Common Foundations, Specialized Games

The library distinguishes responsibilities found across many games from systems characteristic of one genre, platform, engine, or particular game. The point is not to grind every game into the same machinery. It is to reuse the stable parts while leaving the interesting differences where they belong.

Genre profiles

A deck-building game can specialize item ownership into ordered draw, hand, discard, exhaust, and hidden-information zones. A rhythm game specializes action validation around audio time, latency calibration, timing windows, streaks, and synchronized feedback. A farming or life simulation connects world time, crops, inventories, relationships, seasons, crafting, and an economy with very different failure and pacing assumptions from a competitive shooter.

Turn-based tactics adds grids, initiative, action points, visibility, cover, path costs, and deterministic resolution. Action combat adds responsive movement, target selection, hit resolution, animation timing, status effects, interruption, prediction, and audiovisual feedback. Narrative-heavy games specialize knowledge, dialogue availability, branching, continuity, and consequence.

Engine and platform profiles

Unity, Unreal, Godot, custom engines, consoles, PC stores, mobile systems, and XR runtimes expose different lifecycles and capabilities. Adapters translate stable game meaning into those hosts. They should report unavailable or lower-fidelity behavior rather than inventing equivalence.

Game-owned specializations

The consuming game retains its verbs, rules, content, balance, pacing, world consequences, presentation, privacy choices, and final acceptance. A reusable module may explain how a recipe consumes inputs and produces outputs. The game decides whether blacksmithing takes five seconds, a day, a minigame, a rare hammer, or an apology to the local dragon.

The best shared foundation gives games more room to be distinctive because they spend less effort rediscovering the same plumbing—and because that plumbing has been tested somewhere more demanding than a hopeful diagram.