# Spellbound Relics 1.6 — Living Companions

Mei, Abby and Luma now have 24 registered full-body pose frames. Their approved faces, clothing, fur, wings and colors were used as identity references. All delivered frames retain transparent edges without sticker borders.

## What changes in play

- Mei has four walking poses and separate standing, reach-and-cast, discovery and celebration poses.
- Abby has four walking poses plus alert standing, crouch/takeoff, extended leap and joyful seated poses. A brief crouched landing follows a leap.
- Luma has four flight/wing poses plus calm hovering, casting, whispering and celebration poses.
- Walking and flying frames follow the panorama's travel events. Spell actions, requests for help and exploration select reactions. Opening the gate, haven or lantern nest triggers shared celebration.
- Heads and bodies are registered horizontally and standing feet share a baseline, so changing a pose does not slide the entire sprite around. The extended jump canvas preserves Abby's tail and outstretched paws.
- Carried lanterns and flowers stay within Mei's actor transform, with attachment positions selected by her pose.
- When Mei carries both items, the lantern stays in her hand and the flower is secured beside her backpack, keeping the two sprites separate. A flower carried on its own still uses her hand. Existing saves receive the same presentation fix.
- Reduced motion uses still event poses with no ambient frame loop or wing cycle. Hidden pages stop the animation clock. Saved world state and language rules retain their prior identities and behavior.

These are frame-based character animations, not a skeletal animation rig or a full set of directional movement animations.

## Saved artwork and prompts

The built-in image-generation tool produced six transparent master sheets. The walk sheets received focused revisions for stride contrast and facing direction. No CLI image-generation fallback was used.

- `assets/characters-v16/mei-walk-sheet.webp` and `mei-actions-sheet.webp`
- `assets/characters-v16/abby-walk-sheet.webp` and `abby-actions-sheet.webp`
- `assets/characters-v16/luma-flight-sheet.webp` and `luma-actions-sheet.webp`
- Each sheet has four extracted frames, with the same stem followed by `-0.webp` through `-3.webp` instead of `-sheet.webp`.
- [Complete initial and revision prompts](assets/characters-v16/generation-prompts.json)
- [Frame registration data](assets/characters-v16/frame-registration.json)
- [Animated pose preview](assets/characters-v16/pose-preview.gif), assembled from the actual frames; this is an artwork preview rather than a gameplay recording.

Frame extraction, uniform sizing, anchor registration and WebP encoding are mechanical asset preparation. The master sheets remain available. `tools/pack-character-frames.py` can repeat registration from those sheets with Pillow, NumPy and SciPy installed.

## Verification

- 83 character checks cover travel cycles, takeoff, landing, discovery, whispering, celebration, action expiry, still poses and asset availability.
- All 24 frames decode, retain alpha transparency and match their registration metadata; no full-body frame extends beyond its canvas.
- Existing expansion, panorama, pilot, world-state and syntax suites pass.
- Desktop browser checks verified loaded frame changes during travel, a leap and return to standing, travel skip, carried lantern placement, discovery and whispering poses, three-character celebration, and calm-mode immediate travel with still poses.
- Physical phone and Safari verification remain pending. Artwork and animation improvements do not establish learner engagement or language transfer gains.