From the Atlas
Dispatches.
Notes from Cora’s desk. Essays on puzzle craft, behind-the-scenes from Vellestria, occasional data. New ones land every fortnight or so.
19 May 2026
Designing the cogitats economy
Why hint prices in Cora's Atlas are 40, 80, and 120 cogitats — and why the first version was four times cheaper, and why that was the problem.
19 May 2026
Building five nations from one playbook
Vellestria is one of five named nations in the saga. Here's the shared skeleton that lets each one feel different without feeling like a different game.
19 May 2026
The hand-drawn aesthetic in 2026
A small team in Paris on the visual choice that shaped Cora's Atlas — hand-drawn portraits, soft watercolour maps, parchment cards — and why we picked the slow medium in the year of the gradient.
19 May 2026
How Cora speaks two languages
Cora's Atlas is written in English and French in parallel, not translated. Here is what that means in practice, and why we pay the cost.
19 May 2026
The puzzle design pyramid: mechanic, theme, emotion
A small team in Paris on the three layers we stack into every puzzle in Cora's Atlas, the trap each missing layer creates, and one worked example from the Library Quarter dissected all the way down.
19 May 2026
What pacing taught us
A small team in Paris on the shape of a chapter, why fragments arrive in clusters, why secret puzzles are rewards rather than gates, and the metronome we worked not to become.
18 May 2026
Inside the puzzle design: cryptograms, lateral thinking, observation
A small team in Paris on the three categories of narrative puzzle design we use across Vellestria, with three worked examples from the published content, warts and all, and the hardest problem of all: making a puzzle teach you something about Cora's world while you solve it.
18 May 2026
Why we built a Layton successor for the web
A small team in Paris on what we missed about Professor Layton on the DS, what happened to that quiet when puzzle games moved to the phone, and the puzzle game we are trying to build for the browser instead.
17 May 2026
Building Vellestria: how a fictional sea-coast city earned its place names
Vellestria isn't a real place. But Old Town, the Stellar Cliffs, Councillors' Walk, and the rest of its lieux all have a logic to their names. Here's how we built it.