Eve Of Midnight

Lore and other documents for the Eve of Midnight game

Project maintained by theomenden Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Eve of Midnight: Reimagine Calamity - Game Flow Overview

Updated for Spec 026 (Canonical Turn Loop & Action Meter). Eve of Midnight is a single-player, pixel-art roguelike collectible card game: you guide a roster of three heroes through a run of matches against AI Encounters. There is no multiplayer. The numbers here are BALANCE placeholders.

The run

A run is a sequence of matches traversed across a generated run map of worlds and floors. Your persistent state lives on the Run: your three-hero roster (with permadeath), your owned-card deck, your wallet and the bias rates that steer the AI, and the deterministic run seed. Between matches you visit Stores, Forges, and Sanctums that grow that state.

You lose the run when your hero roster reaches zero survivors — permadeath is forever.
You win the run by clearing the final world’s boss.

Heroes carry their growth (Ambition, Morality, archetypes, abilities) from match to match; a hero that falls in one match is gone for the rest of the run.

A match

A match pits your surviving heroes against an Encounter (one or more enemies). It runs as a sequence of rounds, where a round is your turn followed by the Encounter’s turn — you go first. Each turn runs the same four-phase cycle:

Beginning → Main → Combat → End

Beginning — reset the acting side’s budget (your Action Meter from your active hero’s Ambition; the Encounter’s Initiative from the floor formula) and resolve start-of-turn triggers.
Main — metered non-combat actions (play a support, deploy a character, activate an ability), each on the Stack with the opponent’s response window.
Combat — metered attack declarations, each lowered to an effect on the Stack.
End — end-of-turn triggers, persistent-effect ticks, the outcome check, and (on your turn) topping your hand back up toward 5.

The full per-turn detail lives in the Player Turn Structure; the tempo system lives in The Action Meter.

Win / loss

You win the match by defeating the Encounter (all enemies down).
You lose the match when all three of your heroes are dead. Any heroes that fell are recorded as fallen on the Run, removing them from the roster for the rest of the run.

Gameplay principles

Legible tempo. The Action Meter caps how much you do per turn without per-card bookkeeping — capacity from Ambition, action costs biased by Morality, a full reset each turn, and an empty-meter auto-advance.
Meaningful permadeath. Three heroes, each a life lane; losing one is a real, run-long setback, and losing all three ends the match.
Resolution-based integrity. Every action goes on a last-in-first-out Stack with response windows, so the game state never tears and reactions are always possible (and free) on the opponent’s turn.