Scenes drawn in code tend to look like painted backdrops with things sliding across them. The idea here is that someone should be able to stay for an hour. So before anything gets painted, the place gets walked:
- Where's the light, how high is it, and what colour?
- What's the family of colours, and what's the one accent?
- What's far, middle, near and very near?
- What moves, and what moves it?
- What lives here, and what turns up once in a while?
- What would someone do here?
- What's the moment you'd want to catch on screen?
Then the frame gets blocked in with big flat shapes to check where the eye goes. Each element is painted on its own and looked at three ways: up close, in the frame, and at the size it'll be on a phone.
Light is what makes a scene hold together, and people notice when it's wrong even if they can't say why. So each place writes down where its sun, moon, fires and lamps are, and everything reads from that. Nothing can disagree.
A moving thing takes the light where it is. The fox is dark at the edge of the clearing, warms as it reaches the fire, and goes dark again as it leaves. Nobody animated that.
Shadows are cast from each thing's real shape. They fan out from the point under the sun, so they swing round as you walk past, and a walker's legs scissor in theirs.
The guide covers the rest: what reflects, what lets light through, what the air does to it, and how to check a scene one thing at a time.
Anything that changes over time has to be built so that it really can. A beautifully painted cloud that can't change is still wrong.
A person feels alive through small human moments. They wink at you, yawn, sneeze, and push a hand through their hair. Nobody bobs to the beat, and a foot on the ground never slides.
And each place gives them something to do.
The style is written down, so nobody has to guess at it. The style guide says what it is and isn't, with the real numbers from all eight worlds. The rule book has 45 rules. A Law can't be broken. A Custom can, if you say which one and why.
Then a referee checks the work. scripts/validate.mjs runs the scene in a muted browser, on a clock it steps by hand, and measures whatever can be measured: whether anything's blurred, whether the colours shift along their ramps, whether the person bounces to the beat, whether something appears out of nowhere, whether every rare sight ends by itself, and whether a cache grows until the page goes blank. That's 28 of the rules. The other 17 take judgement, like whether every bright side faces the moon, so it hands those back as a list to walk, with a sheet of what to look at. Rank S takes both.
The forest on the day it got a scene of its own, and the forest now:
The limits come from our own history. Every old version of Lofi Studio still runs, so the referee was pointed at each one. What people complained about mostly fails, and what's there now passes.
| What people said | What the referee finds in that version |
|---|
| "i was hoping for this style vs our traditional pixels" | 41 to 87 colours in a frame, and flat patches over as much as 93% of it |
| "the character bounces a lot in every scene" | A beat moves up to 418 pixels around them, in most of the worlds |
| "i was hoping for subtle motion and feeling of being alive" | Nobody's on a life clock, in any world |
| "the lights turning off and on in the castle seem too fast" | A beat changes 3.5% of the castle |
| "I'm big on the lighting too" | The light isn't written down anywhere |
| "Everything is ugly squares", of the coffee shop | 10.3% of the frame was plain boxes, and 2.2% once it was repainted. That check exists because of that sentence |
| "the rain in the office is appearing inside and in front of the TV" | Nothing. It takes someone looking, and that's what the Eye rules are for |
| "the trees just look like balls" | Nothing, for the same reason |
The whole table is in the guide.
It found bugs that had shipped, too. A fishing rod at fractions of a pixel. Lamps in the coffee shop pulsing with the beat. Someone who kept walking for people who'd asked for less motion. A black cat that could stay on the castle wall for minutes. And when it caught clouds appearing from nothing, on an old version, it saved the frame before and the frame after:
It can't tell you a scene is beautiful. A rank is a floor, not a compliment. All eight worlds had Rank A on the day someone looked at two of them and saw rain falling through a TV, a bus driving through a booth, and "everything is ugly squares". The repaint you can see above came from that sentence, and the rule that would have caught the rain was sitting there unticked, waiting for someone to look. What it can't see is written down too, and every check has a page made to break it, so that the referee gets checked as well.
And it talks like a party member. While Claude's using this skill, it sounds like a small, cheerful companion at a 16-bit inn. It's seasoning: numbers, commands and anything you have to decide stay in plain words, it reports just as honestly, and it drops the voice if something's really wrong or you ask it to.
▶ Quest complete: your rooftop garden is finished. Rank S: 27 of 27 machine checks clear, and I walked all 17 Eye rules with a note on each. Rank is a floor, not a compliment: it means nothing was found and somebody looked, not that it's beautiful.
Still in the fog: how the motion feels (I judged it from strips, so the cat's and plane's pace, the window on/off rate and the string's sway are the likeliest to need tuning); real phones and Safari (Chrome emulation only).
That's a real report, from the test below.
In Claude Code, add it as a plugin, then start a new session:
以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗
