In plain words
BallOrcs got its story. The Realm is full of one-of-a-kind bouncy creatures — until the Hollow King arrives: a vast, perfectly smooth grey sphere that drains orcs of their colour and flattens them into silent discs. Your orc is brand new, built in the village barber's chair minutes before the wave hits, so it's the only one the King can't catalogue and flatten. The quest: reignite the Elemental Founts and bring the colour back. You build your orc from parts — every eye, hat, and accessory changes both how you look and what you can do — and the plan is three levels (speed, fire, flight) in ten weekly playable builds.
Under the hood
Three docs landed (docs/GAME_DESIGN.md, NARRATIVE.md, ROADMAP.md),
plus the machinery to make the plan executable:
- Component system: every part carries
appearancedata plus optionalability_modifiers, registry is data-driven, and the character editor lives in a sharedballorcs-coremodule vendored as a pinned submodule atproject/addons/ballorcs_core. Trick worth stealing: the submodule URL is relative (../ballorcs-core.git) so it resolves against whatever remote the superproject came from — the local server on a dev machine, the internal CI hostname inside CI containers. Same save format across future titles; the cross-game character portability is even diegetic (your orc survives because it stays ahead of the King's catalogue). - Level design rule: each level themes on 1–2 abilities; environments favour them, obstacles require them, secondary routes reward off-theme builds for replay value.
- The plan is data:
infra/pm/backlog.jsonseeds GitLab with 10 label-based epics and 57 weighted issues (CE has no native Epics), the L1/L2/L3/V1 milestones, and weekly due dates — idempotent, so the plan evolves by editing JSON and re-running. V1 target: Monday 2026-09-21, riding the existing Monday 06:00 UTC release train, every issue weighted ≤ 2 days so nothing spans a release boundary half-merged.