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Mini-games — Golem Hollow, the first spell, and things placed on the ground

repo: land-of-lor (game/ — director, world, shell, content; tools/hub-ui; builder/; site/) · depends on: building-the-gameground-look-and-levelsworld-map-and-portals

Where this stands (2026-09-18)

Everything is live on spellgrove.com and APK v29 and signed off: the seven pieces built from Kris’s 2026-09-08 voice prompt, then eight more rounds from his play through 2026-09-09 — the golems walk, bodies block and fight, the update notice, the win and the Life Seed, the crystals and the pickup flight, the cards, the molten volcano, the nudge toward the tower (docs/handoff/mini-games.md). Kris played Golem Hollow through on the web build and the phone; the last review flag was cleared by the 2026-09-13 board sweep. Ideas held, not started: mini-games across several Areas, the spell editor, and a per-Area miniGame block (goal, reward, timings, dialogue) in place of the constants the win reads today. 2026-09-15 (Kris, checked by Claude): every player in an Area is registered as a flow-field target and their field is re-queued on each cell change, though only the Stage-4 wanderer hunts players and no live creature does — golems walk to the tree only. It is budgeted (2 ms a tick, pathfind_budget_usec), so it cannot slow the tick, but the FIFO can hold the tree’s recompute back a few ticks after a tower is placed while many players are moving. Held until the first creature that hunts players arrives: then register players as targets only where a kind targets them (_tick_creatures, area_server.gd). 2026-09-18 — the Village’s wanderer is a witch (Rah’s call: a witch, not a wizard). A new kind witch beside wizard — a crooked pointed hat, a gnarled staff, a dark plum robe, a slight stoop (a new general kind field, hinged at the hips so it composes with the blow and the jump), the same ambling and the same frog. She holds the wizard’s cell; the wizard stays in the table, unplaced, for later. Names now clear hats (the label measures the hat’s real top; the wizard’s used to run through his). The frog casts a shadow its own size (every creature’s blob now follows its model), croaks every 3–8 s (the pale ball under its chin is the throat: it fills as the head tips back, then settles) and hops cell to cell on one arc per move instead of sliding. docs/handoff/witch-and-frog.md. The editor palette still shows a letter for her, as for the wizard (no model of her own). No open issues. Past task files (to 2026-09-13): workshop/historic-docs/epics/mini-games/tasks/.

What this is

Kris, by voice, 2026-09-08 — one long prompt, planned in full before a line was written (the plan is the seven tasks here). His words, lightly ordered:

We’re introducing the first — I’m going to use the term mini-game. A mini-game is kind of just another term for an area, or potentially two … a mini-game can go across multiple areas, but the one we’re making will just be in the one area.

In this mini-game we’re going to have our first spell, so we need the concept of spells built in. The first spell is the Lightning Tower spell. A spell requires a number of elements in sequence, and then it results in the creation of something. The recipe is one ice crystal, then three stone, then one fire crystal.

In the area editor, in addition to painting the ground, I also want to place items — a tab for elements and a tab for spells.

All creatures, including the players, need a health bar, a speed, a nature (one of the eight), an attack strength, a defence strength and an attack speed — all quite low.

A new area, about half the size of the Village. In one corner a spawn point spawning stone golems that pathfind to a target the player must defend. A relatively large volcano that every now and again explodes out fire crystals onto the ground around it, at most one per cell — and make the volcano look like a volcano when cells stack. An area of ice whose ground generates ice crystals the way grass generates dirt.

The spell is on the ground as a scroll. If you haven’t got it, it appears there; once you have it, it doesn’t. It’s not an item in the world. The first time you get a new element or spell — dirt included — a “you got” animation and the card.

Vocabulary

• Mini-game — a kind of Area (areaType: "mini_game") with its own rules and a start and an end. One Area today; a later mini-game may span several linked Areas (an area group), so nothing here assumes the word means one grid.
• Spell — a recipe: an ordered list of elements that makes one complex item. Authored data (game/shell/spells.js), not made by players yet. A player owns a spell once they have found its scroll.
• Placed thing — something an author put on a cell in the area editor: a stack of an element, a spell scroll, an object. game/content/areas/<slug>.placed.json, loaded and published exactly like the ground.
• Kind — a type of complex item (player, stone golem, lightning tower, grove tree, spawn point) with its stats and model, in game/shell/kinds.js.

Decisions taken with Kris (voice, 2026-09-08)

1. The target the golems attack is the Grove Tree, a young tree at the heart of the hollow (the game is Spellgrove; a seed-grown tree is on the complex-items list). The alternative was a cauldron.
2. When the tree falls the hollow resets a few seconds later — golems and towers gone, the placed stone and the tree restored. No win condition yet; a count of golems stopped.
3. A golem drops one Stone when it dies.
4. The element Stone is Mountain over Earth; the ground family that shared the name is now Flagstone.
5. Ice Crystal is Water over Thunder, the hexagram already drawn as the Ice ground, which grows ice crystals one per cell.
6. Casting is one tap on the spell in the Spells tab once you hold the ingredients; the tower lands on the cell in front of you, and shoots lightning at golems within a few cells.

Scope

Tasks 001–007, in build order: data and vocabulary; placed things and the editor; stats and health on everything; the mini-game loop; spells (owning, finding, casting, the reveal); the volcano and the ice; Golem Hollow itself, the live verifier and the deploy.

Non-goals (this epic, this round)

Mini-games across several Areas; the spell editor and the cauldron (spell-crafting-interface stays open); per-Area win/reward parameters on the properties page (the win reads the spawn point’s kind and placement, the reward the tree’s kind — see the handoff’s “How generic”). Built later the same day, after Kris’s first walks: players taking damage (knocked down, back at their arrival), towers being attacked, the win at thirty golems with the Life Seed, a per-Area ground-item cap, the in-client “update in progress” notice.

Relevant docs

• docs/specs/CORE_ENTITIES.md — Kris’s “Recipes … I almost called this Spells” note, and Complex Item / Tower / Spawn Point as the named children.
• docs/thought-specs/sixty-four-hexagrams-as-base-items-and-spell-slots.md — the first ingredient decides what a spell makes; 64 kinds of spell.
• battle-arena-poc/overview.md — “a readiness indicator and a trigger, not a workbench”; movement is gathering; ingredients are the arena’s resource.
• game/world/client/items/README.md — the ground-generated item template this extends.
• docs/handoff/mini-games.md — the build handoff (written with 007).

Deliverables (1)

• #25 — Golem Hollow — the first mini-game (2026-09-09)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:mini-games (private repository — sign-in required). The dated Where this stands section above names the open ones. The task files that carried this epic until 2026-09-13 are kept in the repo: task files to 2026-09-13 .

Also available as raw markdown.