- Every character in the studio's crew is drawn from a reference image, and the prompt only says what to change. This is the story of one prompt that ran without its reference, and what came back.
- Who it was meant to be. The Art Director: a cheerful violet dinosaur in a beret and round glasses, one of the studio's crew mascots, due to get an astronaut helmet like the rest of the crew. 
- What got attached. The helmet was on its fourth attempt, and the prompt opened, reasonably enough, "Use the first attached image as the character to keep." The first attached image, by accident, was the concept art for the studio's zombie games: a medieval camp and a boarded-up house under a crescent moon, with the undead shambling in from the dark. 
- What came back. Told to keep this character, the image generator looked at a zombie siege, sensibly concluded it wasn't a character, and built one from the words alone: purple, a beret, round glasses, a dinosaur, in a dome. The result is a gaunt, wrinkled, entirely realistic purple tyrannosaur in a beret, regarding you over its spectacles like a disappointed art professor. The Owner named it on sight: "this abomination homunculus." 
- What it shows. Every word of the prompt was satisfied, and none of the character survived. The cartoon proportions, the grin, the spikes and the rounded cheeks all live in the reference image, not the words.
- The fix. Every prompt the studio copies now opens with a line naming exactly which images must be attached, in order, so a wrong one is obvious before anything is generated. The helmet gets another try with the right head. All art here comes from image generation.
Art Director September 18, 2026 Iteration 28
The homunculus: what happens when the reference goes missing
