Summary
Design pillars, tone, and north-star goals.
Pillars
1. Run the Crew, Don’t Get Your Paws Dirty
The player fantasy is management, not action. You’re the boss raccoon calling the shots — the crew does the dirty work. Every verb routes through delegation: assign, train, equip, dispatch. If a feature asks the player to fight instead of decide, it fails this pillar. Litmus: Can the player win the moment without ever controlling a raid raccoon directly?
2. Scrappy, Not Grim
The tone is comedic and warm, even when the stakes bite. Raccoons get captured, starve, desert — but the game laughs with them, not at them. No gore, no cruelty, no nihilism. Think hood-crew sitcom with teeth, not Darkest Dungeon. Litmus: Would this beat feel at home in a cartoon, or does it curdle?
3. Small Paws, Big World
The identity is raccoon-height POV in a human-scaled world, built from scavenged trash. A soup-can kettlebell, a cracked-cooler pantry, a stolen-laptop sales desk. Scale and material are non-negotiable — every prop, UI, and station should feel like it was dragged in through a storm drain. Litmus: If you swapped the raccoon for a human, would the scene look different? It should.
4. Logistics Is the Puzzle
The challenge lives in resource tension: feed the crew, pay the mission fee, balance crew size against food supply, decide who eats and who raids. Raids are the payoff; the management layer is the game. Combat and action are spice, not substance. Litmus: Does this feature create an interesting tradeoff, or does it just add content?
5. Delegation Is Progression
Progression is measured in tasks the player no longer does. The early game is deliberately manual and explicit — you sort the loot pile by paw at the Loot Table, dispatch one crew at a time, feed each raccoon individually, walk to each station to do each thing. As the operation grows, upgrades, recruits, and stations progressively take those chores off the boss’s desk: auto-sorting intake, multi-crew scheduling, a Fence who lists valuables without being asked, a trained Hauler who stashes the take unprompted. The bigger the crew, the less work lands on the player.
Critically, automation eats tedium — the repeated clicks — not decisions. The player should always still be choosing who to train, which raid to run, and how to balance the food math. If an upgrade removes a meaningful choice, it fails this pillar; if it removes a repeated chore, it passes. Litmus: After unlocking this feature, does something the player used to click every session become something they never click again — while the interesting decisions stay on their plate?
6. Every Raccoon Has a Name
Units aren’t interchangeable. Each one has a name, stats, flavor, and a possible ugly ending. The player should remember the hauler they lost to animal control and feel it when they free her from HQ in the boss raid. Litmus: If this raccoon died, would the player notice?
Tone
Scrappy, comedic, heist-flavored. Low-poly first-person from raccoon height.
North Star
By the end of a session, the hood feels smaller and the crew feels bigger — every score runs on raccoons you hired yourself.
Success is an arc the player feels across a single play session: the neighborhood shrinks as it gets mapped and worked, while the crew grows from a starter handful into an operation that runs on talent the player recruited, trained, and deployed themselves. If a feature doesn’t push on one of those two curves — shrinking the hood or growing the crew — it’s probably not a feature this game needs.