The villagers had been redrawn with selective outlines, heavier on the bottom and shadow edges and softer on the lit ones. Four versions of the same two characters were put on grass side by side: the original pack art, ours, no black on the outer edge, and no black at all.
No black at all won. With one exception: the eyes keep their black on every character. Everything below follows from that.
The villager rule
A pixel that is near-black takes a dark tone of its own material.
- On the silhouette's edge, that is the material the edge wraps.
- Inside the figure, it is the darkest colour sitting beside it.
The second rule exists because of a failure. The first version made one villager's moustache, which is a black line, turn into skin. Inside the figure a dark line is sometimes a feature, so it takes a neighbour's dark tone and stays dark.
A pupil is defined by shape: a black spot of 4 art pixels or fewer, fully inside the figure, in the top 40% of its height. Those are left alone.
All 22 characters were re-exported, 16 townsfolk and 6 protesters, every page including the fighting pages, at the same size, pivot and frames. The art test that checks every move, facing and on-screen size still holds. The earlier selective-outline cast is kept under a version tag and can be checked out whole.
Enemies are harder
The enemies were baked with near-black outlines (#070303 and similar), and their darkest shading is real near-black material, not just outline. So the villager rule would eat their shadows.
The enemy version only removes thin lines, one or two pixels wide, from inside the figure, and leaves dark areas. Edges take the darkest tone of their material, but never one that reads as black.
The bear showed why that last clause is needed. Its darkest fur is nearly black, and with the floor set at the villagers' value, a third of its outline stayed black. The floor is stricter for enemies.
Small black spots stay: they are the eyes. Ten enemies went through it, all the ones placed in the world plus three more. The hero, the bosses and the two companions keep their current edges for now.
The finish runs automatically on every sheet as the baker writes it, so a rebake cannot bring the black back.
Written down everywhere
The standard went into every document an artist or a tool reads: the character guide, the beast pipeline's rules, the villager and enemy briefs, the eye guide and the assets bible. In the review checklist it is a hard limit. A black line anywhere but a pupil caps a character's score at 7.
Checks
The project type-checks clean at 400 sources and EditMode passes 649 of 649. One test, the screen rule check, did not know about the debug menu's two area jumps. They are editor-only, and are now on the check's list with the reason written beside them.