Development blog
How it’s built.
Five in-depth posts, written during the development of Bordure: the race engine, season planning, Draft mode, race weather and the transfer market. No promises: what is done, what is measured, and what still needs fixing.
A race is five seconds repeated thousands of times
Nobody writes the outcome of a race in Bordure: not you, not the game. Here is what happens between the start and the line: the physics, the riders’ reserves, the groups, the AI shared by every team, what each side knows about the race, and a radio that always arrives a little late.
A season is planned before it is raced
Dozens of races to spread across some twenty riders: nobody should fill in that table by hand. In Bordure the staff proposes a complete programme as soon as the season opens, you only touch the exceptions, and what you decide is never overwritten. Here is how that programme is made, then kept up to date, month after month.
Found a team, then pick riders in turn
In Bordure you can start from a blank sheet: you found a team, then the whole peloton, yours and the opposing teams alike, picks its riders in turn from a single pool. Same rules, same information, no result written in advance. Here is how the draft is organised, how the opposing teams choose, and what we measured.
The sky no longer stands still for us
For a long time, a race’s weather was three numbers drawn at the start, which nothing moved and no screen showed. It now changes through the day: the wind picks up or backs round, the rain arrives in the afternoon. The sporting director reads a forecast that can be wrong, and picks a time-trial slot accordingly. Here is how it works, and what the measurements told us, including when they did not say what we hoped.
Riders who choose, agents who negotiate
In Bordure you never simply “take” a rider: you make an offer, their agent answers live, and the rider decides the following Monday, among every agreement they have received. Rival teams recruit with the same rule as your staff. Here is how a rider judges an offer, how a talk unfolds, how a team picks its targets, and what we measured.
The posts quote version numbers of the models. A Bordure save is refused if any of these versions has changed: a game cannot be resumed under rules other than the ones that produced it. The screens and figures are demonstrations; the game is in development.