worldbuilding & aesthetic

Story/0BattleRoyale.fountain

@@ -12,6 +12,16 @@ RULES OF THE ROOM:
 - Stakes are public ("prove your worth"), but the REAL stakes are the skekSil moment: does he choose devotion over self-preservation when it costs him?
 - Adrian reads as steady, seasoned, amused. His being mod "since before Azure" is a
   spoken fact, not a dig.
+
+PRODUCTION DESIGN: read `Story/Worldbuilding.md` BEFORE storyboarding.
+Quick version:
+- The court is **Catmull-Baroque passionately murdering Brutae** — raw concrete
+  substrate, low-poly gilded procedural ornament bolted/carved on top, visible
+  seams, amber rim on ornament / cool fill on concrete.
+- Characters follow the **Gumball Rule** — each in their native render language
+  (painterly dragon, JoJo-ink Azure, chibi Starboy, cel-silhouette Rooster,
+  painted chimera Agate, cartoon-steampunk Ubear, grounded-2D Adrian). Do not
+  homogenize. Do not lampshade the clash.
 */
 
 FADE IN:

Story/Worldbuilding.md

@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+# Worldbuilding — StreamUniverse / BattleRoyale
+
+Production-facing outline for set design, props, costume-adjacent dressing, and background art. Applies across the whole StreamUniverse continuity; BattleRoyale is the first film rendered under these rules.
+
+**Canon anchor:** Rain's origin book series is **Legend**. Use it as the genre compass — post-medieval modernizing world, not high-fantasy escapism, not sci-fi. StreamUniverse is Legend-adjacent in tone and technology.
+
+---
+
+## 1. The era in one sentence
+
+A post-medieval world in which **magic, mathematics, and primitive computer systems have entered a creative union** — and that union is rebuilding the culture's material world from the ground up.
+
+Nobody is modern. Nobody is medieval. Everyone is *in the middle of becoming something new*.
+
+---
+
+## 2. The dominant aesthetic: **Catmull-Baroque**
+
+The draconian cultural memory idolizes the Baroque — ornate, romantic, passionate furniture and architecture. That longing never went away. But the manufacturing stack has changed: **every form must now be mathematically constructable from first principles**, on primitive machines, with limited polygon budget.
+
+The result is a hybrid:
+
+> **"The 1600s copulated with 1980s–90s primitive computer graphics for the manufacturing of furniture and architecture."**
+
+Call it **Catmull-Baroque** — named after subdivision-surface math (Catmull-Clark, Catmull-Rom) that allows procedurally smooth curls from low-poly cages. It is **baroque-lite** because baroque *feels like home*. It is **procedural** because that's what the tech allows.
+
+### Visual rules
+
+- **Subdivision-ornament.** Fleur-de-lis, scrollwork, cabochons, cartouches — all reduced to **low-poly cages with smoothed topology** that read as baroque at a glance, reveal polygon count up close.
+- **Discrete meshes.** Every ornament is a distinct, named, reusable asset. The MOTD frame is a textbook example: ornate, gilded, clearly its own object, clearly not hand-carved-in-place.
+- **Limited palette per object.** Gold/amber/wood-grain on one piece; next piece gets a different triplet. No continuous rich surfaces — each object is a mesh with per-face materials.
+- **Gilded lighting, low-poly silhouette.** Amber and topaz cabochons glint like polished gemstones; the underlying form is angular enough that, rim-lit, you can see the polygon edges.
+- **Where the machine shows through, leave it.** Visible wireframes carved into stone, exposed parametric curves on balustrades, procedural repeats that quantize instead of flow — these are **features, not mistakes**. The culture *likes* the tell.
+
+### Do / Don't
+
+- **Do:** gold leaf on low-poly curl; ornament as discrete placeable asset; subdivision cages visible on close inspection.
+- **Don't:** photoreal baroque detail (wrong era); smooth hand-carved continuity (not how they build); fully modern sleekness (wrong vibe).
+
+---
+
+## 3. The Court specifically — Catmull-Baroque vs Brutae
+
+The Colosseum and the broader court have **one additional layer**: their **material substrate is raw concrete**. Slabs, poured forms, cold masses, unornamented volume.
+
+On top of that substrate, **Catmull-Baroque is passionately murdering Brutae.**
+
+- **Brutae:** the dying brutalism. Raw-concrete architecture that once sufficed — plain slabs, unadorned columns, functional planes. It is losing.
+- **Catmull-Baroque** is being **carved, bolted, gilded, and overlaid onto** every brutalist surface it can reach. Procedural fleur-de-lis sunk into poured concrete. Low-poly scrollwork pinned to slab walls. Gilded cartouches nailed over blast-form seams. Chat-scroll runes chiseled into the concrete friezes of the upper tiers.
+- **The clash is intentional and violent.** It should feel like one era is actively *killing* another in the same frame. A concrete column with a gold Catmull-Clark capital bolted onto it. A brutalist archway stuffed with subdivided cabochons. The court does not hide the seams.
+
+### Practical effect on court shots
+
+- **Material:** raw concrete everywhere the ornament isn't.
+- **Ornament:** everywhere the concrete lets it land.
+- **Lighting:** warm rim (gold/amber) on ornament; cool fill (grey/blue) on raw concrete. The lighting itself enforces the clash.
+- **Mood:** a harsh, beautiful cathedral of a construction site that has been won by the decorators and not yet cleaned up after.
+
+---
+
+## 4. The character-style cocktail — the Gumball Rule
+
+Characters come from **different native universes** and **render in different native styles**. Do not homogenize them. Do not pick one rendering pipeline. The tonal reference is **The Amazing World of Gumball**: 2D characters, 3D characters, photo-real backgrounds, and puppet characters all coexist in the same frame, without comment, and the show is funnier and *more itself* for it.
+
+### Per-character rendering cast (BR roster)
+
+- **Raincloud** — adult anthro dragon, painterly / clean-cartoon hybrid (matches his refs: flat-color PFP crop + painted vtuber still both canonical).
+- **Azure** — JoJo-stylized anime figure, bold-ink Killer Queen silhouette, with the literal-object John Cena tee as a physical-prop gag.
+- **Ubear** — cartoon-mascot bear with a steampunk-rendered mechanical arm (two render languages on one body; leave the seam visible).
+- **Starboy** — chibi proportions, brighter saturation, anime-idol shading.
+- **NotoriousRooster** — silhouette-first Disney-Robin-Hood-era hand-drawn cel feel, beak-in-a-hood, everything else absent.
+- **Agate** — painted chimera, softer edges, semi-realistic feathering.
+- **Adrian** — grounded 2D character-art, closest to a "normal" cartoon human; the anchor against which the stylistic clash reads.
+
+### Gumball Rule do / don't
+
+- **Do:** keep each character in their own render language, on their own shading logic, even when they share a frame. Let their edge-treatments disagree.
+- **Do:** stage them together as if nobody has noticed. No character ever reacts to another character being "differently drawn." That is the joke, and it is never spoken.
+- **Don't:** pick a unifying filter or grade in post that smooths the cast into one look. The clash is the point.
+- **Don't:** write dialogue that lampshades the stylistic difference. Not once.
+
+---
+
+## 5. How the three layers interact in a shot
+
+Any given shot in BR is a three-way collision:
+
+1. **Brutae** (raw concrete substrate — passive, losing).
+2. **Catmull-Baroque** (low-poly gilded ornament — active, winning, murdering Brutae).
+3. **The character cocktail** (each figure in their native rendering language — indifferent to both of the above).
+
+Composition tip: **do not try to reconcile the three.** The frame should feel slightly insane, and it should feel like home anyway. That is the StreamUniverse.
+
+---
+
+## 6. Quick glossary for the team
+
+- **Catmull-Baroque** — dominant aesthetic. Procedurally-built neo-baroque ornament, subdivision-surface ornament, low-poly curls, per-object materials, amber/gold lighting.
+- **Brutae** — the dying brutalism. Raw concrete. Losing ground.
+- **The Gumball Rule** — characters render in their native styles and never comment on the difference.
+- **Legend-compass** — when in doubt about tone, ask "would this fit in the *Legend* book series?" If no, rework.