We call incursion what other games in the genre call a region or a generation. The name change isn't cosmetic — it comes with a lore rule I took seriously when designing the system: each incursion is a universe leaking through the Brecha, with one dominant physical law, its own palette, its own light profile, and its own way for the environment to decay. The map has to look affected by the same phenomenon that produced the esvas living in it — if the incursion is about heat with no source, the ground, the ruins, and the dust also have to carry that signal, not just the creatures.
The system underneath all this is called the "new incursion" cycle, and this is where I had to make the most expensive decision in long-term progression: what resets and what doesn't when you advance.
The absolute rule, written to have no exception
Nothing resets. Not your balance, not your Crédito-paid upgrades, not your progress through quadrantes and stations. A new incursion is not a trade in which you hand something back — it is content opening above what you already hold, harder and with a bigger reward. But there's a line I wrote as an absolute rule, no hedging, no "in most cases": esvas never reset. Level, drift, the entire collection, Registro state, desvio earned, equipped gear, professions, mastery — all of it carries across every incursion cycle without losing anything.
I knew, writing that rule, that it would cost me dearly in terms of balancing — because every new cycle has to give a reward good enough to be worth it, even when the player shows up already carrying a strong bolsa, built over months, tearing through entire incursions without losing power. It's easier to design progression when you can reset the player back to zero every now and then. I took that tool away from myself on purpose, because the alternative — making the player feel like their effort evaporated — is the kind of decision that kills long-term retention in any idle game, and I've watched it happen up close in other projects.
The anti-wall rule, and the number it carries
Every station boss needs at least two active outs besides just hitting harder: persistent HP that accumulates across attempts even when you fail, weakening missions that lower its defense before the fight, and an aggressive counter-pick that gives a 50% bonus to whoever builds the right class against it. This exists because telemetry from other games in the genre — plus a bit of my own gut instinct — convinced me that a boss with no alternative out turns into a wall, and a wall is where idle players quit silently, without complaining, just vanishing. The threshold I set to trigger an alert is a median time (p50) on a boss above 6 to 8 hours. If that happens, it's a sign the alternative out isn't actually working, not just existing on paper.
The decision that cost me months of thrown-away work, just to keep
Before any of these rules existed in writing, I already had finished maps — rasters, tilesets, collisions, entire layouts — from the old version of the game, back when it was still a fan game. I decided all of that was obsolete: nothing would be converted from raster to layer, no normal map would be extracted from old albedo, no coordinate would be preserved, no tile would be reused. Every incursion would be rebuilt natively in layers, from scratch. That wasn't a cheap decision — it meant throwing away months of functional art because it carried the wrong visual identity underneath, even after I swapped the names on the surface. Today, each incursion's pipeline defines, before any blockout even starts, the dominant physical law, the palette, the light profile, the materials, the geometry, the atmosphere, the environment's decay pattern, and the grammar of landmarks — all of it together, because a map that only swaps the palette while keeping the old geometry still carries the ghost of the game I abandoned.
What the account keeps, besides higher difficulty
Prestige is what the account accumulates after the level stops going up: a second ladder that does not make you stronger — it makes you better informed, better served and better recognised. There is no cycle and nothing resets: it accrues from the XP you earn past the cap, and the points buy reading, convenience and status. It never enters the damage formula.
What's still under review
What each node on that board does, and the screen where you pick them, are not published yet — those are the parts still open. What already holds is the shape itself: a second ladder that runs on top of the first, with no reset and no return to the starting point. I would rather ship that structure working today, and say plainly which parts are still open, than wait months on internal self-simulation that's never going to replace real data from a real player actually playing.