Big push on VirusMon today — the cyber town art finally landed in-engine, the client layout got the spec-driven rebuild it's been needing, and I tracked down a font issue that had been quietly making every UI text element look terrible.
VirusMon: cyber town art lands
This was the headline work. Spent the morning on the slicer scaffold — tools/slice_town.py plus a reusable tileset extrusion pass — and got the cyber town atlas sliced out of the art drops. From there it was a chain of small but satisfying steps: palette with building stamps, stamp placement with dual-tileset map output, then recomposing the town to match the mockup layout. The zone renderer now loads the cyber tileset alongside the Kenney one, so we can mix sources per map.
A bunch of playtest tweaks followed once it was actually walkable: enterable houses, lab relocated to the lower-right, the pond got dropped (it wasn't earning its space), cobblestone roads, a tall-grass patch, corner trees. Then I replaced the monolithic tall-grass field with scattered cyber grass tufts — feels much more like the reference art and gives the patch a clear shape.
The tuft patch then got promoted to a real gameplay zone: town now has its own encounter table with the three basic viruses (wormling, keylogga, trojanus) at levels 2–4. The idea is that a new player can catch a second virus near home before committing to route-1. Updated the zone integrity test to reflect that town is no longer encounter-free.
Started sketching route-2 redesign too — it's still using old tileset aesthetics and needs the cyber treatment. Noted that the cyber atlas is missing fence and ledge tiles that the reference uses, so that's a prerequisite before route-2 can really happen. Filed mentally.
VirusMon: game client layout rebuild
Recovered the approved game-client-layout spec from the previous session's transcript — it had been written in a worktree that got cleaned up before committing, which was a minor heart-attack moment. Got it back into main with a fresh implementation plan, then executed the plan subagent-driven on a worktree.
What landed:
- Flex app shell with a 320px identity sidebar populated from synced
PlayerState - Phaser
Scale.RESIZEwith alayoutCamera()pass - Mouse-wheel zoom clamped to
[max(1.25, fit), 5]— and the spec got revised mid-flight to relax the zoom-out clamp so you can see the whole map at minimum zoom - Battle and roster moved to centered bordered panels over the paused (not slept) zone
One annoying bug along the way: the canvas had a 4px inline-baseline gap underneath it that was causing a page scrollbar. Classic display: block fix on the canvas element. Easy once you see it, but it took a minute to notice that the scroll was caused by the canvas and not some sidebar padding.
VirusMon: the font fiasco
Browser walkthrough on the alt account turned up that all the text everywhere looked subtly wrong — blurry, serif-ish, vaguely Courier-ey. Dug in and found it: every add.text call was missing fontFamily, so Phaser was falling back to default Courier at 7–10px and then the camera was upscaling 2.5× with nearest-neighbor. Tiny blurry serifs, stretched.
Tried Press Start 2P first but it overflowed on roster titles, battle menu columns, and starter cards. Switched to VT323 (the DEC terminal font, SIL OFL licensed) self-hosted in client/public/assets/fonts/. Much narrower glyphs, still unambiguously pixel-y. Updated all five scenes — login, creator, starter, zone, battle — to explicitly set fontFamily: 'VT323'.
VirusMon: battle UI polish and sprite fixes
A pile of smaller wins:
- GB-style HP boxes with "HP:" labels and combatant pointer arrows
- L-bracket pointers, HP numbers, and a cursor arrow in the battle menu
- Battle sprites anchored to panel margins with HP bars sitting above the art
- Killed the white halo dots around creature sprites and portraits — halo-free keying in the sprite intake tools fixed it at the source
Also chased down a nasty facing-flash bug where direction reversals would briefly show the old facing. Built a flight-recorder debug tool (F8 dumps the last 4s) to catch it, and the real root cause turned out to be the backward profile-idle frames being wrong on a handful of sheets. Also: facing now follows the held key every frame rather than waiting for server patches. Removed the diagnostics before the day was out.
Closing
A satisfying day — the town finally looks like the game I've been describing in specs, and the client shell is structured properly instead of fighting Phaser's defaults. Tomorrow is probably route-2 and the missing cyber atlas tiles (fences, ledges), plus figuring out the virus market and hospital building stamps.