Today was a big one. Two separate things landed — one at the design level, one at the code level — and they're more connected than they might look.

The way we describe Proclaim changed today — and it needed to. From the beginning, we've known that Proclaim isn't a generic action game. It's a story about faith under pressure, what witness costs, and how ordinary faithfulness can ripple through a hostile world. But the framing we'd been working with — "mission-based" — implied something it was never meant to be. Ethan teleporting between isolated levels, selecting objectives from a menu, living his persecution in discrete packaging. That was never the game.

Today we locked in what the game actually is: a semi-open world, third-person, story-driven narrative stealth/adventure. Ethan moves through a living city. The world persists between missions. The world watches. The world remembers.

That last phrase became the core design hook: Live faithfully in a world that remembers.

Every public action becomes part of Ethan's witness. Helping a stranger during a commute, speaking Christ's name when it would be safer to stay quiet, showing mercy to someone who was hostile — these don't disappear when the scene changes. They ripple through NPCs who remember, districts that shift in response, safehouses that reflect the aftermath, and a network that either grows resilient or fragile depending on how Ethan has lived. The mission system is unchanged. The world around it now has memory.

On the code side, two things landed that move that design from document to reality.

The first is invisible to the player, but load-bearing. When a mission ends, the game now dispatches outward — a signal that carries what happened, where it happened, and slots for everything the world needs to know. The systems that will respond to it are still being built, but the channel is open, the structure is defined, and each one will plug in when it's ready. We also wired district identity into missions properly — missions now carry which part of the city they're happening in all the way through to resolution, so the world update knows exactly where to apply its changes.

The second is what the player sees. The mission system now speaks at the moments that matter. A title card fades in when a mission starts. A toast slides in when an objective changes. A result banner holds when the mission resolves. The tracker from Phase 4 Step 8 is still there in the corner. These are separate — one tracks state, one marks events. But together, the mission system now has both a persistent record and a voice.