HEXIT Devlog 08: One Board, Different Worlds
Earth, Mars and Moon presentation presets change the table, materials and lighting while preserving the same logical battle rules.
Earlier Mars look-development pass: the presentation changes the table, tile palette and lighting, while the objective layout remains the same. This is a prototype capture, not final environment art.
Why environments belong to the match launch
HEXIT is intended to take place across different worlds. Earth, Mars and the Moon should not feel like a colour filter applied after the fact; the table, tile materials, atmosphere and lighting need to agree with the setting.
At the same time, a planet is a presentation context, not a second rules engine. The same CSV can describe the logical terrain, heights, occupancy, objectives and obstacles regardless of whether it is presented as a grassy Earth table or a red Martian surface.
A closed, data-driven selection
The current local selector exposes three environment IDs: earth, mars and moon. The launch flow validates the token and passes it into the map viewer or battle bootstrapper. The future online launch descriptor carries the same value; Unreal presents the accepted choice rather than inferring it from a level name.
Missing environment options remain backwards-compatible with Earth. Unknown explicit values are rejected instead of silently falling back to a surprising palette.
Earth is the authored baseline
The Earth preset is intentionally conservative. It preserves the original grass/table, tile materials, lighting and post-process. This matters because the existing showcase already has a useful visual identity, and a new environment system should not accidentally wash every board in a global yellow grade.
Mars and Moon receive their own presentation treatments: table surface, material tinting and look-development presets. The runtime presenter stores and restores authored material slots and look-rig settings, including water meshes. Logical terrain types are not rewritten to make a planet look different.
Earth remains the original grassy presentation. The objective perimeter is still a gameplay-readable layer, not a new terrain type.
Presentation boundaries
The environment actor owns runtime presentation only. It can create a non-colliding ground plane, temporary material instances and a look rig preset. It must not own occupancy, pathfinding, objective scoring or combat legality.
That boundary prevents a visually dramatic table from changing the answer to a rules query. It also keeps map authoring stable: the CSV and logical grid continue to be useful to the battle, the map viewer, the AI and offline simulation.
Why this matters for production
The system gives the art pass a stable place to grow. A later Mars pass can improve rock materials and atmospheric depth without requiring a new objective implementation. A lunar pass can explore cooler lighting and functional astronaut equipment without turning every figure into a hardcoded exception.
The current Mars screenshot is a look-development checkpoint, not final environment art. Material quality, lighting composition, props and production assets still need dedicated iteration. The value today is the runtime separation: visual world-building can evolve without invalidating tactical content.
The next step is to define a small visual language for each planet—surface materials, light direction, atmospheric contrast and props—then test the same tactical scenario in all three contexts. The question is whether the worlds feel distinct while the rules remain immediately legible.