The Alibi: art prompts beyond the Across the Table pack

78
Confidence that these six cover the art the game needs and are ranked right. What would raise it:
  • +8: you settle the Spare Key look conflict (covered arms or allow wrists), since A1 is written for covered arms.
  • +6: one A1 wardrobe layer is played in the app, to confirm a swap alone gives each case its own suspect.
  • +4: you confirm A2's paper kinds belong in the SVG pipeline and are not painted.
  • +4: a playtest shows whether A5's postures are wanted at all.

Written 2026-10-14, after the pack was imported (63a364f). Each prompt extends the approved seated scene, Image-Assets/The Alibi/across-the-table-production/previews/seated-perspective-review.png, and follows its rules: one camera, a registered 1024×1536 canvas, layers at identity, no text in the art, and no head, hands or skin.

Priority order: A1 and A2 are needed for the game to read correctly with a dozen cases. A3 and A4 improve it. A5 and A6 are optional.

The card: recommendation

Keep the flight to the table, drop the stop. Press commits at once. The card slides onto the steel over 0.75s, and the reply paper rises as it lands. The card stays on the table through the reply and clears at Next paper. Remove Hear reply and Take it back.

Why: the spec makes every round one-shot, and Press is the commitment. A take-back after pressing gives a second look at a decision the player already made, and it adds a tap to about four rounds a case, which comes to about fifty taps a season. The flight alone gives the press its weight. The pack's ASSEMBLY.md asks for the card to wait for the reply, and this would be the one place the app departs from the pack.

Let it stand moves no card: the paper goes and the reply comes up.

A1. Suspect wardrobe layer, one per case (needed)

Every case currently seats the same charcoal sweater. Each case's corpus record has a suspect.look line, so each case should get its own clothing layer. The app swaps it in place of alibi_scene_suspect.

Conflict to settle first. The Spare Key's look reads "Grey cardigan, sleeves pushed up, a tape measure looped around one wrist." Pushed-up sleeves and a wrist show skin, which the pack rules out. I recommend editing the look to keep the arms covered and moving the tape measure to a pocket. The prompt below assumes that edit.

Using the approved seated interview scene (seated-perspective-review.png) and the existing registered layer exports/scene/alibi_suspect.png as the geometry reference, paint a NEW transparent registered clothing layer on the same 1024x1536 canvas.

Keep EXACTLY: the camera, the torso's position, scale, shoulder line, posture and silhouette; the crop at the top edge; the torso ending at the table's far edge at y565; the bounds of roughly x104..919, y0..564; and the overhead light falling from above and slightly behind the camera.

Change ONLY the clothing to: a heathered mid-grey knit cardigan, buttoned at the middle, over a dark crew-neck top. The sleeves are down to the table edge. A cloth tape measure is half-coiled in the left patch pocket, with its end hanging a few centimetres out.

Rules: no head, neck, hands, wrists or any skin. No text, logos or numbers on the tape measure. Everything outside the clothing is fully transparent. Match the scene's painted-ink treatment, its grain, and its green-grey, low-key palette, so the clothing sits as darkly in the room as the charcoal sweater does.
Deliver: alibi_suspect_al014.png (1024x1536 RGBA) and a contact proof composited over exports/scene/alibi_room.png and exports/scene/alibi_table.png.

Template for later cases. Replace the bracketed part with the case's look, written with the arms covered:

[Same as above, replacing the "Change ONLY the clothing to:" sentence with]
Change ONLY the clothing to: <case look, clothing only, sleeves to the table edge>.
Deliver: alibi_suspect_<case id lowercase>.png

A2. Five blank paper kinds (needed)

The corpus has five kinds of paper (memo, log, slip, ledger, statement). The pack has one evidence paper, so every document now looks the same. These are vector components in the pack's existing SVG pipeline (sources/build_components.py), not imagegen.

Add five blank paper components to the Across the Table pack's SVG component set, built the same way as alibi_paper_evidence (sources/alibi_paper_evidence.svg): the same cream stock family, the same slight hand-placed skew, transparent margins, and exports at @1x/@2x/@3x.

Hard rule for every kind: the centre region between the cap insets is uniform paper texture, with no ruling, holes or marks, because the app stretches it to fit text. Every distinguishing feature lives inside the cap insets listed below. No words, numbers or labels anywhere; the app draws all text.

1. alibi_paper_memo: 358x294. Thin typing paper, slightly cooler white. A plain unprinted letterhead band at the top: a single double rule, 34pt down. Cap insets 44, 14, 14, 14 (top, right, bottom, left).
2. alibi_paper_log: 358x294. Continuous-form printout: pale green tint, tractor-feed holes in both side margins, and a perforated top edge. Cap insets 16, 26, 16, 26.
3. alibi_paper_slip: 300x200. Small card-stock slip with rounded corners and a torn top edge, warmer and heavier than the memo. Cap insets 18, 14, 14, 14.
4. alibi_paper_ledger: 358x294. Ledger stock with a red double rule down the left margin and a blue header rule. No column grid in the centre. Cap insets 30, 14, 14, 40.
5. alibi_paper_statement: 358x294. Witness statement form: a heavier border rule inset 8pt on all sides, and a blank signature line along the bottom margin. Cap insets 14, 14, 40, 14.

Add each to manifest.json components with logical_size, cap_insets and exports, matching the existing entries, and add a state proof showing all five on the table at 390x844.

A3. Desk tile, game_alibi (improves)

The Desk row still uses the 256px placeholder alibi_case_folder. Prime Suspect's tile is game_prime_suspect, 512×512.

A 512x512 square game tile for "The Alibi", painted in the same treatment as the approved seated interview scene (seated-perspective-review.png; attach it), shown at 44pt with rounded corners on the app's Desk.

Composition: a close crop of the steel interview table, seen from the same seated camera. The cassette recorder sits at lower right, its red control the one warm accent. The edge of a single blank cream paper lies at lower left, and the dark sleeve of the suspect's sweater shows at the top edge beyond the table.
It must read at 44pt: high contrast between the steel and the dark sleeve, one focal object (the recorder), and nothing finer than about 8px at 512.
No text, numbers, people, faces, hands or skin. Opaque, no transparency.
Deliver: game_alibi.png (512x512).

A4. The case folder on the table (improves)

A closed manila case folder for the opening (before Sit down) and for Case closed, so the case arrives and leaves as an object on the table.

Using the approved seated scene and its registered canvas (1024x1536), paint ONE closed manila case folder lying flat on the steel table as a transparent registered layer, plus its cast shadow as a separate layer.

Placement: centred on scene pixel [512, 890] (the pack's Press target), about 430px wide, rotated about 4 degrees counter-clockwise. Same seated perspective as the recorder and ashtray; do not re-project them or change the camera.
The folder: worn manila, a plain blank tab at the top right, a faint coffee ring, and soft creases. The tab has NO lettering; the app draws the case ID.
Rules: no text, stamps with words, or numbers. The shadow uses the same overhead light and softness as exports/alibi_contact_shadows.png.
Deliver: alibi_folder.png and alibi_folder_shadow.png (both 1024x1536 RGBA), and a proof over the opening scene.

A5. Suspect posture variants (optional)

For reactions without a face: settled (the current posture), leaning back after a retort, and shoulders dropped when a line breaks. This multiplies A1 by three for every case, so do it only once A1 exists and the plain swap feels flat in play.

From alibi_suspect_<case>.png, paint two more registered transparent variants on the same 1024x1536 canvas, keeping the same clothing, crop and table edge at y565:
- _back: the torso leans back about 6 degrees, the shoulders slightly squared, and the arms folded so only the sleeves show.
- _drop: the shoulders dropped and rounded forward, and the sleeves resting heavier on the table edge.
Same rules as A1: no head, neck, hands or skin, and no text. The silhouettes must stay inside x90..934 so the room plate covers every frame.

A6. Low-credibility light wash (optional)

A colder wash, crossfaded in when credibility falls below 60, so the room tightens as the player overreaches.

A variant of exports/alibi_light_wash@1x/2x/3x (390x585 logical, normal blend, transparent): the same overhead source, but colder (blue-grey), with harder falloff toward the corners and a slightly brighter hotspot on the table centre. It must stay subtle: at 100% opacity over the scene, live text on the cream paper keeps its contrast. Deliver: alibi_light_wash_cold@1x/2x/3x.png.

Integration notes

78
Confidence that these six cover the art the game needs and are ranked right. What would raise it:
  • +8: you settle the Spare Key look conflict (covered arms or allow wrists), since A1 is written for covered arms.
  • +6: one A1 wardrobe layer is played in the app, to confirm a swap alone gives each case its own suspect.
  • +4: you confirm A2's paper kinds belong in the SVG pipeline and are not painted.
  • +4: a playtest shows whether A5's postures are wanted at all.