The philosophy of what Unfolding is trying to achieve
The 12 Unfolding Software Principles
1 MVP focused, ideas should be tested as quickly as possible for you guys to criteque then refined.
How did I learn this? Game devs hide their ideas and work on their games and hide them. Then release them too late. This is why Deios 1 is so janky. I hid feedback way too late. Include community feedback, and tweak development every step of the way to make sure the tools I'm making are in the way that people need them.This means that updates will have flaws in them, and having them identified allows me to quickly fixed. Updates should be small so that the bugs they create are small as well. MVP stands for minimal viable product which is the bare minimal demonstration of the feature / product.
2 What you play is what you get: the engine should aim towards being able to be entirely developed in game.
No external coders, third party apps, Unfolding should aim towards giving the users the tools for everything inside of it. This is not going to be completely unattainable as people will always have better graphic. music, coding tools however. However principle 8 contradicts this as well.
3 Market to what is needed, to who needs it
Find communities that have needs that the existing market isn't providing. Every time I have inovated an idea and shown it to the people who need it in a fair price. People have always warmly received it. Meanwhile every time I missed that - I've been ignored. Nobody likes to be harrased with things they don't need. But everyone loves the innovator who improves or tackles new frontiers.
4 Scale based : tools are designed to be used to create hundreds of solutions and should stack on itself for more features later on.
5 Edit at anytime: Every asset should be able to be swapped around at anytime while the game is running, with no reason to recompile.
6 The creators of the software use the engine to make their own games and experience the same issues as everyone else.
7 Every game should be modible using the same toolkit and have parts interchangeable with one another.
8 All data should be open for tweaking. Images, data variables should be open to allow for other software to use the program to assist the Unfolding Engines games
Sometimes there is just better tools out there for getting the jobs done. Unfolding does not hide assets / compress assets in a way that obscures the ability for assets to be used by third part programs. They are in plaintext, png format easy to edit. Its entirely possible to make Unfolding games without even needing to use any of its in place tools.
9 Community based, 100 users can come together to create amazing works together and unfolding should aim towards facilitating those people together and providing the tools for them to organise together.
10 Make small dumb features, as they have smart interactions and multiply everything else
Updates should be boring and small, however their interactions with all the other features should allow for the sophistication of the program to exponentially grow. For instance if I add a feature I'm not adding to the projects value. I'm multiplying the value of the project so that every part is enhenced as a result. I've made the mistake of adding in features to Unfolding that I have only view in and based on themselves, and its lead to feature creep and unuseability. For instance the Incremental maker, I added in the features of having upgrades, choosing whether they produce money or items, upgrades. Whether they cost money or items. Etc. But its better if I have those features covered in other parts of the game. For instance instead of having a upgrade in the incremental menu. Its better if I just put down two incrementals in different part of the game thereby the player has just upgraded their incremental without me needing to write the code for that.
11 Commerciality : Unfolding aims to help the everyday gamer be able to make sellable games, and have a network of games that show how scalable the game is.
12 Provide new genres of games : Unfolding aims to create a new category of game in that people can recognise them as a category or genre of games.
