Cover Craft

# Cover craft (optional advice)

Genex's experience with covers that read well on a gallery card. The requirement and the API are in
`genex__skill {"name":"cover"}` (a PNG or JPEG of the real game, at least 1280×720, handed to
`genex__cover`); everything here is optional, and the game's own look always wins.

## When to make it

A cover reads best once the game looks like itself: its world, its characters and its effects in
place. After a big visual change, a fresh cover keeps the card honest.

## What it shows

- The moment that says what the game is: the action at its most readable, or the place at its most
  characteristic. Two ideas are worth trying: the action, and the vista.
- A frame of the real game, with nothing added: no text, no logo, no light or effect the game does
  not have. A game that is dark by design stays dark; its best-lit honest moment is the one to pick.
- The game's own interface hidden when it covers the scene, unless the interface is the game.

## Framing for 16:9

- Compose for 16:9 at 1920×1080 or larger; Genex crops anything else to its middle 16:9.
- The subject on a third, with room in the direction it faces or moves.
- Depth helps on a small card: something near, the subject, and the world behind it.
- A longer lens (a field of view around 25–40° for a hero shot) flattens less and isolates the
  subject; a wide lens suits a vista.
- On a card the picture is small: one clear subject beats many small ones.

## Light and colour

- Light from the side or behind shapes the subject; light from the camera's direction reads flat.
- The game's own warmest or most dramatic time of day or phase, when it has one.
- One accent colour the eye goes to first.
- Genex refuses a frame under 0.11 mean brightness or one flat colour; a frame just above that reads
  murky on a card, so where the game's light allows, brighter is easier to read.

## Making the picture

- A screenshot of the running game at 1920×1080 (or a render from the game's own scene at that size)
  is enough; a camera placed for the shot can live in a small module of its own so the game's play
  is untouched.
- Hold the game still for the frame: its own update stepped to the moment, effects settled, and the
  quality at its highest.
- Making two to four candidates across at least two ideas, looking at each at card size, and
  keeping the one that reads at a glance works well.

## The clip

Five seconds of real play that genex.games runs over the cover: a moment the game plays by itself
(its own scripted input or an attract mode) rather than a still frame. Motion throughout, no cuts,
no flashing.