The player fantasy

Required

Every game starts with an idea: who the player is in the game, and how playing should feel. OpenGDD asks for that first, in a short fantasy block at the top of 01-overview.md. The block comes before any rule. Only a # title line, or an HTML comment, may come before it.

01-overview.md, directly after the title

You are a small forest spirit, a mote of light in a dying woodland.
You leap, cling, and glide through roots and ruins, rekindling what the decay took.
The forest grieves in silence, and answers every light you restore.
Feel: luminous, melancholy, hopeful.
NOT: grimdark, gory, hopeless.

The block has three parts:

one or more fantasy statements: what the player is and does, at most 280 characters together;
one Feel: line with three to five entries that describe how the game feels. Each entry is one word or one short phrase;
one NOT: line naming the tones, genres or directions the game must avoid. You may write Anti-references: instead of NOT:.

OpenGDD does not check the punctuation of a fantasy statement, so a statement in any language is checked the same way. A statement may continue over several lines. One statement is enough. If you add more, each should describe a different part of the experience: what the player does, what the world looks and sounds like, or what playing feels like. Extra statements help the builder with choices that the first statement does not settle.

You may write the block in any language. The labels Feel: and NOT: stay as they are, in English and with an ordinary colon. A line that starts Feel： with a full-width colon is not a Feel: line. Separate the entries with commas; 、, ，, ، and ・ count as commas too.

The builder uses the block to decide everything the rules leave open. The builder is the person, team or AI that turns your package into a game. In this example, decay should feel sad rather than horrifying, because the block says NOT: grimdark.

What the block is not:

Not marketing text. It is written for the builder.
Not a feature list. Later chapters define the features.
Not a place for references. Names of tuning values, runtime values, typed references such as tuning: or palette:, and links to other chapters are not allowed here. Plain numbers are allowed.

The validator (the checking tool) counts the characters and the feel entries for you. If anything else comes before the block, it reports the code FANTASY_POSITION.

Full rules: OpenGDD specification, §1a.