Success criteria

The design is working when · Out of scope · How it is checked ·

The design is working when

1. You can point at a street in the year 1900 and explain it with something that happened in the year 1300.
2. Two runs on the same seed with different player choices produce cities that do not look alike.
3. Watching a single building go up, voxel by voxel, is worth doing once.
4. The city does something you did not want and you understand exactly why.
5. You can look at the first hundred years of building, and the fifth hundred, and tell which is which without being told, and nothing in the code decided that.

Out of scope

Multiple playable cities. A rendered world map. Combat as a controllable activity. Named historical characters. Anything that makes the player a builder rather than a governor.

How it is checked

The simulation has no renderer and a fixed seed, so every claim above is a test that can be written: the_same_seed_gives_the_same_city, a_town_survives_its_first_century_and_builds, the water probe over sixty years, the land probe over decades, and the rules as shipped regenerated from the code on every build so the numbers on the page are the numbers in the game.

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This chapter is docs/design/11-success-criteria.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.