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clay-borg/specs/ArchitectureBlueprint.md

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Clay-Borg Architecture Blueprint

Reference architecture for the Clay-Borg framework. This document describes the stable structural decisions: layers, component planes, capability ports, data flows, and repository layout. For motivation and product intent see ../INTENT.md; for the full originating exploration see ../history/260730-InitialExploration.md.

Status: draft — this blueprint is normative for new work but still malleable (Clay). Changes go through a decision record in decisions/.

1. Layered architecture

flowchart TB
    TR["TargetRevenue Control Plane
    phases • workload • revenue • licensing • trust"]

    AF["Agentic Development Forge
    specifications • work packets • generators
    tests • scenarios • benchmarks • evidence"]

    GP["Game Packages
    GROUND • fixture games • future products"]

    TT["Tabletop Framework
    cards • decks • tokens • zones • hands
    seats • hidden information • manipulation"]

    GR["Game Runtime
    commands • validation • rules • events
    phases • simultaneous actions • replay"]

    WS["World and Simulation
    entities • components • transforms • time
    scheduling • spatial queries • snapshots"]

    PORTS["Canonical Capability Ports
    render • physics • network • assets
    UI • audio • persistence • scripting"]

    LIBS["Assimilated Libraries
    wgpu • Rapier • Bevy ECS • Wasmtime
    Quinn • egui • Serde • tracing"]

    PLATFORM["Platform Substrate
    native • browser/WASM • server • CI"]

    TR --> AF
    AF --> GP
    GP --> TT
    TT --> GR
    GR --> WS
    WS --> PORTS
    PORTS --> LIBS
    LIBS --> PLATFORM

    AF -.tests and measures.-> GR
    AF -.tests and measures.-> WS
    AF -.tests and measures.-> PORTS
    TR -.governs releases.-> GP
    TR -.governs releases.-> PORTS

The four state kinds

Every subsystem must respect the separation between:

State kind Definition Owner
Authoritative semantic state What is legally happening in the game Game runtime
World state Where representations currently are World layer
Physical state How objects are moving Physics port
Presentation state What a particular player is allowed to see Projection layer

A game must remain playable in a headless process with no rendering and no rigid-body simulation. The 3D tabletop is a projection and interaction surface, never the definition of the game.

2. Clay Canon

The stable conceptual foundation shared by engines, games, tools, and agents.

Component Responsibility
Capability model Names and describes each engine capability and its implementations
Canonical identifiers Stable IDs for entities, players, assets, games, commands, events, sessions, packages
Schema system Machine-readable definitions for game packages, assets, scenarios, engine configuration
Contract system Interfaces and invariants every implementation must satisfy
Versioning model Compatibility rules for APIs, schemas, save games, event logs
Capability registry What exists, where it lives, maturity, dependencies, evidence, release phase
Assimilation manifests Why a library was adopted, what boundary contains it, how it can be replaced

Assimilation manifest (required per external dependency)

capability = "physics.rigid-body.3d"
implementation = "rapier3d"
boundary_crate = "cb-physics-rapier"
canonical_interface = "cb-physics-api"

determinism = "authoritative-server"
replaceability = "high"
exposed_upstream_types = false

required_tests = [
  "physics-conformance",
  "snapshot-restore",
  "card-stack-stability",
  "drag-release-behavior",
]

required_benchmarks = [
  "1000-resting-cards",
  "deck-shuffle-and-deal",
  "multi-object-picking",
]

Hard rule: no external library type leaks across a canonical interface. A card must not contain a RapierRigidBodyHandle, a wgpu::Texture, or an engine-specific entity id.

3. Runtime substrate

The lowest layer Clay-Borg owns itself:

  • Platform abstraction, application lifecycle
  • Time and fixed simulation ticks
  • Task scheduling and job execution
  • Memory and resource ownership conventions
  • Deterministic random-number streams
  • Configuration and feature flags
  • Diagnostics and structured tracing (tracing)
  • Capability discovery
  • Error taxonomy
  • Shutdown, recovery, headless execution

Port/implementation pattern

Every important capability ships a null, a reference, and (when financed) an optimized implementation:

cb-time-api
├── cb-time-realtime
└── cb-time-controlled

cb-render-api
├── cb-render-null
└── cb-render-wgpu

cb-network-api
├── cb-network-loopback
└── cb-network-quic

cb-physics-api
├── cb-physics-null
├── cb-physics-reference
└── cb-physics-rapier

Null and reference implementations keep tests fast, expose semantic assumptions, and let agents work without a GPU or a multiplayer environment.

4. Simulation kernel

Small and largely independent of game-specific concepts.

Entity and component model

  • ECS (bevy_ecs, assimilated standalone — not full Bevy) for world composition, spatial representation, runtime scheduling.
  • Explicit typed aggregates for game rules and authoritative state. Canonical game state is never reduced to arbitrary ECS components.

Mutation pipeline

Every meaningful state change follows:

Intent
  → Command
  → Validation
  → Domain Events
  → State Reducer
  → New Authoritative State
  → World/Presentation Projection

This yields replay, undo/branching, multiplayer sync, bot/agent access, auditing, save-game migration, rule debugging, and scenario testing.

Snapshots and event logs

  • Periodic full snapshots; append-only event streams
  • Stable event serialization (Serde behind versioned Clay-Borg schemas)
  • State hashes, replay seeds, branching from earlier state
  • Snapshot migration; expected-vs-actual state comparison
  • Every failed test produces a replay bundle an agent can execute locally.

5. Physics subsystem

Physics is a service of the world, not a source of game truth. Rapier is the optimized implementation; the server owns authoritative physical outcomes while clients interpolate and predict interaction feedback. Do not depend on independently simulated client physics remaining identical across platforms.

Tabletop physics scope (initial, deliberately narrow): pick up / move / flip / place a card, stack and unstack, move relation markers, snap tokens to tracks, animate reveal and resolution, prevent accidental scattering. Dice, complex joints, bags, arbitrary models, and unrestricted throwing come later.

6. World-building layer

Binds semantic objects to spatial representations.

Concept Meaning
World An independently simulated environment
Scene A loadable arrangement of objects
Object A spatially represented entity
Prototype Reusable object definition
Instance Runtime occurrence of a prototype
Transform Position, orientation, scale
Zone A spatial area with semantic meaning
Surface Table, board, tray, or similar placement area
Seat A participant position and viewpoint
View Player-specific projection of world state
Binding Connection between domain state and world objects

The world system supports multiple simultaneous projections: authoritative server world, player-visible worlds, spectator, debug, replay, and agent-observation worlds. This is what makes hidden hands and simultaneous decisions tractable.

7. Tabletop domain framework

Canonical tabletop object set (no game reinvents these):

Table  Board  Card  Deck  Stack  Token  Counter  Marker  Die  Bag
Zone  Hand  Seat  PlayerPointer  Note  Rulebook  ScoreTrack
SequenceTrack  Timer

Each object carries: physical representation, semantic identity, ownership, visibility policy, interaction permissions, allowed operations, snap behavior, serialization, behavior hooks, presentation variants.

Game-operation modes

Mode Rule
Sandbox Players manipulate objects freely; physics is primary, rules are social
Governed Only legal commands alter authoritative state; objects merely visualize
Hybrid Physical gestures propose commands; zones, ownership, and rules decide acceptance

GROUND uses hybrid mode: dragging a card toward another player only becomes an attack or support action when the rules engine validates target, relationship capacity, timing, and card availability.

8. Game runtime and packages

A game package describes five things separately:

  1. Content — cards, tokens, text, symbols, assets
  2. Setup — session initialization
  3. Rules — legal commands and their effects
  4. Flow — phases, simultaneous windows, end conditions
  5. Presentation bindings — how semantic state appears on the table
games/ground/
├── GAME.toml
├── INTENT.md
├── rules/          # ground.wit, phases.yaml, actions.yaml, resolution.yaml
├── content/        # cards.yaml, tokens.yaml, symbols.yaml
├── scenes/         # table.scene.yaml, tutorial.scene.yaml
├── assets/
├── scenarios/
├── bots/
├── tests/
└── migrations/

Extension boundary

Early GROUND rules live in native Rust crates. The stable extension boundary is later expressed through WebAssembly Interface Types loaded via Wasmtime. A game component receives explicit capabilities from the host (read public state, propose commands, spawn canonical objects) — never direct filesystem, network, clock, or GPU access.

Simultaneous action primitive

Open decision window
→ privately choose action and target
→ commit
→ wait for all players or timeout
→ reveal
→ order or group interactions
→ resolve
→ emit consequences

Networked play uses commit/reveal semantics so early submissions cannot be inspected and exploited. The interaction-group resolver (mutual attacks, support opposing an attack, capacity conflicts, simultaneous end conditions) is expected to become one of the first genuinely reusable Clay-Borg capabilities.

9. Rendering, input, and creation tools

Rust-first stack:

  • winit — windows and platform input
  • wgpu — GPU rendering (Vulkan / Metal / D3D / browser)
  • egui — engine tools, inspectors, early editors
  • Custom scene renderer for the game table
  • glTF as the primary imported 3D format, wrapped in Clay-Borg asset metadata and provenance

Creator environment (grows over milestones): scene hierarchy, object inspector, prototype browser, card-sheet importer, deck builder, zone and snap-point editors, rule-state inspector, event timeline, player-view switcher, hidden-information debugger, physics debugger, scenario recorder, replay controls, package validator.

10. Networking and sessions

Authoritative session host:

Client gesture
→ proposed command
→ session server validation
→ authoritative events
→ state update
→ player-specific projection
→ client animation

Capabilities: session discovery, auth and seat assignment, lobby/readiness, command submission, commit/reveal windows, event-stream replication, snapshot transfer, reconnection, state-hash verification, spectators, player-specific redaction, host migration (later).

Transport: Quinn (QUIC) for native; browser transport is a separate adapter (WebTransport or WebSockets). The canonical protocol is defined independently of any transport:

cb-session-protocol
├── CommandEnvelope
├── EventEnvelope
├── SnapshotEnvelope
├── CommitmentEnvelope
├── AssetRequest
└── CapabilityNegotiation

11. Agentic inner loop

Agentic coding is a first-class product surface. Optimize for small capability boundaries, executable specifications, controlled work areas, and replayable failures.

Work packet (every agent task)

task_id: CB-PHYS-0042
capability: tabletop.card-stacking
intent: Keep card stacks stable after drag release.
allowed_crates:
  - cb-physics-api
  - cb-physics-rapier
  - cb-tabletop-physics
forbidden_changes:
  - canonical game event schema
invariants:
  - semantic card order must not depend on collider order
scenarios:
  - scenarios/card-stack-20.yaml
benchmarks:
  - benches/card-stack-stability.yaml
acceptance:
  - all conformance tests pass
  - no state divergence over 10,000 ticks
  - benchmark regression below 3%

CLI surface (cb)

cb inspect capability tabletop.card
cb task prepare CB-PHYS-0042
cb generate contracts
cb check --affected
cb test --affected            # supports --format json
cb sim ground scenarios/mutual-attack.yaml
cb play ground --players 4
cb replay artifacts/failure.cbreplay
cb compare physics-reference physics-rapier
cb bench --affected
cb evidence build CB-PHYS-0042
cb release assess CB-PHYS-0042

Quality gates

Formatting/linting, dependency-policy check, unit tests, capability conformance tests, property tests, golden scenario tests, replay determinism, snapshot migration, performance and memory budgets, rendering comparison where relevant, security/sandbox tests, documentation and schema consistency.

Tooling: cargo-nextest (isolated parallel tests), Criterion (regression-sensitive benchmarks), sccache (compile reuse), tracing (structured diagnostics).

12. TargetRevenue integration

TargetRevenue governs versioned capability improvements, not the monorepo as one indivisible target.

improvement_id = "CB-GROUND-001"
capability = "game.ground.simultaneous-resolution"
classification = "10x"

estimated_days = 4
daily_rate = 1000
target_revenue = 40000

phase = "commercial-recovery"
release_when_target_reached = "MIT"
trust_record = "required"

Components: improvement registry, workload ledger, cost model, revenue attribution, dependency graph, phase license generator, revenue meter, release gate, evidence bundle, trust service.

Economic rule:

Optimized assimilations may be financed as independent improvements, while the canonical interface remains stable and reusable.

13. Repository structure

clay-borg/
├── INTENT.md
├── SCOPE.md
├── ARCHITECTURE.md            # or specs/ArchitectureBlueprint.md (this file)
├── Cargo.toml
├── rust-toolchain.toml
│
├── canon/                     # entities, events, capabilities, schemas, terminology
├── crates/
│   ├── cb-kernel/  cb-ids/  cb-time/  cb-rng/  cb-events/
│   ├── cb-snapshot/  cb-capability/
│   ├── cb-world/  cb-world-api/  cb-ecs-bevy/
│   ├── cb-physics-api/  cb-physics-null/  cb-physics-reference/  cb-physics-rapier/
│   ├── cb-render-api/  cb-render-null/  cb-render-wgpu/
│   ├── cb-tabletop/  cb-tabletop-physics/  cb-tabletop-view/
│   ├── cb-game-runtime/  cb-game-protocol/  cb-game-wasm/
│   ├── cb-session/  cb-network-api/  cb-network-loopback/  cb-network-quic/
│   └── cb-assets/  cb-ui/  cb-editor/  cb-observe/  cb-evidence/
│
├── games/                     # ground/, fixture-cards/
├── tools/                     # cb-cli/, cb-agent/, cb-import/, cb-pack/
├── scenarios/
├── conformance/
├── benchmarks/
├── replays/
├── examples/
├── decisions/
├── assimilation/              # assimilation manifests
└── target-revenue/

Stay a monorepo during architectural formation. Extract a repository only when a capability has a stable contract, an independent lifecycle, and a genuine external consumer.

14. Milestones

# Milestone Proves
0 Headless GROUND Authoritative rules, commit/reveal, DARVO, replay — no rendering, no physics
1 Inspectable 2D table Presentation bindings without 3D complexity
2 Physical 3D tabletop wgpu + Rapier projection of semantic events
3 Networked sessions Authoritative host, private projections, reconnection
4 Game creation framework Editors, importers, Wasm game components
5 Second fixture game Generality — abstractions promoted to Canon only after a second concrete use

15. Governing design decisions

  1. Build GROUND first, not a general engine first.
  2. Keep rules independent from rendering and physics.
  3. Use commands and events as the authoritative mutation mechanism.
  4. Provide null, reference, and optimized implementations of important capabilities.
  5. Never leak assimilated-library types into canonical interfaces.
  6. Use server-authoritative physics and deterministic semantic rules.
  7. Treat player visibility as a projection, not a UI afterthought.
  8. Make every defect reproducible as a scenario and replay.
  9. Give coding agents bounded work packets and stable commands.
  10. Attach TargetRevenue phases to versioned improvements and evidence bundles.