EchoWarrior Contributor Wiki

EchoWarrior start screen with rain and main menu

This wiki is written for someone who may want to contribute to EchoWarrior and needs a calm first map of the codebase. It documents the main code surface: the crate entry points, app shell, state model, asset and pack gateways, logging, performance hooks, mod manifest layer, and command-line tools.

It deliberately does not document every src/game, src/runtime, src/data, src/ui, src/save, or src/scripting submodule in detail. Those areas already have focused design docs, and they change faster than the main crate boundary.

Prototype At A Glance

Main EchoWarrior prototype screen with HUD and companions — Main runtime: world simulation, companion labels, HUD, input hints, and gameplay stats in the Macroquad prototype.

Shader arena with VFX tuning controls and runtime HUD — Shader arena: runtime VFX, HUD layering, and data-driven tuning visible in one frame.

Dialogue scene with rain, HUD, and speaker portrait — Dialogue scene: choreography, speaker UI, atmosphere, and gameplay state sharing the same runtime.

Tooling At A Glance

Leitmotif scene director with sequences, stage, timeline, and inspector — Leitmotif: the Tauri scene director for authored choreography, backed by the game's `choreo` CLI and schema contract.

Leitmotif action picker with suggestions and beat verbs — Authoring aids: deterministic suggestions, action picking, fix-it flows, and timeline edits all route through one scene document model.

What To Read First

Wiki Map for the sidebar structure and recommended reading paths.
New Contributor Start if this is your first hour in the repo.
Visual Orientation to connect screenshots to the systems behind them.
Contribution Workflow before opening a pull request.
Change Routes when you know what you want to change but not where it belongs.
Verification Guide to choose the right checks.
Tiny Moddable Feature for a slow, guided first implementation path.
Architecture Chapter for the big picture first, then progressively deeper details.
Leitmotif if you want to work on the choreography authoring app.
Main Code Map for a file-by-file reference to the main Rust files.
Assets And Packaging before changing runtime asset discovery or release packs.
Asset Pack Reference for the public pack API and read order.
CLI Tools before using asset_pack, sprite_cutter, mod_check, or choreo.

Contributor Promise

EchoWarrior is built around moddability, data-driven content, and a clean split between renderer-specific runtime code and pure gameplay/data code. A good contribution should make the game easier to understand, easier to mod, or more reliable to ship.

The fastest way to get oriented is to run the game once, read the contributor start page, then pick a small change with a clear verification command.

Site Stack

This is a Vercel-hosted static site powered by Astro and Starlight. Pages are Markdown files under src/content/docs, the navigation is configured in astro.config.mjs, and the site builds to static HTML in dist.

Vercel builds the site with npm run build and serves dist. In the private game repository, this repo is mounted as the Docs/Wiki submodule.

The deployed wiki artifact contains only this public wiki repository. For deeper project notes in a private game checkout, read:

Docs/TECHNICAL_NOTES.md
Docs/MODDING.md
Docs/RELEASE.md
Docs/CHOREO_FORMAT.md
Docs/GAME_DESIGN_DOCUMENT.md

Local Preview

Run the Starlight dev server:

npm run dev

Then open the local URL printed by Astro.