- The people in CHEF! are going to get hand-drawn art, and before any of it could be made we had to answer one question: how many frames does a walking character need? It's a one-way door. Every outfit that ever gets drawn has to have the same number, so picking wrong means redrawing everything.
- The cheap way to answer it would have been to draw a few and look. Instead we rigged the placeholder characters — the ones the game draws with code right now — to walk on a 2, 3, 4 or 5 frame cycle, side by side, at the real size they appear on screen. It cost nothing to build and no art at all.
- Going in, the answer looked like 4. It came out 2, and the reason was structural rather than aesthetic: these characters have no legs, so a walk isn't a stride, it's a bob. A bob happens once per footstep, and two pictures — foot down, body up — say the whole of it. The arms were the thing that would have forced four, and once we measured it, the arms weren't earning their cost.
- That halves the art forever: 8 hand-made images per outfit instead of 16, on a character set that's going to keep growing.
- The last bit couldn't be measured at all. Everything we could count said two frames was complete and even. Whether it actually reads as walking rather than bouncing, at 39 pixels tall, was a question only a pair of eyes could answer. It reads as walking.
CHEF! September 20, 2026 Iteration 88