Every turn in GENERAL! is meant to resolve all at once, and now melee really does. Before, fights were worked out one by one with your army first. So a formation you destroyed never got its own blow in, and several close calls quietly went your way.
Now every clash is worked out from the same moment and all losses land together. A formation destroyed this turn still hits back.
Ties are settled fairly too:
two formations charging into the same gap meet where they stand
two formations heading for the same tile are decided by the shorter march, or a fair coin toss
pulling back from each other costs both sides their free strike
Two identical AI armies used to win 138 battles to 62 depending only on which side they played. Now the battles that end with a winner split evenly.
The enemy used to send every formation straight at whichever of yours was nearest. Now it plans the whole army's attacks together, choosing the fights where it trades best.
Its cavalry looks for your archers and for the sides and backs of your formations, where attacks hit harder.
Enemy archers shoot the target they'll hurt most, and approach to shooting range without walking into your melee.
Enemy spearmen brace when your cavalry could reach them.
Its infantry advances as one line, and walks around rocks and buildings instead of getting stuck behind them.
It plays by exactly the same movement rules you do. In 200 simulated battles on different maps, the new enemy won 132 against the old one's tactics; the old enemy won 62 of 200 against itself.
The command panel's title is now the engraved-metal "GENERAL!" wordmark instead of plain text.
The main buttons (Begin Deployment, Start Battle, Execute Orders, Restart after victory) use the brand's deeper gold, which sits closer to the logo's bronze.
The red "ARDIS" label on enemy units is a little lighter, so the small text reads clearly on the dark panel. The army's red on flags and soldiers is unchanged.
Posts with an animated clip used to show it as a tiny thumbnail under the still. Now the clip is the main picture and the still becomes a small thumbnail beside it — the trash run (CHEF! Iteration 43) shows only its clip, since the clip already covers the whole trip.
Before/After posts keep the pair on top, because a clip only shows the "after"; the clip now plays underneath at a readable size (progress/059-shipped-pair-with-gif-below.png, the busboy cleaning the bathroom).
A clip is never shrunk to a thumbnail anywhere, and a tiny sprite clip still shows at its real in-game size.
Galean Swordsmen now have a painted 8-frame walk toward the camera, from image generation, matching the march-north walk from Iteration 55.
Formations now turn to face the direction they're moving while they move, then face their usual direction again when they stop. Before this, a unit kept its old facing for the whole move, so soldiers ordered south marched backwards.
Moving east or west now shows the soldiers' side view. Swordsmen use the simpler drawn figures there until side-facing art exists.
Only the picture changed. Battle results, and the facing that combat rules use, are exactly as before.
The GIF is a real one-tile move south, recorded in the game: the formation turns and marches toward the camera, then faces north again once it stops.
The Galean soldier's eight-frame walk toward the camera, made by Sprite Manager with image generation, passed the Art Director's review and went to GENERAL!.
The review checked that it's the same soldier in every frame — helmet, blue tabard, eagle shield, sword side and grip — that it fits GENERAL!'s grounded look, and that the walk reads at the size it appears in the game.
The sword fixes are in: every frame's blade now matches the equipment picture.
Frame 1 looked smeared around the sword arm. It wasn't the sword edit: the image itself carried a pale halo, four times more than any other frame. A clean frame 1 with the same sword grip is waiting for review.
The soldier bobbed: frame 6 sat low and frame 8 sat high. Frame 8 is moved down. Frame 6 is enlarged by under 2% from its standing foot, so its feet stay on the ground while its head comes back up to the right height. Both are waiting for review.
Across the walk, the soldier's sword changed length by up to 14% from frame to frame. Each frame's blade was measured against the equipment picture the frames are based on, and the blades that were off were cut out, resized from the crossguard down and put back. Nothing else in those frames moved.
The review page now shows every walk option's sword length against the target, and new walk prompts give the blade's length.
Frame 1 held the sword like the equipment picture, lower and more upright, while the other frames hold it higher and at a slant, so the arm jumped between frames 8 and 1. Two earlier attempts that hold it like the rest are waiting for review.
Frame 6 sat 22 pixels low and is waiting as a moved-up copy.
Frames 1 and 2 looked the same, so the start of each step seemed frozen. In frame 1 the front foot should land heel-first ahead of the body, and in frame 2 the body should dip a little. Neither happened, and frame 5 had the same flat front foot.
The review panel now checks that the front heel lands past the standing line on those frames, and expects frames 2 and 6 to sit a few pixels lower than the rest. The prompts say the same.
Before asking for new images, all the old rejected ones were measured against the new rules. Four fit frame 1, four fit frame 5, and one fits frame 2; they're waiting for review next to the frame each would replace.
(There's no before shot of the panel: the card was decided before one was taken.)
Frame 2's redo had no side-by-side legs to judge by, because the side-by-side only came with a leg guide, and frame 2 was deliberately sent without one. Now every walk frame in review shows each option's legs up close. A redo also shows the legs of the frame it would replace ("NOW").
The new frame 2 is accepted: its free foot is half as high as before. Frame 6 has been sent back with the new frame 2, mirrored, as its guide.
Next problem: frames 1 and 2 now look almost the same, so the start of the step barely moves.
The foot measurement used to split the picture down the middle. When the standing boot crossed that line, both halves measured the same boot, so frame 2 read as nearly level when its free foot was really tucked 218px up. It now finds the gap between the legs and measures each one.
With that fixed, frames 2 and 6 both fail the spec: in the "down" step the free foot should only just leave the ground. Each frame had been the other's guide, so they copied each other.
Frame 2 is being redrawn without a guide, from a prompt that now gives a number (at most 6% of the canvas). The review panel marks anything over about 100px. Frame 6 will follow, guided by the new frame 2.
The new frame 1 had the right legs but sat 25px low. A moved-up copy is waiting for review.
Every walk frame in review now shows its foot and head-height readings, guided or not.
The animation player has a "Redo this frame…" button. It asks why, and the answer is written into the new request's prompt. The old frame stays in the animation until a replacement is accepted.
The walk looked jerky on one side. Measuring each boot on its own showed why: in frame 6 the soldier's legs are drawn about 4% too long, so his head rises and his standing foot dips, then both snap back in frame 7. A copy of frame 6 shrunk to 96% lines up with its neighbours and is waiting for review.
Frames 1 to 3 looked clunkier than 5 to 7. Set beside the mirrored second half, the difference is the swinging leg: in frames 1 and 3 it hangs straight with the knee level, so the walk reads as a shuffle; in 5 and 7 the knee bends and lifts. Frames 1 and 3 are being redrawn, guided by the mirrored legs of 5 and 7.
Six attempts at frame 7 all came back with the swinging heel raised too high. The prompt now says what has to change from the previous frame (the tucked-up heel comes down), asks for the two boots to look almost level from the front with the swinging foot barely off the ground, and suggests editing only the legs below the knee.
A leftover "standing idle pose" line that contradicted a walk was removed from walk prompts.
Rejecting an image now asks why, with one-click reasons like "Heel kicked too high" or "Body sits too low", or your own words.
Each reason is saved with the image and added to the end of that request's prompt, and to every later request for the same sprite, so the next attempt is told what to avoid. The card shows what was rejected before.
The review panel now fails a passing-pose frame whose swinging foot rises above ankle height. Before, the frame 7 option in the pictures passed with its heel far too high; now it's flagged.
GENERAL!'s crest turned into a blob at favicon size, measuring 2.65:1 against the site's dark background where 4.5:1 is the minimum. A new, brighter helmet icon, made with image generation, measures 5.19:1 and still reads as a helmet at 16 pixels. The crest stays as the full mark.
The wordmark was cleaned up (a stray piece of plume under the "G" is gone), and GENERAL! now has the same logo set as every studio project.
The logo slide in GENERAL!'s brand deck was redesigned to show the set.
Both images are reconstructed: composed afterwards from the committed files.
The Art Director re-drew GENERAL!'s wordmark in a compact form that reads at card size; the feed header and landing gate now use it. The wide version stays available for large banners.
On the devlog's small feed cards, GENERAL!'s wordmark was hard to read: a very wide word with a torn cloth banner and long spikes, so its letters ended up much shorter than every other project's.
A new compact wordmark, made with image generation, has taller, bolder letters and no banner. The word is now about 3.5 times as wide as it is tall instead of 4.3, close to the other studio wordmarks.
It took two rounds: the first was bolder but still too wide. The original wide wordmark is kept for large banners.
This morning the soldier's south walk had seven frames. One was half size, two had the wrong leg doing the work, and the eighth didn't exist.
By the end of the day all eight exist at full size with the legs alternating correctly. Frame 8 was replaced again this evening with one that sits at the right height.
The chart shows the remaining problem the review tools now catch: how high the head sits in each frame. Frames 4, 5 and 7 are still off; 4 and 7 are being redone.
The before pictures come from the project's history, not recreations.
(Before image reconstructed from git (the project at the start of 2026-09-16), after the change.)
The written description of the walk had some physically wrong details, including a straight back leg while pushing off and a heel kicked up behind in the recoil pose (the source of the over-kicked heel). The poses now describe a real stride: the pushing leg bends, the standing knee bends on the way down, the standing foot stays flat as the other leg passes, and the lifted foot stays low.
The open requests for frames 4, 7 and 8 use the corrected descriptions.
The awkward moment between frames 7 and 8 turned out to be the soldier's height: he sank lower in frames 7 and 8, then popped back up at frame 1, and frame 4 sat too high.
Each option in review now shows its head height against the rest of the walk, the prompt names the target height, and the leg guide is moved to match it.
Frames 4, 7 and 8 were requested again. Earlier rejected images that match those poses (whatever frame they were first made for) were added as options, including the old frame 4, which turned out to be a good frame 8.
The Galean soldier's south-facing walk is complete: eight frames, all on the same full-size canvas, alternating legs correctly through contact, recoil, passing and reaching poses.
Frames 4, 6 and 7 were redone and frame 8 was added today. The replaced versions are archived.
(Before image reconstructed from git (the project at the start of 2026-09-16), after the change.)
Frame 8 of the Galean soldier's south walk is accepted, so all eight frames now exist at full size.
Checking the whole cycle leg by leg found two frames with the wrong leg: frame 4 had the wrong foot forward, and frame 6 repeated frame 2 instead of mirroring it. Both have been requested again, each with a leg-position guide from its correct counterpart (frame 8 and frame 2).
Frame 6's redo is in: the new frame 6 has the correct leg tucked. Frame 4 is next.
The first half of the walk can now get leg guides too, for redos like frame 4.
(Before image reconstructed from git (the project at the start of 2026-09-16), after the change.)
Each walk frame waiting for review now has a "How to judge" panel: the target pose in plain words, and checks for gear sides and canvas size.
For the second half of the walk, it also shows a PASS picture (the legs as they should be) and a FAIL picture (the earlier frame's legs repeated), plus a close-up of each option's legs at the same scale and a one-line key difference: which boot should be the lower one.
Each option's legs sit in the same row as the PASS and FAIL pictures, with its foot reading underneath, so the comparison is side by side, with Accept and Reject right there.
Every left and right is spelled out as the side of the screen and the soldier's own side ("screen-left (the soldier's right)"), since a soldier facing you has them the other way round.
Frame 7 of the Galean soldier's south walk has been made again at the full canvas, with its legs matching the flipped frame 3 as the walk needs. The old, roughly half-size frame 7 is retired and archived.
Frame 8 has been requested, with its leg guide built from frame 4.
(Before image reconstructed from git (the project at the start of 2026-09-16), after the change.)
Frames 2 and 5 of the Galean soldier's south walk were one pixel short of the full canvas. Each got one transparent row added, and nothing in the picture moved. A game that already copied them should copy them again. Each file's provenance note says where the unpadded version is kept.
Frame 7, which came in at about half size, has been requested again. The request uses the new leg-position guide (frame 3, flipped). Frame 8 follows once the new frame 7 is accepted.
Frames 5 to 8 of a walk are frames 1 to 4 with the legs swapped, and the image generator kept repeating the original leg instead. Their requests now include a second picture: the matching earlier frame flipped and cut down to just the legs, so the target leg position is visible rather than described.
The character itself is never flipped: that would move the sword, shield and pouch to the wrong side.
In review, each option shows which foot is planted next to what the guide expects, and flags a mismatch on the poses where that measurement is reliable.
Every sprite of a character has to share the same canvas. An upload of the wrong size is now refused, with both sizes named.
A new "Wrong canvas size" list shows accepted sprites that slipped through: three frames of the Galean soldier's south walk (frames 2 and 5 are one pixel short; frame 7 is about half size).
A walk frame can be requested again with one click. Accepting the redo retires the old frame and archives it rather than leaving two versions of the same frame.
Feeds are now driven by each entry's Tags: line instead of which project wrote it. Sprite Manager's Galean walk-cycle entry, tagged for GENERAL!, shows up in GENERAL!'s feed as well as its own — the same post, never a copy — with an "also: GENERAL!" chip explaining why it's there.
Feed pages moved to devlog/feed.html?project=<path>; every old game.html?slug= link still lands on the right feed and post.
Filter chips, stats and the landing page follow the same rule: one gate per feed, four today, with the two sources that have no logo yet showing their name.
An 8-slide brand and art reference deck for GENERAL!: overview, visual identity, sprite and concept reference, a current screenshot, logo treatment and key art.
Dark iron and gold: grounded and tactical, with the two armies' blue and red kept for the units.
Two comparisons added to GENERAL!'s brand deck, showing how far the game's art has come.
Unit portraits: the flat placeholder cards beside the new painted portraits, for three units across both armies — Galea swordsmen, Ardus heavy swordsmen in horned helms, and Ardus archers in wolf-pelt hoods.
The Galea swordsman at full height: the original small placeholder figure beside the painted character, side by side at the same scale.
A static devlog (devlog/) with one universal feed and one feed per game, both views over the same data/posts.json — a post is never duplicated, only filtered.
Posts are generated, not written: a read-only sync (scripts/sync_devlog.py) parses each registered game's own PROGRESS.md, one milestone entry per post, copies the screenshots that entry references, and keeps the milestone's original date (inline Date: line, else a hand-derived overlay, else first-seen — never the sync date).
Full backfill of CHEF! and GENERAL!'s shipped history, then an hourly sync that reports thin new posts to the Owner and Project Manager.
Studio and per-game branding (logos, badges, per-game accent theming), a filter-chip switcher on the universal feed, a stats strip, a screenshot lightbox, and a visible site version tag.
GENERAL!'s Galean human base now has a bare body, a fully equipped look (sword, shield, tabard, armor), and frames 1–7 of its 8-frame front-facing walk.
The painted portrait sheet's own frame border turned out to have inconsistent margin/thickness per character (some units' gear reached the frame, some didn't) -- a real source-art inconsistency, not a cropping bug. Fixed by cropping the painted frame out of all 12 portraits entirely and drawing one uniform gold/bronze gradient frame in code instead, guaranteeing identical thickness and position on every portrait regardless of the underlying art.
Replaced the hand-authored vector .unit-portrait HUD art (used in the left command rail's selected- formation dossier, added in Iteration 38) with painted portraits delivered by the Art Director role, one per unit type x faction (12 total), cover-fit cropped from a single delivered sheet.
Renamed the enemy faction from Ardus to Ardis throughout: the faction id, all display strings (HUD faction label, selection/inspection messages), and the CSS class that colors it. comparable to the pre-overhaul baseline in progress/138-wip-legacy-unit-cards-grid.png).
Removed the legacy procedural dirt road (a full pathfinding + cart-rut rendering system) as a visual inconsistency alongside the real tile art from Iteration 48, not requested to be replaced with anything.
Re-added a grid line as a deliberate, explicit design element (communicates the grid-based game, and doubles as visual cover for any remaining microscopic tile-art inconsistency) -- drawn correctly this time as one line per grid edge in raw device-pixel space rather than the per-cell strokeRect removed in Iteration 50, so it can't reintroduce that bug. Tuned from a dark line to a faint white glow, then brightened for visibility per direct feedback. gone and the grid line is crisp and consistent).
Same audit/backfill as Iteration 48. A months-spanning seam-artifact investigation, resolved across several real, distinct root causes rather than one fix:
Removed the entire legacy vector-drawn ambient clutter system (bones, mushroom clusters, sheep, cattle, vector fence/cart/field-stones) as redundant once the accent-object pool covered the same role.
Trimmed the accent-object pool from 146 back down to 30: the original 116-item batch was low-resolution (averaging ~72x84px native against a ~35-55px draw size) and at least one item had baked-in label text from its source sheet; removed entirely rather than salvaged, since a cross-referenced 30-item second batch was already independently verified clean.
Fixed tile seams across pond/forest/rock art via proportional ~7% overdraw, compensating for a genuine soft-alpha-fade at those textures' own edges.
Root-caused a second, structurally unrelated seam source after the first fix didn't fully resolve user reports: resize() computed tile position/size as raw floating-point division of the canvas's fractional CSS size, so terrain almost never landed on a whole device pixel, softening every boundary regardless of the art itself -- fixed by rounding to whole pixels.
Root-caused a third seam source, again found only after the first two fixes still didn't fully resolve it: an always-on per-cell grid strokeRect, whose "crisp 1px line" offset trick only works at devicePixelRatio=1, anti-aliasing into a blurry line at any other scale factor -- removed entirely except for the reachable-tile-highlight case.
Root-caused a fourth seam source, specific to grass (which uses most of the map): the grass tile source art itself has a genuine baked-in bright guide-line artifact in its outer 2-3px, left over from how the source sheet was cropped -- fixed by sampling an inset region of each source image instead of the whole thing. visible seams after all four fixes).
Added sparse, randomly-positioned decorative props (flowers, pebbles, logs, campfires, bones...) scattered beneath units across the battlefield -- purely decorative ground clutter, never blocking a formation from standing on a tile.
Grew from an initial 116-prop batch to 146 after a second 30-prop batch was folded into the same pool. to 30 -- see Iteration 50 -- after the original 116-item batch turned out to be low-resolution with at least one item carrying baked-in label text.)
Documentation gap found 2026-09-15 via an external devlog audit: this entire terrain-art pipeline shipped and has been live in src/presentation/battlefield-renderer.js since 2026-09-14, but was never promoted out of progress/'s wip-labeled screenshot sequence (092-125) into a numbered milestone here, despite being real, current, shipped rendering — not exploration. Backfilled now; see assets/sprites/README.md for the full blow-by-blow history of every attempt below.
Grass: the battlefield ground switched from a procedural vector texture to 12 seamless grass-tile images, deterministically varied per grid cell.
Buildings/Structures: the farmhouse and windmill landmarks switched from vector to real tile art.
Water: five full attempts before landing on the current approach. In order: a 4-bit autotile system, a 32-shape static-pond set, two rounds of explicitly-dimensioned pond sets (v1 irregular shapes, v2 higher-resolution irregular shapes) chasing reported blurriness, a v3 simpler all-rectangle set, a full revert to pure vector rendering when every image-based version still read as blurry, and finally the shipped fix: pond-tiles-v4, 6 seamless self-bordered 512x512-native textures genuinely high-resolution relative to an in-game tile (the actual root cause of every earlier version's blur was never having enough native resolution to downscale from). Pond generation itself was also reworked alongside this: fully random 0-6 tile count (no forced minimum), organic irregular shape via random-walk growth, each texture variant used at most once per pond.
Forest: six attempts. Vector, a 39-shape dimensioned multi-tile forest set, a revert to vector, a forest-tiles sheet, then the shipped forest-tiles-v2 (8 seamless self-bordered textures fixing the prior sheet's crop issues directly).
Rock: a parallel saga to forest -- vector, a 37-formation dimensioned multi-tile set (later a 51-shape revision), a revert to vector, then the shipped rock-tiles-v2 (12 seamless self-bordered textures), completing the image-based trio with water and forest. relabeling; shows the completed trio -- water, forest, and rock all on real tile art together).
Galean Swordsmen are the first unit drawn with painted sprite art instead of simple vector figures. Standing formations, facing forward or away from the camera, play an 8-frame breathing cycle, and alternate between two pose sets so twelve soldiers never move in lockstep.
Marching north, the army's usual advance direction, plays an 8-frame sprite walk cycle.
Feet sit on their ground shadows at every frame, the unit banner stays behind the soldiers, and sprite formations are spaced a little wider so neighbours don't clip into each other.
Other units, side-facing and south-marching Swordsmen, and formations locked in melee still use the vector figures for now.
The art is from image generation, cropped and cleaned up for the game.
Recorded after the fact (2026-09-17): this shipped on 2026-09-13 but was listed as unshipped exploration until now. The "before" is the real close-up taken during the change on 2026-09-13, in the rainy deployment lighting. The "after" close-up and the walk strip are fresh captures of the same unit in sunny Order Phase.
Imported nine additional owner-supplied selection recordings for archers, spearmen, swordsmen, and light cavalry.
Each unit class now chooses randomly between its original recording and its matching new variants, while rapid selections continue to overlap naturally.
A formation can disengage, follow a complete custom route, and re-enter the same melee from another border with one free strike and correct flank/rear facing.
Removed redundant order buttons, command instructions, and prototype battle controls; retained unit dossiers, statistics, planned orders, and a compact sound icon.
Added contextual archer bark priority so out-of-range targets use Advance to Range.
Added the deployment phase, draggable formation swapping, Heavy Swordsmen, Heavy Cavalry, literal visible troop counts, and faction-specific elite equipment.
New melee contacts now blend their formation centers onto the resolved adjacent tiles during the attack's settling phase.
Individual soldiers simultaneously fan from marching ranks into the shared-border engagement layout.
Existing engagements remain stationary and retain their already-spread combat formation.
No unique screenshot: this is a transition/animation smoothness change with no static-image signature (like audio, a still frame can't show smoothness), and its settled end-state — soldiers fanned along a shared border — is the same visual state already captured in progress/053-shipped-reconstructed-multi-border-melee.png (Iterations 26/32). Linked rather than reconstructed separately (2026-09-15).
Each new battle now generates five forest tiles and three impassable rock tiles at independent random positions (superseded 2026-09-14: mirroring/fairness was explicitly dropped per user correction — see WORKLOG.md).
Terrain regeneration occurs on Restart Battle while protecting deployment squares and water.
When an enemy leaves a tile during simultaneous execution, an attacker ordered into that tile takes the empty ground without combat.
If another formation occupies or claims the vacated tile, the attack advance is blocked instead of damaging the departed target.
No unique screenshot: this rule only changes what happens on a vacated tile during resolution, which renders as an ordinary formation quietly occupying an empty tile — visually identical to normal movement already shown in progress/050-shipped-reconstructed-drawn-route.png (Iteration 17). Linked rather than reconstructed separately (2026-09-15).
Replaced synthesized placeholder movement sounds with CC0 recorded metal, leather, and horse-trot audio; provenance is documented in assets/audio/SOURCES.md.
Heavy and light formations now play staggered four-step variations instead of one repetitive impact.
Increased the normal resolution duration from 2.2 to 4 seconds.
Hid planned path arrows as soon as execution begins so they do not linger over moving formations.
Extended right-click advance-to-range behavior to every melee formation: unreachable enemy targets now produce an advance-toward-target order rather than a rejection.
Rebuilt the double-clickable bundle and passed order-controller, resolver, full-battle, and bundle syntax tests.
GENERAL! September 18, 2026 Iteration 60
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CHEF!
Art Director
Sprite Manager
