This one is called Bruce

The game has reached the point where I need to be able to say which one you were playing, and “the version from Tuesday” is not it.

So builds have names. They are taken from people who led uprisings, in the order those uprisings happened.

The board before this week was Wallace. This one is Bruce. You can see which you are on at the foot of the menu, and a bug report carries it without being asked, which is the actual reason it exists: a report sent five minutes after a release and a report from a tab left open all week are otherwise the same message.

Why these names

UPRISING is the system this world is built on, and every campaign in it is an Uprising. Naming the builds after people who actually rose is the architecture saying itself out loud rather than being explained.

Ordering them by when they rose gives something useful for free. Version order is history order, so the sequence is self-documenting and it cannot run out. Wallace led from 1297 and Bruce was crowned in 1306 and won at Bannockburn in 1314, which is also the right way round. I nearly shipped it inverted.

What did not get used, and why

The obvious alternative was the fiction’s own library. A Necronomicon edition. A Book of Eibon edition. It is a good idea for about a minute.

The problem is that a release name is a label on software, and everything inside the fiction is a thing a player can meet. Those two have to stay separable. The Necronomicon is the single most likely in-world object this game will ever name: the day it turns up as a card, or an entry on the Lore page, or something you unlock, the name is doing two jobs at once. Worse, it reads as a promise. Someone told they are playing the Necronomicon edition can fairly expect the release to contain the Necronomicon.

Historical figures cannot collide, because the deck is held to a specific period and a specific set of authors. William Wallace is never going to be a card.

There is one rule underneath all of this and it is the part I actually care about: releases take people, worlds take places. So if a future edition is ever set in antiquity, it gets named for its world and not for its rebel, and Spartacus stays available as a build name forever.

And no number

There is no 2.0. A number invites the question “two point oh of what”, which is the same reason the wordmark does not carry an edition number yet: it promises a shape that does not exist to be pointed at.

What is useful is the stage, so that is what it says. Bruce is a beta. The phone board landed today, there is a way to report a problem one press from the table, and I would rather you told me what is broken than assumed I already knew.