Driftlands — Art Bible

Created: 2026-08-25 Status: Approved Foundation: Visual Identity Anchor "Tideline" (design/gdd/game-concept.md)

Art Director Sign-Off (AD-ART-BIBLE): APPROVED 2026-08-25 — full fidelity to the Tideline anchor, internally consistent, production-ready, scope-honest. Asset production may proceed against this document.

1. Visual Identity Statement

One-line visual rule: If it doesn't read at a glance while the world is moving, it doesn't belong.

Supporting Visual Principles

1. Silhouette-First Construction Every character, structure, resource node, and enemy must be identifiable from outline alone, at gameplay zoom, in motion — before color or interior detail register. Detail lives in shape, not surface: a Don't Starve-style ink-outline pass separates every object from its background regardless of what's behind it, and interior rendering stays flat and low-noise so the silhouette carries the read. Design test: When a new asset's readability is ambiguous, strip it to a black shape at gameplay zoom — if it doesn't identify instantly, redesign the shape before touching color. Serves: Pillar 4 (Scrappy Hands, Serious World) — combat legibility during fast, joyful action is non-negotiable.

2. Home/Drift Shape Grammar Home geometry uses soft, rounded, orthogonal-friendly shapes (weathered, familiar, built-by-hand); drifting lands use jagged, irregular, angular coastlines and silhouettes that visibly refuse to fit the home shore. The grammar itself — not a label or minimap color — tells the player "this belongs" versus "this is passing through," the way Hyper Light Drifter uses palette-per-zone to say "you are here, not there." Design test: When uncertain whether a new landmass or structure reads as home or drift, check shape vocabulary first — if it could be mistaken for the other, it's wrong regardless of correct palette. Serves: Pillar 2 (Home Is the Fixed Point) — the eye must resolve "fixed" versus "transient" before any UI does.

3. Color-Temperature Tide Clock A restrained, desaturated 2-3 hue "home" palette holds steady so that temperature shift reads as signal: docked lands warm toward amber-gold approaching arrival and cool toward blue-violet approaching departure, following Hyper Light Drifter's discipline of a tightly limited palette per state so any deviation is instantly meaningful. Threat lands are the one deliberate rule-break — a hard saturated crimson/acid spike against the restrained field, functioning exactly like HLD's danger-color accents against its muted zone palettes. Design test: If a tide-state or threat needs a HUD element to read, first ask whether the world's palette can say it instead — only add UI once that's exhausted. Serves: Pillar 1 (The Tide Waits for No One) — the schedule must be legible from the world itself, with zero pause for the player to check a timer.

What This Means in Practice

Adopt Don't Starve's ink-outline-plus-flat-fill technique as the base rendering method for every asset class — a consistent stroke weight and flat interior shading keeps the pipeline sublinear in content count, since new biomes reuse the same outline/fill rig with only palette and silhouette swapped. Borrow Hyper Light Drifter's per-zone limited palette discipline directly: define one strict "home" palette and one strict palette-shift curve per tide state (approaching/docked/departing/threat), rather than painting bespoke lighting per land. Reserve full saturation exclusively for threat-state accents and critical interactables (never decoration) so the eye is trained to treat saturation spikes as "pay attention," mirroring HLD's use of color as functional navigation rather than mood-only decoration.

2. Mood & Atmosphere

Six states — Absence/Return kept distinct from Home, since it needs its own emotional register (anticipation/uncertainty, not routine safety) before settling back into ordinary Home mood.

Production discipline: every mood above is achieved through (a) the existing home/threat/tide palette curves from Section 1, (b) a single global contrast/exposure parameter per state, and (c) at most one atmospheric overlay (mist, dust, light particles) — never bespoke per-land lighting rigs. States 4a/4b reuse one lerp system in opposite directions; state 5 reuses state 1's palette at reduced intensity; state 6 is a static composite of assets already defined. No new rendering technique is introduced beyond Section 1's outline/fill/palette-swap pipeline.

3. Shape Language

1. Character Silhouette Philosophy Player characters share one base silhouette proportion (readable as a unified "us" at thumbnail size — Section 1's silhouette-first principle) and differentiate only through gear-tier silhouette and a single accent-shape choice (hat/hair/cape variant), never through body-shape divergence. This keeps the party tellable apart in the middle of combat without breaking the pack-read that says "these five belong together." Enemies telegraph threat-tier through silhouette mass and edge character alone: low-tier threats are small, rounded, soft-edged; high-tier threats are large, angular, spiked — so a player parses danger before parsing detail, serving Pillar 4 (fast, joyful combat needs zero-latency threat reads). Tier 2 NPCs/fauna will inherit the same rounded-vs-jagged vocabulary as home/drift geometry (domesticated fauna reads home-soft, wild/tide-borne fauna reads drift-jagged).

2. Environment Geometry Home geometry uses rounded corners, low-pitch or curved rooflines, and irregular-but-settled hand-built asymmetry (slightly uneven timber, patched walls) — irregularity that reads as lovingly imperfect, not threatening, directly serving Pillar 2 and Pillar 3 (Made by Our Hands: the wobble is the signature of a hand, not decay). Drift geometry uses hard angular fractures, discontinuous coastlines, and shapes that visibly refuse to tile against home's grid — irregularity that reads as alien and temporary, serving Pillar 1's shape-mismatch test.

Material tiers — restrained shape-hardening (decided 2026-08-25): shape-hardening-by-tier is adopted as a secondary read behind palette. Cloth/leather gear stays soft-edged and rounded, matching home's vocabulary (early gear = homemade, safe). Bronze introduces faceted, geometric accents at silhouette edges (pauldrons, blade tips). Iron completes the hardening with angular, faceted mass across the whole silhouette. Crafted progression feels earned in shape, not just color — silhouette communicating mastery, exactly what Principle 1 asks every asset to do. Guardrail: home-adjacent structures never harden regardless of the base's material tier — structures stay in home's rounded vocabulary permanently, so Pillar 2's fixed-point read never erodes as the base advances.

3. UI Shape Grammar UI is a distinct neutral HUD language — rectilinear, minimal-radius panels — not an echo of home's roundness. Rule: rounded shapes are reserved for the diegetic world (home = safety); UI stays geometrically neutral so it never competes with, or gets mistaken for, in-world silhouette meaning. This protects Principle 1's silhouette-reading contract — a rounded UI element could get misread as "home."

4. Hero Shapes vs Supporting Shapes Hero-weight (draws the eye): players, enemies, interactables, the docked-land coastline edge — all rendered with full outline contrast and, where earned, the saturation-spike discipline from Section 2. Supporting-weight (recedes): terrain fill, ambient decoration, background foliage — flat, lower-contrast, desaturated, no independent silhouette complexity. This hierarchy is the shape-level enforcement of "if it doesn't read at a glance, it doesn't belong": anything not on the hero list is deliberately shape-quiet.

4. Color System

4.1 Primary Palette

Home's three hues are deliberately closer in value/saturation than in hue — Driftwood Grey (neutral), Weathered Ochre (warm), Moss Umber (cool) form a tight, low-chroma triad so the palette feels like one material family (weathered wood, worked ochre, damp moss), inheriting Wet Ochre's earthiness without its painterly render cost — everything here is flat-fillable.

Threat spike: Ember Crimson over acid-green (locked 2026-08-25). Crimson reads as blood/violence/danger cross-culturally with near-zero learning curve; acid-green risks reading as "toxic/pickup/loot" — a game-UI convention this project must avoid (Pillar 3 bans loot-drop framing).

4.2 Semantic Vocabulary

• Crimson = active danger, always diegetic (enemy telegraphs, hit states) — never decorative.
• Amber/gold = arriving, opportunity, warming — always tied to tide state, never used elsewhere.
• Blue-violet = departing, closing window, cooling — reserved exclusively for tide state.
• Off-white (Stagger White) = impact/interruption feedback only (hit-flash, stagger) — a UI-agnostic "something just happened" signal.
• Green (Moss Umber) = home-adjacent nature, calm, background — deliberately desaturated so it never competes with crimson's threat read.

4.3 Tide-State Palette Curves (shader contract)

• Property shifting: a single temperature-tint overlay (multiply/overlay blend, one float t 0→1) applied per-sprite to the docked land's tile and object layer only — home layer and UI are never tinted.
• Curve: t=0 at dock-window open → lerp toward Tide Amber tint over the first 60% of the arrival window; hold near-peak through docking; on departure trigger, lerp from current tint toward Tide Violet over the final 40% of the drift-out window.
• Implementation: one shader global _TideTint (color) + _TideAmount (float), sampled by all sprites tagged DriftLayer; home/UI shaders ignore it entirely — this is the "no bespoke lighting rig" guarantee. Both properties must be declared at Global scope on the Shader Graph blackboard (ADR-0013 §1 — a Per Material property, including a merely hidden one, silently shadows the global and the tint never appears).
• ⚠️ "per land instance" holds only at N = 1 (MVP). A frame-global pair cannot represent two sockets at once, and tide Rule 4 makes socket phases a permutation of C/N slots — so no two docked lands are ever in phase. At N > 1 (Tier 1, 3–4) this wording becomes false and the approach needs the per-sprite route in ADR-0013 §4, which must be designed before N > 1 ships. Added 2026-09-01 by ADR-0013.

4.4 Material Tier Colors

Cloth = Driftwood Grey family (undyed, soft). Leather = Weathered Ochre-shifted warm brown (tanned). Bronze = a new mid-saturation warm metal (#A66A3D → highlight #D9A24B) distinct from Weathered Ochre by saturation, not hue, so it reads as "worked metal" against "worked wood." Iron = cool desaturated steel-grey (#8A8F94) with Stagger-White specular highlights — deliberately the coolest gear tier, contrasting warm bronze, so tier is readable by hue-temperature shift alone on a moving silhouette at gameplay zoom (pairs with Section 3's shape-hardening for a double-coded read).

4.5 UI Palette

UI uses its own neutral cool slate (#3A3D42 panels, #E8E6DE text) deliberately outside the world palette family — this divergence is intentional per Section 3's UI-neutrality rule, preventing any UI chrome from being mistaken for tide-state or threat signal. UI accents borrow Ember Crimson only for critical alerts (low health), never decoratively. (Amended 2026-08-31 by design/ux/hud.md: the HUD ships no low-health alert of any kind — no crimson accent, pulse, heartbeat or vignette; the empty pip is the state. Crimson stays diegetic-danger-only, matching §7.1's carry-meter rule. AD confirmed 2026-09-02 at the Pre-Production phase gate (CD-PHASE-GATE ruling): the HUD wins — no low-HP alarm ships. A low-health vignette would be exactly the punitive-urgency framing the project tone rule bans, and crimson's danger-exclusivity is a §4.2 semantic rule. Closed.)

4.6 Colorblind Safety

• Amber vs Violet (tide clock): safe for protanopia/deuteranopia (differ in blue-yellow, not red-green); tritanopia risk — both can desaturate toward grey-neutral. Backup: temperature curve also drives a shape cue — mist density increases on departure (Section 2's overlay), independent of hue.
• Crimson threat spike on desaturated field: protanopia/deuteranopia risk — crimson can read as muddy brown/olive, blending toward Moss Umber. Backup: silhouette-first enemy design (Section 3) plus the Stagger White hit-flash already carry threat state through shape and luminance, not hue alone — crimson is reinforcement, never the sole signal.
• General rule: every hue-coded state already has a non-hue backup (shape, motion, or luminance flash) per the prototype's proven white stagger flash — color is always the second channel, never the only one.

5. Character Design Direction

5.1 Player Character Archetype

Proportion: 1:2.5 head-to-body ratio (slightly large head relative to a realistic 1:4) — reads clearly at gameplay zoom and carries expressiveness without needing facial detail, per Section 3's silhouette-first mandate. All five friends share this exact proportion; no body-shape divergence.

Accent-shape differentiation: 5 hat/hair silhouette variants (one per friend slot) rotate on a single shared base body — this is the entire "who is who" system. Each variant must pass the Section 3 silhouette test alone (identifiable in solid black at gameplay zoom). No cape slot at MVP (adds render/physics cost for a fifth read-channel the hat slot already covers) — revisit only if 5 hats prove insufficient in playtest.

Gear-tier layering: gear renders as a silhouette overlay on the shared base, following Section 3's hardening rule (cloth/leather soft-edged, bronze faceted accents, iron fully faceted) and Section 4's tier colors (cool grey-steel iron vs warm bronze). Tier reads through shape + hue simultaneously — the double-coded contract already locked.

5.2 Recognition Contract

• Us (players): shared 1:2.5 proportion + home-palette-family gear tones + hat-slot variant. Always outlined in the standard ink-outline weight.
• Hostile (enemies): distinct proportion family per threat tier (Section 3: small/rounded = low threat, large/angular = high threat) — never share player proportion, so silhouette alone prevents mistaking friend for foe mid-combat. Ember Crimson reserved for active telegraphs/hit-states only, not base enemy color.
• Neutral (Tier 2 fauna/NPCs): inherits home/drift shape grammar (domesticated = rounded, wild = jagged) per Section 3; flat, non-outlined-in-crimson, no telegraph state — visually inert until it isn't.

5.3 Expression, Pose, Animation Budget

Top-down silhouette characters carry personality through key-pose exaggeration, not facial animation: snappy, anticipation-heavy windups (serving the netcode-proven "swing duration masks latency" learning) and a settled idle bob for home-state calm. Solo-dev budget: 4-6 frames per core action (idle: 4-frame breathing loop; move: 6-frame walk cycle; dash: 2-pose stretch-blur; strike: 3-pose windup/active/recovery — matching the prototype's confirmed windup/active/recovery structure). Squash-and-stretch reserved for impact moments only (landing, hit-taken, harvest-burst) — budget-limited exaggeration, not full animation-principle coverage everywhere.

5.4 LOD Philosophy

Single fixed detail budget, no multi-LOD needed (fixed top-down camera, no zoom variance): max 64-96px sprite height, 2px outline weight, ≤3 interior detail shapes per character (e.g., gear silhouette break, hat shape, one accent line). Anything beyond this ceiling gets cut, not scaled — the budget IS the style enforcement mechanism.

6. Environment Design Language

6.1 Architecture and Growth Stages

Home architecture is Bronze/Iron-Age coastal vernacular — timber-and-thatch camp evolving into hewn-timber-and-stone keep — but per Section 3's guardrail, structures never adopt the faceted shape-hardening applied to gear. Growth reads through scale, footprint, and material palette, not silhouette hardening: Camp stage uses small, single-room, thatch-roofed structures in Driftwood Grey/undyed cloth tones (matching cloth-tier gear palette); Keep stage uses larger, multi-room, timber-framed structures with stone footings, introducing Weathered Ochre accents and eventually bronze/iron fixtures (hinges, tool-racks) as small non-structural detail props only. The roofline stays curved/low-pitch at every stage — permanence is expressed as "more of the same hand-built language," never "harder-edged," preserving Pillar 2's fixed-point read across the whole base lifespan.

6.2 Texture Philosophy

Two-value hatching, nothing more. Flat fill takes the base tone; a single darker hatch pass (fixed-angle parallel lines, one weight) suggests worn wood grain, thatch texture, or stone facets — applied sparingly and only on hero-weight surfaces (Section 3). No dither, no gradient fills, no per-object bespoke texture painting — this keeps texture work as a repeatable stamp/brush operation, sublinear in asset count.

6.3 Prop Density and the Depth-Danger Gradient

Home interior/grounds: sparse, intentional, every prop hand-placed and meaningful (per Pillar 3 — nothing decorative-for-decoration's-sake). Docked land, coastal band: sparse-to-medium, mostly supporting-weight terrain fill with occasional hero-weight resource nodes. Docked land, mid-depth: density rises, more resource nodes cluster, first enemy silhouettes appear. Docked land, interior: dense, visually rich (larger flora silhouettes, rarer node types, tighter enemy clustering) — density itself is the "danger and reward increase" signal, requiring no additional UI, consistent with Section 1's "the world says it" principle.

6.4 Environmental Storytelling (4 producible details)

• Harvested-node stumps persist as depleted silhouette variants until the land departs — visible proof the tide is real (Pillar 1).
• Patched-wall variants at home — a wall sprite with a visible repair patch once damaged-and-rebuilt, accumulating as simple sprite-swap states (Pillar 3).
• Tideline wrack marks — a fixed decal band on the home shore, reused across dockings, marking "lands have stood here before" (reinforces Section 1's shape-mismatch principle with lived history).
• Worn paths — a cheap tile-darkening pass along high-traffic routes between resource nodes and home, using the same two-value hatch system from 6.2 (no new tech).

6.5 Land Template Differentiation

Each of the 6-8 templates is told apart via three cheap channels layered on the shared drift-shape grammar: (a) one signature flora/rock silhouette motif (e.g., spike-reeds vs. shelf-rock) reused across that template's props, (b) one restrained palette accent shifted within the tide-tint system (Section 4) without breaking the amber/violet contract, (c) coastline fracture pattern (jagged-vs-serrated-vs-blocky) as a silhouette-level fingerprint recognizable from the home shore at a glance.

7. UI/HUD Visual Direction

Merged art-director + ux-designer direction (all six UX alignment findings adopted, 2026-08-25).

7.1 Diegetic vs. Screen-Space

Decision rule (Section 1 applied): a state gets screen-space HUD only if it (a) is not visible from the player's own position/camera, or (b) requires precision the world's flat-fill silhouette read cannot carry. Everything else stays diegetic.

• Diegetic (world carries it): tide state (palette curve, Section 4), danger (enemy telegraphs, Section 3 silhouette + crimson accent), base status (visible structure condition, patched-wall states from Section 6), resource richness gradient (prop density, Section 6.3).
• Screen-space (explicit inclusion list — "minimal HUD" is never read literally in combat): own health, dash cooldown, equipped-tool/hotbar, party member health (2–5 friends), off-screen party status, carry capacity.
• The tide glint (off-screen resolution): no persistent tide timer and no numeric countdown, ever. But rule (a) applies when players are deep inland and cannot see the tinting coast: a compass/screen-edge temperature glint in the existing Tide Amber/Violet hues gives direction + temperature only. The world still says it — directionally.
• Carry capacity: screen-space meter in slate; near-full escalates via fill level + icon shake, never crimson — crimson's danger-exclusivity (Section 4.2) is protected.

7.2 Co-op Affordances (required, not optional)

• Edge-of-screen ally indicators using the hat-silhouette variants from Section 5.1 — "who" reads at a glance with zero new visual language.
• Shared-storage claim/take state: the storage panel shows live who-took-what feedback to prevent double-hauling confusion.
• Non-voice ping marker: world-space, placeable by any player; warm signal-orange (crimson-adjacent but distinct — never Ember Crimson, to avoid false danger reads).

7.3 Typography

A humanist slab-sans (grounded, slightly warm strokes; never default UI stacks) — hand-built-world personality, legible at hotbar size. 3 sizes max: Large (headers/critical alerts, 24px+), Medium (labels/hotbar counts, 16–18px), Small (secondary/tooltips, 13–14px — the 1080p floor; nothing smaller ships). Weight carries hierarchy within a size. Contrast commitment: slate panel #3A3D42 vs text #E8E6DE must be verified ≥4.5:1 before the UI theme is locked in implementation (looks compliant; verify, don't assume). These commitments seed design/accessibility-requirements.md.

7.4 Iconography

Icons inherit the world's ink-outline + flat-fill language directly — same outline weight scaled down. Crafted items carry identity through tier color + tier shape-hardening exactly as gear does on a character (Sections 4–5): cloth = soft rounded silhouette in undyed tones; bronze/iron = faceted silhouettes in their locked hex families. The hotbar is the whole visual system in miniature — no separate icon language to maintain.

7.5 UI Animation & Input

Panels/menus: snappy, 100–150ms ease-out only (open/close, selection swap) — no bounce, no flourish. Never animates: anything gating an input — no menu-open delay, no confirm-hold timers, no transition that could cost a frame in combat. Pillar 4 enforced at the UI layer.

Gamepad navigability: every panel defines an explicit d-pad/stick grid-navigation order and a visible focus-state (outline highlight in slate-light — not hover-dependent). No hover-only-critical interactions, per technical preferences.

8. Asset Standards

Merged art-director + technical-artist standards. Compression conflict resolved 2026-08-25: BC7 with RGBA32 fallback — any atlas showing a visible outline artifact flips to uncompressed.

8.A Art Standards

1. File Formats and Source Discipline Working files authored in Aseprite (.aseprite) for sprites/animations — pixel-precise, native palette/indexed-color support, cheap for a solo dev, and exports cleanly to Unity's sprite pipeline. Larger composited pieces (land template coastline master sheets) may use Affinity Photo (.afphoto) if layered painting beyond pixel work is needed. Sources live in assets/art/_source/ (mirrors the exported structure, gitignored from build but versioned), exports land in assets/art/sprites/. Source resolution is authored at 2x final export size minimum to allow future resolution changes without re-authoring; export is exact final pixel size, no runtime downscale.

2. Naming Convention Following the project's [category]_[name]_[variant]_[size] pattern:

• Characters: char_playerbase_idle_01.png, char_enemy_[tier]_[type]_idle_01.png
• Props/resources: env_node_[resource]_[state]_small.png (state = full/harvested/stump)
• Structures: env_struct_[name]_[stage]_[size].png (stage = camp/keep)
• Terrain tiles: env_tile_[landtemplate]_[terraintype]_01.png
• Coastline pieces: env_coast_[landtemplate]_[edgetype]_01.png
• UI icons: ui_icon_[itemname]_[tier]_hotbar.png
• Palette/swatch files: pal_home_master.aseprite, pal_tide_curve.aseprite

3. Sprite Resolution Tiers

4. Palette Discipline as an Asset Rule All DriftLayer-tagged sprites (land templates, tide-affected props) must be authored in neutral home-palette values only — no baked amber/violet tide-state color ever ships in a source file. A shared pal_home_master.aseprite swatch file is the single source of truth for the locked hex values (Section 4.1); every sprite's palette references it directly (Aseprite palette-link, not eyedropper-copied) so a future hex change propagates. Tide tint is runtime-only (Section 4.3's _TideTint/_TideAmount shader globals) — a hard authoring rule: reject any _low/_mid/_high tide-state sprite naming at intake. Tag scope, stated explicitly (recorded 2026-08-27, Technical Setup gate — AD concern 1): DriftLayer covers land-template terrain, harvest nodes, and tide-affected props on docked lands. Combat and character sprites — players, enemies, gear, telegraph VFX — are never DriftLayer-tagged and never tide-tinted (combat GDD telegraph contract: a telegraph must read identically under amber, neutral, and violet — citation corrected 2026-09-01 by ADR-0013; this was previously mislabelled "Rule 11"); home-island structures are untagged by category (Base Building Visual/Audio Requirements). The shader's material/tag taxonomy is authored against this exemption from day one — never retrofitted.

5. Export/Import Philosophy Pixels-per-unit: 32 (matches terrain tile grid, keeps character-to-tile scale consistent). Filter mode: Point (no filter) — bilinear (used in the netcode prototype's placeholders) would soften the ink-outline edges this style depends on; crisp pixel edges are non-negotiable for Section 1's silhouette-first read. Atlas strategy: one sprite atlas per land template (packed by Addressables — the only addressable assets; supports load/unload per docking cycle); the home atlas for player/home assets is a SpriteAtlas referenced directly by the home scene (always resident, not addressable); the UI atlas stays separate and non-addressable. (Wording amended 2026-08-28 by ADR-0005 — the atlas classes are unchanged.)

8.B Engine Constraints (Technical)

1. Draw Call / Batching Budget (<100 calls) One shared home atlas (persistent, scene-referenced) + one atlas per docked land template (packed at Addressables build time, one Land_<id> group each — ADR-0005); 2–5 concurrent lands stays well under budget with URP 2D SRP batching. Batching rule (hard): _TideTint/_TideAmount must be global shader properties (Shader.SetGlobalColor/SetGlobalFloat), never per-renderer MaterialPropertyBlocks — per-renderer MPBs break SRP batching and fragment the draw budget. Any future design asking for per-land tide variance is a flagged risk (would force per-material instances).

2. Texture Memory Budget (2 GB ceiling) Max atlas size 2048×2048 (4096 only for the home atlas if packing demands). Compression: BC7 for hero/home atlases, BC3 acceptable for land atlases; BC1/DXT1 banned (block artifacts on high-contrast outlines). Fallback rule: any atlas with a visible outline artifact flips to RGBA32 uncompressed — quality wins, and even all-RGBA32 (~110 MB) is trivial against the ceiling. Estimated envelope: 25–35 MB texture VRAM compressed.

3. Tide-Tint Pipeline (Unity 6.3 URP 2D) One Shader Graph sprite shader shared by every DriftLayer sprite across all atlases — a single shader variant, no per-land forks. Tint is a global-property read in-shader — which requires the two properties to be declared at Global scope on the blackboard (ADR-0013 §1; Show In Inspector is not the control that does this, and getting it wrong fails silently) — and not a Render Graph custom pass — so 6.3's Render Graph mandate doesn't bite here. If a full-screen tide post-process is ever added, it must be Render Graph-native (AddRenderPasses) from day one. No per-tide-state baked sprite variants, ever. MVP scope (ruled 2026-08-27 at the Technical Setup gate, CD + AD): the minimal pipeline — this one shader reading the global _TideAmount for an amber/violet tint, driven by the scheduler's amberIntensity/violetIntensity floats — ships at MVP (systems index row 14), so the anchor's "the world says it, no UI timer" test can actually be run at the friend-group playtest. Atmosphere, departure mist, drift-in/out cosmetics, and the multi-stop §4.3 curves are Tier 1 "Tide-Tint Polish" (index row 15). The shader needs a Render Graph / shader ADR input in /create-architecture.

4. Animation: Flipbook, not skeletal Sprite-sheet flipbooks (not Unity 2D Animation/rigging): frames pack directly into the atlas strategy, replicate trivially over NGO (a single synced frameIndex int vs. bone transforms), and match the S5.3 budget (4–6 frames per action). Hat variants render as a second flipbook SpriteRenderer sorted above the shared base — no attachment-point rigging.

5. Import Settings Standard PPU 32 (locked, matches 8.A). Filter Point. Mipmaps off (fixed camera zoom — mips only cost memory). Compression per atlas class above.

6. Hard Limits Table

9. Reference Direction

Don't Starve (operationalized in Sections 1, 6, 8) Draw from: the ink-outline + flat-fill rendering technique and hand-drawn hatch texture rule, already locked as the base pipeline. Avoid: its gothic-whimsical linework wobble and muted-but-uniform palette across all states — Driftlands' palette must swing (tide curves, threat spike) far more than Don't Starve's does, so the line technique is shared but the color behavior diverges sharply.

Hyper Light Drifter (operationalized in Sections 1, 2, 4) Draw from: strict limited-palette-per-state discipline and color-as-navigation logic, already governing the tide-tint and threat-spike systems. Avoid: its saturated, neon-dense palette as a baseline — Driftlands stays restrained/desaturated at rest and treats full saturation as a rare event, the inverse of HLD's generally vivid world.

J.M.W. Turner's coastal/tide paintings (new — atmosphere gap) Draw from: his specific handling of light-temperature transition across a single horizon — warm golds bleeding into cool greys/violets at the water's edge, often within one restrained value range. This directly informs the quality of the amber-to-violet tide curve (Section 4.3): not a hard hue-swap but a Turner-style graduated bleed at the coastline boundary. Avoid: his atmospheric haze and painterly brushwork entirely — Driftlands stays flat-fill; take only the color-transition logic, none of the render technique.

Nuclear Throne (new — top-down co-op readability at scale/speed) Draw from: its discipline of keeping character and projectile silhouettes legible even in dense, fast on-screen chaos with multiple actors — achieved through strict silhouette simplicity and restrained on-screen VFX noise during combat. This is the concrete precedent for Driftlands' 2-5 player combat readability at gameplay zoom (Section 5's recognition contract under real multiplayer load, not just solo). Avoid: its high-saturation, high-frequency palette-flicker VFX style — Driftlands' threat/impact feedback stays limited to the locked crimson spike and off-white stagger flash, never a wider FX palette.

Viking Age/Bronze-Age reenactment photography (new — hand-built material warmth gap; material reference, not a game/film) Draw from: actual textures of hand-forged bronze fittings, hand-woven undyed wool, and hewn (not milled) timber joinery — used only as material-logic reference for what a two-value hatch pass should imply (grain direction, hammered-metal facet logic in Section 6.2/3), never traced or painted directly. Avoid: any temptation toward historical accuracy or ornamental detail density — Driftlands' material read must stay within the flat-fill/hatch budget; this reference informs what the hatch implies, not additional rendering complexity.