The checkerboard is out. The shared art generators used ordered dithering to fake in-between shades. They now use interpolated colour ramps and smooth opacity, and the studio's art direction records that shading must not use dithering.
Pixel edges and point sampling are unchanged, so everything stays crisp. Wood grain and other material detail are preserved. The change went into the generators themselves rather than into the output, covering backgrounds, the title, props, warp boxes, water and UI, plus runtime edge glows and generated lighting masks. Sprite and fullscreen shader generation now keeps intermediate shades instead of forcing them back onto the 70-colour palette. Future rebuilds keep all of it.
Checked against the old output:
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Production images changed | 188 |
| Sprites resized | 0 |
| Animation slices or import settings changed | 0 |
| Props rebuilt | All 138 |
A gameplay capture was inspected by eye: smoother wall shading and lighting, with the HUD and the world pixels still crisp.
This was a shading change, not a redesign of characters or gameplay. Scene-transition dithering was left as a separate job, and this was not a full playthrough of every stage.