A 4X that ends in one sitting: the constraint chose the scope

Strategy is the one genre I have sunk tens of thousands of hours into. But a usual session in that genre eats an entire evening, and nobody was building anything for the player who does not have an evening.

One sitting, a match that closes itself

The attempt was to fit the four verbs of 4X — explore, expand, exploit, exterminate — into half an hour. The only honest way to do that is to let the game end itself: a match closes after at most sixty turns, and if conquest is incomplete the score decides. The clock is not a warning, it is part of the rules.

Scope came out of the same constraint. A one-person project cannot match the content volume of a large production, and trying to means finishing no system at all. So the lists were deliberately kept short, and every entry has a job you can tell apart on the board — adding a unit that does no distinct work lengthens the list without enriching the game.

No surprises, only regrets

The second decision is in combat. A system that rolls dice lets a player blame the roll for every lost match instead of questioning their own call. Here the preview you see before attacking is the calculation: same number, same function. Writing a separate “estimate” function would have opened the one door through which preview and outcome could drift apart; that door was never opened.

Randomness is not absent — the map comes from a seeded generator — but it does not leak into play. The same seed and the same sequence of commands always produce the same match, opponent decisions included.

Having no server decided the save format

Running offline and without accounts also decided where a save could live. A save is not a full copy of the state: it is the seed, the setup and the list of commands issued so far. Loading replays that list to rebuild the state — and undo uses the same machinery, trimming the log by one command and replaying the match. No separate undo state is kept at all.

That carries a cost, and it was paid openly: when the rules change, replaying an old save produces a different match, so no migration path can be written. The save version goes up and the old file is quietly dropped. In a game that lasts one sitting that is an acceptable loss; in a long campaign game it would not be.

Letting the machine hold the constraint

I designed the mechanics and the architecture, and an AI wrote most of the code; my job was keeping the architecture intact. But guarding a rule by eye does not scale, so most of the constraints were handed to the machine: the rules core cannot reach the browser, the clock or the network — those are banned at the lint gate — and whether the gate actually holds is tested separately, by linting files written to be wrong on purpose.

The game is live and playable; development continues and the open items sit in their own records. The product side is detailed in the portfolio.