Home

Volley! is a desktop idle game shaped like a tennis rally. The ball goes back and forth between the protagonist and a coach who arrives one round at a time. A counter on the wall climbs. A friend leans on the counter of a small wooden stall on the far side of the play, watching the protagonist play, glad to be there. In another corner, the friend's younger sister works at a bench, fixing what the protagonist brings her.

Underneath the loop sits a story the player meets gradually. Cracks accumulate. The second layer earns its weight by the time the player can read it. What the rally already gave stays earned. The game holds for both readers: someone who only wants the rally running while they work, and someone who notices the names, the digits in the count, the weight a pong-shaped game has not asked for.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md is the front door: picking up a ticket, running the project, opening a PR, signing off. Read that first, then come back here for the thing you are working on.

How these docs work

One page per thing. If you want to know how the ball works, read Ball. If you want to know who Zach is, read Shopkeeper.

Each page runs from the outside in: what the thing is in the fiction, then how it is designed to play, then how it is built. Read as far down as you need and stop.

These docs describe the game that exists. Construction is what is built, so Construction is what is written down. Acts past it are not documented until they are real, and a feature nobody has built does not get a page. When something is cut from the game it is cut from here too.

The game

Page	What it covers
Ball	The ball, its lifecycle, the roster, speed tiers, physics.
Soul	The currency. Gathering it, consolidating it, spending it.
Item	What an item is, how items are authored, how they move.
Shop	Zach's stall. Buying balls, restocking.
Kit	The staging area for balls not in play.
Court	The play surface, its bounds, the miss.
Venue	The place it all sits in.
Partner	The rally partner and the AI behind them.
Save	The save format and how it versions.
Idle	Play that continues without the player.
Story	Construction, as it stands.

The Cast

Page	Who
Characters	The cast, at a glance.
Protagonist	The person at the centre, and the racquet in their hand.
Shopkeeper	Zach.
Tinkerer	Stephanie.
Martha	The first partner.
Fern	The champion.
Partners	The lineage rule and the wider cast.

Process

How the work gets made, from the ticket through to the build.

Page	What it covers
Process	How the team writes, files, and runs the work.
Art	The visual design, the pipeline, the references.
Audio	The score, the sound design, the engine seam.
Continuous integration	Assets, the LFS proxy, exports.

Reference

Page	What it covers
Spikes	Decision records. Why a thing is the way it is.
Research	The public essay, plans, references, studies.
North Star	What the game is, who it is for, what it asks of the player.
Roadmap	The five phases at a glance.