hud

What the pilgrim reads while climbing: require("game.screens.hud").

• H.build(lay, st) — the HUD. Two narrow columns pinned to the two long edges. Left, the body: the helm (lit slit while worn, a bare lit-eyed head under a thrown-back cowl while off), the heat column, the six lost knights, the clock. Right, the climb: the dawn ladder — a strip of the game's own palette standing on end, ticked by canto in roman numerals, with a bead riding it at the pilgrim's height — and the height itself.
• H.visor(lay, st) — the helmet-slit overlay while helmed, and the ember-red vignette that closes in on a bare head as the heat climbs. Returns nil when neither applies.
• H.toast(lay, index, canto) — a canto announcing itself at the top of the frame. One tree with one animation: it rises in, holds, and fades.

Why it is shaped like this

Nothing spans the width. The frame this game films in is 1080x1440, taller than it is wide, so horizontal room is the scarce thing. Both columns are 17% of the short side; on a wide screen they simply stand further apart.

Both columns live in the upper half. The rules slice's on-screen touch controls take the lower-left and lower-right zones and the staging slice's captions take the bottom band. A HUD that reached into either would be a HUD a thumb sits on top of.

Every glyph carries a dark halo, and each column sits on an edge scrim that fades inward. The thing this HUD is read over is a lake of molten rock at nearly full brightness; unbacked text disappears into it.

The toast is at the TOP. The staging slice captions the narrator across the bottom of the frame, and the two must never write over each other.