Systems Design · Playable Prototype
Survive
the Pale
the Pale
Concept
North Star
Overcome uncertainty through deliberate manipulation and find a path forward.
Survive the Pale is a top-down silhouette puzzle game where the player cannot fight. They can only observe, think, and act. Every level is a hostile ecosystem driven by deterministic creature AI. The player's only power is understanding it well enough to manipulate it.
The player is never in danger from what they don't know. They are in danger from what they cannot fully predict. Progress belongs to those who can read the world well enough to act anyway. Powerlessness is the design.
Project Highlight
Behavioural System Design
All creature behaviour is driven by a context-based state machine. The system is fully deterministic: same context, same output, every time. The player's power to manipulate the ecosystem depends entirely on this predictability.
01
Detection Radius
A circular physics body centred on the creature. Broadcasts the type of every entity inside it (player, creature, fruit, or corpse) to the State Decider.
02
State Decider
The priority engine. When multiple conditions are active simultaneously, it evaluates all of them against the creature's priority list and returns the highest-ranked state.
03
State Manager
Holds the current active state. Switches immediately when the Decider returns a different state. Activates the correct Behaviour Node and deactivates all others.
04
Behaviour Node
One script node per state. Runs its logic loop until the State Manager deactivates it or the task completes, then notifies the Manager to re-evaluate.
Priority Resolution: T2 Herbivore detects food and creature simultaneously
Active Conditions
Fruit detected
→
Opportunity
Creature detected
→
Flee
Priority List
1
Flee
2
Opportunity
3
Neutral
Result
Flee
Survival overrides hunger. Move into its detection radius while it's eating and it abandons the fruit entirely. A behaviour the player learns to exploit for misdirection.
Game Design Document
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