Research

Background research that informs Volley!'s direction. Each doc stands alone; together they give the context behind the choices the design and art docs make.

The essay

Doc	Purpose
The Case for Open Development	The published essay. ~15,900 words across fourteen sections plus bibliography. The case for open development as the most reliable practice for a new indie to be seen, with implications past games.

The AI-tooling design docs live in the sister repo, volley-ai.

Sister research

Doc	Purpose
Visual Positioning	Where Volley! sits visually among idle, desktop, and sport games. Reasoning behind the hand-drawn, live-scene direction.
Early Clone Games	Why Breakout's clone lineage outlasted Pong's, and what cloning shaped in the early industry.
Open Development Plan	Earlier internal plan that seeded the essay.
Paddle Bounce	How paddle-and-ball games actually compute return angle. Background for 01-prototype/tech/03-paddle-bounce.md.
Points vs NoEstimates	The case for dropping story points: where points came from and the political reason they exist, why estimates miss (the planning fallacy) and why the velocity fix breaks (Goodhart), and the NoEstimates alternative of forecasting from flow.
Why AI Loves Em-Dashes	Research note on the em-dash prose tell, why the model reaches for it and how the no-em-dash rule counters it.

Working folders

Folder	Tracked	Contents
drafts/	no	Section files for the essay (00 title through 15 sources). Concatenated via the cat command in regen scripts to produce the published file.
notes/	yes	Per-angle research notes the essay was built from.