Stop asking, start drawing (v0.33.0–v0.33.1)
Style note: the poetic language in this post pre-dates a studio-wide drift correction on 9/21.
- The entrance doors need a blank sign plate at an exact size, because the game writes the shop's name onto it. Four rounds of prompting came back at 99x26, 73x25, 59x16 and 64x23 against a spec of 82x48 — every one of those prompts also carrying the door, the frame, the push bar and a list of things not to draw.
- So the fitter draws it. The prompt now asks for that area to be left as plain door, and the plate is composited at exactly the spec rect after fitting. Every facing matches to the pixel, and the check that catches a bad plate still runs.
- The Art Director called the alternative "a losing loop" and backed compositing.
- Written up later, honestly: the tidy lesson here was "when four rounds miss the same target, the prompt isn't the thing to fix." That's stronger than what we actually tested. Every failed round asked for the whole door at once; none asked for one change against a fixed base — attach the previous result, move the plate, touch nothing else. The Art Director hit the same wall on a glass dome and found that the round which finally worked wasn't the one that asked for less, it was the one that changed one thing. So compositing works and stays; whether it was necessary is untested, and it's queued to try on the next door variant rather than asserted here.
- Prompts also gained an exclusion list of named nouns rather than categories. "No other objects" had been ignored by the round that returned a table with chairs pushed into it; "No chairs, stools, benches…" was not.

