What is game-development-constitution?

This repository is a written field guide to general game development, made up of 143 individual principles that cover 24 different areas of making games. Each principle is written to explain what to do, why it tends to work, when it applies, when it does not, how you could put it into practice, and where experienced practitioners actually disagree with each other. The goal is to turn scattered craft knowledge that usually lives in the heads of experienced developers into something searchable and written down, for both human readers and AI systems. The content is organized so it can be read in more than one way. A companion website offers search, filters, links between related principles, and records showing where each claim comes from. For AI systems, the same content is available as structured JSON and JSONL files with a version manifest, plus plain Markdown files, so it can be pulled into an AI assistant's context and used as reference material. There is also a separate library of 30 skills specific to Unreal Engine 5.8, delivered the same way, with its own field manual and a downloadable bundle for local use. A key idea running through the project is that a principle is not an absolute rule. Each one is labeled as either broadly true across different games and styles, dependent on the specific genre or project, or a matter of reasonable stylistic choice where equally skilled developers might disagree. Confidence scores describe how much support a principle has, not how certain it is, and the project explicitly states that real project evidence and player experience should outweigh what the guide says. The project is maintained by a single named author with development help from AI coding assistants. The written content itself is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, while the website code and generation scripts use the MIT License. Running the project locally requires Node.js 22.13 or newer, with an npm test command that validates scope and references before building. It has 1 star on GitHub and is written mostly in TypeScript.