Art book

The Art Book

How every pixel is made.

Every pixel in Væ Victis is one of 32 colours, and every one of them has a known source: a recipe in code, or a 3D figure rendered and quantised by code. This is the tour, with pictures made only by that pipeline. There is no photograph, no painting and no generated image in it.

The making of the game

1. The palette

The palette is fixed in src/core.js (PAL_LIST): 32 entries in nine families, a game of blacks, stone, bone, blood, rust, verdigris and one cold blue, with a single violet kept for spells. A picture is a grid of numbers 1 to 32 (0 is clear). The screen is 320 by 240 and nothing in the game draws a colour that is not on this list; the debug overlay counts what reaches the screen.

2. Characters: a 3D model, eight directions, thirty-two colours

A figure starts as a rigged 3D model: the hero and the people are Clint Bellanger's Flare models (CC-BY 3.0), the props are KayKit packs (CC0). They are composed on one rig, recoloured and costumed at render time (tools/render/jobs-*.mjs: the Tower's soldiers, the gutter's watch, the orphanage's sisters, the Wheel's circus).

tools/render/render.mjs poses the model bone by bone (tools/render/hero-moves.mjs), lights it, renders it from 8 directions at 56 pixels in a headless browser, and quantises every pixel to the 32-colour palette by material. The output is src/sprites-<name>.js: one string of palette indices per frame. The sheet below is that data drawn back out, nothing else.

3. Paintings: a recipe, a field, a dither

A picture that is not a figure (a texture, a portrait, a still, a stained-glass window, the world map) is a RECIPE: a short script in tools/art/paint/ that sets a pixel field (a material, a ramp of palette keys and a value per pixel) with seeded noise, signed-distance shapes and a Bayer dither, then resolves it to palette indices. tools/art/paint.mjs runs it inside the game and writes the pictures as run-length strings.

A recipe is deterministic: run it twice and you get the same picture. That is the provenance. No generated image is a source, a reference or an input of any kind (v83, 2026-10-05).

4. The dither, close up

Zoom into any picture and the dither shows: the game never blends two colours, it places them in a Bayer pattern, so a ramp of four steps reads as a smooth shade at the game's size and as a lattice here.

5. A recipe, line by line

This is the recipe of the haven's floor, the first texture above (tools/art/paint/tex-haven.js). A material, a value and a seed per pixel, nothing else: no image is read.

    const F = T.cobbles(96, 96, { n: 3, m: 3, seed: 81, joint: 1, lo: .32, hi: .78, dome: .3, jit: .75 });
    F.each((x, y, p) => { // the blood: dried black-red in the joints, rust spreading out from them in a ragged tide-line
      const c = pvor(x + .5, y + .5, 96, 96, 3, 3, 81, .75), n = pfbm(x, y, 96, 96, 6, 83, 4);
      const reach = c.edge - n * 10;
      const pool = pfbm(x, y, 96, 96, 3, 84, 4);
      if (p.m === 'void') return { m: pool > .5 ? 'gore' : 'void', v: .25 + n * .15 };
      if (pool > .54 && reach < 4) return { m: 'gore', v: .2 + n * .25 };
      if (pool > .46 && reach < 8) return { m: 'rust', v: clamp(p.v * .6, 0, 1) };
      return null; });
    const r = K.rng('bfcrack');
    for (let i = 0; i < 5; i++) { let x = r() * 96, y = r() * 96, a = r() * K.TAU; for (let k = 0; k < 18 + r() * 14; k++) { x += Math.cos(a); y += Math.sin(a); a += (r() - .5) * .8; F.set(wrap(x | 0, 96), wrap(y | 0, 96), 'gore', .12); } }
    return F.toPix();
  } };
  // the aisles' wet stone: dark irregular stones, black water standing between them, green slime and a glint where it pools

6. Where the pieces come from

Full credits: CREDITS.md in the repository, and the game's credits screen.

The making of the game

Where the game came from, what was decided on the way, and the rule that turned out to matter most.

Every picture on this page is a live frame of the game, the game's own carved title, or a figure drawn by the game's own pipeline. No painted or generated art.