Game design document · v1 · June 2026
A cozy movie-studio sandbox where every choice you make ends up on screen — and the screen is 16-bit.
01 · Vision
You are the director-producer of a small studio on the edge of a pixel-art Hollywood. Each production is a short, self-contained run: develop a script, cast actors, build sets, shoot scenes, cut the footage — and at the end, watch a trailer that is literally assembled from the choices you made. Then the lights come up, the reviews roll in, and you bank the earnings toward your next, slightly more ambitious picture.
The tone of any given movie is the player's to set — the game supplies earnest, campy, gritty, and weird raw material in equal measure, and reflects whatever the player leans into. There are no fail states. A flop isn't a game over; it's a funny review and a smaller check. The career, like the player's taste, only accumulates.
The trailer is not a score screen — it is built shot-by-shot from the player's script, cast, sets, takes, and edit. Choices are expressive first, statistical second.
No bankruptcy, no firing, no timers that hurt. Bad outcomes resolve as comedy and smaller rewards, never as lost progress.
One movie fits in a sitting. The studio — roster, backlot, equipment, reputation — persists and grows across many movies.
Actors, set palettes, props, cameras, music, and genres are collectibles. New pieces invite remixing, not power creep.
02 · The production pipeline
Each phase is one screen, one decision space, and one kind of data it adds to the production record. Phases are sequential in a run; finished phases can be revisited read-only ("dailies").
Two paths to a script. Write it: pick a genre, a premise card, and three beats (setup → twist → finale); an LLM drafts the scene descriptions and dialog lines from those choices, and every line is editable in place — the draft is a starting point, the player is the author. Buy it: the Screenwriters' Market offers 3 rotating finished scripts with quirky loglines — faster, cheaper in effort, but the beats are fixed.
→ adds Script { scenes, roles, locations, toneTags } to the record
Headshots on a corkboard: your persistent roster plus a few open-audition walk-ins. Each actor has four stats (Drama, Comedy, Action, Charm), one Quirk, a salary, and a distinctive pixel portrait and sprite. Drag headshots onto the script's role cards.
→ adds CastAssignment { role → actor } per role
For each required location, pick a backdrop from your unlocked palettes (alley, saloon, spaceship bridge, suburban kitchen…) and place props on a small tile-grid stage. The set you dress is rendered verbatim behind the actors in the trailer — this phase is pure P1.
→ adds SetPlan { backdrop, props[] } per location
02 · The production pipeline (cont.)
The heart of the run. Scene by scene, you see your actual set with your actual cast standing on it, and you direct: choose blocking (staging options derived from the beat), camera (wide / close-up / dutch / slow zoom — gated by equipment owned), and a direction note ("play it straight," "ham it up," "improvise"). Then call action and watch a 3-second pixel preview of the take.
→ adds Take { scene, blocking, camera, direction, quality, toneTags } per scene (best kept take)
A horizontal timeline of your kept takes. Reorder them, set the pacing (languid / steady / frantic — controls cut length), pick a music track, write the title card and the one-line tagline, choose a transition style (hard cut / fade / star-wipe).
→ adds Cut { order[], pacing, musicId, titleCard, tagline, transition }
Curtains part; the trailer plays in a pixel movie palace with a tiny audience silhouette row. Afterward: two or three generated capsule reviews that react to your specific choices, a box-office number, fan gains by genre, and the unlock reel (new actor headshot, prop pack, music track…).
→ adds Release { reviews[], boxOffice, fanGains, unlocks[] } · closes the run
03 · The payoff machine
The trailer generator is the game's signature system and the thing to prove first. It is deliberately deterministic: a pure function from the production record to a ~45-second piece of motion.
Technically this is a sequenced set of DOM/canvas tableaus — no video encoding, fully replayable, and later shareable as a standalone page. Determinism means the same record always replays the same trailer, which makes the Vault cheap and the system debuggable.
Tone is the player-driven flavor layer. Nearly every choice carries 0–2 tone tags; the movie's profile is just the tally.
Randomness lives in exactly three places, all small: the take-quality dice roll (±1 step), quirk event triggers during shooting, and the weekly stock of the Screenwriters' Market and open auditions. Everything else — notably the trailer itself — is fully determined by player choices.
04 · Systems on paper
One plain-data object accumulates through the run and fully determines the premiere. This is the engineering spine — every screen reads and writes it, and the trailer renderer consumes it.
| Entity | Shape (abridged) | Written by |
|---|---|---|
| Script | genre, toneTags[], scenes[], roles[], locations[] | Development |
| Scene | beat, locationId, roleIds[], subtitleLine | Development |
| Actor | name, portrait, sprite, stats{dra,com,act,chm}, quirk, salary | roster (persistent) |
| CastAssignment | roleId → actorId | Casting |
| SetPlan | locationId, backdropId, props[]{propId, x, y} | Set building |
| Take | sceneId, blocking, camera, direction, quality, toneTags[] | Shooting |
| Cut | takeOrder[], pacing, musicId, titleCard, tagline, transition | Editing |
| Release | reviews[], boxOffice, fanGains{genre: n}, unlocks[] | Premiere (derived) |
| Resource | What it does | Cozy guarantee |
|---|---|---|
| Cash | Per-production budget: salaries, props, extra shooting days. Earned at the box office. | Floor budget every run; broke = scrappy, never stuck. |
| Reputation | Career level. Gates unlock tiers, bigger budgets, fancier walk-ins at auditions. | Only goes up — even flops teach. |
| Fans | Per-genre audience. Multiplies box office in that genre; nudges market scripts toward what you make. | Never decays. |
05 · Look, then build order
Dusk-purple Hollywood with marquee gold: clean chunky pixels (no CRT filter), 32–48 px character sprites, painted-looking dithered backdrops, and big readable UI. Pixel display type for titles and signage; a humanist sans for body UI so menus never strain.
Clickable low-fi walkthrough of all seven screens (Lot + six phases) to pressure-test the flow before any pixels are pushed.
One fixed script → cast 2 roles from 6 actors → shoot 3 scenes (blocking + camera + direction) → auto-edit → trailer plays. No sets phase (pre-dressed), no economy. If watching the trailer is delightful, the game works.
Edit Bay (reorder, pacing, music, title cards) and the Writers' Room / Screenwriters' Market. The run becomes expressive end-to-end.
Backdrop choice + prop placement on the tile stage, rendered into the trailer. Heaviest art lift, so it waits until the pipeline is proven.
Studio Lot hub, persistence, economy, unlock reel, the Vault. Short runs become a long arc.
Quirk events, reviews v2, poster generator, shareable trailers, Bijou upgrades.