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.

These folders hold the project's design canon, organised by discipline.

Where to start

If you are an artist picking up a brief, read Art / Bible first. The bible carries setting, cast, the arc, and the craft sections (Six Marks, tone, palette, line, treatment, animation, touchstones) in one place.

If you are an engineer new to the codebase, read North Star for the shape of the game, Tech-art / INDEX for the rendering side, and the active phase folder (01-prototype/ at the moment) for what the team is building this cycle.

If you are a writer working on copy, beats, or character voice, read Narrative / Outline for the story, Narrative / Discipline for craft notes, and Research / STYLE for the prose voice the project holds itself to.

If you are one of Josh's collaborators looking for canon on a specific point, the discipline folder is the answer. Art questions land in art/, story questions in narrative/, pipeline questions in tech-art/.

If you are an open-source visitor, The Case for Open Development is the project's published essay on why the work is in the open. CONTRIBUTING.md at the repo root is the practical entry point.

How the docs are organised

Two kinds of folder.

Discipline folders hold canonical work, owned by the people who do that discipline. art/, narrative/, tech-art/, ai/, process/, research/, characters/, concept/. When something here changes, the next brief and the next ticket pick the change up.

Phase folders hold drafts and decisions tied to a stage of the game's life. 01-prototype/, 02-alpha/, 03-beta/, 04-content/. Work starts in the active phase folder, gets argued through, and settles into the relevant discipline folder when it earns canon.

Phase folders are not canon. Anything in 01-prototype/, 02-alpha/, 03-beta/, or 04-content/ is working draft. If a phase-folder doc still reads as canon, that is a signal to promote it into the matching discipline folder, not to cite it as authoritative. The discipline folders are what the next brief and the next ticket pick up.

The two-folder layout is the navigation: discipline tells you what kind of doc, phase tells you what era it speaks to.

Discipline

Art

Doc	Purpose
Bible	The world canon. Setting, two styles, cast, the arc from Construction through cliff and call, then craft sections (Six Marks, tone, palette, line, treatment, animation, touchstones). Source of truth for the artist.
Tech Pipeline	How the style is implemented in Godot: parallax layers, sprite delivery, the per-style grade.
Character Lighting	Dynamic light-state pipeline for characters across venues.

Narrative

Doc	Purpose
Outline	The story beats, in order. Construction's climb, the break at the championship, Reconstruction's search, and the call at the cliff bench.
Discipline	Writing craft notes for the project: scene construction, dialogue, tone modulation, memory surfacings, line-level cracks, pacing.

Tech-art

Doc	Purpose
INDEX	What tech-art owns: the seam between art and engine.
Grading	LUT pipeline for the per-style grade between Construction and Reality.

Process

Doc	Purpose
Ticket Writing	How issues get written so a stranger can pick them up cold.
Labels	The label taxonomy: what each label means and when it applies.

Research

Doc	Purpose
STYLE	The prose voice for long-form writing. Read first.
The Case for Open Development	The published essay: why open development is the most reliable practice for a new indie to be seen.
Open Development Plan	The internal plan that seeded the essay.
Visual Positioning	Where Volley! sits visually among idle, desktop, and sport games.
Early Clone Games	Why Breakout's clone lineage outlasted Pong's.
Game Structure References	Structural reference points for the loop and the story.

Characters

Doc	Purpose
Protagonist	Who the player is playing as, and what the partners are to them.
Shopkeeper	The friend at the stall in Construction; the person the protagonist pushed away in Reality.
Sister (the tinkerer)	The shopkeeper's younger sister. The bridge across Reconstruction.
Martha and the partners	Coaches in Construction; people the protagonist knew in Reality.
Champ	The dead friend, rendered into Construction as the championship final.

Concept

The concept folder runs from 00-three-styles through 05-postgame. Earliest framing of the two-style world, the rally, the partners, the break, the reconstruction, and what the game looks like once the credits have rolled.

AI

Doc	Purpose
Swarm Architecture	The agent system that helps build the game: Gru-and-minions, two pools, session tiers, PR verdict flow.

The open-development essay sits in research/ but speaks to the same surface: what stays human in the work as AI absorbs the boilerplate.

Phase

Phase	Folder	What lives here now
Prototype	01-prototype/	The public itch.io demo. Active drafts that have not yet matured into discipline canon.
Alpha	02-alpha/	Construction content-complete; the break designed.
Beta	03-beta/	Reconstruction, the cliff and the call, and the postgame playable end-to-end.
Content Updates	04-content/	Supplementary content past the main arc.

Drafts start in the active phase folder, settle into the discipline folder when they earn canon, and the phase folder keeps the working history.

Top-level

Doc	Purpose
North Star	What the game is, who it's for, what it asks of the player.
Roadmap	The five phases at a glance.