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Process Art Bible
The art document for Volley!. Every concept study and production asset briefs against this doc.
The bible holds the world the art has to render: what it is, who is in it, what happens, and the visual craft that serves the telling. The story drives; the craft sections name how the art carries the story.
Audio direction lives in SH-281.
- The world in one paragraph
- Setting and period
- Two styles
- The cast
- Part 1: Construction
- Cracks during Construction
- The break
- Part 2: Reconstruction
- The cliff and the gate
- Credits and postgame
- The Six Marks
- Constants across venues
- Diegetic surfaces
- Venues
- Tone
- Palette, line, treatment
- Animation and rhythm
- Touchstones
- Open questions
- Glossary
A racquet. A ball. A counter on the wall that climbs. A friend leaning on the counter of a small wooden stall on the far side of the play, watching the protagonist play, glad to be there. The first session opens with a sentence in the friend's voice: chase the world volley record. The number is the goal.
Volley holds two worlds. The first is Construction: a vibrant one the protagonist has built and keeps tending, a garden in late afternoon with a long rally at a small wooden stall. The player meets it as the world. The second is Reality: the protagonist's actual hometown, a coastal town in slant afternoon light, where the same people live at their actual ages and one of them, the friend from the stall, has been pushed away. The two worlds are visually and mechanically distinct, and the player learns the vibrant one is a construct only as the climb cracks open.
This bible holds the visual direction and craft sections; story-shape, character arc, and character identity sit in the narrative and character docs, not repeated here.
The protagonist's hometown is a small coastal town on the Welsh and Cornish coast in an imagined warmer climate. Painted terraces in seaside colours: pinks, yellows, sea-greens, sky-blues, the actual palette of Tenby and Aberaeron. Whitewashed walls between them. Palm trees in places. A high street that smells of rain and citrus. Mediterranean light on a British coastline. Stone or terracotta underfoot, a square with one cafe, a bus stop nobody uses. Faded grandeur with sun on it. The kind of place a child grows up in and an adult comes back to. Ordinary, lived-in. Pulls from real reference points; sits on no map.
Two periods, one in each world. Construction sits in 1991: saturated, analog, warm; the protagonist is 26 in that rendering. Reality sits in 2014; the protagonist is 49 there. Period feel reaches across art direction in both registers: 1991 clothes, signage, photo prints in Construction; 2014 textures in Reality.
The garden in Construction draws from this geography. Construction's other venues are pure invention; the garden is the seam where the constructed world touches the real one.
Construction and Reality are distinct worlds. Two styles, two visual treatments, two ways the player engages.
Construction. Saturated colour, generous light, surfaces that gleam, shadows held warm. Characters drawn young and full, present, bodies at ease in motion. Tennis lives here and only here. Structured as a tournament the protagonist climbs from venue to venue.
Reality. A second style, completely. Less saturation than Construction, more texture. Light is just light; weather is in the air. Characters at their actual ages, in their actual lives, plainer than their Construction-renders. Reality's tone is weighted and story-driven. The pull of Reality is its honesty; the player ends up wanting it. Interaction-driven, not rally-driven: the player walks into a scene with several things going on and a handful of contextual interactions, and the puzzle is being present in a room and finding what wants to happen.
Silhouettes and visual DNA hold across both styles. What shifts is saturation, edge quality, lighting intention, level of detail, and arrangement. Same shapes; different weight.
The garden is the meeting point. It is the one Construction venue grounded in the protagonist's actual hometown geography, built from their memory of the real garden. The constructed garden and the real garden remain separate places; the venue is the seam. Other Construction venues are purely fantastic. The garden's "out of place out of time" feel comes from being the venue grounded in a real place still standing.
The bridge between the two worlds is Reconstruction: the long arc after the championship win, in which the player travels freely between Construction and Reality and selected things carry across. Reconstruction is not a third visual style. The two styles stay distinct. Detail in section 8.
There is one locked gate in the entire game. It sits at the back of the garden in Construction. Walking through it transitions to the cliff in Reality. The key arrives late in Reconstruction.
Everyone in this game is real. The Construction cast is the real-world cast rendered young, vibrant, present. The supporting cast are people from the protagonist's life. The exception is the champ.
Anyone who appears in both worlds has two renders: a Construction-render, young, vibrant, present, and a Reality-render at their actual age, in their actual life, plainer. Same character, different style.
Each round of the tournament happens in a shared themed space, with the coach now on the opposite side of the court. Partner renders need to land in both positions: the coach beside the protagonist, partnered, and the same person across the court, in the round. One person, one role with two faces.
Agender. They picked up a racquet long ago and never quite put it down. The garden is theirs. The rally is theirs. The quiet at the centre of it is theirs too.
Drawn like any other character. Construction-render and Reality-render, same shape as the rest of the cast. The image stays consistent across both; the contrast comes from the style, not from a transformation in their figure. In Construction they are at the centre of the rally; in Reality they walk through their hometown at their own pace.
The bible names the body and the role; the character profile holds the person, the interior layer, the weight they carry and the pull they live alongside.
The friend at the stall. Behind the counter of a small wooden stall, leaning on their elbows, watching the rally, glad to be there. The centre Construction's garden is built around.
Two renders. Construction: the friend at the stall, grounded and present in every venue up to the break. Reality: someone at their actual age, weighted, in the closed shop the protagonist walks past, and on a bench at the cliff.
What holds is the posture in Construction and the weight and absence in Reality. Gender, age, presentation are open for the sketch to settle.
The shopkeeper's younger sister. In Construction she is the tinkerer behind the workshop bench in the garden: rests, procrastinates, works at her own pace, finished items land on a done tray with a soft chime. Different rhythm from the shopkeeper, same family ease.
Two renders, like the shopkeeper. Age, presentation, look stay open; the family resemblance to the shopkeeper is the anchor.
Each partner is a coach. The visual job is two renders: the coach beside the protagonist on the court (Construction), and the actual person at their actual age, in their actual life (Reality). The first partner sets the visual bar for the rest. Three more partners arrive in the early game; from then on each new venue brings one.
The first partner sets the visual bar; the lineage rule and wider partner cast sit in the partner character docs.
The dead friend. Construction-only; their Reality is the cliff. Holds the championship spot at the top of the tournament ladder. Render them as someone the protagonist loved; sharp at the championship because the friend was sharp.
Saturated colour, generous light, surfaces that gleam. Shadows held warm. Characters drawn young and full, present, bodies at ease in motion. The garden in late afternoon, the stall against the inside wall, the racquet moving on the left, the friend at the counter watching the rally, glad to be there. Everything has light; nothing is starved.
The protagonist is actively maintaining Construction; tennis lives here and only here. The pretense is the rendering, not the protagonist's care. Construction needs to feel like somewhere the player wants to be, before the cracks ever come. An idle pong game with light and texture, full stop. If it does not earn the player's investment first, the cracks have nothing to crack.
Reality leaks into Construction. Two flavours, both authored, both deniable. The visual examples are what the artist briefs against:
Tonal cracks sit inside Construction's fiction. A flicker in the venue light. A partner's tilt held a beat too long. A colour cooling at the edge of the frame. A moment of sound that does not match the venue.
Meta-contextual cracks sit outside the fiction. A music cue that skips. A UI element that blinks the wrong colour. A loading screen that says something it should not. A pause-menu option whose wording shifts between visits.
The hardest visual discipline: tonal cracks read as oddness without ever reading as a mistake. The deniability is what does the work. Cracks stay tonal, never literal. A coffee mug from the protagonist's kitchen sitting on the equipment rack would collapse the deniability.
The wall comes down. Once. Light, sound, the venue's surfaces, the friend's posture: all turn at once. A giving-way, not a glitch.
After the rupture the player walks through the protagonist's hometown for the first sustained Reality render: the people behind the partners at their actual ages, the closed shop with the lights off, a sign on the door. The walk's visual job is to introduce Reality's full style before the player carries it back to Construction.
The break ends and the player is back in Construction, but the wall does not go back up. The shop stays closed. The friend at the stall is gone. The warm centre is hollowed out; the rallies render that absence.
Reconstruction is not a third visual style; the two styles stay distinct. What changes visually:
Construction weathers as the arc proceeds. Saturation drops a notch, line weight thickens, compositions hold longer pauses. The construction does not visually rebuild; it ages. The warm centre is gone; the rallies render that absence.
Reality acquires content. What the protagonist does there during Reconstruction, and how the Reconstruction loop yields the key that unlocks the gate at the end, is open. The cliff opens at the end, through the unlocked gate in the garden.
The cliff reads as a place people came to. A worn ledge, traces of small ceremony, the marks a group leaves on a spot they returned to until they stopped. A bench sits at the cliff edge, dedicated to the friend.
The protagonist opens the locked gate at the back of the garden in Construction and steps through to the cliff in Reality. The friend at the stall is on the memorial bench. The shape is the protagonist arriving at a place that has been there the whole game; the gate was the last barrier.
Credits play over a rally. The protagonist on the left, the friend at the stall on the right, the first volley between them in the construct. Construction's saturated light returns, with the texture Reality has worn into it across Reconstruction. The bench from the cliff sits somewhere in frame, glimpsed past a gate that stays open.
Postgame is rallying with the friend at the stall, on the right side of the court that used to be the championship spot. The cliff is reachable any time through the now-unlocked gate, with no new gameplay; a place to sit, look at the sea, listen.
Six descriptions of what Volley looks like when the work is landing. They are not commands; Shuck is a sanctuary for craft, not a place that tells people what to make. They are what an artist holds the work up against, on any asset, any screen, either style.
- Intentional. Every choice carries a reason. Nothing arbitrary, nothing default.
- Specific. Particulars over types. This fence, this stall, this tree. Generic warmth fails.
- Distinct. The visual style is unmistakably Volley: hand-drawn line with a visible mark, painted shadows, surfaces that breathe. If two things could be confused at a glance, one of them changes. Readable when small.
- Diegetic. The world is something the player is inside. UI sits inside the same hand and voice.
- Breathing. Movement, posture, body language carry the personality. A simple shape that moves with feeling carries more than a detailed shape that sits still. Still frames feel about to move.
- Shifting. The same world holds multiple styles: Construction and Reality, before-the-break and after, biome to biome. Silhouettes hold; light, colour, line quality shift.
Things that travel with the camera through every Construction venue. They are Construction's spine; they show up wherever the rally goes.
- The protagonist's racquet. Same shape, same colour, same handle, wherever the rally is. Equipment hangs off it; the racquet is the constant the player carries.
- The ball. The same ball at the centre of every rally. Item skins change its art; the size and presence are the same.
- The opposing returner. A wall in the very first venue, a partner from the moment the first partner arrives. One returner across the rally, always.
- The friend at the stall. Zach in his Construction-render. Behind the counter of a small wooden stall, leaning on his elbows, watching the rally. The stall lashes to whatever the venue gives it: a fence, a palm, a meteor edge. He is recognisable wherever he sits. Present in Construction up to the break, absent across Reconstruction, back on the bench at the cliff.
- The volley counter. A wooden plaque in the garden, a coral-rimmed slate underwater, a hovering glyph in space. Same number, dressed for each venue. Diegetic everywhere.
- The warm light style. Colour temperature shifts venue by venue: afternoon yellow, submerged green, nebula pink, canopy gold. The warmth holds even when the colour does not.
- Soul. The bond between the protagonist and each partner that channels through the rally. It deepens with shared rallies and small attentions. A long rally is soul at full breath; a miss is soul catching its breath again. Anything in the rally that bends physics is soul acting on the world. The art renders the place where this kind of motion is natural: the lift of the protagonist a beat longer than gravity wanted, the ball's little extra coast at the top of a hit, the venue light leaning warmer through a long rally.
Reality's constants are its own. The kitchen, the photograph, the back walking down a street, the ordinary surfaces of an ordinary town. They have their own spine, and the player learns both.
Surfaces carry information without HUD. UI sits inside the same hand and voice as the rest of the world. A catalogue, a rack, a pinboard, a clipboard are better than a menu. Where a menu is unavoidable, it is made by the same hand as everything else.
The shop as catalogue. A corner of the venue, hidden until the friend unlocks. The shop reads as a small kiosk: a table with items resting on it, a thumbed-through catalogue the friend brings out across the table, a small counter where boxes briefly sit before they go on their way. The catalogue is what the player will remember. Touchstones for the page treatment are the Argos catalogue, the school-photo-pack order form, the back-of-magazine mail-order spread: flat product photography against plain backgrounds, square-cropped cards, plain captions, prices, product codes. Domestic objects, presented with unfussy honesty. Items reference places the prototype does not visit yet, but the page reads like any other page in the book: a kettle, a deck chair, a meteor shard, a starfish, the same matter-of-fact voice across all of them. Flatness is the load-bearing thing. A travel magazine would oversell the wider world; the catalogue family undersells it, which makes the strangeness funnier and more grounded.
The workshop bench. The tinkerer's place. A done tray for finished items. Tools in known places. The rhythm of the room is part of her personality. She makes tea, stares out the window, reads, tidies, settles into the work in her own time.
The racks. A ball feeder on one side of the play area, holding the balls not currently in play. A smaller equipment rack opposite, holding items the player can attach to the racquet. Both with visible age and use. Their presence in every venue is a constant; their forms are venue-dressed.
The volley counter. Diegetic in every venue. A wooden plaque in the garden, a coral-rimmed slate underwater, a hovering glyph in space. Always a count; never a HUD number floating outside the world. In Construction the count is visible during the rally; in Reconstruction the count is hidden during the rally and only checkable in Reality.
Plaques and signs. "Best volley: 47, set after the storm." Memory in place of HUD, where the world has a wall to write it on.
Reality's score-checking surfaces. The score migrates to Reality across Reconstruction. The sister's place may have the day's number on a small note pinned somewhere, or she might glance at her phone and mention it. The closed shop has its closing-time hours written on the door; the number lives there too for the protagonist who looks. The cliff carries the count in some form, once unlocked. Specific surfaces are open; the commitment is that the score lives in Reality, not on the rally HUD, during Reconstruction.
The first venue is the garden. From there Construction leaps, and each leap is bigger than the last. Same partner. Same friend at the stall. Same light. A wildly different world around them.
A walled stretch of grass in one corner of a wider garden. Setting reads as a UK and Mediterranean blend, warm climate; architecture part European cottage, part Mediterranean patio, part a memory the protagonist is reaching for that does not exactly belong anywhere. Stone or terracotta tiles underfoot. A wall or wooden fence around the edge. A tree at the back, an olive or fig or apple, branches already old. Late afternoon light, slant and golden. The garden feels lived-in. Paint chips, vines on the wall, a watering can on its side near the tree.
The friend's stall sits against one inside wall. A small wooden affair with a stripe of awning and one shelf of items. The stall is not part of the architecture; it is a thing the friend put there. It can fold up and travel.
A ball feeder sits on one side of the play area, holding the balls not currently in play. A smaller rack opposite holds equipment items.
A locked gate sits at the back beside the tree. It is the one locked gate in the entire game. The player can see it but not reach it across most of the climb. Past it, just barely visible, is something the player cannot quite resolve: a streak of weirdness, a glimpse of cliff edge, a strip of sea that does not belong here. The garden is closed but not sealed, and the strangeness is meant to flicker rather than linger. Late in Reconstruction, the protagonist returns to the garden, unlocks the gate, and walks through to the cliff in Reality.
The garden is the prototype's only built venue. Per SH-275, it carries the championship-shape exemplar: one coach, Martha, one mechanic she teaches, one round. Everything else in the game is the same shape, scaled across the trajectory below.
Each venue is also a sticking point for the protagonist, related to the event at the cliff. The resonance is only obvious looking back; the Construction rendering does not need to point at it. Every venue carries one quiet weight underneath.
The first leap, in the prototype, is implied as a cliffhanger rather than visited. The player triggers it and the world fades on the brink of something else.
The leading candidate for the second venue is underwater: sun above the surface, light filtered green and gold through deep water, the ball drifting through bubble streams, the friend now seen and heard through water. Cool, alien, dreamlike. Touchstones: Studio Ghibli's Ponyo and the sunken world in Spirited Away; Mario's underwater levels for the buoyant, slow-motion physics; Omori's underwater sequences for tone and saturation. Underwater is not formally locked.
Beyond underwater, the leaps are sketches. A tropical island with palm shadows on white sand. A meteor in nebula light. A cathedral of trees high in a canopy, honey light through leaves. A goo dimension where everything jiggles. A jungle full of dinosaurs. A massive stadium with a crowd. A city on clouds. An ice cave with breath visible in the air. A library so vast the shelves disappear into haze.
The mechanic underneath the leaps is the protagonist reaching further and further for a better hiding place. The bigger the wonder, the more elaborate the construction. The break, when it comes, lands on top of all of it.
Volley is Pong-shape, not table-tennis. The rally happens on a court bounded on two sides:
- Top edge. A hard ceiling; the ball bounces.
- Bottom edge. The ground. Pong-style floor; the ball bounces. Hitting the ground does not end the rally.
- Left side. Where the protagonist stands. Open behind them; if the ball passes here, the rally ends.
- Right side. Where the partner stands. Before the first partner arrives, a wall stands in for them and returns the ball. After the partner arrives, the partner returns it. Open behind them past the partner; missing here also ends the rally.
The court visibly opens onto the rest of the venue. A missed ball does not despawn. It keeps its velocity, rolls out of the court, loses energy on the venue floor, and comes to rest wherever it stops. Resting balls render in the mid or foreground over the shop and workshop, so they stay visible. The court is part of the venue, not a separate stage; everything around it is something the player can see.
Five rules the art holds the work to.
- Enjoying Construction is not the joke. The narrative reveal does not punish the player for the time they spent in the rally. The rally and the story both hold up on their own.
- Earnest. Personal and particular. Characters are specific. Items have flavour. The voice means what it says.
- Stress is natural friction. Tension has ebb and flow, the way a long rally does. The friction makes a moment feel alive.
- Trust the player. Let the player notice, wonder, and eventually understand.
- Cracks stay tonal. The leak renders as light, posture, sound, atmosphere. The cumulative shape relies on deniability.
The art takes itself a touch more seriously than a pong game should, and that is intentional. The presentation holds while harder material sits underneath; both run at once without undercutting either. Sadness, when it comes, is a consequence the player can sit with. The art is never scary or distressing; Reality is quieter, not darker.
Audio direction lives in SH-281. A summary of the arc: Construction is synthetic, bright, energetic; cracks bring small dissonances and meta-glitches; the break is abstract synth, harsh, minimalist; Reality is acoustic, with bustle and wind instruments; Reconstruction holds synth and acoustic in conversation, weighted increasingly toward acoustic and toward fuller arrangement; the cliff and call run thin then full; the credits reach for both wonder and weight, full orchestra, the synthesis the game has been working toward.
Hand-drawn illustration with the mark visible. Pencil and brushwork that breathe. Not pixel art. Not painterly realism. Not vector-clean.
Colour. Bold shapes, limited and confident colour. Construction runs saturated and warm: honey golds, soft blues, deep amber shadows, colour as comfort. Reality runs the same family with the saturation dial turned down: muted warms, honest greys, natural greens. Light falls where it falls. Exact hex values lock as the first finished assets land.
Line. Confident, slightly imperfect, visibly made by a person. No flat vector polish, no mechanical precision. Construction's line is cleaner; edges resolved. Reality's line is looser; the mark breathes more. Same hand, less composed. Stroke weight stays consistent within a scene. Silhouette reads first; line detail second.
Shape. Soft and organic for characters; geometric and stable for props and architecture. The ball is round, the racquet is a slab with weight, the racks are specific objects. Characters stay simple; environments carry more depth. The two meet through shared light and palette, so characters belong to the space rather than floating on top of it.
Treatment. Every element drawn by the same voice. No placeholder asset ships; if it is in the frame, it belongs. No outline-and-flat-fill shortcuts; line and fill work together. Shadows are painted, not rendered. Ambient occlusion is a choice, not a default. Cuphead-level commitment to the hand-drawn voice across every asset, including the interface.
Environments carry foreground, middle, back. Layers move independently where the camera allows. Depth rewards sustained attention.
Typography locks as UI lands. Working direction: one hand-drawn-feeling display face for game-world text, one quieter reading face for UI copy. Both sit inside the line-quality rule.
Fewer frames, better chosen. Motion carries more than rendering detail.
Anticipation, contact, follow-through on every meaningful action. Hits, misses, rallies, reactions. Time can stretch at the moment of impact.
Body language before face. Weight shifting, shoulders dropping, a pause before a reaction. The posture speaks first.
Style can bend at emotional peaks. Line loosens, perspective warps, the ball becomes a feeling. The rules hold; the rendering flexes. Ping Pong: The Animation and Slay the Princess are the touchstones.
Each animation state reads as a different emotion, not a different sprite.
Rhythm. Hits, misses, rallies, streaks, reactions, UI feedback land on a felt rhythm. The game has a pulse the art and sound both serve. Visual rhythm is felt before it is noticed.
A note on cost. Minimal animation per character keeps the labour budget where it belongs while painted backgrounds carry the world's weight. A production decision, made deliberately. The expressive range comes from the choice of pose and the timing between poses.
Each rally point closes on a visible beat at the ball's apex: a bloom of light, a brief connecting arc, a synth chime, a reaction from the friend who holds the venue's bond. Eyes up, racquet lift, a small gesture from wherever they stand. Satisfying, not loud. The friend is a co-celebrant of the return, not scenery.
The bond doing the work changes by venue. The garden runs the beat through the shopkeeper at the stall. The treetop, underwater, and meteor venues run it through the coach who teaches there. The pattern is the same; the character carrying it is whoever the venue's wind belongs to.
The Reconstruction implication follows. Once the shopkeeper is gone, the garden's bloom and chime thin or fall silent; the rally returns mechanically and the celebratory beat does not. The hollow at Construction's warm centre lands in the rally's own texture. The other Construction venues, with their coaches still present, keep their wind.
A reaction per rally point is animated state on whichever character holds the bond in that venue. Even one looped frame plus a short return reaction is per-frame work the artist signs up for, multiplied across every venue. Worth scoping with Aubrey before this lands as a hard requirement.
Every work below has been cited in the design corpus as a tonal or visual touchstone. Two or three resonate most with any given push of the work; the rest sit as ambient context.
- Porco Rosso (1992, Studio Ghibli). North star for light and place. Late-afternoon watercolour style.
- Good Will Hunting (1997). Reality reference for finding beauty in honest, unglamorous places.
- La La Land (2016). How saturation and lighting shift to change a scene's feeling without changing its style.
- Baby Driver (2017). Rhythm as a visual principle.
- Ping Pong: The Animation (2014, dir. Masaaki Yuasa). Sport as conversation. The style itself bends at peak emotion.
- Haikyuu!! (2014-2020). The defining text on volleyball as emotional language. Reaction shots that give a single point meaning.
- Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020, dir. Masaaki Yuasa). Fewer frames, better chosen.
- Ranking of Kings (2021). Storybook simplicity carrying enormous emotional range.
- Odd Taxi (2021). Visual restraint as narrative strategy.
- Bo Burnham: Inside (2021). One person, one room, obsessive light arrangement.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Wildly different visual modes held by a single emotional core.
- To Be Hero X (2025). Multiple visual styles within one work, used as emotional punctuation.
- Detectorists. British pastoral. Quiet kindness, gentle people, English summer afternoons. Tonal anchor for Reality.
- Coco. Sun-saturated Mediterranean style, family memory.
- Wallace and Gromit / Beatrix Potter. British illustration. Specific, lived-in, particular.
- Adventure Time. Visual variety held together by tonal continuity across wildly different settings.
- Pong (1972). The seed object.
- Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee / Exodus (1997 / 1998). The Oddworld Signature: six artistic commandments that governed every screen. Structural inspiration for Volley's Six Marks.
- Broken Age (2014). Hand-drawn painterly with dual settings shared by one story.
- Machinarium (2009, Amanita Design). Painterly atmosphere at sustainable scale.
- The Stanley Parable (2013). A game that lets its own scaffolding show without breaking the player's trust.
- Neko Atsume (2014). Mobile lineage Volley sits adjacent to.
- Enter the Gungeon (2016). Readability at small scale.
- Cuphead (2017). Total commitment to one hand-drawn voice across every asset.
- Rain World (2017). Environmental storytelling through care. Hand-placed ecosystems, painterly decay.
- Star Fetchers (2020). Personality through motion rather than rendering.
- Omori (2020). The closest existing structural parallel for Volley's two-style move. Headspace and Faraway Town: same cast, different weight.
- Slay the Princess (2023). Pencil-on-paper line that shifts as the player's belief shifts.
- In Stars and Time (2023). Hand-drawn storybook cast in a time-loop frame.
- Rusty's Retirement (2024). Format peer for the desktop-companion mode.
- Cast n Chill (2025). Backgrounds as environments rather than backdrops.
- Poco (2025). Vibrant-but-controlled palette across cluttered hand-painted worlds.
- Wanderstop (2025). Tonal peer. Mechanics that stay pleasant while carrying real weight.
- Despelote (2025). Sport as a frame for emotional material.
- Black Hole Fishing (2026). Diegetic UI at its most committed.
- Outer Wilds. Tiny planets, music drifting across space.
- Mario Galaxy. Biome variety as cosmic style.
- Wii Sports Resort. Sport-as-place. Each activity a distinct visual setting.
- Kazuo Oga (My Neighbor Totoro art director). Watercolour quality of light.
- Atsuko Nozaki (Ranking of Kings character designer). Storybook simplicity.
- Naoyuki Asano (Eizouken character designer). Loose, sketchy, energetic.
- Baku Kinoshita (Odd Taxi director). Visual restraint as deliberate strategy.
- Joar Jakobsson (Rain World). Solo painterly worldbuilding.
- Chad and Jared Moldenhauer (Cuphead). Production discipline.
- Joe Harty (Enter the Gungeon). Readability through silhouette at small scale.
- Ashley Rose Smith (Cast n Chill lead background artist). Layered painterly environments.
- Abby Howard (Slay the Princess). Pencil-on-paper line that does narrative work.
Where a character or an object is not pinned down, the sketch settles it. The bible follows what the sketch lands.
- The shopkeeper's gender, age, build. Deliberately open.
- The sister's gender, age, presentation. Deliberately open. The anchor is the family resemblance to the shopkeeper.
- Martha's age. Working range 45 to 60.
- The protagonist's physicality. Gentle, agender. The MC profile holds the rest.
- Exact colour palettes for each style.
- Typography: display and reading faces.
- How partner introductions render.
- The first leap biome. Underwater leads, not formally locked.
- Why the protagonist was not at the cliff the day the friend died. Declined the trip, was not invited, had drifted from the group by then. The asymmetry between protagonist and shopkeeper holds either way; the specific cause is open.
Where the bible feels actively wrong, the bible moves to fit.
The named terms the bible uses, in one place. Each is defined fully in its own section; this is the quick re-loader.
- Construction. The vibrant style. Saturated, warm, generous. Where tennis lives. Section 5.
- Reality. The second style. The protagonist's hometown, weighted and lived-in. Section 3 (overview), threaded through Parts 1 and 2.
- Reconstruction. The arc between the break and the cliff. Free travel between the two styles; bidirectional carry. Not a third visual style. Section 8.
- The break. The single rupture at the championship win. The protagonist beats the champ; the win lands wrong; the wall comes down. Section 7.
- The cliff and the gate. The ending, at the cliff. The protagonist opens the locked gate at the back of the garden in Construction and steps through to Reality; Zach is on the memorial bench. Section 9.
- The key. Opens the one locked gate at the back of the garden in Construction; through it is the cliff in Reality. How the Reconstruction loop yields it is open. Sections 8 and 9.
- The cliff. The place outside the town where the friend died, a spot the friend group used to jump from. Visited late in Reconstruction. Sections 7 and 9.
- The champ. The dead friend. Construction-only. Holds the championship spot. Section 4.
- The round. The encounter at the end of each tournament step where the coach takes the other side of the court. Section 4.
- The shopkeeper. The friend at the stall in Construction; the absence the protagonist walks past in Reality. Section 4.
- Stephanie. The shopkeeper's younger sister, the tinkerer. At the family shop counter in Reality; works the bench in Construction. Section 4.
- The partners. Coaches in Construction; people from the protagonist's life in Reality. Each teaches one mechanic via the rally. Section 4.
- Tonal cracks. Cracks inside Construction's fiction: light, posture, sound, atmosphere. Section 6.
- Meta-contextual cracks. Cracks outside the fiction: UI, music, loading screens, menu wording. Section 6.
- The carry. The bidirectional bridge between Construction and Reality during Reconstruction. Curated, not open. Section 8.
- Soul. The bond between the protagonist and each partner. Anything in the rally that bends physics is soul acting on the world. Section 12.
- The Six Marks. The rendering rulebook: Intentional, Specific, Distinct, Diegetic, Breathing, Shifting. Section 11.
- Two renders. Each cross-style character has a Construction-render, young, vibrant, present, and a Reality-render at their actual age, in their actual life. Section 4.
Contributing
The game
The Cast
Process
Reference