Character composition POC

client parked

repo: land-of-lor · updated 2026-08-05

What this is

The player-facing flow for choosing an avatar and outfit at game start (and presumably later) — built on top of the composable-parts mechanic already proven out by the object-gallery POC, but from the player choosing side rather than the system generating side covered by object-system-experiments.

Why it exists

RECIPES.md names this directly as one of the two motivations for choosing 3D models over 2D sprite sheets in the first place: “wanting to add user-chosen custom clothes… that method simply doesn’t scale to allowing user choice.” The design docs also draw an explicit boundary here: a human player is a Creature like any other (§6, §8 in docs/README.md) but restricted to a small, hard-coded subset of head/body choices at character creation — “the player does get to make choices about head and body shape from the beginning — but only from a very very small subset that we hard-code set” (RECIPES.md). Unrestricted 64×64 Simple Life combinations are for creatures the player makes, not the player’s own avatar.

Scope

The selection UI: presenting the small hard-coded set of head/body/colour options to a new player.
Wiring that selection into the same socket-based composition system object-gallery already demonstrates (gear/clothing attaching to socket_head, socket_torso, etc.).
Clothing selection specifically — GAME_ITEMS.md and RECIPES.md both treat clothing/armor as a Complex Item type in its own right, with a Type/Colour-Texture/Kind slot structure (Kind determining garment-vs-armour, per the Mountain-trigram-as-armour idea in RECIPES.md).
MIND slot handling for the player specifically: per slots-and-items.md, the player’s MIND slot is always filled by “Heart of Heaven” (hexagram 1, The Creative) — i.e., player control — distinct from an NPC creature’s Will-stone.

Non-goals

Not the general parametric object-composition research (trigram-driven shape/colour generation for arbitrary creatures) — that’s object-system-experiments; this epic consumes that system for the specific, constrained case of player character creation.
Not later in-game creature creation (Simple Life, Horse/Pegasus-style discovery) — that’s regular gameplay, not the character-creation flow.

Key open questions

What the actual hard-coded subset of head/body options is — not yet chosen, only that it should be small.
Whether players can change their avatar later, or only at creation.
How clothing/armor Kind (garment vs. armour, per the Mountain-trigram rule floated in RECIPES.md) surfaces as a player-legible distinction rather than a hidden trigram check.

Relevant docs

land-of-lor/pocs/object-gallery/ — the working socket-composition POC this builds on directly.
land-of-lor/docs/RECIPES.md — the Creature/Clothing recipe drafts and the “small hard-coded subset” note for players specifically.
land-of-lor/docs/slots-and-items.md — Creature/Player slot table, including the MIND = Heart of Heaven rule for player-controlled characters.
land-of-lor/docs/GAME_ITEMS.md — Clothing/Armor as a Complex Item type.

Status

2 backlog

Next: Parked — not being worked right now.

Tasks (2)

backlog (2)

character-composition-poc/001 — Propose the small hard-coded head/body/colour option set (priority 1, estimate S )
character-composition-poc/002 — Wire a basic selection screen against the option set (priority 2, estimate M , blocked by character-composition-poc/001 )

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Also available as raw markdown.