Map as live gameplay surface — diegetic centrality, navigational preservation

D-022: Map as live gameplay surface — diegetic centrality, navigational preservation

Pick 10 from the 2026-05-21 vision verification session. D-012 canonised the self-rewriting map as brand / cosmic image but framed it as lore surface (cover art, splash). D-013 canonised przepisać as the walking verb, making map rewriting the operational metaphor for every step. D-014 §1 demoted Map from the mobile bottom bar because crafting is core loop and Map was treated as exploratory.

Pick 10 names Map as the central gameplay artifact — encounter queue surfaces as map pins, click region → enter combat / quest beat, leak intensity drives color tokens, steps rewrite curvatures in real-time. This is in tension with D-014 §1’s “Map is exploratory, demoted to secondary.”

D-022 reconciles: Map is diegetically central, navigationally secondary. The 5-tab bar (Home / Tree / Factions / Quests / Craft) stays; the Home tab fronts a Map widget that IS the encounter-queue UI. Mirrors PoE atlas — THE endgame artifact, reached through gameplay chain (Home → Map widget → expanded view), never a top-level menu.

1. Map is the central diegetic gameplay surface

The 6 regions per D-006 Pillar 4 render as the map’s surface (region populations may be sketch-only at Phase 13 closed-beta per D-007 §1; render contract is forward-compatible to full population). Live behaviour:

Layer orthogonality: D-022’s gameplay-render layer is orthogonal to D-012’s brand-illustration layer. The two share the rewriting metaphor (przepisać per D-013), but D-012’s canon-locked visual constraints (warm parchment, 18th-century surveyor’s hand, no central figure, no glow, no cosmic background) govern marketing surfaces only. Gameplay rendering is owned by ui-designer per §What-D-022-does-NOT-decide and may use visual primitives (active-leak glow on a pin, animated pin pulse) that D-012’s brand-illustration constraints would forbid in a marketing asset.

Surface	Behaviour	Anchor
Region curvatures	Rewrite in real-time as the Walker accumulates attested steps	D-013 (przepisać is the verb), D-007 §3 (server-authoritative)
Leak intensity	Drives color-token shifts per region (e.g. region.frostlands blue saturation modulates with active leak tier per D-014 §3)	D-012 (six region color tokens), D-014 §3
Encounter pins	D-020 tropy queue surfaces as map pins, each carrying its difficulty badge (easy / normal / hard / keystone-ready)	D-020 §3
Quest-beat pins	Active quest beats render as separate pin class (visually distinct from tropy)	D-016 (quest grants progression), quest-state subsystem
Click region	Enters region context — surface for combat initiation / quest-beat advancement / faction interaction	D-020 §1 (pull-based initiation gesture)

This operationalises D-012’s Mapa, która się przepisuje from lore image into running gameplay. The map IS the experience — every walking session writes new ink onto it.

2. D-014 §1 nav posture preserved (NOT superseded)

The mobile top-level bar remains 5 tabs: Home / Tree / Factions / Quests / Craft. D-014 §1 is unchanged. Map is NOT promoted to a 6th tab; Craft is not demoted; the bar shape from Phase 13 mobile implementation is honored.

Map is reached contextually:

• Primary entry: Home tab fronts a Map widget (size, position, expansion gesture = ui-designer W-level). The widget IS the encounter-queue UI from D-020 — pins are interactive directly within the widget.
• Secondary entry: region links from Quests (quest pin → map zoomed to quest region), Factions (faction overview → faction’s primary region), Tree (cluster preview → starting region of cluster’s class per D-019 §3).
• No standalone map tab. The map view is always entered through a contextual entry point; there is no “Map” button on the bottom bar.

3. Diegetic vs navigational centrality

Diegetic = the map is the central artifact of the game’s experience. The Walker’s relationship to the world IS their relationship to the map; every step is an editorial commit (D-013) to the map.

Navigational = the map is reached through gameplay actions, not through chrome. Players don’t navigate TO the map; they navigate THROUGH it. PoE’s atlas is the operational reference for the navigational posture only (most-engaged surface, never a top-level menu) — the atlas-as-endgame-gating semantic is NOT borrowed here (WalkRPG’s Map is always-on from session 1; the forthcoming D-023 atlas-endgame ratification owns that semantic).

This split is the load-bearing reconciliation. D-012 + D-013 + pick 10 demand diegetic centrality; D-014 §1 demands navigational restraint. D-022 says both win — Map is centrally embedded in Home (highest-frequency entry point), and the bar shape stays.

4. Encounter queue (D-020) lives on the map

D-020 §3 ratifies a tropy queue with difficulty badges visible BEFORE commit. D-022 names where the queue lives: the queue IS the Map. Each trop is a map pin; the badge is the pin’s visual class. Tapping a pin opens the D-020 commit dialogue (badge details, risk-choice acceptance). Initiation IS the click on the pin.

Two surfaces collapse into one. D-020’s “tropy queue” and D-022’s “encounter pins” are the same artifact; only the framing differs (queue = list register, map = spatial register). A list view (if ui-designer wants one) is a sub-view of the Map widget, not a parallel surface.

5. Map state is server-authoritative

Per D-007 §3 (anti-cheat) and D-018 §What-not-decide (sink-debit ordering), every map state change is reconciled server-side:

• Step-driven curvature rewriting — server applies attested steps to map state on sync.
• Leak intensity color shift — derived from server-authoritative leak-tier state per region.
• Pin placement (tropy + quest beats) — server-authoritative pool fill per D-020 §2.

Client renders state, doesn’t author it. Mock-step / GPS-spoof attacks cannot rewrite the map (D-008 anti-cheat posture preserved).

What D-022 does NOT decide (delegated)

• Map widget size + position on Home + expansion gesture — ui-designer.
• Map zoom / pan UX (pinch / drag / button) — ui-designer.
• Per-badge pin visual styling — ui-designer (within D-020 §4 contract: badge visible BEFORE commit).
• Leak-intensity color shift math (how saturation maps to leak tier) — B-level (mechanics-designer + ui-designer joint).
• Quest-beat pin vs trop pin visual distinction — ui-designer.
• Map schema (MapState, MapPin, region curvature representation) — W-level (tech-architect).
• Animation policy for live-rewriting (battery cost vs visual richness) — B-level (mobile-developer + ui-designer).
• Whether map zoom level affects which pins surface (decluttering at full-continent zoom) — B-level (ui-designer).
• Accessibility variants for visually-impaired players (screen-reader narration of map state) — open D-level question, round-4 Q&A topic.
• Offline rendering policy during D-009 §2 7-day offline cap — does the client render last-server-known state (map looks dead during the most engaging walking week), client-side optimistic state with rollback on sync (UX whiplash if server diverges), or a hybrid? — W-level (tech-architect + mobile-developer joint). §5 server-authoritative reconciliation specifies the sync-time contract; offline-time client render is a separate design call.

Rejected alternatives

• Promote Map back to bottom bar (supersede D-014 §1). Rejected — would force a 6th tab (cluttered) or demote Tree / Factions / Quests / Craft to make room. D-014 §1’s reasoning (crafting is core loop, Pillars 1-2-3) still holds. Diegetic-centrality reconciliation preserves both intents at zero structural cost.
• Keep Map as exploratory-only (no encounter queue surfacing). Rejected — contradicts pick 10, leaves D-020 tropy queue without a spatial surface, removes the diegetic centrality D-012 + D-013 demand.
• Make Map a modal overlay (not embedded in Home). Rejected — fragments the engagement (evening session splits between Home and Map screens), contradicts the “Map IS the experience” framing, increases UI surface complexity.
• Map widget on Home plus a Map tab (both entries). Rejected — redundant nav, dilutes the 5-tab bar’s clarity, no clear win over single contextual entry.
• Queue UI as a list separate from Map. Rejected — collapses to two surfaces with the same content (the queue IS the pin set); list-register can be a sub-view of the Map widget if ui-designer wants it.

Reasoning

D-022 is the load-bearing reconciliation between three canonised forces:

• D-012 (defining image) + D-013 (walking-rule verb) demand the map be central to the game’s identity at every register — lore, brand, gameplay.
• D-014 §1 (nav posture) demands the bottom bar honor the core loop (Pillars 1-2-3), which previous canon read as “crafting in, Map out.”
• D-020 (encounter system) needs a spatial surface for tropy pool — a pure-list register would contradict D-012’s spatial register.

The reconciliation key is the diegetic/navigational split. “Central” can mean “central to the experience” (diegetic) or “central to the chrome” (navigational). D-014 §1 made the navigational call; D-022 makes the diegetic call. They coexist because they answer different questions.

PoE’s atlas is the operational reference for the navigational posture only — most-engaged surface, never a top-level menu. The atlas-as-endgame-gating semantic does NOT carry over (WalkRPG’s Map is always-on; D-023 will ratify the actual atlas-endgame surface separately). WalkRPG’s Map is the navigational equivalent: most-engaged surface, embedded in Home, never a tab.

Source: pick 10 from ops/memory/vision-qa-2026-05-21.md. Triage by game-director (2026-05-21 session) flagged D-014 §1 nav-posture tension as soft risk; reconciliation via diegetic/navigational split closes it. Pre-ratification recon per [[feedback-decide-triage-recon]]: no naming entities introduced (MapState, MapPin are schema names deferred to tech-architect, not glossary entities).