Shape language · Road to Redemption

Design every monster as a black silhouette first.

The camera looks down at three-quarters, the way it does in the game, and a monster on screen is about 40 pixels tall, in a crowd, in the dark, in a sunlit field or on the white stone of heaven. At that size texture is invisible and faces don't exist. What reads is the outline, and the light on it.

So each family of the bestiary has its own shape language, chosen so that a player can tell a Gloom Spider from a Hollow Ghoul by silhouette alone, at a glance, while two thousand of them press in from the edge of the light. Heaven adds a harder test: it has no colour, so its three factions have to read by shape alone.

The six families

Monster	Family	Silhouette
Hollow Ghoul	Drowned	Vertical, slumped, dripping, head pushed forward.
Bone Archer	Bone	Thin and angular, all sticks and points, the line of a bow.
Cavern Brute	Stone (Cinderborn)	Massive and blocky, wider than tall, shoulders above the head.
Cinder Imp	Fire (Cinderborn)	Small, jagged and flickering, never still.
Gloom Spider	Gloom	Wide and low, many legs, no face.
Rime Wraith	Rime	Tapered and floating, no feet, a trail of frost.

The monsters are the world's own: Velmarch's drowned, its miners fused to the stone, the spiders of the Gloamroot. A faction's white is what makes them troops (below).

Rules for every monster

Silhouette first. A monster is drawn as a solid black shape before anything else, and it has to read that way. If two families could be confused in black, one of them changes.

Dark against bright ground, too. The climb comes up into daylight (meadows, wheat, golden moorland, a salt desert at noon) and ends on the white stone of heaven. The same silhouettes have to read as dark shapes against a bright ground, which, done right, reads even better than black on black. Loot, telegraphs and allies that glow at night get a rim or a glow strong enough to hold against the sun and against white stone.

Big shapes on top. The camera sees shoulders, heads and backs, not faces. A Cavern Brute's shoulders rise above its head; a Gloom Spider is a wide, low disc of legs; a Rime Wraith tapers to nothing where its feet should be.

Rarity is light, not geometry. Magic monsters take a blue rim, rares a gold glow, uniques an ember one. Monsters of one kind share one mesh, and materials are shared per rarity, which is what lets thousands of them be drawn at once. It reads better, too: a gold glow in a grey crowd is the first thing the eye finds.

Telegraphs are honest. A slam fills a red circle on the ground before it lands. Projectiles glow in their element's colour. Nothing that can hurt you is dark, and in heaven nothing that can hurt you is white.

Stylised, lit well. Flat or gradient-painted colour, and detail that comes mostly from light and from emissive cracks: the ember seams in a brute's stone hide, the frost breathing off a wraith.

Budgets are measured, not a style. Every monster has three levels of detail: about 4,000 vertices near the party, about 1,500 at mid range and about 400 for the far horde. Each level is authored so that its silhouette still reads on its own. Heroes carry 8,000 to 15,000 triangles, with at most four on screen. These numbers come from measurements on the target machine (design/perf/vertex-budget.md and the performance notes in docs/performance.md); the 200 to 400 vertex rule of the first prototypes was a guess, and is gone.

What the paintings settled

The concept paintings fixed a few details that every model and painting of these monsters keeps. How the paintings are made is on the painting guide.

The drowned have a hollow where the ember was. Hollow Ghouls and Rime Wraiths carry an empty, frost-rimmed hollow in the chest: the inverse of a fallen's glow, and readable from above for the same reason.
The Gloom Spider is eyeless, and its swollen belly glows with the light it has eaten.
The Cavern Brute wears its miner's helmet and pick fused into the rock of its body.

Heaven's three factions

Decided by Alex on 25 October 2026: in the world, angels exist in their true forms, white and worse than heaven's glamour. The Wardens are lifeless (golems, empty armour, automata, puppets), the Heirs look godlike, and the Apostates look human. Each region's champion is an angel's true form, set down on the board at the heart of its army.

Warden: upright, blocky, a blank mask, a keyhole in the ribs, wings of hinged slats

Heir: a towering column of light, six wings, wheels for a halo

Apostate: a person's height and shape, a hammer, wings only in the shadow

Proposal

Heaven has no colour, so the factions are told apart by silhouette first, the way the monster families are. Three shapes, each its faction's hubris made visible.

	Wardens	Heirs	Apostates
The read	A wide block: broad, upright, square	A tall column: thin, vertical, rising	A small figure: human height, hunched to work
Wings	Folded tight down the back like a stone cloak	Raised high above the head; six on a champion	Clipped short, bound with cord; in the world, only in the shadow
What breaks the outline	A tower shield planted beside it; keys at the belt	Tall narrow banners above the line; a halo of wheels	A hammer over the shoulder
How they stand	Facing outward, never toward the House; perfectly still	In long ordered lines, like a procession	In a ring, or alone in a gap
True form in the world	An automaton: blank mask, cage of ribs, a keyhole for a heart, joints pinned with brass	A colossus of radiance: robes written edge to edge with script, a face too bright to see, a sword of light	An ordinary weathered person in a plain cloak; the shadow behind has great broken wings
Their white	Porcelain, chains, padlocks, masks	Radiance, robes, banners	The shadow, the teeth, the edge of the hammer

Wing pose is the key. Folded, raised, clipped: at 40 pixels on white stone, the line of the wings is the first thing that reads, before the shield, the banner or the hammer. Keep it on every angel of a faction, from the champion down to the still angels on a wall.

Troops: the white on the world's own things

Proposal

A faction makes troops of the world's monsters and dead, and its white is how you tell whose they are. The white is a mark laid on the family's own silhouette, never a new silhouette, so a Warden-held ghoul still reads as a ghoul.

Warden troops are bound. White masks with no eyes, white chains, padlocks on the chains; beasts on leashes; smaller white puppets and stone sentinels among them. The mark sits on the head, which is what the camera sees. A Warden horde stands in ranks and moves together.
Heir troops are converted. White robes and hoods over the living and the risen dead, white banners carried above the crowd, a radiant thing at the centre the crowd never looks up at. The mark is the banner, which breaks the outline upward. An Heir horde comes in lines, like a procession.
Apostate ground runs loose. No troops of their own: ordinary people with hammers, and the world's things freed of the Wardens' hold, still wearing the broken white of the chains they slipped, a trailing end of white chain on a dark shape. An Apostate region comes at you from every side at once.
A fallen's own raised dead wear the shapes of the dead in the fallen's own white, with the coal's red in their eyes (decided). Red eyes in a white horde read as the enemy fallen's, never a faction's.
The more white, the more played. A magic piece carries more white than a plain one, and a rare is moved by an angel's own hand (both decided); here, a rare is half white. The rarity rim stays on top, so rarity still reads first.

Players and people

The fallen follow the same rules. Their signature is the ember glowing through the chest, and gear changes their outline at the shoulders and head first because that is what the camera sees. Decided by Alex on 25 October 2026: a fallen's faction shows in its shadow, its wings and the light off it, never on its body or gear, so a party of mixed banners keeps four outlines of its own.

Proposal

The ember reads on any ground. Against black it is the light; against a sunlit field and against white stone it is the only warm dot in the frame. Model it so it reads in all three.
A fallen's wings come back as its faction shows, from its seat on: folded, raised or clipped, like its faction's angels, so the wing pose that tells a faction's hosts apart tells kin apart too.
The people of the world carry no white at all: farmers, priests, traders and children are pieces nobody plays. They wear the world's earthy reds, browns and greens, smaller and bundled against the cold, and in Hearthold lit from below by braziers.