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
Credit-paid upgrades reset. Your balance resets. Your progress through quadrantes and stations resets — and comes back a tier higher, harder and with a bigger reward, because otherwise "new incursion" would just mean repeating the same thing under a different name. 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 cycle gives you, besides higher difficulty
Prestige Points feed a permanent skill tree, separate from the bolsa — quality-of-life stuff and horizontal bonuses that also carry across cycles. Each new cycle also rolls a Cycle Relic, one of three modifiers that changes how that specific cycle plays, and grants a visible prestige rank that works as a social marker of how much time you've invested in the game. There's also a partial-skip mechanism: after beating a progression milestone a certain number of times, you can clear it automatically for a small cost instead of repeating it by hand — an acknowledgment that "doing it again for the fifth time" isn't a challenge, it's friction.
What's still under review
The cap on the permanent buff each cycle grants has a defined soft cap, but it's still up for revision — I don't have enough beta data to know if the current cap is too generous or too tight after three or four cycles in a row. And the activation cost of the partial skip scales with a ceiling I also haven't finished calibrating. I'd rather ship the structure working today, with those two numbers flagged as pending, than wait months for internal self-simulation that's never going to replace real data from a real player actually playing.