Kingpin's Room — art production specification

Status: drafted 2026-10-13 by Claude for Sarah's review; expanded the same day to a single two-wave production run. Replaces the art direction in spec-v2 §1.2 (Kingpin Showdown) and the concept mockup Sarah supplied on 2026-10-13. That mockup is a narrative reference only; its style is not approved.

This spec commissions every painted asset for Kingpin's Room in one handoff, delivered in two waves with a review between them (section 8). The app draws every number, name, question, chip count and verdict. The painter makes the room, its chairs, six family bosses, the Kingpin, the close views for each hand, the reactions, and four small sprites.

1. The game the art serves

The back room of a supper club after hours. One long table. A boss from each con family sits along its sides, and the Kingpin, Calico, sits at the head.

• Each hand is a real bank question in which one family's trap is the live wrong answer. That family's boss plays the hand, seen close across the table.
• Beat a boss and they rise and leave; their chair stays pushed back for the rest of the run. Lose and they stay seated and play again later.
• Every hand a boss wins leaves a chip in front of their seat. Chips stay after the boss leaves, so at the end of a run the table shows which families cost you the most.
• When every boss has left, Calico plays. Her question carries traps from more than one family, weighted to the families with the most chips. Her hand is the only one with a draining pot, which empties on a clock. She either concedes or wins.

The art therefore needs a room assembled from layers: chairs that can be tucked in or pushed back, bosses who can each be removed independently, a Kingpin who is plainly in charge, close views for every hand, and clear places on the table for chips and name cards.

2. Sources of truth

3. The room

The private back room of a supper club, owned by Calico. The club is closed for the night. The room is used for business, not for gambling.

Lighting. Three practical sources, with no hanging lamp anywhere:

• a pair of brass wall sconces on the back wall, flanking the head chair, which light her from behind and give the far end of the table its warmth;
• the bar light spilling through the door on the left wall, which lays a warm wedge across the floor and the near-left corner of the table;
• a dim cool fill for everything else.

The table surface takes the light as a matte waxed sheen with soft highlights, never a mirror or a gold glare. Shadows fall consistently away from the sconces and the door.

Mood. Quiet, private and patient. Business happens here, and she is never in a hurry.

Never in a plate. People, side chairs, text or numbers, chips, cards, name cards, a pendant or hanging lamp of any kind, green felt, wet or glossy floors, bloom, neon, cigarette smoke filling the room, extra doors. The plate with all six tucked chairs laid over it must look complete and attractive.

4. Camera and composition

The room view (kingpin_room) is seen from the foot of the table, standing, eye height about 1.55 m, centred on the table's long axis and angled slightly down. The table recedes to the head chair. The player stands where the last empty seat would be.

• Portrait 2:3. Everything is generated at 1024 × 1536 (the tool's maximum) until the assembly review passes (Sarah, 2026-10-13). Then kingpin_room and every layer registered to it are upscaled by exactly 1.5× to 1536 × 2304, as one set by one method, and the assembly review is re-run on the upscaled set. The manifest records each file's native 1024 × 1536 size and the upscale method; an upscaled file is never described as native. The two close plates and their layers are 1024 × 1536 (Sarah, 2026-10-13): the question paper covers more than half of each, and their faces are large, so the roughly 1.65× enlargement on a phone does not show. Record the true native resolution in the manifest. An enlarged image is not a master.
• The head chair sits on the centre line. Her head, once seated, falls at about 27–31% of plate height.
• All six side chairs are in frame, facing the table and on its perspective. On the full-table plate Sarah chose (2026-10-13) the seats' tabletop rows fall at about 38%, 44% and 56% of plate height, and the camera stands about 2.0 m up. The exact targets are in kingpin/wave1-revisions.md.
• Quiet bands. The top 8% carries the header; keep it to dim ceiling and wall. The bottom 22% is the near end of the table and the floor, which carry the app's pot, controls and transitions; keep it to bare table and shadow.

See kingpin/room-composition.svg for the approximate layout.

The two close views are used during hands, with the question paper covering their lower half:

All three plates show the same room: the same wood, wallpaper, chairs, sconces and light.

5. Seats and characters

Each seat belongs to one family for good, so the table reads the same every run.

The Squint is painted now so the whole table shares one finish and one light. He stays out of play, and R1 shows its tucked empty chair, until figure-family questions exist in the banks. The seat order is a proposal; changing it changes only which layers are painted at which chair.

5.1 The bosses at the table

Places are inked; people are painted. This is the app's existing split: environments (The Raid's locations, this room) use the graphic-novel noir finish with ink contours, and people (the 28 con portraits, Falconer) use the soft painted finish with no ink outlines. Each boss keeps the roster portrait's finish, face, hair, age, build and wardrobe colours, and takes the room's light, shadows and perspective so they sit in it. A player who knows the Lineup must recognise each boss at a glance at phone size. That recognition test is an acceptance gate (section 10).

Each boss has three registered layers on kingpin_room, each a full-canvas transparent PNG with its own shadow layer (multiply):

5.2 What the seats show

A pushed-back chair means someone left. A tucked chair means nobody sat there. The two must be told apart at a glance at phone size.

5.3 The Kingpin: Calico

Calico. A new character, not one of the 28 cons. She has no family and no habit. She does not make mistakes; other people make them for her. She owns the club. Her name is a cat's, set against the birds (Peregrine, Falconer, Tern): calico cats are almost all female, and a calico coat is a patchwork, as her table and her hand are. Copy calls her Calico or the Kingpin.

• Age and build: a woman in her late sixties to early seventies. Upright and solid; she does not lean on anything.
• Face and hair: strong brows, a direct and unhurried gaze, the lines of someone who has laughed and calculated in roughly equal measure. Silver-white hair set in a low chignon.
• Wardrobe: a tailored jacket in deep tobacco-brown wool over a cream silk blouse. One piece of jewellery: a brass brooch at the lapel. No furs, no sunglasses, no cigarette holder, no visible weapons.
• At the table: seated square to the table, forearms resting on it, hands loosely clasped, not steepled. A closed ledger and a fountain pen lie at her right hand, and a glass of water at her left.
• Register: amused, patient, unbothered. She expects to win and does not need you to know it. Avoid every stock version of the role: the glamorous femme fatale, the cartoon gangster, the sweet grandmother and the witch.
• Distinct from the table. Her silhouette, colouring and pose must not echo any boss. In particular she must not read as an older Contrarian (dark hair, black clothing) or as a female Squint (white hair is shared, so her chignon, brows and wardrobe must carry the difference).

Her assets:

The three close layers must register to one another: her chair, her shoulders' position and the table objects stay put except where the pose changes, so the app can cross-fade between them.

6. Chairs, table zones and sprites

6.1 Side chairs

Each of the six seats has two chair layers registered to kingpin_room, each a full-canvas transparent PNG with its own shadow layer:

The chairs are armless, so no chair part passes in front of a seated boss. If one does in the painting, deliver an occluder mask for that seat.

6.2 Table zones

Every side seat has two zones on the table directly in front of it, which the plate and every chair and character layer keep clear:

• Name card zone: about 18 cm of tabletop at the table's edge, centred on the chair. The app places a blank folded name card here and prints the family name on it.
• Chip zone: about 20 cm of tabletop just inboard of the name card. The app stacks the chips that boss has won from you.

6.3 Sprites

Each sprite is transparent, seen from the room plate's camera angle at a mid-table seat:

The Wager's chips are top-down and labelled, so they are not reused here.

Layer order on the room view. Plate, chair shadows, chairs, character shadows, characters, name cards, chips, then the app's overlays and UI.

Layer order on the close views. Plate, character shadow, character, question paper, then the app's overlays and UI.

7. Question paper

kingpin_paper: the surface the question and answer choices sit on during every hand, laid over the lower half of both close plates.

• Heavy cream club card stock, faintly toothed, with a thin blind-debossed border inset from the edge and softly worn corners. It should read as stationery from her desk, distinct from the Wager's paper.
• No lettering, no ruled lines, no logo, no cat motif. The app sets all text on it, and reading must stay effortless.
• Transparent outside the card's edge, with a soft contact shadow baked into the alpha so it sits on the table.
• About 1350 × 1165 native, like the Wager's paper. Built for nine-slice stretching: keep all edge and corner character within about 110 px of the border and keep the middle plain and even. Record the cap insets in the manifest.

8. Process: one handoff, two waves

The whole commission is handed off at once. The painter stops once, after Wave 1, for Sarah's review. Every layer in Wave 2 is registered to plates approved in Wave 1, so a change to a plate after Wave 2 starts would invalidate everything painted on it.

Wave 1: the room and the style proof

1. kingpin_room, plus all six chair_<seat>_tucked layers, since the room cannot be judged without its chairs.
2. boss_irrel_seated (the Professor at R2) and calico_seated.
3. boss_close_plate with boss_irrel_close, and kingpin_close_plate with calico_close.
4. The plate-independent pieces: calico_portrait, chip, name_card, kingpin_paper.
5. Run the recognition test (section 10) on the Professor, in the room and close up.

Revisions. Corrections from the first Wave 1 review are in kingpin/wave1-revisions.md.

Review. Sarah approves the room, the three plates, the style of the Professor and Calico, and the plate-independent pieces. Nothing in Wave 2 starts until she does.

Wave 1 accepted (Sarah, 2026-10-13), including all six seated bosses, which Wave 1 delivered early. Wave 2 starts from the accepted layered set and repaints both close plates to match the room; see kingpin/wave2-brief.md.

Wave 2: everything else

1. _rising for all six bosses, and _close for the five other than the Professor. (Their _seated layers arrived in Wave 1.)
2. All six chair_<seat>_pushed layers.
3. calico_close_concede and calico_close_win.
4. Fill anchors.json.
5. Assembly review. Composite, with placeholder app UI, at phone size: a full table; a mid-run table (two bosses gone with pushed chairs, chips at three seats, R1 tucked); an end-of-run table (all bosses gone, chips everywhere); one boss hand with the paper; Calico's hand with the paper; and her concede and win frames.

9. Deliverables

Into Image-Assets/Kingpins-Room/. Every figure and chair layer is a full-canvas transparent PNG with a matching <name>.shadow.png.

Also:

• anchors.json: for each seat (L1–L3, R1–R3), the pixel position on kingpin_room of the name-card anchor and the chip anchor, plus the scale at which the 1024 px sprites sit at that seat.
• source/: layered source files if the tool produces them. If it does not, say so in the manifest.
• manifest.json: every file with dimensions, native resolution, alpha, byte size and SHA-256, plus the paper's cap insets. Same shape as The Raid's.
• specs/prompts.json if generated: exact prompts and the references used for each image.
• review/: contact sheets for each wave, each boss (seated, rising and close) beside their roster portrait, the seat states of section 5.2 side by side, the assembly composites of section 8, and a phone-size preview of each plate at 390 pt wide.

Not commissioned: an entry or title screen, and verdict stamps. The old Kingpin Showdown stamps (Image-Assets/Dead to Rights*, Case Dismissed*) and the retired bestiary art stay where they are and are not used.

10. Acceptance

Recognition. Show each boss at phone size, in the room and close up, beside the six roster portraits, shuffled. Each is matched to the right portrait on sight. A boss who can be mistaken for another fails.

Registration and reuse. Every seated boss sits in the chair position of that seat's tucked chair with no jump when one replaces the other. Every rising frame sits on the seat it leaves, and its chair matches the pushed-back chair that follows. Swapping any seat between its states leaves no seams, halos, orphaned shadows or missing furniture. Calico's three close layers cross-fade without anything but the pose moving.

Seat states. At phone size, a tucked chair and a pushed-back chair are told apart at a glance, and an occupied seat is never mistaken for either.

Zones. No chair, figure, shadow, hand or held object enters a name-card or chip zone. Name cards and chips placed at every anchor sit on the tabletop at the right scale and perspective.

Hierarchy. At phone size, with all six bosses and Calico present, Calico is the first person the eye finds.

Consistency. The three plates show the same room: wood, wallpaper, chairs, sconces, sideboard and light agree. Calico's face, hair and wardrobe agree across all four of her room-style layers and, allowing for the change of style, calico_portrait. Each boss's three layers agree with one another.

Paper. Body text and four answer choices set on kingpin_paper at the app's sizes read without effort on both close plates. Stretched to the tallest likely question, the paper keeps its corners and border intact.

Distinctness. Side by side with the Wager's table, the two rooms cannot be confused: no felt, a different table shape, different wall treatment and different light. The two games' papers cannot be confused either.

Style. ART_DIRECTION's visual QA checklist, every item recorded, for each plate. No hanging lamp. A matte table and floor. No unrequested additions.

Phone. At 390 pt width, every seat's state reads at a glance, and the quiet bands hold the header and the pot without fighting the art.

11. Open items

• Seat order (section 5) is Claude's proposal.
• The Squint's appearance in play waits on figure-family questions in the banks. With him, the bosses are two women and four men; Calico makes the table three and four.
• The plates' display size in the app is not fixed. The 2:3 plates and the quiet bands cover the likely layouts; the first integration confirms them.