Document Governance

Purpose

This folder is the official documentation layer for EchoSpire: Portals.

Its job is to define the current canonical view of the project without forcing the team to treat the entire GDD as a single source of truth for every question.

Source Hierarchy

When two documents disagree, resolve the conflict in this order:

1. Documents under docs/official
2. Documents under docs/gpt54
3. the repository GDD

Files generated by other models outside docs/official are non-canonical reference material only.

What Belongs Here

The official set should contain only documents that answer recurring cross-discipline questions.

That includes:

• lore and setting canon
• gameplay structure and faction-class rules
• terminology and mechanic definitions
• technical architecture and implementation boundaries
• production priorities and milestone guidance

It should not become a dumping ground for every brainstorm, experiment, or one-off content pass.

Roles Of The Main Documents

• World And Lore defines the setting, factions, leaders, and narrative identity.
• Gameplay Reference defines what the player does, how progression works, and how the game content is structured.
• Rules Glossary defines official terms and mechanic meanings.
• Hero Progression And Difficulty defines persistent hero growth and environmental escalation.
• Campaign And Conflict Framework defines authored campaign structure and faction-versus-faction conflict.
• Technical Architecture defines system boundaries, implementation philosophy, and platform decisions.
• Production Roadmap defines what the team should build next and in what order.

Editorial Principles

• Prefer curated summaries over raw duplication.
• Preserve a clear separation between lore truth, gameplay truth, and implementation truth.
• Keep terminology stable once promoted here.
• Update this set when design intent changes materially, not for every temporary experiment.
• Promote content from prototype docs only after it has been consciously accepted as canon.

Current Canon Decisions

• The official content direction is based on the GPT-5.4 documentation set under docs/gpt54.
• The GDD remains the large working design archive, but it is no longer the only document a new contributor should read.
• The other model output files in the repository are not part of the official reference set.