Finally!

I've been working on this game for a while now, and I kept telling myself "one more feature, then I'll share it." That loop doesn't end on its own, so I'm ending it here.

Pattern Ledger is playable. Not finished, not polished, but playable. You can pick a character, learn the rules from an in-game mentor, fight through a district of encounters, and either win or lose. The core is there.

Here's what the last stretch looked like, if you're curious.

The Binding Circle

The central mechanic is a 12-position circular board where obligations appear as marks. You play cards to resolve them. Simple idea, surprisingly hard to make readable. I went through maybe five versions of the layout before landing on something where you can actually tell at a glance what's urgent and what can wait. It's still not perfect, but it works.

Nine characters, nine problems

Every character started as a mechanical archetype: this one heals, this one draws extra cards, this one punishes escalation. That's fine for a prototype. But the more I wrote their backstories, the more the mechanics started bending toward who they are as people. The Cultivator doesn't heal because healers are a class; she heals because she's patient and believes in tending things slowly. The Reflector doesn't copy effects because mirrors are cool; he copies them because he's never been sure which version of himself is real.

I don't know if players will feel any of that. But it matters to me that it's there.

Valthek

The tutorial is built around a character named Valthek Luminspire, your mentor. He walks you through your first case, explains the rules, and judges you a little. I spent way too long on his dialogue. He's not a friendly tutorial wizard. He's tired, precise, and skeptical that you'll amount to anything. I like him. I hope you do too, or at least find him interesting enough to keep clicking.

What's next

Mostly: listening. This is the first time anyone outside my head gets to touch this thing, and I genuinely don't know what's going to confuse people, what's going to click, and what's going to fall flat. So if you play it, even for five minutes, tell me what happened. Comments here are great. Screenshots of where you got stuck are even better.

I'll be working on balance, encounter variety, and sound design over the coming weeks. But the direction depends a lot on what I hear back.

Thanks for giving it a shot.