Character sprites

Character sprites are the pixel-art bodies of Arborwake's cells: the Ranger, the generic residents, the stationary cells and the named cast. All of them are 2D, slime-like and recognisably cellular. None is humanoid.

Production pipeline#

1. Masters. Each named character starts from approved layered masters (membrane, cytoplasm, nucleus, expression). The masters for the first six came from Codex's approved "faces-v1" study, with two A/B alternatives for each character.
2. Identity pick. Three fresh blind testers compared the alternatives. The proposal was Fen A, Bram B, Mote B, Pip A, Rill A and Cress B. On 2 November the user accepted all six ("Accept all six").
3. Rig prep. Anchors, contact spans, eye and nucleus boxes, tendril sockets and masks were recorded without touching the masters (50f744d9).
4. Animation. animate.py deforms all layers together by inserting or removing whole rows and columns. Outlines, palettes and faces stay pixel-exact while the body squashes and crawls. The nucleus lags the body by 1 px.
5. Sheets. Each character has one sheet with six facings (top east, west, south, north; side east, west) and 23 frames of 56×52 px, in the shape of the game's cells.json.

Turned bodies#

At first, south and north reused the east body with the face turned. On 2 November the user asked to "Redraw turned bodies". Character sprites drew new south and north poses, and the user approved them for Fen, Mote, Pip, Rill and Cress ("Others is fine"). The face-turn version (59afcc2c) stays as a fallback.

Bram's redesign#

Blind testers and then the user read Bram's original three-lobe body as suggestive. Bram was redrawn as a broad, low, scalloped "bun" for every facing (bef5b91c). Since then, every blind character check asks whether any shape reads as suggestive or anatomical. The user later confirmed that the bun was "long approved".

Withdrawn: the larger Ranger and generic recolour#

On 2 November the user first asked for the Ranger to be sized up to match the named cast, and for the generic Pip and Mote to be resized and recoloured. Several versions followed. The user rejected one as "trash" because of a wobbly outline. The same day the user withdrew the whole request: "don't make the ranger, pip and mote bigger. and remove the colour change as well." The folders ranger-large/ and generic-microglia/ are history only (792654c3). The named cast stays larger than the Ranger, and that is accepted.

Development#

• In the alpha: the six named sheets (fen, bram, mote, pip, rill, cress) are listed in src/main-game/game/art/SOURCES.json on Placeholder (69c7b5470). The lead's report says it installed "approved named directional/tending animation".
• Still open: the lead's audit found that turn rooms always drew the south-facing Ranger idle frames. The later integration reports animated encounter movement, but no fresh blind animation review.
• Later cast: Nell, Stella, Aster, Vessa and Wick have approved static designs from Codex. They are site-bound, so they need an idle-plus-role-action study, not turned bodies. Production waits on the user's look.
• Related deliveries: the Vessel Margins callers and the monocyte (approved, 77c147f5, 4539b617), the Quiet Tracts repair kit (approved, b90fe68e) and the redrawn 24×24 companion icons (approved, 039a9b87).

Gallery#

See also#

• Tendrils
• Flow
• Art direction
• Review process

Sources#

1. 16c9aab43:art/characters/named-cast/anim/README.mdcopy
2. 16c9aab43:art/characters/named-cast/ab-blind/RESULTS.mdcopy
3. 16c9aab43:art/characters/ranger-large/README.mdcopy
4. b89f778c2:src/main-game/game/art/SOURCES.jsoncopy
5. b89f778c2:docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-reconciled-game-integration.mdcopy
6. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-lead-sprite-audit-claude-handoff.md (working copy, not in Git)
7. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-workstreams-todo.md (working copy, not in Git)