Doodle Codex

Square, opaque, seamless 64×64 ground, six frames at 10 fps. Each base is shown 3×3 to prove the seam. A variant is its base plus one interior feature, and tiles against everything its base does; an engine picks one by a weighted hash on all-one-terrain cells. Listed low to high in draw order: the higher terrain owns the edge between two.

Variants

Borders are a corner-Wang set drawn on a dual grid: 16 masks per terrain, six frames each. A cell with several terrains is the lowest as a base plus one overlay per higher terrain. Shore atlases replace the overlay when the lowest terrain is water (foam), scorch when it is lava (charred crust). Diagonal roads, rivers and trails stay connected by design. Cliff atlases draw a height step inside one terrain (grass over grass) from an integer height per cell: a bank on the south-facing edge and a drawn rim on the other three, with foam or a charred line at its foot where it stands in water or lava. A natural bank is earth or its own stone; ground somebody built stands on a built face (dry stone under a field, ashlar under a road or a flagged floor, upright planks under floorboards). Sixteen flights (stone and wooden stairs, earth ramps, and stairs onto a stone wall; see Structures) are the way up, and a waterfall carries a river over the step. Every overlay, shore, scorch and cliff atlas also has three alternate drawings that can be mixed in tile by tile without a seam, so a long border does not repeat. The pictures below are static proofs built from the shipped atlases.

Hand-placeable walls on the ordinary grid: one still piece per cell, and the cell is what it blocks. The name says where the piece sits in a wall; a 256-entry lookup on the eight neighbours picks it automatically. Walls do not animate. Kinds: interior (face 36 px); rock (face 24 px); stone (face 30 px); stone_low (face 12 px); timber (face 28 px). A door or gate replaces one straight piece of a run and ships closed and open. A window is swapped in the same way, in a south-facing run or edge of the interior, stone, timber kits, dark and lit; it blocks as the wall does. Kits join each other with a butt joint: 16 small joint pieces per kit close the cut end where the neighbouring cell is a wall of another material. Or with a bond, drawn instead of the joint where two kits are built as one wall: the stronger kit's courses run a tooth or two into the weaker one's face (80 bond pieces, on east and west sides that show face).

interior

rock

stone

stone_low

timber

Cut-outs that stand on terrain, drawn in elevation with a ground shadow. map scale means a landmark for the world map (a castle two tiles wide); local scale means drawn to stand beside a person. Trees block only the trunk, so a person can walk behind the crown; a street lamp, a shop sign and a market stall block their foot the same way. A rug and a mat are floor pieces: flat, walked over, drawn under everyone. 28 props have a second state (awake, dark, dive, erupt, moored, open, raided, sealed). A state that plays once (a gate, a lid, a ship mooring) starts on the idle picture and holds its last frame; play it backwards to undo it. The waterfall stands across a cliff edge on water. The sixteen flights are where a unit climbs: stone stairs, wooden stairs and an earth ramp stand across a cliff edge, one cell on the high ground and one on the low (16 px), and stairs_wall climbs 30 px from the ground onto the top of a stone wall. Each comes in four directions.

Cut-out actors. Every creature has idle, walk, attack, hurt, die and poof (the corpse vanishing in smoke) in four facings, and every one adds a signature. Below: idle in all four facings, then every other state facing down. Tier is difficulty 1–5. An elite is its base creature in another palette with the same silhouette, and every creature has one. The seven big creatures (ogre, treant, dragon and the four lords) play their attack, walk, signature and death over 12 frames instead of 6: a wind-up, the blow, a follow-through and a recovery; a stagger, a fall and a landing. Every state and facing carries a measured box per frame, and a hit box on the frame the blow lands.

Elites

People are a paperdoll: a body in underwear plus wardrobe pieces the engine stacks, so any body can wear any item. Every piece exists for every body, state and facing. The strips below are composed from the shipped pieces exactly as an engine would.

Bodies

Skins and hair colours

Hero builds

NPC looks

The 16 states (hero in "leather", facing down)

Four facings (walk)

Wardrobe

119 items across 9 slots, each fitted to all 12 bodies: tabard: apron_leather, apron_white, tabard_blue, tabard_red; mainhand: axe, bow, cane, dagger, fishing_rod, hammer, longsword, mace, pickaxe, pitchfork, scimitar, spear, staff, staff_crystal, staff_orb, sword, sword_dark, sword_dragon, sword_light, toy_sword; head: bandana_red, cap_jester, cap_leather, circlet_gold, coif_chain, crown_gold, hat_feather, hat_straw, hat_wizard, hat_wizard_blue, headscarf_blue, helm_dark, helm_dragon, helm_great, helm_kettle, helm_light, helm_nasal, hood_black, hood_brown, hood_green; offhand: basket, book, buckler, lantern, sack, shield_dark, shield_dragon, shield_kite, shield_light, shield_round, tome_dark, torch, toy_shield; torso: blouse_white, doublet_purple, doublet_red, doublet_teal, dress_blue, dress_green, dress_purple, dress_red, gambeson, gambeson_black, gambeson_red, gambeson_white, robe_black, robe_blue, robe_brown, robe_grey, robe_purple, robe_white, shirt_linen, tunic_blue, tunic_brown, tunic_green, tunic_red; feet: boots, boots_tall, sabatons_dark, sabatons_dragon, sabatons_light, sabatons_plate, sandals, shoes; legs: breeches_tan, chausses_chain, greaves_dark, greaves_dragon, greaves_light, greaves_plate, leggings_leather, skirt_blue, skirt_green, skirt_red, trousers_black, trousers_blue, trousers_brown, trousers_green, trousers_grey; cloak: cape_purple, cape_red, cape_tattered, cape_white, cloak_blue, cloak_brown, cloak_green, cloak_red; armor: cuirass_dark, cuirass_dragon, cuirass_light, cuirass_plate, hauberk_chain, jerkin_leather, jerkin_ranger, mantle_mage.

Parchment UI as nine-slice pieces (corners fixed, edges tiled), inventory slots, bars whose fill tiles, cursors, and two handwritten bitmap fonts, each in two sizes and two pencils (ink and chalk): hand, the game's own printed pencil, and cute, a middle-schooler's rounder, friendlier writing. Both cover Western and Central European accents, and both also ship as a .ttf. Dialogue portraits are layered from the same wardrobe as the sprite, so a portrait always matches what the person is wearing, and carry the face detail a 64 px sprite cannot: irises, lids, nose, mouth, wrinkles, freckles, scars. Portraits are stills, facing the viewer.

Status icons

Scroll bar and minimap

Handwriting

Loot is what a monster leaves when its smoke clears. Effects are projectiles the engine moves (drawn pointing right, shipped per facing) and a hit spark. Icons are still 64×64 inventory pictures.

Icons

A second layer over the terrain: small things lying on the ground, scattered by the engine anywhere in a cell (not at its centre, so the ground stops reading as tiles) or placed by hand. Drawn over the terrain and under everything y-sorted; never blocking. placed pieces are never scattered: they tell a story about one spot.

1. The street is a first set. One lamp, four trade signs (inn, smith, shop, healer), two stalls, one rug and one mat, beside two houses, an inn, six pieces of furniture and two floors. No bench, cart, fountain, notice board or washing line; no sign for a temple, a stable or a guild. A window sits in a south-facing wall only, on the stone, timber and interior kits: none in a side wall or at a corner, no shutter that closes, no stained glass. A bond between two wall kits lives in a face, on an east or west side: a boundary on a north or south side is still a butt joint, and the interior kit keys into nothing.
2. Cliffs and stairs. A height step has a drawn bank on its south-facing edge only; the north, west and east edges are a lit lip, a rim line and a shade. Fifteen terrains have a cliff; mountain, peaks, rock, water and lava do not, by design. The waterfall faces south, is one cell wide and one level tall, and nothing falls into lava. A flight climbs one level (16 px) or onto a stone wall (30 px); no other wall kit has one. Ramps are earth only: no sand or snow version.
3. Landmarks. Sixteen of the seventeen great landmarks have a state, and the ruin has none by design. Only the city has a second design (a timber town): no pirate ship, no second volcano or palace. The wayside props (bridge, mine, camp, well) have one design and no state.
4. Monsters. Twelve-frame animation covers the attack, walk, signature and death of the seven creatures bigger than a tile; their hurt, and every state of every smaller creature and every person, are six frames. Some elite effects keep the base's colours by nature (a web, a tongue, a war-cry, a howl, a thrown boulder). Monster portraits exist for the lords only.
5. Portraits. Stills, facing the viewer, one expression per body. No talking or blinking frames.
6. UI. The two handwriting faces cover Latin, monotonic Greek and Cyrillic (468 characters): no CJK, no polytonic Greek, no right-to-left script. The scroll bar is vertical only and has one thumb state. Twelve status icons; an effect outside that list has none.
7. Faces. Sprites keep two eyes and a brow at 64 px by design; all face detail is in the portraits.
8. Terrain. Farmland runs east-west or north-south, not diagonally. Borders come in four interchangeable looks; within 10 px of the drawn contour any two differ on 11 to 45 percent of pixels (mean 24), and where a border crosses the tile edge is fixed, so a border is varied, not unique. A cliff has four looks too, but its face is mostly its own hatching: any two differ on 11 to 14 percent of drawn pixels. Pair atlases have one look.
9. Gameplay data. Only suggested data ships: walkability per terrain, blocked cells, idle hurtboxes, impact frames, and for monsters a measured box per frame and a hit box per state. Those are boxes round ink, not designed colliders. People have no per-state boxes: a paperdoll's ink depends on what it wears.