fog
A small rule I wrote into the fog of war — and what it turned out to actually be about.
The fog of war rule I wrote works like this. Things you’ve seen don’t fully disappear when they leave your line of sight — they go translucent, leave a shadow. Things you haven’t seen are pitch black. Two identical rooms, one seen and one not, are two different worlds to the player.
I thought I was solving for UX, helping the player remember where they’ve been. Turned out that wasn’t it. It’s more like someone who once said a thing you can’t quite forget — you still talk to them, act the same as before, but in your eye there’s now a faint layer of something. You can unsee. Your brain helps you forget. The screen doesn’t.