# Hybridization — what was reused, from where, and why This collection takes a source repo full of open-source game clones and turns it into ten playable titles. "Hybridization" here means a specific, auditable thing: **for each original, name the upstream titles it draws on, say exactly what was taken — mechanics *and* the actual bytes — and say what was deliberately not taken.** Nothing is absorbed silently. The raw audit of the source repo is `docs/INVENTORY.md`. Scope rules are `docs/SCOPE-GATE.md` (standing decision #7 records the opt-in that made real upstream content shippable). The mechanics of the import are in `docs/VENDORED-CONTENT.md`, per-file provenance in `vendor/MANIFEST.json`, licensing in `docs/LICENSING.md`. ## The two lanes | Lane | What it means | Titles | |---|---|---| | **port** | An upstream open-source game, built from a pinned commit. Reused as-is. Engine, assets and licence stay upstream's; the 18 GB tree is not vendored. | Mindustry, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Luanti, Endless Sky, DarkPlaces, DDNet | | **forge** | An original title written for this repo: its own renderer, rules and content design, running on real upstream sprites, audio and game-data tables. MIT code. | Vaultbreak, Tessera, Ember Drift, Rift Nine | Each `ports//PROVENANCE.md` records upstream URL, pinned commit, licence, artifact size and SHA-256, and the build commands that were actually run. ## The four originals run on real upstream payload 578 files / 21.9 MB under `vendor/`, produced by `tools/vendor.py` from ten pinned commits (Endless Sky, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Unciv, Cataclysm: DDA, SuperTuxKart assets), verified file-by-file by size and SHA-256 in `tests/vendor.mjs`. Every game still declares its own art and audio fallback, and every game boots and plays when the bundle is deleted — tested, including a control run where `window.AOMG_VENDOR` is neutered. ### Vaultbreak — roguelike |Taken from|What was taken|What was not taken| |---|---|---| |Shattered Pixel Dungeon|11 animated creature sheets driven as the whole bestiary — rat, bat, snake, gnoll, eye, ghoul, brute, golem, ghost, elemental, and `vault_boss_elemental` as the VAULT WARDEN — plus the 16×16 item atlas for loot icons and `amulet.png` for artifacts, and the three region **terrain atlases** (sewers/prison/caves) as the dungeon floor and masonry — cell indices taken from SPD's own `DungeonTileSheet.java`, not guessed. 12 sound effects (hit_slash, hit_strong, hit_crush, hit_magic, miss, zap, item, gold, descend, levelup, death, boss) and two music loops (`vault.opus` in the dungeon, `tense.opus` from sector 6).|Its turn engine, class system, item behaviour, level generator. No Java code copied.| |Cataclysm: DDA|169 items as the loot table with their real names, prices, weights and descriptions shown verbatim in the tooltip and log; 11 monsters used as the **stat anchors** for the bestiary (e.g. `mon_zombear` → the brute, `mon_big_rat` → the rat) through a documented hp/atk/dice conversion; 4 real recipes in the fabricator (bandages from cotton patchwork + medical tape ×5 + disinfectant; recharge station from frame + recharge station; pillow from cotton patchwork + cotton ball; napalm from diesel ×125 + plastic chunk + bleach + oxidizer powder).|Its C++ engine, its mapgen, its huge item matrix.| |Mindustry|Scrap → craft → upgrade still shapes the mid-run power curve: loot is a material, and the fabricator is where power comes from.|Its conveyor/defence sim, engine, assets.| Turn economy is SPD's: the world advances one tick per player action. Canvas 2D, procedural BSP floors, shadowcast field of view, tap-to-path movement. ### Tessera — hex 4X |Taken from|What was taken|What was not taken| |---|---|---| |Unciv|The **actual Civ V technology tree**: 74 technologies across 18 columns, 7 eras, with their real costs, prerun quotes and building costs. 31 units and 50 buildings (81 buildables) gated on it, and 23 nations with leader names for the title/pause/game-over lines.|Its Java/LibGDX engine, its map generator, and its tilesets: every Unciv tilesheet (HexaRealm, FantasyHex, Minimal) is flat-top 64×56, while Tessera's map is pointy-top, so blitting them would need a 90° rotation that turns a mountain peak sideways. Tessera keeps its own drawn hexes rather than ship art that reads wrong.| |OpenTTD|Road-and-trade logistics: roads cut movement cost and generate trade income between connected cities.|Its transport sim, its sprite sets.| Shipped rule: a tech opens when any tech of the previous column is known — measured, the stricter "previous column, lower-or-equal row" rule only reached 12 of 74 techs. Costs scale 0.10×, units 0.30×, buildings 0.32× so a 74-tech tree still finishes inside an 80-turn game. ### Ember Drift — space trading and combat |Taken from|What was taken|What was not taken| |---|---|---| |Endless Sky|13 ship sprites (downscaled, loaded from `vendor/`) for 6 buyable hulls, 3 pirate classes and two kinds of ambient traffic; the hull table itself — 120 hulls with real cost/hull/shield/mass/cargo — converted to game stats by a documented mapping; the 10 ES commodities with their real base prices driving the market.|Its engine, its data-file interpreter, its 120-hull full data set (13 preloaded).| |DarkPlaces / Quake|The arena-shooter cadence: screen shake, hit flashes, projectile speed that reads at a glance.|Its engine, maps, shareware data.| Stat mapping, in code: hull 100·√(ES hull/600), shield 60·√(ES shields/300), accel from ES mass, turn from ES mass, cargo ES cargo ×0.5, price 450 + ES cost/2000 with 40% trade-in. Enemy hull scales with the player's tier so a warship does not trivialise combat. ### Rift Nine — momentum platformer |Taken from|What was taken|What was not taken| |---|---|---| |SuperTuxKart|Seven sound effects mapped to the moment they belong to (boing = jump, anvil = hard landing, crash = death, clock = coin, break = hook fire, bubblegum_explode = hook release, explosion = boost pad) and `alien_signal.opus` as the looped soundtrack.|Its 3D engine, karts, tracks.| |Shattered Pixel Dungeon|Animated sprite sheets used as scenery: `crystal_wisp` (32 frames) as drifting wisps, `eye` as a watching eye, `golem` as feet-anchored plates creatures. Palette-graded so they belong in the neon palette instead of reading as pixel noise.|Its gameplay, its UI.| |DDNet|Speedrun structure: per-room timing, best-time deltas, ghost replays, instant respawn at a checkpoint.|Its netcode (single-player, offline by design).| Level generation is untouched by the decor pass — creatures are added after all geometry, never near solids/spikes/saws/lasers/pads/coins, and each room has its own seed, so the generator's output is byte-identical with or without the bundle. Measured frame time is unchanged (median 16.7 ms, p95 16.7 ms over 301 rAF samples before and after). ## Attribution where a player can see it Every original names its donors on the title screen, e.g. "Ships and market data: Endless Sky contributors (GPL-3.0)" and "Item data: Cataclysm: DDA contributors (CC-BY-SA-3.0)". That is the licence attribution requirement being met in the artifact, not only in a doc. ## Technique reused across all four `shell/lib/gamekit.js` is the only code common to the originals: device-tier detection, DPR-capped canvas fitting, a fixed-step loop with clamped dt, namespaced `localStorage` with export/import, haptics, a synthesised sound kit used as the fallback when the vendored audio is missing, a thumb-pad builder, and a seeded PRNG. Each game still owns its renderer and rules. ## The cross-hybrid lane Michael's standing directive (SCOPE-GATE decision 8): *use the clones' assets and back ends to cross with other ones that mesh well, mix up and collab, then rename.* Four titles do exactly that. Each is a renamed game in its own folder, built from one clone's engine plus a second clone's systems and shipped assets — both halves have to carry weight at runtime. | Title | Engine taken from | Systems crossed in | Assets it draws | Renamed from | |---|---|---|---|---| | **Siegehaus** | Vaultbreak (SPD turn economy, permadeath, BSP floors, shadowcast FOV, crafting, boss) | Mindustry's production model — ore veins, drills, conveyors, fabricators, turrets on a per-turn tick | 3 SPD terrain atlases, 11 SPD creature sheets, 169 C:DDA items, 36 Mindustry sprites | `vaultbreak` | | **Charterline** | Tessera (hex 4X: 74 Unciv techs, 50 buildings, 31 units, 23 nations, one expanding AI) | Endless Sky's commodity market as chartered trade routes between your cities | Unciv's tech/building/unit tables, 10 ES commodities, 6 Luanti node materials | `tessera` | | **Nulltrace** | Rift Nine (nine grapple rooms, run structure, per-room timing) | id's PM_Friction / PM_Accelerate / PM_AirAccelerate at shipped constants (320 / 6 / 100 / 10 / 30) and DDNet's speedrun framing | 13 ES ship sprites, DarkPlaces-derived weapon feel, stk audio | `rift-nine` | | **Lanternfall** | Ember Drift (ES 120-hull table, 10 commodities, market, Newtonian flight) | Quake-era arena cadence — 10-frag limit, armour on 25 s, weapon crate on 40 s | 13 ES ship sprites, ES commodity table | `ember-drift` | | **Cinderhold** | new build (this repo) — isometric actor/ability layer, camera, loot and inventory | DCSS's vault corpus as the level source: every floor is cut from a real `MAP` grid with its depth band and tags | 12 Flare portraits, 6 painted menu panels (9-sliced for every window), Flare's `tooltips.png` and `character.png` HUD frames, 140 Flare item records, Flare monster sheets as a palette source | new — no parent original | | **Wardenmarch** | new build (this repo) — turn/phase manager, movement BFS, attack resolution | Wesnoth's own unit rules (hp, movement, cost, alignment, per-attack damage/number/range) played on DCSS arena geometry | 22 Wesnoth unit records with sprites and portraits, 14 terrain tiles | new — no parent original | What each cross actually costs and buys: - **Siegehaus** is the strictest of the four: Mindustry contributes *art only*. The belt, drill, fabricator and turret logic is written from scratch in `games/siegehaus/js/main.js`, because shipping Mindustry's simulation would make the "backend × backend" claim false. The mesh is temporal — the SPD turn you spend is also the tick your line runs on, so fighting and building compete for the same resource. - **Charterline** keeps Tessera's whole tech tree and gives the map an economy that isn't a flat bonus: each city exports one good cheap and imports another dear, chosen deterministically from its id and re-drifted every turn, so route income is the live spread between two specific cities. Luanti materials texture the terrain because a material swatch has no implied camera angle — which is precisely why Unciv's flat-top tilesets are still not used (decision above). - **Nulltrace** replaces Rift Nine's "accelerate toward a cap" model with Quake's friction-then- accelerate model, so speed is only ever bled by friction and a fast line stays fast. The vertical arc stays Rift Nine's: the nine rooms were built around that jump height, and changing it would invalidate the course rather than improve it. DDNet contributes the framing — an unpausable run clock, splits, a bronze/silver/gold ladder against Rift Nine's existing par table, and a ghost of the best run. - **Lanternfall** puts Ember Drift's hulls and market inside an arena: the frag limit ends a round, the item timers decide who holds armour, and the credits the round pays buy the next hull. The Quake contribution is cadence, not physics — no shareware pak exists anywhere in the clone tree, so nothing was imported from Quake itself. The two 2026-10-30 hybrids cross the *data*, not just the pictures, and that is what makes them different from a reskin: - **Cinderhold** takes DCSS's hand-authored geometry as its level format. A floor is not a procedural blob: it is one vault chosen from the corpus by depth, so its shape has authored intent (a corridor, a ring, a hall with pillars) and it arrives with the vault's own tags and depth band. Flare supplies what fills it — 140 item records whose damage ranges, armour values and bonus stats are Flare's own numbers, so a found dagger's damage is an upstream value rather than a balance guess. - **Wardenmarch** takes Wesnoth's rule set as its combat model. Hit points, movement allowance, recruit cost, alignment and every attack's damage/number/range come out of Wesnoth's WML, and the game resolves them as written — melee attacks cannot reach two tiles, a 5-move unit has 5 move points. The arena is the DCSS half: the fight happens over a vault's actual floor plan, where doors and pillars decide line of sight instead of an open board. Neither of them presents as a port: no upstream engine runs inside either page. What is borrowed is geometry, rules and art, all vendored and attributed; the code that turns it into a game is written here. ## Dependency policy Zero npm packages, no CDN, no web fonts, no analytics, no runtime network of any kind — the vendored payload is a local file set, loaded by a classic `