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Gravity & Grit — colour scheme & style guide

A practical reference for keeping the game, its store pages, and any marketing in one consistent visual identity. This grounds the mood described in concept-art-prompts.md into concrete hex values and rules, and reconciles it with the colours already shipping in src/style.css and public/manifest.webmanifest.

Concept art referenced throughout this doc lives in images/concept-art/; itch.io-ready crops live in images/itch-io/ — see Asset inventory at the bottom.

Colour palette

Sampled from the concept art (gritstone rock, heather moorland, the logo lockup) and reconciled with the colours already in the codebase, so the palette below is what's actually in use, not an aspirational alternative.

Swatch Name Hex Used for
🟪 Heather Charcoal #2A2433 Dark backgrounds — already the theme_color/og-adjacent purple-charcoal in index.html and manifest.webmanifest (#3d2f56 is the lighter sibling below)
🟪 Heather Purple #3D2F56 Existing theme-color meta / manifest theme_color. Secondary panel backgrounds, "Grit" accent letterforms
🟧 Bracken Orange #C6702F Primary accent — logo "Gravity" letterforms, links, CTAs
🟫 Gritstone Grey #8A8478 Rock texture, neutral UI chrome, secondary text on dark
Ink / Outline #241F26 Logo bevels/outlines, darkest UI chrome
🟩 Moss Green #5E7A3F Muted foliage accent, dark-mode success/positive state
🟩 Bracken Green (bright) #6CC24A Existing #stamina-bar-fill colour — keep as the one bright HUD green
🟦 Slate Blue (sky) #4C5A72 Concept-art stormy sky; use for moody backgrounds, loading screens
🟨 Horizon Gold #E0A458 Warm rim-light accent, hover/highlight states
Parchment #EDE6DC Body text on dark backgrounds, waymarker-post white

In-game HUD colours (src/style.css) are intentionally brighter/more saturated than the moody marketing palette above, because they need to read at a glance over a moving 3D scene: brake amber rgba(200,150,20), pedal green rgba(40,160,70), jump red rgba(180,40,40), warning #ffd166, error #ff6b6b. Don't flatten these into the marketing palette — they're a separate functional palette and already tuned for legibility. The in-game sky (#87ceeb, a bright cartoon blue) is also a deliberately different, more legible register than the concept art's stormy slate-blue-to-gold sky — treat that as a placeholder worth revisiting once real terrain art lands, not a bug.

Typography

  • Logo/display: a bold, chunky, slightly weathered display face — see logo-mark-transparent.png. Don't substitute a clean geometric sans for the logo itself; the weathering/bevel is part of the brand.
  • Subtitle/UI headings: a narrower condensed sans-serif (stencil/waymarker feel) — see "PEAK DISTRICT DOWNHILL" in the lockups.
  • Body/UI text: the game itself uses system-ui, sans-serif (src/style.css) — keep UI text plain and legible; save the weathered/condensed treatment for logo and headings only.

Logo usage

  • logo-mark-transparent.png is the primary and only logo asset (real alpha transparency — it was regenerated from the source Gemini output, which only looked transparent via a painted-on checkerboard rather than an actual alpha channel). Use this version for any compositing work; don't reuse the original checkerboard PNG. The stone-carved lockup and woodcut-badge alternates generated alongside it were dropped in favour of this mark's cleaner, more consistent style.
  • Maintain clear space around the mark roughly equal to the height of the "G" in "GRAVITY"; don't crop the baseline scuff/dirt texture.

Imagery style

See the art direction paragraph in concept-art-prompts.md for the full brief. In short: stylised cel-shaded 3D-illustration, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater/SSX energy meets British countryside travel poster, low raking late-afternoon light, real Yorkshire/Derbyshire gritstone moorland detail (dry-stone walls, heather, bracken, weathered millstone grit). Gritty and weather-beaten, not cute or soft.

itch.io page setup

The itch.io edit-game page (Style tab) exposes BG/BG2/Text/Link colours, a font picker, and Banner/Background/Embed BG image uploads. Recommended values, matching the palette above:

Field Value Notes
BG #2A2433 Heather Charcoal
BG2 #3D2F56 Heather Purple — one step lighter, for content panels
Text #EDE6DC Parchment — readable on the dark BG/BG2 above
Link #C6702F Bracken Orange
Font Lato, size Large Confirmed available in itch's picker; try Oswald or Montserrat first if offered — either reads closer to the logo's condensed-stencil subtitle style
Banner (needs regenerating) Previous crop was sourced from the now-removed stone-carved lockup; replace with a banner built around logo-mark-transparent.png instead. Itch's max display width is 960px, height <400px
Background images/itch-io/page-background-1920x1080.png Cropped/upscaled from style-anchor-stanage-descent.png — note it includes a "STANAGE EDGE 1.5 MILES" waymarker; the game currently only models Cut Gate, so treat this purely as generic gritstone-moorland atmosphere, not a claim about in-game locations. Regenerate without the sign if that reads as misleading
Embed background image images/itch-io/embed-background-640x360.png Cropped from key-art-sessioning-the-tor.png at very close to itch's native 640×360, so minimal quality loss
Cover image images/itch-io/cover-630x500.png style-anchor-bike-jump.png cropped top-biased (full width, top 812 of 1024px height kept) to hit the 630×500 aspect ratio, then resized, with the transparent logo composited top-left in the clear sky rather than centred over the bike

These four itch crops were produced with a quick ImageMagick centre-crop/composite pass from the source concept art — good enough to preview the page layout today, but consider regenerating tighter, purpose-built versions at native resolution (rather than cropped/upscaled derivatives) before a real 1.0 launch push.

Dimensions above come from itch.io's own image-size guidance (cover 630×500, embed background 640×360, banner ≤960px wide/<400px tall, background sized to taste around a 960px-wide inner column).

Web/social preview

public/assets/og-image.png (1200×630, used by the Open Graph/Twitter meta tags in index.html) has been regenerated from style-anchor-bike-jump.png with the transparent logo composited top-left, matching the existing og:image:alt copy ("a mountain biker jumps off a gritstone ledge over Peak District moorland at sunset") almost exactly. No further action needed unless the art direction changes.

Asset inventory

docs/images/concept-art/ — source concept art (see concept-art-prompts.md for the prompts that generated these):

File Description
logo-mark-transparent.png Standalone wordmark, real alpha transparency, for compositing — the primary logo asset
style-anchor-bike-jump.png Style anchor: lone bike mid-jump off a gritstone boulder (prompt 0)
style-anchor-stanage-descent.png Rider descending past a "Stanage Edge" waymarker with spectators on the tor
key-art-sessioning-the-tor.png Wide key art: riders working a gritstone tor, logo + "Sessioning the Tor" caption
ui-character-customization.png UI concept: jersey/shorts/helmet/bike-component picker plus achievement badge mockups

docs/images/itch-io/ — crops derived from the above, sized for itch.io's page-editor upload fields (see table above).