Status: Accepted, 2026-08-28

Context

Boundless Vector Arena proved that PixelBullet can host a genuine deterministic game product rather than another fixed-scene wrapper. Its complete 31-position campaign, four bosses, perk drafts, checkpoints, replay, copied presentation, bounded visual feedback, spatial SFX, captions, and silent-by-default music infrastructure now provide durable first-party integration evidence.

Continuing to use unfinished Arena release polish as PixelBullet's governing roadmap would couple the engine workspace to a product-prototype parity goal. That is not the intended relationship with any separate commercial game.

Decision

Arena remains a genuine product composition root under products/boundless_vector_arena. It is feature-frozen as a maintained first-party reference product and technology demonstrator.

Arena remains a source-workspace consumer of PixelBullet engine and framework code. It is not an external SDK product and does not establish a frozen SDK or ABI.
The implemented campaign and systems remain supported reference evidence.
PixelBullet will not maintain feature parity with a separate commercial game or use that game's future features as an Arena backlog.
Unfinished public-demo and release polish is deliberately deferred. Phase 6 remains partially implemented; Phase 7 release hardening is not complete.
Arena has no intentional distribution package and is not a release candidate.
Reactivating feature development requires a new, explicit public-demo or product decision with an owner, scope, acceptance gates, distribution intent, and maintenance commitment.

The Arena maintenance contract defines allowed maintenance and validation expectations.

Consequences

Arena continues to catch integration regressions and to document product composition, but unrelated PixelBullet work is not required to reproduce the full Arena development campaign. Product-specific expansion, production music, controller features, final balance, long soak, and store/release packaging are outside ordinary maintenance.

This decision does not extract Arena, freeze current source APIs, promise binary compatibility, or turn product YAML into a plugin ABI. External-project support is a separate design problem tracked by External Project Workspace and Installed Editor/Runtime Contract v1.