A day on quality rather than new rooms. The bosses were each rendered, blown up to three times size and judged against the project's own art rules. The headline is that they shared one flaw, and it was in the lighting, not in any of the drawings.
One flaw, every boss
The shading only curved the outer fifteen pixels of a shape. That is most of a terrier and almost none of a retriever, so the big dogs came out as one flat tone with a shaded outline: a clay mannequin.
The form now bands the whole animal in hard steps, with the back lit, the flank mid and the belly dark. Two further passes stop it looking machine-made. One settles the surface so a band covers a whole flank rather than faceting at every seam. The other rubs out the one- and two-pixel specks a colour quantiser leaves behind.
Fixing the lighting exposed problems the flat shading had been hiding or compensating for:
| Boss | What changed |
|---|---|
| Barnaby | A grey mannequin, now a black dog. His mass is tipped one step darker so he reads black while his lit back still separates him from the shop's night. The share of him that vanishes into that night fell from 18% to 13.7%. |
| Snookums | His black saddle had been painted bottom-heavy to make up for flat lighting. With real form his back climbed onto the pale end of the ramp and became a grey horse blanket, the failure his own code comments warn about. The top two steps were brought down. |
| Pip | The wiry coat was per-pixel random noise plus a checkerboard, both banned by the art rules. The wiry edge is now tufts grown from each shape's own outline, so they are the same hairs in every frame and travel with him. Removing the checker failed the lighting gate, correctly: it had been the only cool pixel on him, so the room's light is back as a proper band down his shaded faces. |
One boss was left alone on purpose. Bruiser's lighting already bands properly, and the only dithering left is confined to the seams where two stamped parts meet. The sheets were rebuilt to prove nothing moved.
A gate that measured the wrong thing
Duchess was the worst of them: a pale cream blob whose legs merged into the body. Her own quality gate passed her, because it measures variety and the eye reads structure. Every lock of her coat was banded identically wherever it hung, so light and dark were interleaved all over her.
She now has whole-animal form. Each lock steps by where it hangs from, so the near side reads bright and the far side reads away. Two wrong turns are written into the code. Biasing by height drew a straight waterline across her and all four legs. The first correct version closed the grooves over her toes, which her gate caught.
Molly and Simon get bodies
Molly and Simon had been Mittens' exact silhouette with other colours on it. The ask was different builds, with every one of Mittens' movements kept.
A build is a small set of edits to the shared drawings, plus a small set of edits to where they are stamped, applied once before a sheet is made. All the animation, timing and frame count come along, and nothing is re-animated. Molly is the narrower cat, with a slimmer, shorter barrel and a finer head. Simon is heavier through the chest with a broader head. Both are grey tabbies, marked by the project's own coat model.
What actually reads at this size was measured. The barrel is mostly hidden behind the legs and head: taking four rows and three columns out of it changed 5% of the silhouette, and the three cats still looked like one cat. The head is what carries a build, at 19 pixels across for Molly, 21 for Mittens and 23 for Simon.
This is not finished. Only the walking and running sheet exists for them so far, and the game still recolours Mittens rather than loading their sheets, so nothing in the game uses it yet.