Deliverable #42 · 2026-10-27

The App Store header — a moonlit Village, looping, and Esmeralda in search

epic: store-release delivered

Kris, 27 October, with Apple’s asset best practices open: “come up with a header for Spellgrove so it stands out from the crowd and catches the right eye … Esmeralda talking looks really cool, but so too does some game play … perhaps you will produce a simple looping video … to bring us up from the default standard look in the App Store, to something that is beautiful, smooth and polished.”

From iOS 27 a product page can open with a header — a picture or a video up to 30 seconds, 3840×1646 — and a search result can show a 3:2 picture or video in place of the screenshots. Both play silently and loop.

Two iPhones: the Spellgrove product page with the moonlit Village header and its gold lettering, and a search for 'magic game' showing Esmeralda's conversation as the search picture — How the two look on an iPhone (a mock-up of the App Store)

The header

The Village of Lor at night: the houses lit in their owners' colours, children walking the gold street toward the moon, a faun carrying a chest, fireflies

The Village at night, from the house street that is coming with the own-house update. The camera drifts slowly over the main street, every window lit, the bazaar tent and Esmeralda tiny at the far end, the moon huge behind them, and “Spellgrove” set across the moon in the lettering from the Google Play feature graphic. Eight children walk in and out of the lanes. Everything that moves repeats exactly every twenty seconds, and the last second fades into the first, so the loop has no jump. An iPhone shows only the middle of the picture; the lettering, the moon and the children all sit there, and the sky above them stays clear for the time and the back and share buttons.

The search result

Esmeralda's real conversation screen over the Village

Esmeralda’s conversation exactly as the game draws it, over the same Village, softly out of focus behind her. She asks “Would you like to learn the spell to create a familiar?”, “Yes please.” lights up as if tapped, she gives her list — a Life Seed, a Sharp Stick, a Smooth Pebble and five Mud — and asks again. Search is where someone decides in a glance, and a character asking a question, with buttons to answer her, says what kind of game this is faster than a street does.

The two that weren’t chosen

The same header without the lettering — The header without the lettering

The street at 3:2 with the lettering across the moon — The street, for search

Why a night

Most game headers are bright daytime art. A deep purple night with one big warm moon stands out on the page, and it is the game’s own sky. It is also the game itself, moving: every frame is drawn by the game’s renderer from the real Village, houses, characters and conversation screen.

The files

For App Store Connect (both 20 seconds, 30 frames a second, H.264, with a silent sound track):

Product page header, 3840×1646: spellgrove-header-21x9.mp4 (still)
Search results, 2880×1920: spellgrove-search-esmeralda-3x2.mp4 (still)

On YouTube: the header and Esmeralda — and the header is Spellgrove’s promo video on Google Play.

Kris is uploading them to the Asset Library now, ahead of Apple’s review of 0.2.2. Apple shows them on iOS 27 and later. They are re-made by tools/store-header/, which renders the same frames again exactly.

Sources & artifacts

← related epic: store-release

Also available as raw markdown.