Scene Intro Cards, Cast Cheat-Sheet, Dark Game Player

A few days after the big May drop we shipped three small follow-up moves while they were fresh — a per-scene cinematic title card, a cast cheat-sheet inside the Scene Wizard, and a dark theme for the public game pages. Quick tour below.

🎬 Per-Scene Intro Cards

Every scene now has an optional cinematic title card that fades in when the player enters it. Three fields — Title, Subtitle, Body — all optional. Leave Title empty and the card never shows. Fill them in and you get a short cinematic beat at the top of every scene.

Set them in the Inspector → Scene tab → Intro Card accordion. Examples:

• Title: "Forest of Whispers"
• Subtitle: "Day 3 · Morning" or "Chapter II"
• Body: "The fog hangs thick. Something rustles in the trees."

The card fades in over 600ms, holds for ~3 seconds, fades out. Players can click anywhere to skip. It also fires after a portal transition, so chapter titles work for level-to-level transitions.

📋 Cast Cheat-Sheet in the Wizard

The final wizard step (Generate) used to ask you to "describe what happens" with an empty textarea — but you'd already forgotten which NPCs and enemies you picked three steps ago. Now the same step shows a compact inline cast list above the description box:

• NPCs (teal accent) — name + optional one-line backstory you can fill in.
• Enemies (red accent) — same format, name + backstory.
• Pickables — small chips with thumbnail, name, quantity.

You can rename anyone right there. A meaningful name — "Brennan the Innkeeper" instead of "NPC 3" — gives the AI a much better signal for the dialogue it generates. The description placeholder also auto-pulls a real NPC name as a hint, so you stop staring at "name, name…" and start writing a real story beat.

📜 Story Editor Sees Your Cast

The Story Editor used to show one card per scene with just the name and description. Now each scene card lists its full cast inline — NPCs (teal), Enemies (red), Pickables (yellow chips with thumbnails). You can scan a 10-scene game in one screen and immediately see who lives where without opening each scene in the editor.

🌑 Dark Game Player

The public game pages at /games/<id> now have a dark theme. The old cream paper chrome was competing with the rendered 3D world in the centre and pulling the viewer's eye out of the game. Body, header, sidebar, comment box — all dark surfaces with cream text and yellow accents.

The HUD overlays (HP/MP/time/inventory/dialogue) keep their toon comic styling — they're part of the game, not the page chrome. Only the surrounding website wrapper went dark.

🎬 Scene Intro Sits Above the HUD

Tied to the intro card work — when a scene title card fades in, it now sits above every HUD element (HP bar, time chip, controls hint, action rail). The whole canvas dims behind a soft 55% black with a tiny blur, the title fades in, the world stays visible. Click to skip. Feels like a movie title card, not a loading screen.

Try It Now

All free in your browser at VXLVERSE. Open the editor, pick a scene, click the new Intro Card accordion in the Inspector → Scene tab, write a one-line title, hit Play. Your scene now opens like a movie chapter.

More on what shipped earlier this month in the May 2026 update post, and on the underlying ideas in our 30-minute speed-run.