A real-time strategy game in the StarCraft lineage: the fairness of chess, the complexity of SC2, built on a modern deterministic architecture. One product owner, an AI staff, everything in public. This journal is the record: every decision, milestone, artifact, and misstep.
The entire multiplayer architecture rides on one property: the same commands must produce the same game, bit for bit, on every machine. Milestone zero existed to prove that or kill the project cheap. Fifty acceptance tests, two operating systems, two .NET runtimes, 601 state hashes per run. All of them identical.
Why the world needs a new Space Chess, and the three decisions that shaped Black Magic before a single line of game code existed: native over web, Unity over Bevy, and a simulation that never touches its own renderer. Plus the methodology experiment: what project planning looks like when implementation is nearly free and the bottleneck is one person's attention.