Art direction

Document 02 · 4 min read

World palette

Shadow black#020302 #090B04
Deep shadows, never pure black on lit surfaces

Shadow green#181B06 #252D0D #3E4215
Vegetation and foliage shadow (the most common tone: ~40% combined)

Night blue#0F1115 #141B2D #2A445E
Sky, distant air, cold stone shadow

Moon blue (accent)#2A54C7 #3060F0
Moon rim light, reflection on stone and water

Lavender#676988 #7885E4
Sky reflection on wet cobblestone and planks

Olive/earth#5D5A38
Wood, earth, straw in half-light

Amber (warm accent)#C08A30 #A86018
Windows, lanterns, torches, bonfires

Source: docs/02 (table of extracted colors). Cold in the environment, warm only in the lights.

One sentence

"An ancient world that changes with the hour: golden sun by day, a moonlit night warmed by lanterns." Semi-realistic, painted medieval fantasy: believable proportions and materials, exaggerated color and light.

Night palette (extracted from the frames)

Average colors per cluster (k-means on 44 thousand pixels from the 11 frames, without the watermark strip). Both videos are mostly dark: the first three colors add up to ~25% of the image.

Role	Color	Use
Shadow black	`#020302` `#090B04`	Deep shadows, never pure black on lit surfaces
Shadow green	`#181B06` `#252D0D` `#3E4215`	Vegetation and foliage shadow (the most common tone: ~40% combined)
Night blue	`#0F1115` `#141B2D` `#2A445E`	Sky, distant air, cold stone shadow
Moon blue (accent)	`#2A54C7` `#3060F0`	Moon rim light, reflection on stone and water
Lavender	`#676988` `#7885E4`	Sky reflection on wet cobblestone and planks
Olive/earth	`#5D5A38`	Wood, earth, straw in half-light
Amber (warm accent)	~`#C08A30`→`#A86018`	Windows, lanterns, torches, bonfires

Rules:

Cool in the environment, warm in the sources. Amber only appears where there is a justified light source (fire, lantern, window). This also guides the player: warm light = people, safety, quest.
High saturation in accents, low in masses. Shadows are dark greens and blues, not gray.
Magic in cyan blue (the orb from video A) and, for the dark side, a violet. Each school of magic has a color; none uses amber, which is reserved for "human" light.

Palettes by time of day

The references only cover the night. The other phases of the cycle follow the same cool × warm contrast rule, which inverts by day (warm sunlight, cool shadows).

Time	Main light	Palette	Typical weather
Late night (pre-dawn)	Low moon, first blues on the horizon	Grayish blue, pale lavender	Low fog in the valleys
Dawn	Grazing sun	Pink, peach, light gold; lilac shadows	Dew, rising mist
Day	High sun	Vivid greens, ochre, light stone, clear blue sky; bluish shadows	Sun, clouds, passing rain
Dusk (golden hour)	Low, orange sun, backlight	Amber and orange dominate; windows start to light up	Sky with clouds lit from below
Night	Moon + warm sources	The palette extracted above	Stars, Milky Way, clouds lit from above

The dusk, when the villages light their windows, is the signature moment that connects day to the reference palette.
Weather changes the palette at any hour: rain (everything wet and reflective, which reinforces the damp style), storm (cold lightning), fog (low contrast, silhouettes), snow in the high regions.

Light and atmosphere

At night, the main source is the moon, cold, from above and the side, creating blue rim light on trunks, roofs and armor. By day it is the sun, which travels across the sky; both are dynamic.
Practical light: dozens of small warm sources per village (windows, posts, torches). They must be cheap: fake emissive lights + a few real dynamic lights near the player.
Low mist and height fog for depth; light volumetric scattering near warm sources.
Sky as a piece of art: Milky Way, clouds lit from above, large moon. In first person the sky is worth as much as the ground.
All times of day are calibrated, not just the night: each phase of the cycle has its own palette and light (table above) and a test scene (see the cycle in 04-mundo.md).

Materials

Semi-realistic, PBR, with a painted finish: textures with hand-made color variation on top of the physical base.
Moisture is part of the style: slightly wet stone and wood reflecting the sky.
Moss, ivy and grass taking over the joints of everything old.

Vegetation

Colossal trees (trunks 5–15 m in diameter) as biome landmarks; ivy, exposed roots, ferns.
Discreet bioluminescent points in ancient forests (fungi, insects), in blue-green.

Architecture

Human: half-timbered houses, steep tile and thatch roofs, stone with arched doors, chimneys with smoke, cloth awnings.
Sylvan: houses on platforms and inside trunks, rope and plank bridges on several levels, rounded doors.
Every large city has a silhouette of towers and spires visible from afar.

Characters

Silhouette before detail: capes, hoods, staffs, plate armor with engravings.
In first person the player sees arms, hands and what they hold: bracers, gauntlets, the lantern. These first-person models get the most art care in the project (they appear 100% of the time).
NPCs always doing something (selling, carrying, talking).

What to avoid

Everything dark gray-green with no warm source (becomes "realistic" and sad).
AI-video bloom and saturation on every surface: exaggeration goes only in the accents.
Magic glow everywhere (loses the value of the rare orb).
Interface that covers the screen: see 03-design-do-jogo.md, minimal HUD.

Next art steps (no code)

Own mood board, with licensable photo and painting, replacing the AI frames and also covering dawn, day and dusk, which the videos do not show.
Own concepts: market village street and tree village, each by day and by night, and a wide view showing scale at dusk.
Light guide by time of day: the same test scene (greybox) at five times (late night, dawn, noon, dusk, night) and with rain and fog, to lock the values.
First-person arms character sheet (classes ↔ bracers ↔ lantern).