The dog remembers three things
The first playable build was one dog, ten sheep, and a rule simple enough to test exactly.
Commit d887e54 is where on larping first became a Defold project you could run. There was no title picker and no sequence of scenes. The project booted directly into zoomies.
The rule was already the one that still matters: tap three places and the dog remembers them as a patrol. A fourth tap does not add more complexity; it replaces the oldest idea. Ten sheep respond to that moving pressure while also separating, gathering, aligning, wandering, and eventually settling inside the pen.
That was enough to discover the shape of the project.
Put the behavior somewhere testable
The flock, dog, metrics, and authored tuning lived in plain Lua. Defold handled input and pictures, but it did not own the rules. The first test suite could run the same seed and commands twice for 360 fixed steps and compare every animal. It also checked the three-waypoint memory, world bounds, speed limits, the alert response to a nearby dog, and the dwell time required to finish.
This was not proof that the sheep were realistic. The definition file said so directly: the pen’s attraction was an accessibility rule, not a claim that livestock recognizes a glowing goal. That distinction—between observed behavior, authored help, and the story a player tells about either—became useful far beyond the herd.
More foundation than screen
The same commit also introduced the shared LAN session and TCP transport modules. None of that networking was visible in the first playable screen. It was foundation laid beside the game, not evidence that multiplayer already worked.
At this point the project was one small verb with a deterministic center: place three ideas, watch a group respond, and be able to replay what happened.