Truespeak Studio

What a spell or hazard leaves behind

Fire, oil and ice on the ground, fog, walls and auras above it, each defined once: how long it lasts, what it does to whoever stands in it, and what it becomes when fire, water or another area reaches it. Triggers place areas, formulas ask about them, and Truespeak Studio checks every definition against the rest.

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How it's set up

Rules › Areas

Oil · Surface

Lifetime
Until Removed
Damage Type: Fire
Result: Fire

Fire · Surface

Lifetime
Fixed Duration, 3 turns
Area Arrives: Water
Result: Steam

Steam · Volume

Lifetime
Fixed Duration, 2 turns
End-of-Life Result
Water
Each interaction row sits on the area it changes: what reaches it, and what it becomes. Fire damage on any part of the oil sets the whole slick burning for three turns. Water poured on the fire turns those cells to steam, a cloud above the ground that settles back as water two turns later.

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Surfaces and volumes

An area is a lasting region of the world, placed by a spell, a trap or a hazard, that acts on whoever stands in it. A surface lies on the ground, such as oil, water, ice or caltrops. A volume fills the space above it, such as fog, a wall of fire or an aura that moves with a character.

  • Lifetimes until something removes it, for a set number of turns, as long as the effect that placed it lasts, or for good, as with lava
  • Something left behind when it ends, such as water where steam was, or ash after a fire
  • Fog that hides whoever is inside, smoke that blocks a line of sight, ground that costs more to cross, and walls nobody walks through
  • One area to a cell, or several sharing one, such as a web under grease, with each area deciding what happens when another arrives

How it's set up

Rules › Areas

Fog · Volume

Lifetime
Fixed Duration, 10 turns
Blocks Sight Through
On
Obscures Inside
On

Caltrops · Surface

Lifetime
Until Removed
Cost Multiplier
2
No line of sight passes through the fog, and nobody inside it can be seen; it lifts after ten turns. Crossing the caltrops costs twice the movement, and they stay until something removes them. Only a volume can block sight.

Area effects

Actions, reactions and timed triggers place areas with a Create Area effect, in the footprint of their own area targeting. Remove Area, Move Area and Transform Area clear them, move them or change what they are.

  • Fixed where it lands, or moving with whoever placed it or with another creature, such as an aura
  • Areas aimed at empty ground too, so grease still lands in an empty doorway and fire still lights oil nobody stands in
  • Traps and thrown flasks that place an area from an item
  • Removal by area or by tag, inside the effect's own area, wherever its user placed them, or everywhere

How it's set up

Rules › Triggers

Action

Smoke Screen

Targeting

Area
Circle
Radius
10
Max Range
30

Effects

Create Area
Smoke, Anchor Fixed Point
Lifetime Override
LEVEL
The smoke fills a circle of radius 10, placed up to 30 away from the character, and stays where it lands. It lasts as many turns as the character's level, in place of the Fixed Duration that Smoke sets for itself, so another action can place the same smoke for longer.

Interactions

Each area has an interaction table. A row names a stimulus, such as a damage type, another area arriving, sharing the cell or lying beside it, or a tag a spell applies, and what the area becomes, or that it is gone. Water and fire make steam both ways, fire damage on water or water poured on fire, and rows may loop: water freezes to ice, and ice thaws back to water.

  • The whole set drawn under the table as a graph, your element wheel, so you see where a loop closes and which area leads nowhere
  • A burst at the moment of change, such as a poison cloud that explodes when fire reaches it and hurts everyone inside
  • A row for one area beats a row for its tag, so a general rule can have exceptions

How it's set up

Rules › Areas

Water · Surface

Damage Type: Fire
Result: Steam
Damage Type: Cold
Result: Ice
Damage Type: Lightning
Result: Electrified Water

Fire · Surface

Area Arrives: Water
Result: Steam
Transform Tag: Bless
Result: Blessed Fire
Transform Tag: Quench
No result: it goes out
Each side of a meeting is written on the area already there: Water says what fire does to it, and Fire what water does. Bless and Quench are tags that a spell's Transform Area effect applies to the areas it covers.

Spread

Spread is written on the fuel, never on the fire: an oil slick's interaction rows say what happens when fire reaches it. Each row also says how far the change goes at once, through every connected cell of the slick or one ring of cells at a time.

  • Fire that runs through a whole slick, even one that two characters poured
  • A fire that goes out behind its front, each ring of it burning on its own clock
  • Fire that crosses only the areas that say they catch, never bare ground
  • A fire lit on someone else's oil is yours, and so is the damage it deals

How it's set up

Rules › Areas

Surface

Oil

Lifetime and End

Lifetime
Until Removed

Cadence and Decay

Cadence
Interval, 1

Interactions

Damage Type: Fire
Result: Fire, Connected: the whole slick at once
Adjacent: Fire
Result: Fire, Cell: one ring at a time
Fire damage that touches any part of the slick lights all of it. Fire that reaches its edge creeps in instead, a ring of cells each turn, the oil's own cadence, and stops where the oil ends.

Cadence, decay and drift

Each area runs on a clock of its own, its cadence: at the start of its owner's turn, or every few turns. On that clock it can lose strength, and a cloud can drift with the wind or on a bearing you set, such as away from whoever placed it, and break up once the wind is strong enough.

  • Values of its own, set when it is placed, such as a fog's strength rolled with dice or taken from whoever placed it
  • Decay that drains one of those values each cadence, so a cloud thins out and its formulas see how strong it still is
  • A rolled decay, for a fire with a chance each turn to burn out
  • Wind your engine reports, so a cloud goes where the weather takes it

How it's set up

Rules › Areas

Volume

Poison Fog

Instance Currencies

Intensity
Default seed formula 1d4 + 2

Cadence and Decay

Cadence
Interval, 1
Decay Currency
Intensity
Decay Rate
1

Drift / Dispersal

Drift
Wind
Wind speed at least
20, Ends after (turns) 1
Each fog starts with 3 to 6 Intensity and loses 1 a turn; Intensity is a currency with a floor of 0, and the fog ends when it gets there. It drifts wherever the wind blows, and a wind of 20 or more breaks it up a turn later. Wind speed is in your project's distance unit per turn.

Occupancy and area events

Each area acts on the creatures inside it through passives that hold while they stay and reactions to what happens there. The area hosts both, so a cloud's poison and how strong it still is live on the cloud, not on every creature that might walk in.

  • Passives such as slower movement in oil, which end the moment a creature steps out
  • Reactions when a creature enters, leaves, crosses a cell, starts or ends its turn inside, when the area ticks, or when it turns into another
  • Occupants you choose among the owner, allies, enemies and neutrals, minus creatures with a tag such as Flying
  • Statuses that stay with the creature, such as Burning that lasts its full time after the fire goes out

How it's set up

Rules › Areas, Rules › Triggers

Poison Fog · Volume

Reactions
Choking

Choking · Reaction

Listen Events
The area's tick, an event the engine sends
Targeting
Event Subject: the creature inside

Effects

Modify Currency
HP: TARGET_HP - INTENSITY, damage type Poison
Each turn the fog ticks, every creature inside loses HP equal to its Intensity, so a thinning fog hurts less. In an area's reactions a bare name reads the area: INTENSITY is the fog's own, and TARGET_HP is the HP of the creature inside.

Area queries

Formulas and conditions can ask about areas the way they ask about tags: in an action's availability, a passive's condition, an effect's value or a quest objective. Each question names an area or an area tag, and renaming an area updates every formula that asks about it.

  • Whether a creature stands in an area, or in it or next to it
  • The same questions about a target, such as a bonus only for allies standing in a cloud
  • How many areas of a kind are left anywhere in the world, so a quest step can wait until every fire is out

How it's set up

Rules › Triggers, Plot › Quests

Light an Arrow · Action

Available
NEAR_AREA(FIRE) == 1
Modify Item
Flaming, on the arrow

Smoke Cover · Passive

Condition
IN_AREA(SMOKE) == 1
Overlay Taxonomy Tag
Hidden

Put Out the Fires · Objective

Completion Condition
AREA_COUNT(FIRE) == 0
FIRE and SMOKE are area tags. NEAR_AREA is 1 when the character stands in or right beside an area with the tag, so an archer standing beside a fire can light an arrow in it. IN_AREA is 1 only inside: in smoke, the character is Hidden. AREA_COUNT counts those areas anywhere in the world, so the objective completes once no fire is left, however it went out.

Not in areas yet

The checks read your areas as you wrote them, and your engine plays them out: the cells, the wind and who stands where are its part. The quest preview doesn't model space, so area queries read 0 there. Playing out a fight, or a scenario from start to finish, before any engine exists is planned work, and so is export to your engine.

See the roadmap

  • Combat, economy and probability analysis

    Planned

    Estimates of encounter difficulty, of the currency players can have at each stage of the game, and of the odds of passing the checks the main story depends on.

  • Scenario playthrough simulation

    Planned

    Your whole game played through without graphics, automatically or step by step by you, to find what no run reaches and where a run gets stuck. Today, previews step through one conversation, quest or story at a time.

  • Engine export adapters

    Planned

    Built-in exporters for Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot and RPG Maker, plus generic JSON, XML and custom formats. Today, you load the project's files into your engine with code of your own.

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