Art

An empty slot. What is written here is only “what has to exist before this slot counts as filled.”

First — building solo, the real bottleneck is not code

The premise of this slot.

Building a game alone makes people picture the coding being hard. In practice what blocks you is usually the art.

The reason is simple.

	Code	Art
Handing it to an AI	Works reasonably	Works less well
Time per item	Minutes to hours	Hours to days
How many you need	As many as features	Characters, animations, effects, UI — all of it

And art has to match in style. Ten good pieces are unusable if the styles disagree.

What travels — “value before colour”

A rule from the wuxia game.

Choosing colours, people start with hue — blue family or red family.

What actually matters on a game screen is light and dark (value).

Because players separate objects by difference in brightness, not by colour.

Situation	Result
Different hues, similar brightness	Character and background do not separate
Different brightness	They separate even in similar hues

So value is fixed first and colour goes on afterwards. Reversed, you get a screen that is pretty and unreadable.

What has to be re-decided — “what will not be made”

The most important question in this slot.

Building alone, you cannot make all of it. Which leaves two options.

	Result
Start without deciding	Exhaustion stops you somewhere arbitrary — and where you stopped was never chosen
Decide first, then start	What is absent is intentional — and what is present is finished

Deciding what will not be made is hard because it means admitting the game’s limits.

But the limits arrive whether you decide or not. The only difference is whether you chose them or were pushed into them.

Choosing what is absent makes it a style. Being pushed into absence makes it unfinished.

The detailed record starts here

An empty slot. What’s written here is only what has to exist before this slot counts as filled.

What travels — value before colour

From the wuxia game’s art. Value comes before hue. Secure the value difference between character and floor first, and only then does anything — lineage colour, effects — go on top of it.

Colour-blind support gets solved in the same place. Separate hue alone and some people see nothing; separate value too and it reads even when the colour doesn’t. That’s a question of what gets decided first, not of accessibility bolted on later.

What has to be re-decided — what won’t be made

Building solo, art blocks before code does. So the first thing this slot has to produce isn’t a list of what to make but a list of what not to make.

On the wuxia side this was left without a conclusion. Honestly stated, it is still undecided — which makes this the slot most likely to be filled last in the next game too.