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Character composition POC

repo: land-of-lor

Where this stands (2026-09-27)

Live. Deliverable 031 (Rah’s drawn faces) went into the game the day it was cut: every player body wears an appearance — eyes, nose, mouth, hair from Rah’s drawings, a shirt colour and a pants colour from sixteen each — dealt from the character seed until chosen. The account screen’s box is a third bigger and turned by hand, with six buttons inside it (each showing the current choice; a tap is the save), and the gold name above the figure is editable (the phone platform’s name is kept beside it). The table is game/shell/faces.js; a new part is a row and a picture (tools/faces/README.md). Handoffs: docs/handoff/appearance-{director,client}.md. Open: more parts as Rah draws them; the mouths’ small source; at the game’s own camera a head is eleven pixels, so there the colours do the telling-apart. Earlier attempts at AI-made faces are deliverable 030’s record. No open issues. Past task files (to 2026-09-13): workshop/historic-docs/epics/character-composition-poc/tasks/.

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.

Deliverables (2)

• #31 — Rah's drawn faces — the parts, cut exactly, and a viewer (2026-09-27)
• #30 — Attempts at styling by AI (2026-09-22)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:character-composition-poc (private repository — sign-in required). The dated Where this stands section above names the open ones. The task files that carried this epic until 2026-09-13 are kept in the repo: task files to 2026-09-13 .

Also available as raw markdown.