Tag
Development posts tagged documentation. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.
8 posts
A nine faction RTS with a campaign, built in 140 days by one human who has never read the code and one model that wrote all of it. How that actually works.
642,530 lines directed by someone who has never opened a file. The plan is the interface, and this is what a plan has to contain to be arguable by a reader who cannot check the code.
Parallel agents work well on separate files and fail on shared decisions. Three collisions from building this blog, and the brief shape that prevents them.
Nine factions, each one changing a rule of the map rather than a column of stats: creeping corruption, hidden tunnels, crystal power fields and six more.
Twelve damage types against eight armours is ninety six numbers, and no player reads ninety six numbers mid-fight. Half of them do nothing, on purpose.
One rule shaped every hero in the game: the player should always have a useful button to press. Four-ability kits failed it, so every kit went to six.
A model starts every session knowing nothing about the last one, so the documentation is the memory. That changes what belongs in it, and it is rarely a diagram.
The original design document describes a two-race game with two columns of stats. It shipped with nine factions, naval warfare and a review of its own weaknesses.
