art-bible

To create a production-ready art bible, author nine canonical sections covering visual identity, mood, shape language, color system, character, environment, UI, asset standards, and references. This defines visual rules and style prohibitions that gate all asset work, reducing pipeline ambiguity and rework.

A complete game art direction guide includes nine sections: visual identity, mood, shape language, color system, character, environment, UI, asset standards, and references. These coordinate art-director and technical review tasks to establish a unified visual specification for production.

To update an existing art bible without losing previous work, use a retrofitting process that detects an existing design/art/art-bible.md file and fills only the incomplete sections. This delta editing preserves prior art direction while appending missing production guides.

To enforce technical performance budgets within a visual identity document, integrate optional technical-preferences files into the art bible workflow. This surfaces conflicts between art direction and technical requirements, ensuring production constraints align with the visual specification.

You need an approved game concept document at design/gdd/game-concept.md before authoring art direction guides. The game concept provides the foundational design context required to generate the visual identity, mood, and shape language for the complete art bible.

You can use a stepwise workflow to manage sign-off for an art bible by selecting review modes like solo, lean, or full. This process spawns director gates for approval and writes status metadata directly into the art bible file for pipeline handoff.