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Object system experiments

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

What this is

Follow-on experiments from the object-gallery POC (land-of-lor/pocs/object-gallery/), which already demonstrates the core mechanic: creatures and gear as Godot scenes built from primitive parts plus named attachment sockets (socket_head, socket_right_hand, socket_torso, socket_feet, socket_back), with gear scenes snapping onto whichever creature’s sockets exist regardless of scene nesting depth (a Centaur nests a Horse instance and a Basic Humanoid instance and composes cleanly). This epic is where that mechanic gets pushed further: deeper composition (objects made of objects made of objects), and objects whose composition is driven by actual element/recipe data rather than hand-authored scenes.

Why it exists

The design docs settle on 3D models specifically because the composition mechanic needs to scale combinatorially — hand-drawn 2D sprite sheets can’t support arbitrary player-chosen body/gear/colour combinations, but transformable 3D primitives can (RECIPES.md: “That method simply doesn’t scale to allowing user choice… I think 3D models are actually the much easier approach”). The object-gallery POC proves the socket-attachment half of that claim works. What it doesn’t yet prove: whether recipe output (an item defined by slots filled with elements, per docs/README.md §6, §8) can drive which primitives/colours/textures get composed, rather than a human hand-picking them per creature as the POC currently does.

Core constraint: physical gathering bounds the viable ingredient count (2026-08-05)

This is a core game constraint, not an arena-only one — record it prominently here because it directly bounds the “periodic table of ingredients” work this epic is responsible for. battle-arena-poc’s loadout mechanism established that ingredients are gathered physically, in real time, by moving around and picking things up off the ground or off kills. That single design choice has a consequence for the whole element system, not just combat: 64 is a fine number for a system, and an unworkable number for drops on a floor. A player cannot hunt for the specific few ingredients they need among 64 visually/mechanically similar drop types under time pressure — that’s not a UI problem to polish away, it’s a hard legibility ceiling on how many distinct, physically-gathered things can coexist in one play space.

This constrains the periodic-table/ingredient-authoring work that is still open in this epic: whatever the full 64-element system looks like, only a small subset of it can plausibly be things a player picks up off the ground mid-fight. One candidate shape for the answer, not yet decided: tier ingredients by gatherability — a small arena-gatherable core (the ones that drop from creatures and ground, likely overlapping with the “~20% at launch” starting set) plus a long tail of rarer, derived, and composed ingredients reached through crafting or trade instead of picked up mid-fight. That would keep 64 intact as the underlying structure while giving real-time play a small, curated floor to actually work with. This overview records the constraint and that candidate shape — it does not resolve it, and it deliberately does not propose an actual ingredient list. Pick this up when the ingredient-authoring work itself is actually underway, not before.

Scope

• Extending object-gallery’s socket mechanic to deeper nesting (an object holding sub-objects that themselves hold sub-objects — e.g. armor with attachable decorations).
• Driving composition parametrically from element/trigram data (the SHAPE/COLOUR/TEXTURE trigram-typed menus in docs/slots-and-items.md) instead of hand-picked scenes — this is the actual research question, since the POC currently hard-codes 7 creatures rather than generating them from hexagram input.
• Evaluating whether the current low-poly flat-shaded primitive style (see docs/3d-object-sourcing.html for the sourcing research behind it) holds up as complexity increases.

Non-goals

• Not the character/clothing selection UI for players — that’s character-composition-poc, which builds on this epic’s mechanic but is about player-facing choice, not the underlying composition system.
• Not full creature AI/behaviour (Formula/ports/stocks, §8) — this epic is about the shape of a Complex Item, not its ongoing behaviour.

Open design questions (not tracked as formal Question objects — these are premature until the relevant work is actually underway)

• How much of “trigram → shape/colour/texture” (the derivation function referenced across slots-and-items.md) is a lookup table vs. procedural — flagged repeatedly in the source docs as undecided (“this is programmatic based on the element… partly set… partly programmatic”).
• Whether the current hand-authored low-poly style scales to the full 64×64 Simple Life combination space, or needs a more systematic asset-generation approach.
• How the periodic-table/ingredient-authoring work reconciles 64 structural elements against a much smaller gatherable-in-real-time floor (see the constraint above).

Relevant docs

• land-of-lor/pocs/object-gallery/README.md and its scenes/ — the working POC this epic extends.
• land-of-lor/docs/RECIPES.md — the 3D-models-vs-2D-sprites reasoning, and the “Other Feature Slots” thinking (hair, wings, horns) that motivates deeper composition.
• land-of-lor/docs/slots-and-items.md — the SHAPE/COLOUR/TEXTURE trigram menus this composition system would eventually be driven by.
• land-of-lor/docs/3d-object-sourcing.html — asset-sourcing research behind the current art style.
• battle-arena-poc/overview.md — the loadout mechanism whose “movement is gathering” design produced this constraint.

Status

1 backlog

Next: Parked — not being worked right now.

Deliverables (1)

• #2 — 3D model concepts — composing creatures from parts (2026-07-29)

Tasks (1)

backlog (1)

• object-system-experiments/001 — Drive one creature's shape/colour from trigram input (priority 1, estimate M )

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