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The game interface — first brush

repo: land-of-lor

Where this stands (2026-09-18)

The touch controls (2026-09-18, Kris’s voice brief; docs/handoff/touch-controls.md). A “Moving around” choice in the account screen under Play Tag — Follow touch (as before) or Joystick — saved on the device, never the account. The joystick is fixed bottom-left, translucent white with the HUD’s gold for the live octant and the pressed state, eight directions past a 14 px dead zone, walking pace constant, sending moves at exactly the tap-and-hold cadence (no extra traffic, no per-frame work). Run and Jump are two round buttons on a thumb arc bottom-right in both modes (hud.run_held, hud.jump_pressed); the “Tap anywhere to move” hint moved to the empty bottom-left as a HUD pill. The stamina bar is a slim strip under the heart, shown only while spent or running, and the health track shrank from 104 to 80 px (docs/handoff/run-and-jump.md). Kris’s rule from this batch: UI work is reviewed by a design agent against real renders before it ships — round one is recorded in the handoff. Also 2026-09-18: the title wordmark stands on the painting with a tapered gold rule instead of a plum pill (someone tried to press it), and a door into an Area still waking up says “Opening the way…” while a real drop keeps “Reconnecting…” (docs/handoff/wordmark-and-arrival.md). Open: everything about touch is unverified on a device until Kris plays — the two-finger case (stick + Run), a finger sliding off, the dead zone and pad size (three constants at the top of touch_controls.gd), and whether the live arc should sit inside the ring rather than under the knob. Earlier: all four first-brush pieces signed off 2026-08-12; the card editor’s promotion to the public site and the elements’ authoring stay outside this epic. No open issues. Past task files (to 2026-09-13): workshop/historic-docs/epics/game-interface/tasks/.

What this is

The first visual brush of the actual game. The live multiplayer POC already gives us a 3D browser world with touch-to-move (server-architecture, deliverable 8); this epic puts the game around it: a title screen, an in-game HUD, and the player’s collection — the 64 elements rendered as collectable cards. It also builds the authoring tool Kris uses to create and edit those 64 cards, which is the vehicle for element-table’s task 001 (this epic builds the tool and the card look; element-table stays the owner of the content — names, properties, rarities).

The goal state for this pass: title screen → walk around the world → open your Ingredients and look at your cards. Placeholder visuals are fine; the real visual design comes from a Claude Design session driven by design-brief.md in this folder. Once account creation lands (the immediate next epic after this one), this is a functioning MVP that real beta testers — Kris’s kids, nephews and nieces, and interested friends — can be invited into.

What’s decided (2026-08-11, planning session with Kris)

• HUD structure: a health bar plus three buttons — Ingredients, Spells (cauldron icon — eventually a view of the actual cauldron object), Gear — and all three open one full-screen panel on different tabs. This is the hybrid of the two options Kris was weighing, and it matches the earlier inventory thinking in land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/inventory-interface.md (one inventory, major tabs); Blueprints/Recipes can join as a tab later without touching the HUD.
• The element card (from Kris’s pencil sketches + the physical table session): card background is the element’s colour · art panel · hexagram glyph + King Wen number in the corner · trigram pair (“Wind over Mountain”) · name bar · a lower box for where it comes from + what you need to hold/collect it (the origin column made visible) · rarity: common / rare / legendary. The machinery (hexagram, number) is never hidden; only flavour is.
• The Ingredients grid shows all 64, always — laid out logically (upper-trigram rows × lower-trigram columns, same as Kris’s physical table). Cards you haven’t collected are greyed-out templates with a big “?” — the full set is memorisable and the gaps invite collection.
• Shell architecture: an HTML/CSS/JS layer that boots the untouched Godot web export from its own page (GODOT_CONFIG lives in the page, so no re-export is needed) and overlays DOM UI above the canvas. Claude Design produces HTML/CSS, so its output slots straight in. Lives at land-of-lor/pocs/game-shell/.

Notes toward later decisions

• The collectible-card framing opens a real-money acquisition channel outside the game: purchasable element packs (dozen-based bundles, at least one rare per dozen; maybe premium rare-heavy dozens; maybe player-created packs offered on the web version of the trading post). In-game remains currency-free — trading stays item-for-item, per the settled no-in-game-currency principle. Direction Kris likes, not yet a decision.
• Hold the 64 lightly. The hexagram set is the guiding structure and its boundedness is genuinely useful (any player can memorise the whole table) — but Kris can imagine wanting more than 64 someday. Everything here keys elements by King Wen number without hard-capping the set.

Sequencing (named, not decomposed here)

After this epic: account creation and remembering accounts (so testers keep their collections), then a marketing pass — inviting the beta family/friends circle in, website engagement work, and the Kickstarter pre-launch (kickstarter-prelaunch) — engagement more than money. A step soon after MVP: collecting ingredients in the world.

Non-goals

• Not the spell-crafting interaction itself (spell-crafting-interface) — the Spells tab is a placeholder until the cauldron exists.
• Not account creation or persistence — next epic, deliberately excluded here.
• Not the element content — names, properties and rarities belong to element-table.
• Not the recipe engine, trading, or any server change (server-architecture, barter-marketplace).

Open design questions (prose for now — formalise only if they block tasks)

• How much of an un-collected card is revealed — name? some properties? Currently: glyph and number only, everything else hidden. Kris was explicitly unsure (“maybe you see the name, and maybe even some properties”).
• What the Spells tab shows before spell-crafting lands (currently a cauldron placeholder).
• Whether the grid’s un-collected treatment should tease rarity (a legendary-shaped hole invites questing) or stay uniform.

Relevant docs

• design-brief.md — the self-contained brief for the Claude Design session.
• land-of-lor/pocs/game-shell/README.md — the shell, the shared card renderer/data contract, run and deploy instructions.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/inventory-interface.md — Kris’s earlier inventory-tabs thinking (with Ben) that the HUD decision matches.
• epics/element-table/overview.md — the keystone table this UI renders; the settled machinery/flavour, rarity and origin principles.
• brand/design.md — the storybook-cover direction, palette and typography the brief inlines.

Deliverables (1)

• #9 — The start of the game — title screen, HUD, and your card collection (2026-08-11)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:game-interface (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.