Style-Bakeoff

Style Bake-Off — validate the house look before locking it

Goal: pick the render style for the whole universe (one look, six cameras) by looking, not reading. We render the same four subjects — player · foes · gameplay scene · website — in three candidate styles, holding the world canon constant so the only variable is the render style. Then judge on look × animatability (Redline + Rothulk need real 2D frame animation).

Each prompt is self-contained (codex has no shared memory between runs): WORLD CANON + one STYLE CARD + one SUBJECT + an output instruction.

World canon (identical in every image)

The Scourge universe — DOOM-grade, brutal. Palette: blood #c1121f, hellfire #ff6a00, gunmetal, bone; toxic-green #8bdc1f only on Scourge bio-glow. NO neon, no magenta/cyan. The Scourge is a parasite: ruptured host flesh, invasive tendrils, embedded toxic-green breach cores, black chitin over stolen bone/metal.

The three style cards

STYLE A — HI-FI STYLIZED RENDER (the current doc lock)

Rendered 3D-sculpt / AAA dark-fantasy concept-art look; believable heavy materials (wet flesh, cracked bone, rusted hell-metal) dragged through painterly grime; exaggerated heroic silhouette; one hard hellfire rim-light from a low side; deep crushed near-black shadows; internal emissive glow in mouth/eyes/ wounds; near-monochrome warm grade. Cinematic, gritty — NOT photoreal, NOT cartoon. Animatability: HARDEST. Best static/billboard; frame animation is expensive — animate via billboard bob/scale + 8-frame pre-rendered turntables only.

STYLE B — CHUNKY RETRO PIXEL (DOOM-1993 lineage)

Bold low-resolution pixel-art sprite, ~96px tall, limited 16–24 color DOOM palette, hand-placed pixels, strong readable silhouette, dithered shading, gritty and grimy, clean transparent edges. Animatability: EASIEST. Small frame sheets, classic 4–8 frame cycles, tiny files — the most animation-friendly across all three games.

STYLE C — STYLIZED HAND-PAINTED INK (Darkest-Dungeon / Mignola energy)

Bold illustrated look: thick confident inked outlines, flat-to-gradient painted regions, limited DOOM palette, heavy chiaroscuro with a hellfire rim, exaggerated grotesque shapes. Premium and graphic — not photoreal, not pixelated. Animatability: MEDIUM-EASY. Flat inked regions + separable shapes animate cleanly with limited frames and squash/stretch — a strong look/animation balance.

STYLE D — HIGH-DETAIL / HD PIXEL ART (Vincent’s idea — likely the sweet spot)

TRUE pixel art on a visible pixel grid, but high-detail and richly lit — Blasphemous / Dead Cells + remastered 1990s DOOM/Amiga sprite sheets. Far more detail and drama than chunky Style B, but still unmistakably pixelated — blocky, crunchy, made of visible pixels. NOT a smooth 3D render (that’s the v1 mistake that made it a clone of Style A), NOT painted, NOT photoreal. Animatability: EASY. The look is pre-rendered sprite frames — render the model across frames/angles exactly like the originals; the retro coarseness hides frame-to-frame drift that wrecks hi-fi animation. Most of A’s richness with most of B’s animatability, and it’s the most authentic DOOM lineage. Rendered by run-d.sh (after the A/B/C batch) → d-remaster-*.png.

The four subjects

PLAYER — the player hero, a PYRE PURGER (elite soldier of the Pyre, the offense faction): heavy scorched battle-armor over a flame-cauterizer rig, visored gas-mask helm, a big industrial energy rifle, scarred and battle-worn, grim and heroic. Full body, centered, forward-facing ready combat stance, near-black void background. Built for game animation: clear separable limbs and joints, even readable lighting, strong silhouette.

FOES — a lineup of three Scourge foes side by side on a near-black void: (1) a SWARM-RIPPER, fast lean melee host-puppet with bladed bone-claws and ruptured flesh; (2) a SPITTER, bloated ranged host lobbing toxic-green bile from a swollen breach-sac; (3) a GRAFT-BREACHER, hulking elite fused with rusted hell-metal and an embedded toxic-green breach core. Clearly one parasite army. Full body, built for animation: clear limbs, readable silhouettes.

GAMEPLAY — a first-person gameplay screenshot of a DOOM-like horde shooter: the player’s gloved hands holding an industrial energy rifle low with a muzzle flash; a horde of Scourge host-puppets charging through a grimy blood-stained industrial arena lit by hellfire; a HUD with health / ammo / score in heavy uppercase; blood splatter and ember particles. Full scene, all assets integrated.

WEBSITE — a website landing-page hero mockup for SHIP SHIT GAMES studio (deadrot.com): a dark brutal games gallery — big uppercase Oswald headline, a row of game cards with cover art, a blood-red PLAY button with an ember glow, gunmetal panels on a near-black page, a hero banner showing a Scourge breach. Desktop-browser web UI mockup.

Run it (codex, your ChatGPT sub — no API key)

run.sh (next to this file) renders all 12 into style-bakeoff/:

bash lore/Art/style-bakeoff/run.sh

Then compare the preserved outputs in packages/assets/sources/generated/lore-art-style-bakeoff/2026-06-04/. Each filename is <style>-<subject>.png.

Judge, then lock

Score each style on: (1) does it look amazing per-asset, (2) does the roster stay coherent, (3) can Redline/Rothulk actually animate it cheaply. Pick one. Locking it = edit the assetgen: block + Style-Bible prose, then bun assetgen tokens re-flows every game at once. Record the verdict on shipshitgames/shipshitgames#62.