# Shattered Worlds - Visual Direction **Visual North Star.** Current as of 2026-06-04. Mundane reality rendered in ink and ash, broken open by a door of impossible color. The art's one job: make intrusion read as wrong the instant it appears. ## Identity The figure on the concept sheet is The Walker: he travels between realities, and where he appears, catastrophe follows. He is weak. He opens the Door - and the Door is the only way through. The look hangs on a single contrast: **reality is mundane, intrusion is impossible**, and the picture must sell both at once. The governing rule, lifted straight from the direction sheet: *apocalypse is localized.* Chaos has a radius. A giant raptor tears through a Monday-morning skyline while, a block away, life continues. That radius - the bleed from grey normalcy into saturated catastrophe - is the visual signature of the whole game. - Mundane world - The Walker arrives - The Door opens - Intrusion bleeds out - You choose ## The Canon Two locked assets. Everything new must look like it belongs beside these. ![Card back: distressed black card with gold occult geometry and a glowing violet doorway](../assets/cardback.webp) **Card back - production canon.** Distressed black stock, gold occult cartography (astrolabe rings, cardinal glyphs), a single violet doorway burning at center. Sets the card-back standard for every shard. ![The Walker concept sheet: character study, reality variants, the door, and a reality-to-intrusion palette ramp](../assets/art-style.webp) **Direction sheet - The Walker.** Character turnarounds, the Door studies, three reality variants (big-box store, Monday-morning raptor, rush-hour volcano), and the reality-to-intrusion palette ramp. The mood, line, and color logic all derive from here. ## What The Look Always Is Tests an asset can pass or fail, not vibes. ### Look 1: Ink-and-ash linework, not clean vector Heavy crosshatch, grain, and distress carry the base layer. Surfaces look **printed and weathered**, like a graphic novel left out in the rain. Flat, crisp, modern-flat-design rendering is off-brand. ### Look 2: Reality is desaturated; intrusion is the only true color The mundane base sits in grey-greens and slate. Saturated color is a **scarce resource spent only on intrusion** - the Door, the catastrophe, the bleed. If everything is colorful, nothing reads as wrong. ### Look 3: Apocalypse is localized - show the radius Catastrophe always has an edge. Compose so the **boundary between normal and broken is visible in frame**: shoppers beside the glow, traffic beneath the volcano. The contrast is the point; a fully-consumed frame loses it. ### Look 4: Occult cartography is the system's hand Gold geometric line-work - rings, glyphs, sightlines - marks anything structural: card backs, frames, UI chrome. It's the game's diegetic skeleton, the **language of the Door and the Destiny**, distinct from the painted scene inside. ## The Reality-To-Intrusion Ramp The single load-bearing element. Treat this ramp as the **master gradient every reality maps onto** - the shared color logic that makes distinct worlds feel like one game. Reality is mundane, desaturated slate. Intrusion is impossible color, moving from magenta to ember. It is **flavor, never game logic** - it never feeds back into rules or the deck. But it is not static: the renderer maps the core's pure `intensity` read-model onto this ramp, sliding the screen from mundane to intrusion as the run escalates. A dial the renderer turns from the game's state, never one the rules read back. ## Per-Reality Palettes Each world keeps the grey base but claims its own intrusion hue, so realities stay distinct while sharing one logic. #### Big-Box Store Fluorescent dread. Toxic green intrusion glowing down retail aisles. #### Monday Morning Daylight blue normalcy ripped by a raptor; warm ember of falling debris. #### Rush Hour Dusk gridlock under a volcano. Magenta sky bleeding into lava orange. #### The Door (constant) Violet, everywhere. The Door carries the same hue across all realities - it is not of any world. ## What The Look Must Never Become ### Saturated everywhere If the whole frame is vivid, intrusion stops reading as impossible. Color is rationed on purpose; spend it and the core contrast dies. ### Generic dark-fantasy Skulls, runes-for-their-own-sake, grimdark-by-default. The horror here is the *mundane* broken, not a fantasy world that was always spooky. ### Clean flat-design UI Crisp vector chrome fights the ink-and-ash world. UI is occult cartography on weathered stock, not a productivity app. ### Total-apocalypse splash Frames consumed edge-to-edge by catastrophe. Without the radius - the surviving normal beside the chaos - the signature contrast is gone. ### AI-mush rendering Smeared, detail-less, "no clear focal point" texture. Linework must be deliberate; the eye must land on the Door. ## Settled Direction The three questions the look raised, now decided. These become the visual spec's opening agenda. ### Decided: Reality-to-intrusion is flavor, never game logic Intrusion **never feeds back into rules or the deck** - it cannot change what is true in the game. But it tracks the run: the renderer drives backdrop intrusion from the core's pure `intensity` read-model, so the screen slides toward catastrophe as the game escalates. Flavor that follows the state, not a value the state reads back. ### Decided: Card fronts vary by reality-shard The back is constant canon; **fronts are shard-themed**, each carrying its world's palette and intrusion hue. This is the visual half of *"worlds are identity, not wallpaper"* - the deck in your hand looks like the world you're standing in. ### Decided: The Walker is always present - distant until drawn He's a **persistent figure in the background**, a person in the distance who drifts from scene to scene through the run. He is also in the deck: **the moment you draw him, the distance collapses** and he's right in front of you. Ambient dread made literal, and a card - which makes "the Walker" a deck mechanic the spec must define, not just art. Captured 2026-06-04 from one production asset ([cardback](../assets/cardback.webp)) and one direction sheet ([The Walker](../assets/art-style.webp)), promoted out of `work/notes` into reference. Companion to [the project vision](vision.md): vision defines what the game *is*, this defines what it *looks like*. Status **current** - open when a visual decision feels wrong. It defines look, not requirements; the settled decisions above seed the visual spec - including the Walker, now a deck mechanic and not only a figure.