Aesthetic Direction — briefing the Regalia look

What it is. The art brief: the palette, contrast rules, depth plan, and silhouette language that give a game one coherent look. The house default is Regalia — a small, AA-gated set (docs/STYLE.md) built on one hue at two opacities: bold, rounded, friendly, no outlines. This module is how you brief a look that clears both the pattern-readability floor and the six-axis vision judge (design/JUDGE.md), not just how to pick pretty colours.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. The look is the first thing the player believes about the world — before a single mechanic fires. A frame that reads as shipped, not debug earns trust; a flat grey grid loses it in a second.

The Regalia palette

Import REGALIA, REGALIA_DAY (light), REGALIA_NIGHT (dark) from @hayao (docs/API.md). It’s a core of four, grown by the job — never a big box of crayons:

Surfaces run light paper → mist → cloud and dark ground → night → shade; text is ink/soft on light, paperInk/softInk on dark. Grow the palette by the job, not the mood — a new hue earns its place only by owning one specific thing the core four can’t (that is exactly how rose and bark got in), and it stays out of the core UI chrome. Every pairing is WCAG-AA verified — npm run palette is the gate. The engine stays palette-agnostic; Regalia is a consistent starting point, never a restriction (docs/CONVENTIONS.md).

Vectors / options — dialing the look to the theme

The palette is fixed-ish; the composition is where you express theme:

Warm accents (gold, rose, bark) push a scene toward harvest/vitality/craft; cool accents (green, blue, ink) toward night/order/calm. Let the theme’s register from world-theme-vectors pick the corner.

Method

1. Choose the ground (REGALIA_DAY vs REGALIA_NIGHT) from the theme’s tone. This decision colours everything after it.
2. Pick 3–5 accents by meaning, not prettiness — one alarm/focal hue for the avatar, the rest for world & factions (world-faction-identity). Reserve the highest-contrast pairing for the player so the avatar out-contrasts the scenery (JUDGE axis 1).
3. Plan depth in three layers — background / midground / foreground — before placing anything. Emptiness (objects floating in a void) is the JUDGE’s most common failure (axis 2). Grade a sky, pin a horizon, layer ridges as stacked duotone masses.
4. Give interactables an ink edge or a bright focal. Pickups/actors read via the duotone split — a 32% mass carrying a 100% focal detail — plus a glow/pulse; contrast lives in the edge and the focal, not a flat fill (docs/CONVENTIONS.md).
5. Set the silhouette language — the shape rules that make avatar, enemies, and pickups readable as black shapes (pattern-readability).
6. If lit, own the light. A real LightLayer + PointLight carves a focal point out of ambient dark; but multiply-lighting lowers contrast, so the Regalia AA guarantee holds only pre-lighting — judge lit contrast from the rendered PNG, and let the lightingIssues feel-gate (npm run feel) own it.
7. Render and judge. Run npm run judge <slug>, look at the pixels, fix every high-severity finding cosmetically (the golden hash must stay unchanged), re-render until it reads shipped.

The JUDGE bar — brief to pass all six axes

Worked example — a keeper walking into the dusk

Theme: a small-scale, elegiac ascent (elegiac, intimate).

• Ground: REGALIA_NIGHT — a graded night sky, pinned horizon, layered ridges (the depth the JUDGE demands).
• Accents: gold as the warm lantern glow and focal/avatar hue against a blue/ink night; rose reserved for danger only. Three hues, one world.
• Light: each lantern is a PointLight pool carving warmth out of the dark — depth and the mechanic in one visual. Contrast judged from the PNG.
• Edges: lanterns and the keeper carry a bright focal detail over their mass so they read against the dark ground.
• Result: a frame that reads as an atmospheric ascent, not a debug void — the exact gap the vision judge exists to close.

Aesthetic hook

This whole module is the aesthetic hook. The one thing to internalise: Regalia gives you harmony and AA for free, but not depth or contrast-under-light — those you compose per scene and prove from the rendered pixels, never from the hexes (design/JUDGE.md axis 2). Design in the palette; judge in the PNG.

Traps

• The debug void. Objects on a flat grey field. Plan three layers first; emptiness is the #1 judge failure.
• Palette clash. Reaching outside the Regalia set for “one perfect blue.” Break the one-world rule and every frame muddies. Swap the whole palette or stay in it.
• Contrast from hexes. Trusting npm run palette AA under a LightLayer — multiply kills it. Judge lit scenes from the PNG; let lightingIssues gate it.
• Fill without edge. A flat accent shape on a same-family floor vanishes. Duotone split (mass + focal) + glow on anything interactive.
• Mid-tone mush. All hues at one value = no focal point. Reserve the widest value range for what matters most.
• Skipping the judge. “Passes the gates” ≠ “looks shipped.” Run npm run judge and actually look.

Composes with

• world-theme-vectors — supplies the register that picks the palette’s corner.
• world-faction-identity — each faction’s owning hue is assigned from this set; silhouette rules are briefed here.
• pattern-readability — the salience floor this brief must clear.
• pattern-juice-choreography — feedback that punctuates without smothering (JUDGE axis 4).

See also

• docs/STYLE.md — the Regalia visual house style: the palette, the duotone “draw anything in five rules” recipe.
• design/JUDGE.md — the six-axis rubric this module briefs to; the /judge loop (.claude/skills/judge/).
• docs/CONVENTIONS.md “Default palette is Regalia” — the palette, the duotone rule, DOM chrome, and the npm run palette AA gate.
• docs/API.md — REGALIA, REGALIA_DAY, REGALIA_NIGHT, withAlpha, mix, LightLayer, PointLight.