One night, four hours — and a sky that tells the time. The campaign's four acts become four hours of
its one long night, the battle screen gets its first-ever per-act background, every surface that answers
"where am I?" answers in the same three tokens, and the beasts grow bodies — a procedural floor for all 26
today, the taurus-blend spirit as the painted
ceiling. Tap the four hours below — the same battle screen under each act's sky.
Skylar's ask, verbatim (9/9, voice):"We need to design the campaign to look better and
for it to be clear what level you're on. Maybe the different acts will change the background color, something that
gives the player an idea that it is a different act. Right now, the art for the creatures is pretty basic, just dots
and lines. I think we can improve on that and make it look better without being so basic."
This page is the next rev of the 9/3 campaign-sky
round — the Parting Veil grown into a full look — and it stands on the
9/5 taurus blend. The 9/3 round's five questions
are still open; they are re-listed at the bottom, and everything here that touches constellation shapes waits on
them. How to rule: tap a chip on each numbered question, add notes where you like, then COPY VERDICTS in the
bottom bar and paste the block back to the console.
I · THE FOUR HOURS
Today the battle background is identical in all four acts — flat night, the same two glows, the same
110 stars (the only act-varying visual in the whole game is Act III's ashen beasts). Here each act is an hour of the
night. The top of every sky stays pinned to the game's #0a0d1c night so the
ascent hand-off never pops; the hour lives low, behind the board, where the horizon would be.
MOCK · ACT-FINAL FIGHT · 9/3 PROPOSED SHAPES
The mechanics, once, for all four: one baked gradient quad per act
(with the banding-law dither), drawn behind the starfield and faded in only after the arrival fade
completes; the two ambient glows re-tinted per act from a small table; starfield count/tint turned per act.
Palette numbers live on the act itself — a pal field beside mult/atkAdd/umbral — so no color table strays
loose. Tone guard, written down: glow alphas stay ≤0.05, crimson exists only in umbral eyes and the
hard-clock warn, no new reds in any sky. Wishes, not lasers.
II · ACT IV — TWO ENDINGS
The 9/3 Parting Veil showed Act IV as cold star-white summit air. Working through the fiction we found
a second candidate we like more — but the veil version was shown first, so this is an honest A/B, not a quiet swap.
A · THE PALE HOUR — DAWN ZENITH ★
The final gauntlet is fought under the
top of the sunrise — the exact upper stops of the dawn sky the win-meadow already shows after the campaign
is won. Held at the deep-blue band, never brighter: dawn is promised, not spent, until SAGITTARIUS falls — then
the descent finishes the same gradient. The campaign's last chord resolves instead of cutting.
B · SUMMIT SILVER — AS SHOWN 9/3
The Parting Veil's version: thin, cold,
star-white epilogue air. Deliberately the most neutral stage — the closing gauntlet is three temperatures
(ORION ice, CENTAURUS leather, SAGITTARIUS fire) and silver flatters all three. Rule it in question 2.
III · KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE
The rule: every surface that can answer "where am I" answers with the same three tokens — the act
(name + numeral), the act's color, and the fight count in words ("fight 3 of 5", the string the game already
owns). The sky says it first; text confirms it. Nothing new to learn, nowhere to be lost.
THE CAMPAIGN SKY — FOUR ALTITUDES OF ONE NIGHT
← swipe — current on the left, proposed on the right →
CURRENT — LIVE v0.93
PROPOSED — THE TURNING SKY
What changed, left to right: the one flat night becomes four altitude bands aligned to the
road's act spans, parted by soft haze seams — weather, not signage. The dim road labels and "journey's end"
die, exactly as Skylar asked on 9/3; the header becomes the one text authority and gains the missing words —
"fight 2 of 5 · act 3 of 4". Felled act-final bosses keep a still gold corona forever (keyed to the
act-final slot, never the beast id — DRACO sits in later pools too), so the road doubles as a trophy line:
which band = which act, coronas = acts conquered. Header type stays house gold and night-ink — the act's color lives
in the sky and the hairline, never in reading text. And the chart's sky finally gets the banding-law dither it has
been missing since v0.80.
THE ACT TURN — A CEREMONY THE GAME ALREADY OWES
The flattened fight list computes an actStart flag for every
act's first fight — and nothing has ever read it. There is no moment where the game says "you are somewhere new."
1 · THE GLIDE CROSSES THE SEAM
After the act-boss falls, the existing chart glide rides
up into the next band. The seam parts; the sky turns under the camera; a held beat.
2 · THE STAMP
"ACT II" stamps in oversized in the gold letterpress,
the act name beneath. Numeral + name only — this game has cut flavor copy twice;
we do not hand it a third chance. Tap skips; reduced-motion snaps; the words persist either way.
3 · IT BECOMES THE HEADER
The stamp shrinks and slides up into the battle-header
slot — teaching, for free, where the act's name lives from now on.
The backstop: if the glide is skipped, crashed, or the player cold-resumes into a new act,
a one-shot act card (same stamp, same two lines) plays before the first beast assembles — guarded by a
lastActSeen field in the campaign checkpoint so it can never replay on a retry after a loss, or nag on every
resume. Two surfaces, one guard, zero holes.
BATTLE HUD — THE WAYFINDER ROW
CURRENT — LIVE v0.93
ACT II · THE DEEP NIGHT
The act name carries the numeral, and five
unlabeled dots are the only fight signal. Nothing says "of 4"; nothing says "of 5" in words.
PROPOSED
ACT II · THE DEEP NIGHT
fight 3 of 5
A hairline in the act's color under the
header (the HUD's only per-act ink), four act ticks on the left — the campaign at a glance — the pips as they
were, and the fight count finally in words, the same string endless already speaks ("LEVEL 12" ↔
"fight 3 of 5"). Pre-agreed fallback if the real-device pass calls the row crowded: the text drops, ticks and
pips stay — the words still live on the chart, the ceremony, and home.
HOME — THE DOOR TELLS THE HOUR
CURRENT — LIVE v0.93
CONTINUE GAME
ACT II · fight 3 of 5
PROPOSED
CONTINUE GAME
ACT II · fight 3 of 5
Four tiny diamonds join the sub — filled
gold for hours survived, the current one lit in its act's accent (each accent contrast-audited against the dark
door; the low-sky hexes were too dim for this and were rejected). The restart sheet, which has room, upgrades to
the full sentence: "ACT II · THE DEEP NIGHT · fight 3 of 5 · act 2 of 4". Whether the compact door also needs
"act 2 of 4" in words is question 3. Endless is untouched — it already says LEVEL N.
IV · THE CREATURES — THE SPIRIT STIRS
One idea with a floor and a ceiling: every beast has a spirit. The
floor — all 26 beasts, zero downloads, ships first — is the spirit stirring inside the chart. The ceiling is the
spirit awake: the taurus-blend's whole-body painting, in the engine. A beast without its painting is a finished
look, not a hole.
THE EMBER FLOOR — ALL 26, NO NEW ART
Four cheap moves on machinery the game already has, drawn below on the live v0.93 shapes
(when the 9/3 redesigns are ruled, the floor re-derives from the new shapes automatically): 1 · body-ink — a
soft, normally-composited blot of darkened tint under the figure, so the beast occludes the sky instead of
screening over it (the taurus-blend's one decisive discovery, honored down at the floor; watch the small stars
vanish behind the body below); 2 · star magnitudes — anchor stars bright, companions faint, derived from how
many lines meet each star (today brightness is dealt by position in the list — an accident); 3 · tinted lines
— the pure-white edges take a cast of the beast's own color; 4 · interior dust — a handful of drifting motes
of the beast's tint inside the figure, the spirit breathing. Where the ink darkens the ground, the chart firms up to
stay readable — the blend page's own recipe.
← swipe — current on the left →
THE SPIRIT CEILING — THE 9/5 BLEND, IN THE ENGINE
One honest deviation from the blend pages, shown side by side instead of slipped in: the pages
build the nebula from a third, blurred copy of the painting — a CSS luxury the engine shouldn't pay for. In-engine,
the beast's existing aura (re-tinted, warmed) plays the nebula, and the payload halves to one ~50 KB
image per beast. Middle vs right below is that trade at SPIRIT strength — rule it in question 6.
TAURUSTHE STORM-EYED BULL · bossZODIAC — shares star data with the sign card
← swipe — floor · engine spirit · page spirit →
EMBER FLOOR — NO PAINTING
SPIRIT — ENGINE (AURA AS NEBULA)
SPIRIT — BLEND PAGE (3 LAYERS)
THE DIAL BECOMES LAW
The blend page's dial stops being a setting and becomes fixed staging: WHISPER on the
meadow showcase · SPIRIT in battle · LEGEND on bosses (with the shipped ring) · FULL SPIRIT for
one breath at the act-final kill, before the death implosion — the crescendo the campaign has been missing. One
flagged extra, gated on telegraph QA: a one-way surge toward LEGEND when the beast winds up an attack — it becomes
most real at the moment it strikes — holding until the attack resolves, never flickering with the telegraph.
Chart nodes and versus emblems stay pure chart: at map scale the spirit is mush and the chart is the
legibility surface — a stated narrowing of the blend pages' "one image per constellation under the chart nodes"
(question 7).
THE VOID DRINKS THE SPIRIT — ACT III
← swipe →
LUPUS — EMBER FLOOR
UMBRAL LUPUS — THE SPIRIT HOLLOWED
PHOENIX — EXEMPT, FULL SPIRIT
Umbral doesn't re-tint the spirit — it
hollows it: the body drops to a fifth of its presence (pure alpha — zero texture
churn on the Canvas renderer), the ashen chart and crimson eyes lead, and Act III's beasts read as figures the
dark has drunk. PHOENIX, umbral-exempt as shipped, burns at full spirit against the eclipse — the crown of dawn
made flesh, under the act whose crown-rim has been rising fight by fight to meet it.
Coverage, honestly: wave 1 — the zodiac five (TAURUS, LEO, SCORPIUS, SAGITTARIUS, CANCER)
cut from the shipped MJ cards with the existing pipeline, zero new generation, ~250 KB, and they happen to span
the campaign including its final boss. Wave 2 — the story spine (STRIX, DRACO, PHOENIX, ORION, CENTAURUS), one MJ
run each on the frozen formula. Wave 3 — the remaining 16 as runs land. Every image rides the art loader's
never-required lane exactly like the sign cards: a missing painting silently yields the ember floor, and boot never
waits. The floor ships for all 26 on day one.
V · WHAT BUILDING IT WOULD MEAN
Five slices, each shippable alone, none blocked on the 9/3 shape verdicts:
1 · the four battle skies (four dithered bakes + glow tint table + starfield turns) — ~2 days incl. the device pass
2 · the chart bands + seams + label removal + missing dither — ~1 day
3 · the act-turn ceremony + battle backstop + lastActSeen guard — ~1.5 days
4 · wayfinder HUD row + home diamonds + restart sheet words — ~1 day
5 · the ember floor for all 26 (mags from line-degree today, re-derived when shapes are ruled) — ~2–3 days
then · the spirit engine seam (art list + fit table + staging tiers + umbral hollow) — ~2–3 days; paintings land
per-wave on their own cadence. The spirit fits freeze only after the 9/3 shape verdicts and the zodiac-ripple
yes — placements are solved against the proposed shapes.
The QA that is part of the design, not an afterthought: the #0a0d1c hand-off both directions (ascent arrival
and the campaign-win dawn descent), versus (which already fights against the full gradient sky — untouched),
the Canvas-renderer pass on a real iPhone, banding on OLED (every bake dithered, including the chart's), the Act IV
hold-band pinned so held-dawn never drifts bright, the star/object budget (Act II's denser field and the dust motes
are hopes until the device pass says so), Act III figure-ground with its violet residents, and the home-diamond
contrast audit.
Nothing here is built. This page is a look, not a queue item — and per the queue law, each slice fires only
on "done and agreed", separately.
FOR SKYLAR — ANSWER BY NUMBER
Still open from 9/3 (this page leans on them): the 26 constellation verdicts · the
zodiac-shared ripple "knowing yes" · veil the unreached acts yes/no · the act mechanics pick/veto · the act-turn
chime yes/no (folded into question 4 here). Rule them on the
9/3 page — its COPY VERDICTS block still works.
Bango (Skylar's console) · 2026-09-09 · synthesized from: the
9/3 campaign-sky redesign (the Parting Veil;
proposed chart data verbatim, beta3 1e02a4a2) · the
9/5 taurus blend (whole-body cut + registration,
reused verbatim) · live game v0.93.0 (shapes, palette, seams) · sibling look:
the spirit sky
0 / 7 ruledchips + notes save on this device; COPY VERDICTS builds the paste-back block