delve design guide

How the game looks, sounds and feels. docs/plan.md covers what the game is; this covers how it should read on screen. “Now” is what exists in the code today; Proposal is a direction for Foster to approve or change.

Mockups and palettes are recolours of a real gate frame (Lantern Town, two players), so they show the existing art under each direction, not new art. They live in docs/design/; the guide is published at https://design.delve.fdhproperty.com.

Pillars

1. Readable at a glance: a player, a monster and a platform are never confused.
2. A place you return to: each zone has its own light, palette and sound.
3. Warm, not grim: cosy town and danger that is pretty, not gory.
4. Feel first: movement and hits are tuned to numbers and kept by bots.

Setting and tone

The names so far, Lantern Town, Mossy Field and the Cinder Eye, already lean toward light against the dark.

• A. Lantern Dusk (recommended). A world at permanent dusk where towns are lit by lanterns and the wilds by embers, spirits and moss glow. The light is the theme: zones get darker and stranger with level, and the boss is a fire that wants the lanterns. It suits the light map we already have and makes zones easy to tell apart.
• B. Bright Meadow. MapleStory’s sunny daytime: saturated, cheerful, closest to today’s look. Lowest risk, least distinctive.
• C. Mossy Ruins. Muted, overgrown ruins of an older civilisation. Moody and coherent, but it fights pillar 3 and reads poorly on small phone screens.

Pixel scale (locked)

• Now: 16 px tiles, a 12×22 player, camera zoom 2, a 960×540 viewport with canvas_items stretch and nearest filtering. So one art pixel is two screen pixels and the view is 480×270 art pixels, 30×17 tiles.
• Rule: every sprite, tile and icon is drawn at that one density. No scaled-up or scaled-down art, no mixed resolutions, no rotation of pixel art except swinging held items (already done in player_view.gd).
• Positions snap to whole art pixels when drawn. Proposal: turn on rendering/2d/snap/snap_2d_transforms_to_pixel so interpolated players never sit on half pixels.

Palette

• Now: colours live in code (player_art.gd, art.gd, hud.gd), about 60 hand picked hex values, a flat sky #6ea6db, no background.
• Proposal: one shared palette file (game/render/palette.gd) that every drawn colour comes from, 32 colours at most, with per-zone ramps picked from it.

Option A’s core twelve (the full 32 extend each with a light and a dark step):

Light

• Now: a per-tile flood-fill light map (lighting.gd): sky light and torches, decaying 0.9 per open tile and 0.78 per solid tile.
• Proposal: keep it and add a per-zone ambient colour and level (town 0.85 warm, fields 0.75, deeper fields lower, boss map 0.4 lit by the boss). Light sources (lanterns, torches, portals, the Cinder Eye) carry their own tint. Players carry a small light so a dark zone is never unplayable.

Characters and monsters

• Outlines: a 1 px outline in a darkened version of the sprite’s own colour, not pure black. Tiles have no outline. This is how sprites pop off busy backgrounds.
• Silhouettes: every monster must be identifiable as a black shape. Size bands in art pixels, from today’s sprites:

• Animation frames (proposal; the player has 4 today: idle, stride, step, jump): idle 2–4, walk 4–6, jump 1 up + 1 down, climb 2, attack 3–4, hurt 1, death 4. Monsters: move 2–4, attack 2–3, hurt 1. At 60 Hz, 6–8 ticks per frame.
• Players: the same body for everyone; identity comes from equipment layers (hat, top, bottom, shoes, weapon), as in MapleStory. That needs the body split into layers before gear lands in M6d.

Environment

• Tiles: 16 px, top edge always lighter than the body, grass caps on exposed dirt (already done), one-way platforms visibly thinner than solid ground, climbables (ladders, ropes) a distinct warm colour that stands out from the background.
• Backgrounds (proposal; none today): a sky gradient plus 2–3 parallax layers at 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6 of camera speed, drawn in the zone’s far colours with no outlines and lower contrast than gameplay tiles. Gameplay layers stay the highest contrast.
• Per-zone shift: each zone picks sky stops, two hill colours, an ambient light and an accent from the palette. Town: warm lanterns. Mossy Field: green and lantern-gold. Higher fields: cooler, dimmer, more Spirit. Boss map: Ink and Cinder.

UI and HUD

• Now: Godot’s fallback font at 8–12 px, navy slots (0.16, 0.2, 0.42, 0.85), gold selection (0.85, 0.68, 0.2), hearts for life, a boss bar (0.95, 0.42, 0.12), damage popups DAMAGE_COLOR #ffd94d and HURT_COLOR #ff5959 (main.gd) rising 18 px over 1.2 s.
• Proposal:
  • A pixel font at one size (8 px art, 16 px on screen) plus a bold variant for names and numbers. Candidates must be OFL: m5x7/m6x11 (free, permissive) or Silver. Text gets a 1 px Ink outline, never a drop blur.
  • Panels: Dusk at 90% with a 1 px Parchment border at 30%, 2 px corner cut. No gradients, no rounded vector corners.
  • HP and MP as bars (MapleStory), replacing hearts: HP Cinder, MP a blue from the palette, XP Lantern along the bottom edge.
  • Damage numbers: dealt in Lantern, taken in Cinder, crits bigger and Ember, heals in Leaf; rise 18 px and fade over 0.8 s.
  • Every HUD element must be readable at a 375 px wide phone screen (P3).

Game feel (now, then targets)

Hit-stop and shake are client-only presentation online, so they never touch the sim’s determinism. Bots check the movement numbers stay put.

Audio (proposal; the game is silent today)

• Music: one loop per zone, calm in town, a pulse in fields, full drums at the boss. Acoustic with soft synths to suit dusk: guitar, marimba, pads.
• SFX: short and dry: swing whoosh, hit thud, kill pop, pickup chime, level-up fanfare, portal hum, footsteps per surface. Every hit has a sound.
• Sources: CC0 or bought packs first (Kenney, Sonniss GDC bundles), then commissioned music once the zones are settled. Nothing AI-generated in shipped audio until rights are clear.

Asset pipeline

• Code-drawn (now): tiles, item icons and the player are pixel masks in GDScript (art.gd, player_art.gd). Fast, diffable, consistent; fine for tiles and icons.
• Local mflux (now): monster sprites came from local mflux generation, cut out and downsized to the pixel grid. It works with no API key; the lanternfall proof showed the same. Every generated sprite is cleaned up by hand or script to the palette and outline rules before it ships.
• Rules: everything lands on the pixel grid and the palette; sources and prompts for generated art are committed next to the PNG; third-party assets only under CC0, CC-BY (credited in CREDITS.md) or a bought licence that allows redistribution in a game; no assets traced from MapleStory or Terraria.
• Proposal: a tools/art/ check in the gate that fails a sprite with colours off the palette or a size off its band.

Open choices for Foster

1. Setting and tone: A Lantern Dusk, B Bright Meadow or C Mossy Ruins.
2. Palette: lock option A’s 32 colours, or a stock palette (e.g. Resurrect 64).
3. HP and MP bars instead of hearts.
4. Pixel font: m5x7/m6x11, or commission one.
5. Art source for M6d–M6g: keep mflux plus cleanup, buy a pack, or commission a pixel artist for the player and gear layers.
6. Audio: packs now and commission later, or commission a composer early.