Director Tools: Tuning, Presets & Debug
The Director is built to be tuned, saved, and stress-tested. This page is the playtester and tuner workflow: how to snapshot and share difficulty settings, and how to force events on demand in a debug build.
Difficulty presets (export and import)
A preset is a complete snapshot of the Director's tuning: threat weights, thresholds, cooldowns, adaptation, and phase settings, saved as a single file. Presets let a tuning session move fast and let you share a feel with someone else.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Save preset | Writes the current Director config to a named preset file |
| Load preset | Applies a saved preset to the live Director immediately |
| Switch | Jump between presets to compare how a run feels |
| Delete | Remove a preset you no longer want |
Under the hood a preset is just the Director config exported to JSON and later imported back. That means a preset is portable: hand the file to another playtester and they load the exact same difficulty.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Export | Serialize the current Director settings to a JSON file you can keep or send |
| Import | Load a settings JSON back into the Director, replacing the current tuning |
| Preset store | Named presets are kept together so you can list and switch between them during a session |
TIP
Presets are the right way to run an A/B on difficulty. Save "calm" and "relentless" variants, switch between them across runs, and keep the one that feels right. One value at a time still applies: change little, label clearly.
What is in a preset
| Group | Includes |
|---|---|
| Pressure | Threat weights, event threshold, cash normalize |
| Pacing | Global cooldown, per-type cooldowns, tick interval |
| Adaptation | Enabled, gain on survival, decay on loss, health range |
| Events | Event weights and time-of-day multipliers |
The phase schedule and feature flags are separate data files; a preset captures the Director's scoring and pacing, which is what most tuning touches.
Debug: forcing Director events
In a debug build you can fire any Director event on command instead of waiting for pressure to build. This is how you test a specific event (a raid, a rival hit, a sweep) in seconds.
| You pick | The Director does |
|---|---|
| An event type (for example a SWAT raid or a rival attack) | Forms the squad, assigns roles, and fires the mission immediately |
| Optionally, a target or squad | Uses them; otherwise it auto-picks a valid target of the right type |
Forcing an event bypasses the threat score and cooldowns, so you can reproduce a scenario on demand. Any event in the event catalog can be forced by its id. If no valid target exists for that event type, the force is safely aborted rather than crashing.
NOTE
Debug event firing is a testing control. In a normal build the Director fires events only through its threat score and phase schedule.
TimeTravel (internal tool)
TimeTravel is an internal development tool for jumping straight to a complex game state without playing hours to get there. It seeds a scenario (owned safe houses, high heat, a deal in progress, a raid building, pawns with specific cash and traits) and then hands control to the normal game: real UI, real GOAP, real Director, real heat and raids, from a pre-authored starting point.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Reach a specific gameplay moment instantly for interactive testing |
| Scenarios | Data files, not code branches |
| Availability | Dev-only. It is hidden and not part of normal player or playtester builds. |
It is called out here so the term is not a mystery, but it is a developer tool. Scenario authoring is internal and is not part of this public wiki. Playtesters use the presets and debug event firing above, not TimeTravel.
Related
- The system these tools shape: The Director
- The full config key list: Economy Config
- The pressure these events add to: Heat, Investigations