Design Analysis & Dev Diaries

Every designer's first instinct when building a reactive world is to add a morality meter. It makes sense on paper. You want the player to feel the weight of their choices. You want those choices to matter. A bar that fills or empties is clean, readable, unambiguous. It tells the player: you are becoming something. I built one for Koel. Then I deleted it. The Problem with Meters Morality meters don't measure morality. They measure optimization. The moment a player sees a met