink the potion it used in the original run. But that gear is not a physical duplicate sitting in the dungeon from the start. The remembered gear becomes recoverable only when the echo reaches its corpse/death-event, dies again, corrupts, allies, or otherwise resolves. This creates the central loot tension: Do you follow your echo to reclaim what it carried? Do you protect it so it survives? Do you let it die because the corpse is more valuable than the echo? Do you risk a corruption roll to potentially gain an ally or recover better gear? Echoes can fight real enemies and affect the current run, but they do not consume current-run loot. If an echo kills an elite, the live world may drop loot for the real player. The echo continues using the gear it remembers from its own timeline. This keeps gear from duplicating uncontrollably while preserving the fantasy that each past self is replaying the run that actually happened. ## Player Experience The game should feel tense, readable, and systemic. The player is not solving timelines from a menu. They are physically navigating the dungeon in real time, watching old decisions play out around them. The fantasy is: **“I know what I did last time. Can I use it?”** A bad run may become useful later. A retreat might create a future decoy. A doomed boss attempt might soften the boss for the next self. A greedy loot run might create a dangerous corpse deep in the dungeon. Every death adds possibility, but also danger. ## Scope Target The first version should be small: - one dungeon - one character - real-time movement and combat - deterministic input recording/replay - echo pathing with local recovery - corpse and gear recovery - random loot per live run - 3–5 enemy types - 1 boss - simple echo resolution roll - no timeline scrubbing - no full world persistence - no complex narrative system The goal is not to build a huge roguelike. The goal is to make the central mechanic feel incredible. ## Design Pillars **Death creates actors, not upgrades.** Past lives become part of the dungeon. **The dungeon resets; history does not.** The world stays understandable while death-events accumulate. **Echoes reenact failure.** Each past self is trying to reach the fate that created it. **Gear belongs to death-events.** Loot is not duplicated freely. Remembered gear becomes real again through corpses and echo resolution. **Past selves are useful, dangerous, and unreliable.** They can scout, distract, die, corrupt, vanish, or rarely ally. **The player arrives in time.** There is no timeline editor. The drama comes from physically reaching the right place at the right moment. **Failure is authored by the player.** Every echo is a record of something the player actually did.