Git Recon: menus as a toy-soldier briefing, hill climb to 8/10, rounds 3+ (from #3554) #3560

Score: 5.2/10 (target 8)

Carried from #3554 (round 2, PR #3559; round 1 was #3544 and PR #3552): Git Recon's menus as a toy-soldier briefing. A toy-soldier third-person shooter fought in a codebase, with glossy black clay soldiers. The menus are the toy box and the field manual: moulded-plastic sprues and runners as frames, a glossy clay sheen on buttons, stencilled field-manual headings, mission cards like punched dog tags. Our own ideas only, never the look of any commercial toy line or game.

Goalpost: 8/10 from the owner on the menus

1. In the game's own look. Title, lobby or front, settings, results and any panel read as the same world as the play view: material, type, ornament.
2. Artwork, not only CSS. Backplates, frames, textures and insignia as small SVG, procedural canvas or headless-Blender tiles; say what each weighs.
3. Still readable, every screen size. Contrast at or above today, play view unobscured, checked with bun run probe git-recon --shot from phone to desktop.
4. eqosys menus wear it. The sign-in chip, report form, achievement toast and any lobby come through the skin hook from eqosys menus: a game injects its skin once and every shared surface wears it, hill climb to 8/10, rounds 2+ (from #3530) #3541, never a second stylesheet.
5. House kit underneath. Components come from packages/ui and packages/game-controls re-themed by tokens; a forked copy of one is a gap.

Where it stands after round 2

• Round 1 (Git Recon: the menus as a toy box and field manual (menus climb round 1) #3552, merged): an olive map table; a manila field-manual page in an SVG sprue frame; stencil-cut headings; glossy black clay buttons; dog-tag mission cards; a rubber-stamped result. The Controls panel shares the page and frame through the packages/ui tokens plus its own classes.
• Round 2 (Git Recon: a moulded sprue, a tally sheet, your own clay soldier on the menu (menus climb rounds 2 and 3) #3559):
  • The sprue has gate ribs every ~110 px and numbered corner parts (A1, A2, B1, B2).
  • Wide screens get a folded field map and a clay recon figure on the table.
  • Results carry a tally sheet with tally marks (src/ui/tally.ts).
  • Phone polish: an olive fade under the cog, long keys wrap, one body font.
• Art so far: 7.3 KB of SVG in apps/git-recon/public/menu/.
• Shots are in apps/git-recon/docs/shots-2026-11-04-menus/: before-* (main before round 1), r1-* (after round 1), now-* (after round 2). The shot script drives the page through the probe; a --js with more than one statement must end in return.
• Judges: this round's fresh judge scored round 1's result 4.4 and round 2's 5.2, each corrected two points down. Round 1's two judges had put round 1 at 5.0, so judges drift by about half a point. Compare within one judge.

Next

1. Artwork on every screen size, not just desktop. Tablet and phone get no map, figure or insignia. Put a small stamped insignia strip or a corner prop on narrow screens.
2. A better clay figure. The judge read the SVG soldier as crude stacked shapes. Try a headless-Blender or procedural-canvas render of a glossy clay figure, kept small.
3. The forms still look like web forms. Make loadout a set of part bins with stamped labels, put an embossed name on each dog tag, and give the settings list some ornament.
4. eqosys menus. When the skin hook (eqosys menus: a game injects its skin once and every shared surface wears it, hill climb to 8/10, rounds 2+ (from #3530) #3541, PR eqosys skin: a game injects its look once, and the chip, toast, report form, lobby and spaces wear it (climb round 1) #3540) is on main, put this skin through it for the sign-in chip, report form and toast. Not before.