Encounter backgrounds

Encounter backgrounds are the painted rooms behind each turn-based board. Claude A authors each room's layout (floor polygon, holes, doors). The Room building session paints it. Codex hosts it.

How it works#

• The style is "3D made 2D". Each room is built in Blender from the Hearth library, rendered in its own camera, then finished as pixel art on the shared B08 palette.
• The board sits inside the room. The user said on 1 November: "The final room doesn't need to be square, the green ground just needs to be enough to fit the grid." The floor keeps an organic outline, grown where needed so every walkable square is whole floor.
• Obstacles stay round. On 2 November the user said: "Keep those round, like before… they don't need to fit the grid perfectly, because the grid is already shown in a playthrough." Knots, boulders, hedges and vessel openings keep their own round shapes.
• The grid is never painted. Claude B draws the Board grid at runtime. Room building supplies a ground pass for each room: its alpha shows where the ground is visible (so standing objects hide the grid), and its colour holds the light.
• No painted axon in Quiet Tracts. The runtime must place the approved repair kit's segment tiles, or the room shows no axon. The README marks this IMPORTANT for integration.
• Readability is blind-tested at 1x under the grid. Earlier rounds fixed lanterns on doorway tiles, shadows read as "mud" and trails read as routes.

The sixteen shells#

After the round-obstacles ruling, nine shells were re-rendered (for example Pressure Front t14 and Storm Season t4). When the boards changed to 24×20 ground squares, the user said "Leave them": the painted floor strips outside the playable squares stay, and the approved shells are not re-fitted.

Development#

• In the alpha: the lead's audit lists "Art 8742b7cf8, 16 shells" in the encounter snapshot. Grid and preview work continued to 349973ba6.
• Ground passes: the 16 shells (3d124fad8) and the Hearth crops (a54c79fc5).
• Hearth disturbance boards are 1:1 crops of H15, never repainted. The Hearth sample (301e5237) went to the user for a look. The approved scorch pieces serve both the boards and the overworld.
• Earlier work: more than twenty real-time run rooms (Gardens v3 to v6, the Margins m-series, the Tracts x-series and the side-quest rooms) were painted before the turn-based change. They stay as history and as side-quest rooms.

Gallery#

See also#

• Environment art
• Board grid
• Turn-based encounters
• VFX

Sources#

1. 5ed726064:art/environment/blender-study/gardens-rooms/README.mdcopy
2. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-02-lead-full-project-reconciliation-audit.md (working copy, not in Git)
3. docs/ops/agent-messages/2026-11-01-claude-workstreams-todo.md (working copy, not in Git)