Afterglass

What you do

• Build. Carve rooms into the keep's cross-section. Every room you build has a twin in the Tain.
• Assign. People have skills and traits and work where you put them.
• Craft. Tallow becomes candles, sand and silver become mirrors, ore becomes arms, grain becomes bread.
• Defend. Walls, a gate and archers against raids. Ring the bell to send workers to their posts.
• Tend. Heal the wounded before they die badly, and hold funerals so grief can heal.

What goes wrong by day

• Raids by the Ashen Host, later with rams and ladders.
• Fire spreading through wooden rooms.
• Sickness in crowded quarters. The sick die Pale.
• Hunger and cold. Deaths from neglect wake Restless.
• The Lantern Church, which inspects the keep when too many souls are bound.

What last night gave you

• Dreams: rested, happier workers.
• Essence: healing and wards.
• Whispers: a bound shade behind an uncovered mirror coaches whoever works that room.
• Warnings: a black mirror shows tonight's threats and tomorrow's raid.

What you do

• Light. Place candles. The Unlit can't enter light, and every candle burns down by dawn.
• Work. Shades work the twin rooms (table below).
• Guide. Send shades where they're needed. Routes through the dark are dangerous.
• Ward. Spend essence to seal a mirror or a rift for the night.
• Hold. Shades fight at the edge of the light.
• Hush. Silence every shade: the Unlit pass by, but all work stops.

What comes up from the Deep

• Creepers: fast and weak; they snuff candles.
• Maws: break twin rooms. A broken twin haunts its day room.
• Weepers: seep into the Dreamwell and give the sleepers above nightmares.
• The Hollow: a new-moon boss that eats light.
• The Drowned: on rainy nights, up through the moat's twin.
• Your own dead gone wrong: Restless shades and Wraiths.

The rules

• Keep a shade and it works tomorrow night. Dread rises by one.
• Cover its mirror and the shade is released. The living gain remembrance, and anyone bonded to it is at peace instead of grieving.
• Restless shades with no mirror must be released, or they turn Wraith after three nights.
• Break a mirror in an emergency to free everyone in it at once. The room then has seven seasons of bad luck, after the old superstition about seven years.
• Name the dead in the ledger. Named shades fade half as fast.

Dread is the cost of keeping. At five, the Lantern Church sends an inspector. Covering mirrors after a death is a real mourning custom, kept in Jewish homes during shiva and in Victorian households.

The Rite is also the save point and the natural place to stop a session.

• Capacity. Your mirrors' combined slots cap how many shades you can bind. That cap is the main brake on farming death.
• Twins need a mirror. A twin room can only be worked if a mirror in its day room links the two.
• Uncovered mirrors are open both ways: whispers help the living by day, and if the twin room falls at night, something comes through.
• Cracked mirrors leak. Broken ones free their shades and curse the room.
• The black mirror is modeled on John Dee's obsidian scrying mirror, now in the British Museum.

Bonds

• Twinned work. A living worker and a bonded shade in a room and its twin both work a quarter faster.
• Grief. When someone dies, the people bonded to them work a fifth slower until a funeral or a release.
• At peace. Releasing a bonded shade turns grief into a lasting morale boost.
• Haunting. A bonded shade that turns Wraith goes after its own kin's room first.

Fading and remembrance

Shades lose memory every night. When it's gone they pass on by themselves: free, but you lose the worker. Chapel services and memorials by day make remembrance, which restores memory, and a name in the ledger halves the fade.

Aging (a cut candidate)

The living age by season and have children. By the late game, everyone you started with works nights. It's poignant but expensive; see the cut list.

• A year is four seasons of seven days. The chart above shows the day and night split; summer builds, winter survives.
• The seventh night of each season is a new moon. The Hollow comes up from the Deep.
• Raiders follow the harvest. Autumn brings sieges that camp outside for days.
• Plague summers hit crowded keeps.

• The eclipse, once a year. Day and night run at the same time for a few minutes: both rosters awake and both threat sets attacking. It's the set piece that proves the two halves belong together.
• The Long Night at the winter solstice ends each year: a double-length night and the year's hardest fight.
• The Inquisition can come in any season if dread stays high.

Technical spec

• Canvas: 180×320 portrait, scaled by whole numbers (6× on a 1080×1920 phone) and letterboxed otherwise.
• World: taller than the screen. The camera pans between keep and Tain, with 1× and 2× zoom so pixels stay square.
• Grid: floors are 18 px (16 of room, 2 of floor); walls are 2 px.
• People: 4×8 px, with two-frame walk and work cycles.
• Palette: the 32-color ENDESGA 32 by day. The Tain is the same art flipped and run through an eight-step violet ramp.
• Light: candlelight uses 4×4 ordered dithering, four light levels, and a slight flicker.
• Interface: drawn at twice the world's pixel density in a pixel font, so text stays sharp.

Cut list, in order

1. Aging and children
2. The Court of Shades
3. The Drowned
4. The eclipse
5. Two of the three endings

My estimate, not a measurement: a vertical slice in about ten weeks part-time, and 1.0 in 12 to 18 months part-time.