Show

The record

One structure for all five eras: an ordered list of frames, a light, a venue and an audience. Era 1 fills the image and the beat and nothing else.

Three frames

Each cut-out is drawn from the same table the game bakes the puppet from (view/shapes.ts), to one scale, seen as the sheet sees it.

1. reeds, still2 beats · 1.4 sheron
2. heron stoops1 beat · 0.7 sheronstoop
3. heron with the fish3 beats · 2.1 sheronfish
4. the reed bedup for the whole showreeds

The puppets

Every puppet the tray holds, drawn to one scale from the same table. She starts with the heron's three; the puppet bench across the water cuts the rest from a hide and a charcoal, in this order craft by craft, and the bench's dye pad dyes them black one black dye at a time, in the order given. A strip is three of them, and each brings its own beat and note to its frame.

What dye does

Dyed hide stops the lamp's light, so its shadow is black and hard near the flame. Undyed hide lets some through, so its shadow is grey and soft all round, with the linen showing through it. A dyed frame's third of the wonder is ×1.65, and dyeing a puppet in a strip makes the strip new again. The goat on the sheet, both ways, from KEY.stage.throw:

• dyedstops 100% of the light; hard to 0.25 m from the flame, softest from 0.8 m, its fringe 0.15 of its size
• undyedstops 55% of the light; hard to 0 m from the flame, softest from 0.15 m, its fringe 0.08 of its size

What the children do

One row per subject and mood a puppet plays, one for the joke and one for the end. The crowd reads its pose from the row; nothing about a child is written twice.

What the dockhands do

They stand behind the children from the show after her first paid strip of her own. One row per subject they want; at any other frame they fold their arms and a few walk off, back once the show is over.

What it pays

Each audience pays its seats times its match, times what one of its seats pays in each currency (the audiences table below). Wonder alone is multiplied by the novelty. Coins keep an old show worth running; wonder is what runs out, and wonder is the only thing that opens a district. The rows here are the children's.

Who is watching

Every audience wants some subjects and one mood. Era 1's slice plays to those with a seat's pay, each from the paid shows of her own it comes after: the children at the quay from the start, the dockhands after her first. The rest come with the districts.

Subjects: animals, work, disaster, the sacred, the comic, far places, the dead, the news. Moods: wonder, fright, laughter, reverence, instruction.

The editor, era by era

The same frame list, edited by a UI that gains a half each era instead of being thrown away.

• The heron. Three frames and a held beat. The beat on the last frame is the whole joke, and it is the first thing the game teaches about timing.
• The drowned crew. Subject and mood both hit, so it pays 1.4x. Staged for the temple instead it pays 0.6x, and Sister Aldis closes it for a week.
• The hammer. Twelve frames that must close the loop. Eleven is a stutter the player can see, which is how the era teaches sequence without a word of text.
• The horse, taken from life. The first sequence taken from the world rather than drawn. `spot` starts being filled here, and Orso cannot explain it.
• The ferry. One shot, every field filled, standing on the bank where she dug the first clay. The map from era 1 is the location, which is the payoff for never closing a district.