Game design¶
Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.
General design thinking that isn't tied to one game. These principles were worked out while designing The Crawl, a seasonal online dungeon game, and building Fboard, a fingerboarding game. Each page states the principle in general terms, then points back to where it came from.
None of this is offered as universal truth. It's what these two projects decided, and the reasons they recorded.
Pages¶
| Page | The idea in one line |
|---|---|
| Everything is numbers and modifiers | Build every item, ability and hazard from one shared model, so variety is data, not code |
| Theory before math | Settle what a system is before tuning its numbers, and treat every early number as a first guess |
| Simulation you can trust | Keep rules in one place, let the server decide, and make tests and bots prove the rules hold |
| Stakes, fiction and continuity | Put fatal stakes where they count, let the fiction explain the rules, and never break what a player has seen |