Lost Phantom / Games / Winter Is Here / Prototype

Winter Is Here — playable prototype

The core loop, running. Build by day, hold by night. This exists to answer the design's open questions by playing them rather than arguing about them — above all: how does the wall rule actually feel?

The wall rule, live. Zombies path to your keep and will detour up to 3 tiles around anything you build. Cost them more than that — wall too far out, or box them in — and they stop pathing and start chewing through the wall in front of them. So a wall is not a "no", it is a toll: a short clever one redirects, a huge one just becomes a chew toy somewhere you did not want them standing. Try both and watch the difference. The tolerance is the single most load-bearing number in the design, and it is one line in engine.js.
1–6 walls — palisade, stone, reinforced, barbed wire, spiked, ice
QWEAS towers · Z mortar · X gatling · C searchlight
M mine (on an ore seam) · H house (+2 beds)
L lumber camp · O workshop · P storehouse · B barracks — each does a real job
U upgrade · T cycle targeting (click a tower first)
N skip to night — do not wait if you are ready
Space pause · R restart · Esc cancel · V sound on/off
Camera — the valley is 64x18 now and does not fit the screen: right/middle-drag to pan, wheel to zoom, arrow keys or edge-scroll, K finds the keep (it snaps home when a wave starts, and nudges to a breach you cannot see). Touch: drag pans, pinch zooms, long-press orders.
Weather rolls at every dawn — blizzards shorten tower range and slow workers; a cold snap stiffens the infected too. The HUD chip top-right says which.
Shop (side panel): frost crystals are the premium currency — the store is a mock that grants instantly; real IAP replaces one function.
Goals (side panel tab): nine run-long objectives with wood/iron rewards — never crystals, so paid stays paid and earned stays earned.
Drag (left) to box-select workers
Right-click to send them (a wall = repair it)
Click a tower, then right-click a zombie to focus fire

What this proves, and what it does not

Working: the day/night flip with production stopping dead at dusk, workers gathering wood then iron once a mine exists, the wood→mine→ore→upgrades chain, five tower types with three upgrade tiers each, three wall materials that visibly degrade as they are chewed (damage reads as missing material, not a health bar), zombie pathing with the detour rule, brutes and runners, and the RTS layer — box-select workers, order repairs, focus a tower on one target.

Not yet: zombies ignore workers and towers and only ever go for walls and the keep (decided: they only ever want the base — reach it and they besiege it, and when it falls you lose); there are no gates, so walls do not block your own workers (#6); waves are designed nights now — eight scripted, pulse-timed, hint-announced; a composer takes over after — rather than designed nights (#5); and nothing persists between runs (#8). Those are in the design doc's open questions because they are decisions, not omissions.
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