Home / The Lab
16 experiments · 5 tracks · every one standalone, pinned to a release of the kit
Lots of small experiments in drawing, moving and laying out storyboards: other kinds of character, a stage you can direct like a game, physics, a camera, a flowchart and a threat model that explain themselves, a game engine. Each one is a single page that keeps working as the kit moves on, and each says what it taught us under the thing itself. A thing that works is lifted into the kit as a new release; a thing that does not stays here with its lesson.
How to draw a character: other packs, things with faces, a designer.
Which look fields make a character, and what does a cast file need that the drawing does not?
A live character designer on the kit's drawCharacter: every look field as a control, two previews that redraw as you type, a random button, and the cast JSON ready to copy.
Can a second character pack, clean thick-line cartoon instead of sketch, keep the kit's contract and stay on model?
The lab cast drawn twice, by the kit and by a plain-SVG ink pack with thick outlines and flat fills, from the same look fields, poses and moods.
What survives of a cast when each character is a 16 by 24 pixel sprite generated from a few lines of text?
The lab cast as 16 by 24 pixel sprites on a canvas, coloured from the cast's look fields, with a four-frame walk and three moods.
Can a rule, a store or a boundary be a character in a storyboard rather than furniture?
An inbox, a vault, a padlock, a server and a boundary wall, each with a face in the kit's ten moods and a reaction of its own, with Vex from the lab cast pushing the wall.
How to make it move: a stage API, a walk cycle, gravity, dialogue, a timeline.
Can a storyboard's actors be directed like a game, from a script of verbs, and can playing the game write the script?
A script of verbs (enter, walk, say, think, camera) the actors carry out, drawn by the kit's own drawCharacter; a timeline, a scrubber, and a direct mode where the arrow keys move an actor and what you do is written into the script.
What does a real animation timeline (scrubbing, speed, easing) give a kit panel that the kit's CSS play cannot, and what in the kit's markup helps or hinders it?
One kit panel choreographed with an anime.js timeline: setting, prop, entrances with overshoot, bubbles word by word, caption, with a scrubber, speed and easing controls.
What happens to a storyboard when the reader chooses the next line and the text types itself out?
A visual-novel scene on a kit panel: typed-out lines in a seeded Rough.js bubble, a branching script as data, and the reader's choices as buttons.
What does a physics engine behind a storyboard panel add, what does it cost, and could a storyboard carry a drop as data?
matter.js behind a kit panel: keys, envelopes and padlocks fall, bounce and pile up, and the characters react when one lands near them.
Can a stick-figure rig driven by a phase give a storyboard character a walk, a run and a jump, and still look like the kit?
An 11-joint rig posed by parametric walk, run, jump and idle cycles, then the same bones dressed in Oto's colours.
How the panels sit together, and where the reader looks.
Can a storyboard be one wide scene that a camera moves across, and can a scene hold another scene?
Three of the kit's panels side by side as one world; the camera pans and zooms between beats written as data, and zooms into a laptop whose screen is another panel drawn by the same kit.
What does a comic page, a filmstrip and a grid each want from the same seven panels, and what does panel size do to a scene?
The same seven-panel storyboard laid out as an A4 comic page with a splash, a filmstrip and a 2 by 4 grid, with a print button.
Can one sticky panel, redrawn and played as the text scrolls, tell a storyboard better than a deck does, and what should the text beside it say?
A scrollytelling storyboard: a sticky panel redrawn and played as eight steps of text scroll into the middle of the window, with a progress bar and a panels-only mode.
How far the format stretches: a flowchart, a threat model, a sequence diagram.
Can a diagram people already write (Mermaid) become a storyboard that explains itself, node by node?
Mermaid text in, a graph laid out by dagre and drawn in the kit's ink, and a character who walks it along the edges, lighting each node and saying what it is for.
Can a threat model (a data-flow diagram and its STRIDE findings) be played as a storyboard instead of read as a table?
A data-flow diagram as data, drawn in the kit's ink; the attacker walks to each flow and asks a STRIDE question, the author's answer appears red (open) or green (mitigated), and the watcher's face follows.
What does a sequence diagram gain when its lifelines are characters with faces, and what does a text language for its messages need?
A sequence diagram with the lab cast as lifelines, messages from a tiny text language, envelopes that travel, arrows that draw themselves and faces that react.
What a real engine gives, and what it costs.
What does a game engine give a storyboard's cast, what does it cost, and what would it take for a storyboard to play inside one?
kaplay in a canvas: the lab cast baked into sprites from the kit's drawings, a player who walks, bumps into people for a line and opens a vault.