Precursors v0.3.1 — Sprites, Living Songs, and Persistence

Two releases in one day. v0.3.0 shipped this morning with the music system, 22 folklore species, and the ship intelligence gate. v0.3.1 follows it with the visual and lore work that wasn't quite ready — and a couple of things that were quietly broken.

Norn sprites are bigger and better

Norns now render at 48×48 pixels in a true top-down perspective with eight directional views — north, northeast, east, and so on around the full compass. Each direction has a walk cycle and an idle cycle. Idle includes a subtle breathing animation. The sprites are described to match the deer-like anatomy that's central to Norn lore: graceful, four-limbed, distinctly non-human.

This is the result of the full Norn sprite overhaul pipeline — not just bigger pixels, but a coordinated description pass so that every variant stays consistent with the established look.

Songs die when species die

This one is doctrine. Songs in Precursors belong to specific creatures. When the last member of a species dies, their music fades from the catalogue. If you don't protect your Norns, you lose their culture. The mechanic was always the thesis of the music system — this release makes it real.

The chorus system also lands in this build: creature group vocalisation, glyph overlays, narrative sediment. The world records what happened here.

Eggs survive reload

The dock was losing eggs on page reload — they'd hatch fine in a session, but a refresh wiped the dock. This was a serialisation bug: eggs weren't being written to persistent state. Fixed. Your eggs are safe now.

Other fixes

The SongSystem was being instantiated twice on reload, causing double-playback of music. It now tears down cleanly on scene shutdown. The ship hull is properly embedded in the ground (no more floating ship). Speech bubbles fade in and out smoothly rather than snapping. Achievement notification border colours now render correctly for rare drops.

Play at play.multiversestudios.xyz.