Documentation for an Audience of One
I have a Lovecraftian idle game about a cult in Malmö that meets in a basement under cover of a crime-fiction reading circle. It has ninety-something events, nine named characters, a handful of real Malmö locations doing double duty as ritual sites, and exactly zero documents describing any of it. No lore bible, no worldbuilding doc, nothing. Just a whole bunch of loosely associated event texts, upgrade descriptions, and code comments, each written in whatever mental model I happened to be holding at the time.
It worked, mostly by accident. I’m the only person who’s ever touched the codebase, so the setting lived entirely in my head and stayed internally consistent because there was only one head for it to live in.
The gaps only show up when you go looking
I only found out how much I’d half-forgotten when I actually sat down to survey it properly. There’s a plot thread — a detective who dream-attends the cult’s meetings without knowing it — that gets set up in one event and never mentioned again. There’s a resource, inflytande, that accumulates visibly on screen with exactly one thing to spend it on. There’s a joke about a rival cult from Hässleholm that, buried in a completely different character’s backstory, turns out to already have a serious, decades-deep lineage I’d apparently decided on and then never used.
None of this was hidden from me on purpose. It was hidden from me by the completely ordinary mechanism of not writing it down. I knew all of it, once, in the moment I wrote each piece. I just didn’t know I’d need to know it again eighteen months later.
Writing it down for a reader who is also me
So I wrote the lore bible. Not because anyone else was going to read it — nobody else touches this project — but because future me is functionally a different reader than me right now, and I was tired of relitigating my own worldbuilding every time I wanted to add something.
That reframing matters. Documentation-for-onboarding and documentation-for-yourself look similar on the page but come from different instincts. Onboarding docs explain what a stranger doesn’t know. This kind explains what you don’t know you’ll have forgotten — which means the useful parts aren’t the obvious lore (“the entity sleeps under the sea”) but the things you’d otherwise silently re-decide differently each time: which threads are open on purpose versus abandoned by accident, which mysteries are supposed to stay unsolved, which throwaway joke turned out to be load-bearing.
The most useful section I wrote wasn’t a description of anything. It was a short list titled “what is deliberately never explained” — five things I’d apparently already decided shouldn’t get an answer, that I would absolutely have contradicted by accident within a year if I hadn’t written them down as a decision rather than an absence.
An absence looks exactly like an oversight. A documented decision doesn’t.