The dopamine design bible — distilled from building Aether Vanguard,
and obeyed by every pixel of this site. You are feeling these rules right now:
the cursor in your hand is Law I with the ink still wet.
LAW I
Anticipation first
Dopamine peaks before the outcome, not at it. Every meaningful event is a
four-phase beat: telegraph → anticipation → action → payoff. The reveal is the
spike; the win is just the receipt.
⌘ try it: press and hold anywhere on this page, feel the gather — then release.
telegraphed
no telegraph
hover the left orb and feel it gather. the right pays off identically, cold. feel the difference?
LAW II
Nothing changes silently
The presentation-coverage gate: no state change ships without a visual + sound +
animation beat that explains who acts, on what, and what happened — legible without
reading. In the game it is enforced in code; a silent change fails the build.
⌘ on the homepage, the Grimlight badge pops and sparks when its live-check resolves.
silent flip...it changed. could you tell?
presented flip
same state machine, two clicks. one changes silently; the other explains itself.
LAW III
Answer in under 100ms
Hover and press feedback lands faster than doubt. The numbers, exactly:
Something is always breathing, drifting, or resolving. But juice must echo the
theme — embers and torchlight here, never generic sparkle. Motion means something:
the menu of a world going dark breathes inward.
dead until you press breathe. then it never stops.
LAW V
One accent per surface
Dark ground + one glow + exactly one accent color. Rainbow accents read as
"different artists". One accent, one hand — cyan belongs to Aether Vanguard, torchlight
to Grimlight, ember to the wizard.
✦GrimlightNEWPlay →
same layout, one hand vs five.
LAW VI
Sound is tiered, silence is spent
Every event class maps to a documented sound family. Loud = high priority (confirm,
reward); hover is the lowest tier — near-subliminal or absent. Pitch contour is
valence: rising means yes, falling means no. Not sounding on everything is what makes
the cue that fires feel intentional.
the actual site lexicon, tiered by attention. sound off? watch the toggle, top right.
LAW VII
Depth is the tell
Parallax and layered motion are the #1 thing separating a game from an app.
Pointer-driven depth, used sparingly; the world is the hero and the UI hugs its edges.
⌘ the sigil behind the homepage wordmark drifts against your hand; the game cards tilt.
◈
GRIMOIRE
✦
move your hand inside the frame. flatten to feel what dies.
LAW VIII
End on an open loop
Close one thread, leave two dangling — a named gap, never "come back soon!".
Sessions that end mid-curiosity get finished.
7 / 8
transcription of the deeper laws. the eighth slot glows. it will not fill here.
Which is why this page ends here, mid-grimoire: the deeper laws —
reveal ceremonies, the craft rubric, the sonic lexicon — are still being transcribed.
Meanwhile, see the laws hosting real infrastructure in the
Cloud Sorcery tour.