# Roadmap

## Built

| MVP requirement | State |
| --- | --- |
| Top-down 2D twin-stick bullet hell | Movement, aim, fire, i-frames, death and respawn; MultiMesh bullet rendering. |
| Multiplayer with server-side hit validation | Authoritative dedicated server; clients send input only; all hits resolved server-side for both players and enemies. No PvP. |
| Simple, predictable enemies | Drifter, Turret, Stalker, plus a lobby dummy. Five movement behaviours, all closed-form. |
| Stationary boss, adaptable format | The Warden of the Fold: four phases, data-defined. A new boss is one function and zero simulation changes. |
| Lobby hub with dungeon entry | Persistent lobby instance, portal, party forming window, dungeons opened on demand. |
| Emergency escape | One-second server-owned channel, cancelled by release but not by damage; a disconnect runs the same channel so quitting is never a cheaper exit. |
| Leaving and arriving | Downed players return to the hub on request (no timed respawn); entering a dungeon grants 2s of invulnerable, weapons-cold arrival protection. |
| Hub awareness | Server-pushed roster showing who is online and which dungeon they are in. |
| In-game menu | Escape opens return-to-hub / disconnect / quit. |

91 tests plus an end-to-end smoke test over a real socket, including a bot that
is SIGKILLed mid-dungeon to prove the disconnect path.

## Next, in rough order of value

**1. Make the dungeon a place.** Right now it is one arena and three stages.
Rooms, doors, and a `SimWorld` with static geometry — which means adding a
collision representation for walls (segment-vs-circle for players, segment
crossing for bullets) since there is no physics engine to lean on.

**1b. Progression, and what it turns on.** Several things are currently sized
for "no persistence yet" and should be revisited together with it: death sends
you to the hub rather than costing anything, a linkdead body is simply deleted
once it channels out (there is no hub state to put it in), and `peer_names` is
client-supplied and trusted for display. All three are fine now and none of them
are once a character has anything worth losing.

**2. Art and feel.** Everything is drawn with `draw_circle` and a generated dot
texture. Sprites, hit flashes, screen shake, muzzle flashes, death effects, and
sound. None of it touches the simulation — this is entirely `src/view/`.

**3. A second boss.** The format claims to be reusable; the way to find out is
to use it. A mobile boss will exercise `BossDef.stationary`, which the runtime
already reads but no content uses yet.

**4. Progression.** Loot, character stats, persistence. Needs a decision on
storage: for a dedicated server, player state belongs server-side in a database,
not in a client save file.

**5. Netcode hardening.** In the order they will actually matter:
   - DTLS on `ENetMultiplayerPeer` before any public server.
   - Authentication; `peer_names` is currently client-supplied and trusted for
     display only, which is fine now and will not be once there is progression.
   - Snapshot delta compression, once enemy counts grow.
   - Interest management inside an instance, once arenas are larger than a
     screen.

**6. Scale.** The simulation costs ~1.4% of a core per instance, so the ceiling
is bandwidth and process supervision, not CPU. A shard manager that runs several
server processes behind a lobby-of-lobbies is the shape, but it is premature
until there is a game to fill it.

## Deliberately not done

- **Lag compensation.** Discussed in [NETCODE.md](NETCODE.md): rewinding for a
  shooter's view would mean a player who dodged still gets hit, which is the
  wrong trade for this genre.
- **Pattern-level bullet replication.** A large bandwidth win that couples the
  client to emitter behaviour. Not worth it until bandwidth binds.
- **`MultiplayerSynchronizer` / `MultiplayerSpawner`.** Right tools, wrong shape
  for a bullet hell. See [ARCHITECTURE.md](ARCHITECTURE.md).