The looks — tune the eight ground types and their 64 variations

done priority 2 estimate M

ground-types/006 · created 2026-08-17 · updated 2026-08-18

What to do

Spec items 3 and 4 as a content pass with the game running, separate from the rendering plumbing. Set the placeholder colours and patterns in game/shell/elements.js (ground on the eight trigrams, groundVariant on the 64 elements) until each of the eight reads at a glance — grass green, sand yellow (some variants dirt), snow and ice, lava red-orange, water and deep water blues, mountain grey, Heaven as eight distinct decorative floors (tiles, bricks, paths) — and each variant is visibly a flavour of its base. Write into elements.js’s header that ground colours are not the trigram identity colours (Earth’s identity colour is brown; grass is green). Re-run sync-elements.sh.

Definition of done

Screenshots of all eight types (and the Badlands showcase) in docs/handoff/; Kris reviews. Committed and pushed in land-of-lor.

Where the work lands

land-of-lor/game/shell/elements.js, docs/handoff/.

What was done (2026-08-17, laptop session)

Base albedos retuned for how they light (grass #467a31, sand #c2a866 + two dirt flavours, snow #a9b6c0 + two ice flavours, water, lava, mountain, deep water, stone #9c9081); Stone’s eight became named floors (Stone tiles, Plank floor, Gravel path, Mosaic, Red bricks, Cobbles, Blue tiles, Gold flagstones) with bricks / planks / checks patterns added to the atlas; the scene’s ambient 0.6 → 0.45 and sun 1.0 → 0.9 so light types stop clipping (both in client_main.gd and _shots.gd). Header of elements.js says why.
Judged in _shots.gd (a new g-ground-corner close-up) — screenshots in docs/handoff/ground-types/. Snow still reads bright, deliberately; its flavours survive.
This is a placeholder pass; Kris’s eye decides. Every value is one line in elements.js and re-syncs with sync-elements.sh.

2026-08-18 — the brief for real art

land-of-lor/docs/design/briefs/GROUND_TILES_BRIEF.md — for Claude Design: 64 seamless tiles, the constraints the engine imposes (repeat per cell, the shader does the transitions, flat-lit), the storybook direction, and the full table of the 64. Kris pastes it in; the PNGs drop into world/client/ground/<lower>/<upper>.png and the engine uses them over its drawn tiles.

View source in repository · also available as raw markdown.