Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5
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The audit Eric called for, delivered whole. Open doors are DOORWAYS now: stone jamb posts at both ends and a lintel hung across the top (paintable as textures/doorframe.png), the way through open to the eye. Battle damage shows — the engine's per-edge wallDamage wears painted cracks into any wall, heavier as harm mounts. The wall safe stands as a strongbox volume instead of a flat token. Hedges take root: an underbrush floor decal covers the whole square beneath them (Eric's report — a billboard at center depth can't reach the floor trapezoid's near edge), and the hedge itself widens past the cell. Rubble stretches across the fallen wall's full gap, corner piles landing at the posts, exactly as its art was painted. The first-person effect gaps close: victory now throws SIX fireworks climbing over the winner's home with gold washing the screen; sector rotations flash violet and heave the whole world; the Thumb of God lands with a burst and a shudder; walls conjured from nothing rise in stone dust; and every hazard pratfall plays — pit falls (with a dark drop and jolt for the faller's own eyes), ooze slips, tack yelps, thorn snaps, slime, dust. Dying in first person fades long and dark. And the whole tale travels: a finished game's full replay carries the share button too — turn -1 mints a link to every turn of the game, each through its wizard's own eyes, titled for the winner's triumph. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
95 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
95 lines
5.3 KiB
Markdown
# The conjuration sprites — a spec for the artist
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The first-person view (`/?fpv`, and the replay's "your eyes" mode) throws
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spell moments through the air as **billboard sprites**: flat images that
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always face the camera, drawn glowing in mid-air, occluded by walls, and
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scaled by distance. Nine sprites cover every spell moment in the game.
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Each lives at `packages/web/public/textures/../fx3d/<name>.png` — replace
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the file, refresh, done. The current files are placeholder radial glows;
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all nine are shown side by side at `/?tokens` under "The conjurations."
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## Technical requirements
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- **Format:** PNG with a transparent background. The transparent area is
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essential — whatever is opaque is what flies.
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- **Size:** square, any resolution; 128×128 or 256×256 recommended. The
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renderer scales freely and pixelates on magnification (the whole view
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is deliberately chunky, like the wall textures).
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- **Drawn additively:** sprites are composited in "lighter" (additive)
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mode over a dark dungeon, so dark pixels vanish and bright pixels glow.
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Paint light-on-transparent; pure black will be invisible. Midtones read
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as translucent light.
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- **No animation frames.** Each sprite is a single still. Motion comes
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from the renderer: projectiles streak across the room, impacts swell
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from small to large while fading out. Radially symmetric (or nearly so)
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designs work best since the image does not rotate.
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- **Fills most of the canvas.** Leave only a small transparent margin;
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the renderer sizes the sprite by its canvas, not its painted extent.
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## The nine sprites and where they appear
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| file | flies as | moment |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| `fireball.png` | projectile | Fireball, Sudden Death, Blaster Wand — a ball of fire streaking caster → target |
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| `bolt.png` | projectile | Lightning Blast, Power Drain — a crackling bolt |
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| `waterbolt.png` | projectile | Waterbolt — a hurled gout of water |
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| `spark.png` | projectile | anything else that travels: thrown objects, bodies knocked back, dragged things — a neutral streak of force |
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| `burst.png` | impact | a fireball landing; victory fireworks — swells and fades |
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| `splash.png` | impact | waterbolt landing, stone turned to water |
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| `hit.png` | impact | damage landing on someone you can see; punches, claws |
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| `shimmer.png` | impact | teleports, warps, illusions, minds touched — the general "magic happened here" glimmer, violet by tradition |
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| `shield.png` | impact | an attack fully stopped; absorbed spells |
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| `rubble.png` | prop | a destroyed wall's remains: bursts on the kill, then stands as a mound at the fallen edge for the rest of the reel. Unlike the others this is drawn OPAQUE (normal compositing) — paint it as solid debris, not light |
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Projectiles hold their size in flight (about a third of a wizard's
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height). Impacts start small and swell to roughly double while fading —
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so an impact painted as a ring or burst reads especially well.
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What the sprites do NOT need to carry: screen-wide flashes when YOU are
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hit (red), healed (green), or teleported (violet), the camera shake, the
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door slide (doors animate by sliding `door.png` along its own edge — no
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separate art), and the jammed-lock seethe (a pulsing rust glow the
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renderer lays over the door) — those are renderer effects, not images.
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## The terrain, in two families
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**Floor decals** — `public/textures/pit.png`, `slime.png`, `tacks.png`,
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`dimwarp.png` — are painted INTO the flagstones by the floor caster,
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alpha-blended texel by texel like the home tile: transparent wherever
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plain floor should show. The pit can carry its own painted label if
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wanted. Square, any size.
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**Standing volumes** — `public/terrain3d/thornbush.png`, `rosebush.png`,
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`jello.png`, `dust.png`, `warpglow.png` — are billboards in the room.
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The hedges render CELL-WIDE at half wall height (paint them twice as
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wide as tall; a wizard in the square peeks over the top). The jello
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cube fills the whole square and is drawn ~60% opaque — paint it solid,
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the renderer supplies the translucency. Dust likewise. `warpglow` is a
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pillar of light drawn ADDITIVELY (like the old glow sprites): bright
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means bright, black vanishes. Rehearse any of them in place:
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`/?fpv&terrain=thornbush@3,7;jello@4,7;dimwarp@2,7`.
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## Walls' dressing and damage
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`public/textures/doorframe.png` dresses OPEN doorways: paint an empty
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stone doorway on transparency — posts in the outer ~8% columns, the
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lintel in the top ~16% rows, nothing in the middle (the way through).
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`public/textures/cracks.png` is battle damage: dark fractures on
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transparency, laid over any damaged wall with opacity rising as the
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harm mounts. `public/textures/underbrush.png` is the ground beneath a
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hedge — leaf litter to the square's edges, a floor decal like the pit.
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`public/terrain3d/safe.png` is the wall safe, standing as an opaque
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strongbox (square, transparent ground).
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Note on `rubble.png`: it renders stretched ACROSS the fallen wall's
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whole gap — one cell wide, half a cell tall — so piles painted at the
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canvas's lower corners land at the two posts.
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## One more paintable surface: the home tile
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`public/textures/home.png` is a floor overlay for home-base cells,
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drawn over the flagstones and TINTED by the owning wizard's color at
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draw time. Paint it near-white/neutral with transparency wherever the
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plain floor should show through; the tint does the rest. Square, any
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size, same as the other textures.
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