clay-borg/INTENT.md

Intent

Clay-Borg is a rebuild-from-scratch simulation and games engine framework: it assimilates and optimizes techniques and implementations useful for games, simulations, and robotics.

It is not another monolithic game engine. It is a capability-assimilating development engine with four distinct properties:

1. Clay — its canonical models, contracts, rules, and tools remain malleable.
2. Borg — mature, optimized libraries are assimilated behind controlled interfaces rather than copied or exposed directly.
3. Product-driven evolution — abstractions are extracted from working games, beginning with GROUND — A Game of Bonds and Rivalry: DARVO Edition, rather than invented in isolation.
4. Instrument — the engine is rigorous enough that it cannot proceed past a rule that does not decide. What it cannot execute, it reports: findings about the game's design are a product of building the simulator, not a side activity, and they are carried back to the game's owner with the artifact that produced them. (ADR-0012. A restatement of what has already happened six times, made a duty. If a pass ever tolerates an undecided rule by quietly picking a default and not raising it, this property is false.)

A fifth property, added 2026-08-08 because three adversarial review rounds made it undeniable:

5. The instrument is under the same discipline as the engine. Twelve fatal defects were found in one measurement, every one in our apparatus and none in the game, and several had already been written into evidence as conclusions. A tool that reports design findings without treating its own measurements as claims is reporting its bugs at the same volume as its results. (See specs/Taxonomy.md for what "defect" now means, and where.)

The central rule:

Own the semantics; assimilate the implementation.

And the second, which says what the product actually is:

Clay-borg is a design-evidence instrument. Its output is not a number about a game; it is an auditable answer to what does this rule do at the table, and how much should you trust that — specs/Positioning.md.

Clay-Borg owns what an entity, object, command, event, card, zone, relationship, game, simulation, asset, plugin, and capability mean. External libraries (wgpu, Rapier, Bevy ECS, Wasmtime, Quinn, egui, Serde, tracing, …) provide optimized implementations of rendering, physics, networking, serialization, and similar functions behind canonical ports. No external library type should leak across a canonical interface.

Vocabulary

"Error", "failure", "finding" and "correction" were each being used for the game's design, our formalisation of it, the code, the measuring apparatus and the sentences we wrote. specs/Taxonomy.md fixes that: every defect statement names a stratum first — GAME, MODEL, ENGINE, INSTRUMENT, ACCOUNT, PRESENTATION — because "a bug in the simulator" and "a gap in the game" have different owners and different fixes.

Where this is going

Three tracks, none started, in specs/Positioning.md §4: a second game (which is the falsifier for "GROUND is an example"), game theory as the lens on dynamics, and assimilated knowledge about why games work, offered to designers.

The field is surveyed in simulators/ — one profile per system, each marking what was checked and what is recollection. The survey already shrank two of the three tracks: Browne's 57 criteria and Ai Ai's authoring metrics mean track three is adopt and find the gap, not invent; and OpenSpiel's exploitability is the standard instrument for the question track two exists to ask.

Why GROUND first

GROUND requires modest physics but sophisticated social state, simultaneous decisions, and constrained sequences (a binding DARVO deny/attack/reverse state machine, a typed relationship graph, commit/reveal simultaneous resolution). It must stay playable headless — no rendering, no rigid-body simulation required to run or test the rules. The 3D tabletop is a projection and interaction surface for the game, not the definition of the game.

The most important 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.

First product

A headless, replayable, and agent-readable GROUND rules engine that can be projected onto an increasingly physical virtual tabletop, while every new capability remains replaceable, measurable, and financeable through TargetRevenue.

Implementation order

0. Headless GROUND — full authoritative state, 2–6 players, commit/reveal, relationships, DARVO, GROUND practice, CLI player, replay and scenario tests, simple bots. No rendering, no physics.
1. Inspectable 2D table — card/token/hand/relationship-graph visualization, drag-to-propose, debug inspector, hot-seat play. Open on one human verification, and every run of it so far has found something no test could. 2026-08-02, run 1: the drag was broken — drop targets were ids, which must be unique, so the graph circle held seat-0 and the seat card had none (CB-WP-0016). Run 2: the drag worked but the page was wrong about which moves exist, showing 5 cards each claiming all three target kinds where 9 specific commands were legal, with no way to see what was pickable, held, or droppable (CB-WP-0017). Both fixed. What remains is perceptual and unreachable from here by construction (ADR-0010 D5): run cb-play --serve 0 and confirm you can see what can be picked up, what you are holding, and where it may go.
2. Physical 3D tabletop — wgpu renderer, Rapier-backed physics, camera and pointer controls, snap zones, asset importer.
3. Networked sessions — authoritative host, private projections, commit/reveal protocol, reconnection, replay verification, spectator mode.
4. Game creation framework — object prototypes, scene/zone editors, card/deck importer, package validation, Wasm game components.
5. Prove generality — implement one deliberately different fixture game; only then promote duplicated GROUND abstractions into the stable Clay Canon.

No concept becomes canonical merely because it looks general. It becomes canonical after surviving a second concrete use.

Sister repositories

• ground-game — the authoritative home of the GROUND boardgame itself (rules, editions, content). Clay-Borg implements the engine that simulates it; game-semantics questions defer to that repo.
• target-revenue — the canonical home of the Target Revenue Framework and the TRSL license text this repo is released under.

Provenance

This intent is distilled from the fuller architectural exploration in history/260730-InitialExploration.md, which also covers the runtime substrate, simulation kernel, physics subsystem, world-building layer, tabletop domain framework, networking architecture, the agentic inner loop (work packets, CLI surface, quality gates), and the TargetRevenue business-control model in full detail.