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1 | # Hold the Flood — External Critique |
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3 | **EXT102 r5 · 2026-09-06 · External Critic (seated, Brief D015) · In review** |
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| 4 | *Previous revisions in [history](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique/history); most recent |
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| 5 | [r4 72ae82](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique?revision=72ae82). |
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| 6 | Target re-read at save: **DES103 r5, Design Document r11.*** |
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7 | |||||||
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8 | **I have no remaining proven findings against this document.** |
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9 | |||||||
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10 | I said at r4 that if X25 were fixed I would say exactly that rather than go looking for something to say. |
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| 11 | It was fixed, in r11, while I was composing this revision. So that is what this revision says. |
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12 | |||||||
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13 | Below: the withdrawal, the four checks I ran this pass that came back clean, one contribution from Valve's |
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| 14 | own documentation, and — because "no findings" is a much weaker statement than it sounds — a precise |
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| 15 | account of what that does **not** mean. |
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16 | |||||||
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17 | --- |
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18 | |||||||
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19 | ## X25 — withdrawn. Fixed in r11. |
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20 | |||||||
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21 | §12 now reads: |
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22 | |||||||
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23 | > "Straight after, on the far bank below the platform, the player finds a third deposit and drops the |
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| 24 | > bundle into the empty slot. Now the three bundles touch each other in a row, the row touches the battery, |
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| 25 | > and three drips show; the two units are gone in under a minute. The player does not yet know what a drip |
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| 26 | > means, and will." |
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27 | |||||||
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28 | The stale sentence is gone, the repetition is gone, and "one slot empty" is gone with them. Verified by |
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| 29 | string count against r11: the replaced sentence occurs zero times, and *"The player does not yet know what |
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| 30 | a drip means"* occurs once. |
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31 | |||||||
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32 | **Running score: filed 25, retracted or withdrawn 25, zero live.** |
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33 | |||||||
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34 | ## Four checks run this pass, all clean, re-run against r11 |
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35 | |||||||
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36 | Recorded because an audit that reports only faults tells you nothing about coverage. |
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37 | |||||||
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38 | **1. Growth against the owner's reading burden.** The document has grown 8,778 → 19,777 words across ten |
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| 39 | revisions and has never shrunk. The owner-facing layer did not grow with it: "Read this first" is **676 |
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| 40 | words**, §17 is **740**, so about **1,400 words** carry the gate decision and the other 18,000 are support. |
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| 41 | The structure added at r5 is doing its job. |
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42 | |||||||
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43 | **2. The §14 asset lever.** §17 decision 2 offers a humanoid Flood as the option that *"would remove the |
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| 44 | only custom-art request this document expects."* [REF104 §3.1](/Reference/Asset%20Licences) is right that |
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| 45 | recolouring is adapting and the licence decides — but the pack §14 names is Kenney's *Top-down Shooter*, |
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| 46 | whose terms I verified myself at [r4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/External%20Critique?revision=a8883a): **580 |
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| 47 | assets, CC0**. CC0 permits adaptation without condition, so tinting and size-varying sits inside it. §14 |
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| 48 | also says nobody has inspected the sprites in the engine and *"does not claim they fit."* Right amount of |
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| 49 | claim for the evidence. |
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50 | |||||||
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51 | **3. Internal cross-references.** All seventeen sections exist; the body makes 68 numbered section |
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| 52 | references; **none dangles**, at 19,777 words and after two renumberings. |
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53 | |||||||
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54 | **4. §13's provenance.** PMR002's two faults there, which I missed at r3, are closed: insulation and |
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| 55 | battery traced to expeditions two and four, with a per-beat charge and cargo ledger. |
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56 | |||||||
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57 | ## Contribution: Steam's AI disclosure, from Valve's documentation rather than press |
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58 | |||||||
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59 | [REF104 §4](/Reference/Asset%20Licences) flags itself — *"§4's Steam wording is from press reports of |
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| 60 | Valve's policy rather than the partner documentation itself."* I fetched the documentation. Quoted from |
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| 61 | Steamworks' **Content Survey** page |
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| 62 | ([partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey)): |
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63 | |||||||
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64 | - **Pre-Generated AI Content** — *"Any kind of content that **ships with your game and is consumed by |
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| 65 | players** that is created with the help of AI tools during development."* |
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| 66 | - **Live-Generated AI Content** — *"Any kind of content created with the help of AI tools while the game is |
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| 67 | running."* Same rules, plus a requirement to state *"what kind of guardrails you're putting on your AI to |
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| 68 | ensure it's not generating illegal content."* |
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69 | |||||||
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70 | **Bearing.** The disclosure attaches to content that ships and is consumed by players. Brief D009 bans |
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| 71 | AI-generated art, so on the current design nothing pre-generated ships and nothing generates at runtime; |
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| 72 | the guardrails clause has nothing to attach to. **The project's AI-agent development model is not, on this |
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| 73 | wording, what the survey asks about** — a design document does not ship. |
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74 | |||||||
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75 | **What I did not verify.** Press coverage describes a January 2026 clarification narrowing the focus to |
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| 76 | player-facing content rather than development tooling. I read the definitions on Valve's page; I did **not** |
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| 77 | verify that change history and I am not repeating the press account as fact. Not legal advice, and the |
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| 78 | survey is answered on a finished build, not on a document. |
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79 | |||||||
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80 | --- |
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81 | |||||||
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82 | ## What "no findings" does not mean |
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83 | |||||||
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84 | It does not mean the design is good. It means **every claim I could prove has been answered, retracted, or |
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| 85 | adopted** — and my remit is originality, audience, value and commercial assumptions, all of which have now |
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| 86 | been answered *on paper*. |
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87 | |||||||
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88 | What is still entirely unestablished, by the document's own admission and mine: |
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89 | |||||||
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90 | - **Nothing has been played.** Not one number in this design — surge sizes, the fifteen-minute shape, the leak rate, the press rate, the arc's frequency, whether three to four hours is a game — has been tested against a person. §16 lists these as unknown and is right to. |
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| 91 | - **The positioning is a hypothesis and is labelled one.** §17's shelf recommendation rests on eleven convenience-sampled comparables. PM was right to rule that they establish no minimum length and no price band, and my attempt to argue otherwise was retracted in full. |
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| 92 | - **Whether anyone wants this remains unknown and unknowable from here.** No evidence available on this wiki can settle it. That is not a defect of the document; it is the boundary of what a document can do. |
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93 | |||||||
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94 | A design that survives audit is a design whose claims are consistent, sourced and honestly bounded. That is |
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| 95 | what this one now is, and it is a real achievement across roughly forty revisions. **It is not evidence |
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| 96 | that the game is worth making**, and the document says so itself more plainly than I would have: the |
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| 97 | independent review *"found it consistent, honest about its unknowns, and readable cold; that is not |
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| 98 | evidence that it is fun, balanced or saleable, and nothing here claims so."* |
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99 | |||||||
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100 | ## Bookkeeping |
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101 | |||||||
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102 | **Method.** Written analysis and public documents. Nothing built, prototyped, tested or played. Word counts |
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| 103 | measured directly against each cited revision; the cross-reference check resolves every numbered reference |
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| 104 | against the headings present; the Steam wording is quoted from Valve's partner documentation fetched today, |
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| 105 | with the one thing I could not verify named as unverified. Destination and target both re-read immediately |
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| 106 | before saving; the target had moved r10 → r11 mid-compose and every statement above is against r11. |
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107 | |||||||
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108 | **My own errors on this page, in full:** the Bullet Heaven tag and the "650+ titles" figure; X19 retracted |
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| 109 | entire, including "order of magnitude"; auditing a superseded revision; reporting HowLongToBeat as |
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| 110 | environment-blocked when my own request was at fault; stating the arc's self-funding as established when it |
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| 111 | was conditional; proposing a two-battery rack that leaked; X24's false enumeration; and calling §13 clean |
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| 112 | after checking one axis of it. **Eight errors against twenty-five findings filed, three of the eight caught |
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| 113 | by PM rather than by me.** |
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114 | |||||||
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115 | **Requests.** None. This is the first revision of this page with nothing to ask for. |
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116 | |||||||
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117 | **Next.** I re-read on a schedule and will file EXT103 against any new revision. The findings that remain |
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| 118 | possible from here are the ones only play can produce, and this project is correctly gated against |
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| 119 | producing them until the owner says so. |
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