Reaching a game was Singleplayer → pick a level. Reaching a multiplayer game
was Multiplayer → Host Game → wait → pick a level → wait, and the gamemode
dropdown had exactly one entry which set a string nothing read.
PLAY now starts the last map and mode played, and says which — "Akiba Crossing
• Deathmatch" under the button, so pressing it is a promise rather than a leap.
Everything else on the home screen is a detour from that, which is the right
shape for a menu: the common case is a button, not a path. Hosting is one press
and lands in the lobby already hosting; the lobby puts map, mode, players and
start on ONE screen; Enter connects, so typing an address does not then require
reaching for the mouse.
This is the lesson HoYoverse published about Zenless Zone Zero's first months
more loudly than anything else they have written. Their postmortem on the TV
mode names three complaints — it took too long, it sat between the player and
the combat, and there was too much of it early — and 1.2 removed it from the
story entirely rather than shortening it. Time spent BEFORE the thing the
player came for is not neutral, it is a cost.
The cards were a two-stop gradient generated from two colours in a meta file,
whose hover state was `use_hdr = true` — not a visible change on any of them.
They are photographs now, shot by debug/map_preview_capture.gd, which took
three attempts to get right and each attempt is a comment in the file:
- framing each map from OUTSIDE by merging every VisualInstance3D's AABB
produced five tiny dioramas floating on a table, and one solid black
rectangle. That is a minimap, and a minimap is not a photograph.
- standing at a spawn point fixed three maps and left two black: fps_blockout
is genuinely dark and most of its spawns face an unlit wall, and
procedural_arena builds its geometry at runtime so no fixed offset is
reliably inside it.
- so the tool now RENDERS several vantages and scores each result — mean
luminance times its standard deviation, because brightness alone picks the
empty sky and variance alone picks a high-contrast corner of a dark room.
Their product picks a photograph. A black rectangle passes any check that
only asks whether the camera ended up somewhere sensible.
Also fixed, and caught by looking at the screenshot: the selected mode chip was
unreadable. Its glyph is ink on volt, and the theme gave every button a 5 px INK
outline — an ink glyph inside an ink outline is not outlined, it is five pixels
fatter, and on a small chip that is a solid blob. Button labels now carry no
outline at all, which is the same reasoning debug/ui_contrast_check.gd already
encodes: an outline separates a glyph from a backdrop it cannot beat alone, and
a label on a solid chip does not have that problem. The chips keep their heavy
ink border, so nothing about the drawn look changes.
`current_gamemode` is normalised on the way in, because it used to hold a
display string and six callers still pass one. An unrecognised id compares
unequal to GameMode.GUN_GAME and would silently disable that mode's weapon
issuing — half a mode is worse than none.
The menu's background character is the player's OWN skin holding their weapon,
rather than the box-and-capsule mannequin that stood there before.
spawn smoke 0, game modes 30/30, movement 11/11, contrast 108/108, HUD layout
PASS, weapon holds 0, dances 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Audio (all CC0 — Kenney packs + OpenGameArt, see assets/sounds/SOURCES.md):
- Replace every procedural synth WAV with forged sounds (ffmpeg pitch/layer
mixes): distinct fire sounds per weapon with 2-3 variations, explosions,
footsteps x5, land/jump/dash/vault, knife swing, hit/kill confirms,
bullet impacts, reload, flight loops, UI hover/click/confirm/error,
match jingles, menu music
- AudioManager.stream_for(): AudioStreamRandomizer per sound id — every
weapon now gets variation + pitch randomization on each shot
- Explosions and bullet impacts play positional audio; landing has its own
sound instead of a pitched footstep; ambient wind bed on every map
Visuals:
- ExplosionVFX: shared cel-shaded burst (white-hot stepped core, ink
shockwave ring, star spikes, flat smoke puffs) replaces the orange
sphere in both local and remote-replay paths
- Comic star muzzle flashes on all weapons; unified cel tracer bolts with
ink outlines across hitscan/shotgun/remote paths
- Impact decals: hard-stepped ink-splat gradients instead of soft airbrush
- Toon shading on first-person view models + arms, third-person weapons,
and the procedural humanoid fallback (no hull outlines on FBX weapons —
their hard normals tear the inverted hull)
- Fix: giant soft "blob" highlight on floors — toon rim/specular disabled
on level-geometry materials (pre-existing artifact since the cel commit)
- Fix: own third-person weapon rendered into the first-person camera
(shadows-only now covers first_person_mode)
UI:
- UITheme: comic theme on the root window — Bangers display font (OFL),
paper panels with thick ink borders + hard drop shadows, papaya accent,
themed buttons/inputs/popups; hover/click sounds on all menu buttons
- Main menu: tilted comic wordmark, sunset toon diorama, looping menu music
- Match HUD: themed scoreboard/killfeed/kill counter
Viewports:
- 4x MSAA project-wide + viewmodel/diorama viewports (crisp ink lines)
- Viewmodel camera near plane 0.01; third-person camera FOV syncs settings
- debug/visual_capture.gd: dev tool to screenshot menu + level for review
Verified: 11/11 movement tests, spawn smoke test 0 failures, before/after
screenshot comparison of menu and level.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
