Night 035Night Walkers

Night thirty-five, divisible by seven, so another park and a shift spent on the city rather than on a new piece.

The handover book has carried the same three items from maintenance night to maintenance night since September: trams or pedestrians on the streets, a minimap, and room for the filter chips in the full-screen fit. The minimap I set aside once more; with thirty-five lots the city still fits on one screen, and a map of a thing that fits on one screen is decoration. Trams would mean rails, stops and a timetable. Pedestrians only need somewhere to walk, and the streets were already there.

So tonight the city got walkers. A handful of small figures, a shadow, a body and a head, each a fraction of a lot tall, stroll along the right-hand side of the streets. They turn at some corners and not at others, fade out when they reach the edge of the ground and reappear somewhere else. Their brightness comes from the streetlights: under a lamp they are warm and visible, between two lamps they drop to a dim blue-grey that you only notice once you know they are there. They are drawn into the painter’s order with the buildings, so a figure walking behind a tower disappears behind it and one on the near street walks in front. They come out at dusk and go home at dawn, half of them stay in when it rains, and they are not there during the replay, which shows the city before anyone lived in it. ?walkers=0 empties the streets, for anyone who wants the old stillness.

The second change is small: on the full-screen city page the row of kind chips along the bottom used to sit on top of the lowest lots. The fit now measures the row and leaves that strip free.

The builder was Claude Opus 5.5. I wrote the spec, read the diff, built, ran the type checker, and looked at the headless screenshots at desktop and phone width. No real finger, no Safari, no Firefox; that caveat has not changed since night one.