Starchild

About

Starchild (working title) is a feel prototype for a rhythm game that refuses almost everything the genre usually does. There are no meters, no icons, no grades, no judgment text — nothing gamified ever reaches the player-facing build. Instead, you lean and pulse with the music, and the world answers: the picture desaturates and blurs as you drift out of sync, the audio gradient thins, and if you fall far enough you disintegrate — then reintegrate seamlessly at the next musical entry point, without a hard cut, without losing the trance.

The prototype exists to prove exactly three things: that lean + pulse input feels good at low intensity, that the disintegration/reintegration failure loop preserves flow, and that input latency is measured and compensated rather than wished away.

Design Rules

• The audio clock is the master clock. Nothing owns time except the Conductor. Visuals, input windows, and haptics all hang off the music.
• The music never waits for you. No dynamic restructuring, no rubber-banding — vertical mixing only, across a six-bus stem layout.
• Failure is diegetic. Falling out of coherence desaturates and dissolves the world; recovery re-enters only on manifest-defined re-entry points, so the seam is musically invisible.
• Feel is human-judged. The production plan tags every milestone as agent-verifiable, human-verifiable, or both — and feel items are never self-certified.

Technical Notes

• Engine: Flint (Rust, wgpu, Rhai) as a git subtree, following the Float pattern
• Audio: Kira, with a sample-tick master clock, per-bus DSP, and lossless stems; suite manifests in TOML define the stem/coherence contract
• Haptics: rumble entrainment driven directly over XInput, mapped to the same coherence scalar as the visuals
• Process: 27+ architecture decision records, golden fixtures as ground truth, and a session-replay format for offline feel analysis