Seventeen events across the mailroom: ordinary days, Marlene Hobb and Trevor
Pike, a misrouted envelope that can be delivered or kept, and a hard-times
branch that fires on negative money and always leaves an ungated way out.
Writing real content turned up two things the engine could not express.
Per-turn upkeep (`pack.upkeep`): the MVP spec wants recurring income and costs,
but effects only run when a player chooses something, and baking wages into
every option would be tedious and easy to get wrong. Upkeep entries carry their
own conditions, which turned out to be enough for the loan service charge to be
a three-step function that escalates with the size of the debt — no multiply
operation, no engine change. Upkeep changes are recorded separately from choice
changes so the UI can distinguish them.
Per-character starting relationships: Trevor starts below the pack default on
`likes_you` because he arrived two weeks earlier and has priced that in.
Characterisation as data rather than as an opening cutscene. Nobody starts
feared, either — `fears_you` defaults to 10, since a midpoint default would mean
every new hire arrives already intimidating.
The content suite plays 60 seeded runs and asserts every event fires and every
option is taken at least once. That caught real dead content: Trevor's favour
chain sat behind a gate no plausible player could reach, taking two events and a
hard-times escape route with it, and debt could pass 5,500 while the service
charge stayed flat, so the failure spiral flattened out instead of tightening.
Both fixed in the data — the gate softened and given another route up, the loan
capped and its charge tiered.
The validator also gained a real fix: it counted an event with a cooldown as a
stage's fallback, but a cooldown can exclude it, so a stage could still run dry.
86 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §11-13, including the seeding trap that
makes a correlated chooser look exactly like a content bug.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
The planning docs commit to one thing above all: adding content must never
require touching the engine. This lays the foundation that makes that true.
All game state is addressable by dotted path (money, skills.negotiation,
relationships.boss.likes_you, flags.took_loan), and conditions and effects are
generic operations over those paths. The schema in the planning docs had
`requires: { skill, min }` and `effects: { money, skills, relationships }`,
both of which hardcode the state shape into the engine; the first gate wanting
a relationship threshold or a flag would have meant an engine change.
There is deliberately no "random event" category. Every turn filters the whole
event pool by stage and conditions and draws by weight, so a routine turn, a
rare interruption and the hard-times branch differ only in their data.
Also here, neither in the planning docs but both cheap and load-bearing:
- A seeded, serializable RNG. Runs replay exactly from seed plus choices, which
makes tests deterministic and playtest reports reproducible. The generator's
position is one uint32 living in the save.
- A load-time content validator. Undeclared paths, unknown character ids, ids
that cannot be path segments, events that can never fire and stages with no
fallback event are all caught on load instead of forty turns into a game.
The turn loop is a pure function, so a saved game resumes into exactly the run
it left — covered by a test that plays thirty turns, plays the same thirty with
a JSON round trip in the middle, and deep-equals the two.
72 tests, no dependencies. Reasoning recorded in docs/DECISIONS.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
Jesse.Markowitz