Credits, a blocked door, and the shape of a lie
Putting whole development teams on each hub meant working around a source that could not be reached, and changing the data model twice to avoid saying something untrue.
The obvious source for credits returned 403 to a fetch and a bot check in a browser. Working around bot detection was not on the table, so the first two games were transcribed from their own manuals instead — which is the primary source those databases work from anyway. The remaining four were supplied directly.
Two changes to the data model came out of doing it honestly, and both are about avoiding a small lie rather than about tidiness.
Two fields that had to change
- A credit row can carry a section
- Emperor was built by BreakAway Games for Impressions and Sierra, and credits the two studios separately. Cleopatra and Poseidon credit their own teams. Flattening those into one run of roles would tell a reader something untrue about who made what.
- A game can name more than one source
- Zeus's base credits came from its manual and its expansion's from a listing. Naming one of two sources is a small lie, so the field became an array and the block names both.