Isometry

Glossary

Concise definitions of the core terms you meet when building an Isometry campaign.

Introduction

This page defines the vocabulary used throughout the Isometry developer manual. Read it once to get oriented, then return to it whenever a term in another page is unfamiliar. The terms below are the building blocks of every campaign: the data you write, the engine concepts that load it, and the words the manual uses to describe gameplay.

Terms are listed alphabetically. Each definition is one or two sentences, with links to the pages where you put the concept to work.

Prerequisites

You do not need to read these pages first, but the terms here make more sense once you have seen them in context:

Terms

Action : An entity that changes the game when it runs, such as dealing damage or moving an actor. Each action names one of the 75 built-in action functions in its do field and passes parameters to it.

Actor : A character in the game world, either player-controlled or AI-driven. An actor entity defines fields such as name, speed, base, perception, and salience, and references its sprite, skills, resources, and strategy.

base : The size of an actor's footprint, used for placement and to decide what is solid. In the example hero actor, base is 8.

Behavior : A goal-and-action pair used by AI. A behavior lists the conditions (its goals) that must be met, and the action to run when they are.

campaign : A complete game definition: a folder of YAML entity files plus assets, packaged as a .zip that sits beside the Isometry binary.

Condition : An entity that compares two values with an operator (==, !=, <, >, <=, >=). Conditions drive an action's if/else logic and a behavior's goals.

dice expression : A string in tabletop dice notation, such as 1d20 or (1d6)-1, that the engine rolls to produce a number. Measures and damage parameters use dice expressions.

entity : A pure-data record loaded from YAML. There are exactly 33 entity types (Main, Actor, Action, Skill, Strategy, and so on); entities hold data only and contain no game logic.

entity key : The unique name you give an entity in its YAML file, for example heroActor or attackAction. Other entities point to it by this key. Always write the clean key like name; the underscore forms such as name_ are internal and never used in campaign files.

fog of war : The unexplored darkness over the map that lifts as actors discover tiles within their perception range. Tiles marked as ghosts stay hidden.

KeyRef : A field whose value is the key of another entity, forming a typed reference. For example an actor's sprite field is a KeyRef to a Sprite entity, resolved at load time.

KeyRefArray : A field holding a list of entity keys, that is, an array of KeyRefs. An actor's skills: ["attackSkill", "healSkill"] is a KeyRefArray.

Main : The single required entity that defines a campaign's starting state: the player actor and the starting map. Every campaign has exactly one Main entity.

Measure : A value an actor computes from a dice expression, such as luckMeasure rolling 1d20. A measure can be public, private, and gated by a reveal threshold.

Parameter : A key-and-value entity passed to an action function. An action lists its parameters as a flat array of KeyRefs, for example "parameters": ["attackResourceParam", "attackDamageParam"], with a sibling top-level Parameter block defining each one.

perception : An actor's vision range in pixels for detecting other actors and clearing fog of war. The example hero's perception is 25.

dialog : A titled text panel shown to the player, defined by a Dialog entity with title and text. Dialog text supports templating tokens for live actor values (see below).

plugin : A nested campaign .zip merged into the host campaign at load. The Main entity's plugins field sets resolution order; earlier entries win, and the host campaign's own files always take priority.

Repo : The engine's internal store of loaded entities. You never touch it directly.

Resource : A trackable numeric value on an actor, such as health, mana, or gold. A resource entity defines default, min, max, and visibility fields like reveal.

salience : How easily other actors detect this actor; higher means more visible. The example hero's salience is 1.

Strategy : The AI controller assigned to an actor through its strategy field. A strategy holds a list of behaviors that the engine evaluates to decide what the actor does.

Dialog templating tokens

Dialog text can show live actor values with two Jinja2-style tokens. @ reads the target actor (the one being viewed); $ reads the caller, that is, the actor whose dialog is open.

HP: {{@health}} / Your luck: {{$luck}}

Here {{@health}} shows the target's health resource and {{$luck}} shows the caller's luck measure. Use these tokens only inside a Dialog entity's text field.

See also