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. There is no photograph, no painting and no generated image in the game; since 5 October 2026 a guard script fails the build if a generated image returns. This chapter is the short tour. The long one, with every sheet and the recipe in full, is the art book: How Every Pixel Is Made.

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 from 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. This book keeps the same rule in its own stylesheet.

1. 1 k#050407
2. 2 n0#0d0b12
3. 3 d1#1a1520
4. 4 gr0#2a2630
5. 5 gr1#48434f
6. 6 gr2#77707d
7. 7 gr3#a8a0a6
8. 8 bn0#8c7d68
9. 9 bn1#c4b392
10. 10 w#eee4cc
11. 11 r0#240408
12. 12 r1#520a11
13. 13 r2#8e1318
14. 14 r3#c8231f
15. 15 r4#ff4f3a
16. 16 br0#2b1810
17. 17 br1#553221
18. 18 br2#875634
19. 19 gd#c39535
20. 20 y#f3d37a
21. 21 v0#0b1c1d
22. 22 v1#15332f
23. 23 v2#275651
24. 24 v3#468a7f
25. 25 v4#8cc6b3
26. 26 b0#0a1030
27. 27 b1#1b2d6c
28. 28 b2#3658bd
29. 29 b3#86a8ff
30. 30 sk0#6a5a63
31. 31 sk1#b9a6a6
32. 32 p1#8a4fc0

2. Figures: a 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, then 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, 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 sheets below are that data drawn back out, nothing else. The character cards in The Gallery are single frames of the same sprites.

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

A picture that is not a figure (a texture, a map, a stained-glass window) 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 picture as a run-length string.

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.

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 when you look closely.

5. A recipe, in one line

The haven’s floor begins with a single call: const F = T.cobbles(96, 96, { n: 3, m: 3, seed: 81, joint: 1, lo: .32, hi: .78, dome: .3, jit: .75 });. That sets stone cobbles on a 96 by 96 field with a seed. Everything after it (the dried blood in the joints, the rust spreading out in a ragged tide-line, the cracks) is a material, a value and a seed per pixel. No image is read. The full recipe is in the art book.

6. Where the pieces come from

Full credits are in CREDITS.md in the repository and on the game’s credits screen. What is still synthetic in the game is the voices (open-source speech models), which the project’s own inventory records as placeholders until the owner and his wife re-voice them.