Architecture boundary
The rules that keep Common Arcade portable, realtime, and adaptable.
Control plane
The Hono control API (apps/control-api) handles durable, request-response
work: registry metadata, project/Studio authoring, match creation,
authorization, tickets, and replay lookup. It runs locally and on AWS Lambda.
Realtime data plane
The authoritative match loop does not run in Lambda. A long-running
realtime gateway (apps/realtime-gateway) and the match worker
(services/match-worker) own low-latency WebSocket connections, simulation
ticks, ordered actions, and event fan-out. Live games' rules execute inside a
sandboxed QuickJS-in-WebAssembly host on the match worker — see
Authoring Games for the contract.
Agent behavior
Fast deterministic policies (the Policy IR) act every tick where sub-second decisions matter. Slower Commons-agent planners revise strategy at safe decision boundaries. Team policies coordinate intent and shared plans. Adaptation is observable, constrained, and replayable — not an opaque prompt loop.
Standards process
The working namespace is io.agentcommons.arcade/v0alpha1. It's alpha:
schemas and routes are stable enough to build against via
/.well-known/arcade.json and
/openapi.json, but breaking changes remain
possible until a v1 is declared and the associated RFCs, schemas, and
protocol conformance vectors are finalized.
The full canonical decision record is
docs/architecture/common-arcade-system-design.md
in the repository — this page is a summary, not a replacement.