Patch Notes B0.23 - Project SABLE
Introducing Project SABLE
Hey friends, Pollution here! For the past month we have been quietly building our first official Craft game, and today it is ready for you to play. Introducing Project SABLE.
The story...
The year is 2090 and the world looks fine. Phones are faster, cities are bigger, and cybernetic implants barely earn a second glance. What the public never learns is that living things keep mutating into monsters without warning. These events are called Outbreaks. Nobody knows what causes them, and they are arriving faster every year. Standing between ordinary life and the impossible is Project SABLE, a secret bureau built by rival nations that agree on exactly one thing. The world must never find out.
You play the agents who hold that silence together. You hunt the monsters, bury the evidence, pay for the damage, and hand the morning news a better story. The work is brutal, the politics inside the bureau are worse, and the cover story is wearing thin. Every mission ends with the world calm, ordinary, and completely unaware, and your job is to keep it that way for one more day.
The game...
Project SABLE is an open world. We did not want to funnel everyone through the same tutorial town, so the game gives you a variety of starting locations spread across different countries. You can begin your career as an agent in Seoul, Toronto, Moscow, or wherever your story makes the most sense, and each start drops you into a different corner of the same living world. The world itself is flexible too. Your character can lean on cutting edge technology, tap into the mystic arts, or get by on nothing but plain skill and grit. There is no wrong door, and there is no single "right" build. You can shape your agent any way you want and the game will meet you there.
Fair warning, drawing the regions of Earth was one of the hardest parts of this whole project. Every continent, every ocean, every region got traced out so that the world map actually feels like a world. (Note from Pollution: This is actually my third time mapping out Earth for a game, feel free to copy my world so you don't have to!)
(Note from Pollution: The whole idea grew out of Dungeon Break, a world I built on Friends & Fables that covered the entire Earth. I loved that scale and wanted to make it again, but this time with a tighter premise, a secret bureau, and a world that has no idea how much danger it is in. Between the hundreds of characters, the locations, the lore files, and the wide variety of mutated creatures, there is a lot of world here to get lost in.)
How we got here...
The mechanics...
The game system was the part we thought about the longest. We wanted something original and easy to play. Something fun, where players never have to wait around to level up. Something customizable, and simple enough mechanically that both weak and strong AI models could handle it without tripping over the rules. As AI gets better, this won't matter as much, but we want to deliver the best experience possible to our players.
What we settled on is a system with no classes at all. You earn XP, and you spend it however you want. Increase your stats, buy new feats, or save it up for something big. Your build is never locked in. A player can start down the path of a martial artist and then, halfway through their journey, decide they want to dabble in the mystic arts. They can roleplay that turn with the AI, spending saved XP to raise their Wit and grow their Mana pool, discovering new mana feats as they purchase them. Or they can skip the roleplay entirely and just tell the AI how they want to spend the XP. The AI is flexible and will handle it however the player prefers, which is honestly the beauty of this game.
Everything runs on three stats. Might, Finesse, and Wit. We chose that over something more complex on purpose. Three stats are easy to keep track of, and there are fewer directions a player has to look when figuring out how they want to build. Balance came from a lot of iteration on how abilities, damage, and conditions scale against each other, so that a big flashy feat costs what it should and a cheap trick stays a cheap trick.
We also got rid of proficiencies entirely. In their place, feats and items manually increase your skills by a flat amount. That is easier to track, and it means there is no ceiling. If you want to keep growing a skill forever, you can as long as there are feats and items available to boost them. Spend XP on a feat that raises it and watch the number go up. It scratches the same itch as classic RPG skill trees, where you can look ahead, plan a build, and work toward it.
Feats have prerequisite growth too. You can upgrade a feat to a higher tier while keeping the lower tier version, so you can still cast the cheap version for less stamina, mana, or energy if you are fighting something weak. And if you are far enough along stat wise, there are rules that let you skip the prerequisites and jump straight to a higher tier feat by paying an added tax. Skipping the line costs you, but the option is there.
With builds this open, we needed a way to actually measure how strong everyone is. That is where Character Power comes in. Every character, NPC, and creature in the game has a power score calculated from their stats, health, and resources.
That number is what makes the encounter system work. When it is time for a fight, the game weighs the party's combined power against whatever is on the other side and builds the encounter to match as best as possible. It is not about making the game easy. It is about making sure a brand new agent does not walk out of their first briefing and straight into some end boss Ancient Black Dragon situation with no warning. Threats scale with you, the dangerous stuff stays dangerous, and when you do punch above your weight class, it is because you chose to.
Every one of these decisions came back to two kinds of flexibility. Flexibility for players, who should be able to build anything they can imagine. And flexibility for worldbuilders, because this system is built to be a foundation. Anyone can take it, build on top of it, and create their own skills and feats for their own worlds. Power scores and encounter balancing come along for the ride, so anything you create slots into the same scale as everything else. It is versatile enough to handle pretty much any genre you throw at it.
Above is a screenshot of the game system first draft from the first few days of working on this project.
The world...
The worldbuilding process was a constant back and forth of jotting down ideas and using AI to help push the direction further. The world is heavily inspired by Dungeon Break, a game on Friends & Fables that features the entire Earth, around 180 countries, each with their own city or multiple cities, and several points of interest that players can visit and explore. That game is built around the idea that Earth is being invaded by monsters from another dimension, where breaks in reality pour out creatures that threaten everyone's lives.
We wanted to create an original world with that idea as part of the inspiration for it. This time there is one secret organization, Project SABLE, and only a select group of elite heroes travel the globe saving lives and keeping the peace while they dig into the truth behind where these mutations and creatures are actually coming from. It started as just a fun idea, and it turned into another Earth sized project.
Above is a screenshot of the world building from the first few days of working on this project.
The art style...
We have always liked lineless, bold art, but after a lot of discussion we landed on an anime theme for this one. The goal was uniformity. When people see a piece of art from this game, we want them to know instantly that it came from Project SABLE.
Getting there took work. We tried a lot of different styles, and we mean a lot, before finally narrowing it down to one. Once that was locked, we chose a color palette. After that, we picked reference images and wrote special image instructions to keep every generation as controlled as possible. The result is a world where everything matches, everything is as it should be, and you can feel that a lot of thought and heart went into the content. That is the standard we want to show in everything we do.
Above is a screenshot of the art style choices from the first few days of working on this project.
Give it a play and let us know what you think. Thank you for playing Craft, and we will see you in the field.