A stale/incomplete Godot import cache made preload() of the sprite
textures fail at COMPILE time, killing the actor scripts entirely —
no movement, no draw, near-black screen (reported on the Mac editor
after pull). Switching preload -> runtime load() degrades a missing
texture to an invisible sprite instead of a dead script; movement and
logic always survive. Committed state was verified sound via fresh
clone (imports + main scene + smoke all clean); this hardens against
the cross-machine cache-lag failure mode. Smoke 3/3 green.
Operator asked for placeholder sprites for playtest feel. Actors now
render the hand-authored pixel maps (tools/aseprite/maps -> assets/
sprites_ph, committed) via code-created Sprite2D — no scene texture
UIDs to hand-author. Dynamic feedback preserved: grunt/burster heat
tint + hit flash drive sprite.modulate, heat-aura ring stays a _draw
overlay; salvage fade drives modulate.a. Arena floor/walls, HUD, and
FX stay primitives. CLAUDE.md greybox-art note updated (was 'no
sprites'); real art (watercolor scenery + pixel sprites) still later.
Smoke gate 3/3 green on nh3-dev headless 4.7.1.
Belt (canon: charges are the cost, the belt is the ammo): cards are
CARD_TYPES indices consumed on play, next slides into the 2-slot hand;
belt cap 8; HUD shows hand glyphs + upcoming-card ticks. Card pool
grows to 4: SHOCKWAVE, HEATWAVE, DASH (impulse along held movement
direction — aimable while frozen, no aim input), IGNITE (nearest-enemy
heat spike past threshold). Rooms: spawn-budget waves (base 8 +4/room,
4 rooms/run); clear -> interstitial fork (CARD vs SCRAP +8) -> CARD
opens a 3-option draft + scrap decline (+4) -> next room; final clear
or mech destruction -> tally overlay (rooms/kills/scrap/chem) with
relaunch on 1. Interstitial owns the pause while active; the hand
yields input and time authority to it. Mech death now signals the run
manager instead of hard-reloading.
Chain semantics (same-tag surge / cross-tag chemistry trigger)
deliberately deferred to M3.
Smoke gate: belt consumption white-boxed in the card phase, _until
moved to process_frame (physics awaits deadlock under pause), run
phase covers clear->fork->draft->belt growth->room advance->tally.
3/3 green on nh3-dev headless 4.7.1.
vh