Enforce naming and organization conventions — consistency scales, chaos compounds
GDC-L1-CONTENT-000301
Statement
Adopt and enforce consistent naming and folder/organization conventions for assets, code, and data — early. Consistency scales gracefully as the project grows; inconsistency compounds into a mess where nobody can find anything, duplicates proliferate, and tools break. A convention followed is worth more than a perfect one ignored.
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Rationale
A game accumulates thousands of files, and the cost of disorganization grows super-linearly: finding assets, avoiding duplicates, wiring up tools, and onboarding people all get harder as the mess deepens [S-gregory-game-engine-arch]. Conventions are cheap to establish and enormously expensive to retrofit, so the time to set them is at the start. They pay off in searchability (you can find the thing), tool reliability (automated pipelines depend on predictable names and paths), and shared understanding (a team parallel to "make decisions visible and durable," TEAM-0004 — the convention is durable shared knowledge).
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Applies when
Any project past trivial size, and especially any team or long-lived project. The larger the content and team, the more it matters — but it's cheapest to start on day one.
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Does not apply / Exceptions
A one-person weekend prototype can be loose about it (though even solo devs drift). And conventions can be over-engineered into bureaucracy that slows people down — the goal is consistency that helps, not a rulebook for its own sake. A simple convention everyone actually follows beats an elaborate one they route around.
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Implementation
Keep them simple enough to follow. Enforce them via tooling/validation where possible (CONTENT-0004) rather than vigilance alone. Refactor toward the convention when things drift.
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Disagreement
Little on the value of conventions; the nuance is how much structure (lightweight vs. elaborate) and how strictly to enforce. Over-formalization can bureaucratize; under-structuring invites chaos. Match the rigor to team and project size.
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Notes
Confidence 4.
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Connected principles
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Source trail
S-gregory-game-engine-archJason Gregory. Game Engine Architecture. 3rd ed., CRC Press, 2018.
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