Bootstrap before design
Day one of The Rot Hunters produced no game. It produced a repository pinned to the exact tool versions Wardenfall uses, two Cloudflare deployment targets (a development one that publishes a preview for every ticket, and a production one that only publishes from the main branch after every check passes), a landing page, and a decision log with three entries. No framework was chosen. No renderer. No architecture rules. Those come from the design, and the design comes from a short list of tickets we have not finished writing.
Why the road comes first
Wardenfall taught us that the moment a design decision is made is the moment it is cheapest to build. If the deploy path already exists, "let's try the opening room as a top down thing" becomes a preview link the same afternoon. If it does not, the same idea waits a week while somebody sets up hosting, and by then it has been argued about instead of played.
The other reason is the way we work. Most of our implementation happens through an automated loop: a ticket is written, an AI assisted agent picks it up, opens a merge request, deploys a preview, and a human plays the preview before anything merges. That loop needs the deploy scripts and the quality gates to exist before the first ticket, or the first ticket becomes "build the loop".
What we deliberately did not decide
Wardenfall's architecture has nine hard rules: a pure simulation with no rendering imports, a fixed sixty hertz timestep, all tuning in one file, seeded randomness, and so on. They are good rules. They are also rules for a third person melee game, and copying them into a project whose core action is unknown would quietly decide what the game is. So the second repository says, in its own instructions: architecture rules not yet defined, do not invent them, the first design tickets state the structure. When a ticket is silent, prefer Wardenfall's defaults. That is a default, not a decision.
The name
Players will type the address, so the game's domain is one word, like wardenfall. The repository and the deployment projects keep the hyphen in rot-hunters, because the automation config already expected it. That is the kind of decision that goes in the log: not because it matters, but because in six months someone will wonder why the two spellings differ, and the answer should be one search away.
What happens next
The design tickets. Each one is a question, each answer becomes a numbered decision, and the ones worth reading get a post here. The first playable slice, whatever it is, will be small and played before anything else gets built.
Published on 4 October 2026 with the first batch of devlog entries. Drafted from the project's commit log and decision records with AI writing tools, then edited by Alexis Rivard.