# Relay Zero II: The Varnish — changelog

## 2026-10-10: v2.1, The Full Bestiary

- Every monster, boss and item of the original game now exists, translated tick for tick from the disassembly and reskinned for the Varnish. Before this, most enemies, all bosses and most gear were missing.
- Overworld: lynels, moblins, goriyas with their return discs, tektites, blue leevers, peahats, armos statues that wake (and hide stairs), boulders, ghini and their ghosts, and all their shots.
- Vaults: darknuts that parry from the front, zols that split into gels, like-likes that eat the shield, wallmasters that carry you back to the entrance, ropes, stalfos, cursed bubbles, gibdos, blade traps and fire-breathing statues.
- Casters: vires that split into keese, pols voices that die to an arrow, both wizzrobes, lanmolas and moldorms.
- Bosses: Aquamentus, Dodongo, Manhandla, Gleeok (cut necks fly loose), Digdogger (needs the whistle), Gohma (an arrow into the open eye), Patra, and the Grand Varnisher, a masked clockwork tyrant who is invisible until struck and only a silver arrow can finish. His room starts dark and brightens.
- The captive is freed and the ending plays: the curtain, her thanks, the flash, the closing words and the credits, then the second quest.
- Gear: boomerang and magic disc, bow and arrows, blue and red candle (lights dark rooms), whistle (whirlwind travel, the lake drains to reveal a vault), bait, tincture, wand and book, fold-bridge, raft, bracelet pushes, burnable bushes, and an inventory showing every item.
- Vault people, the pond fairy, the grumbling one who wants food, the money stash and the life-or-money room.
- Dark vault rooms are painted in a cool gloom with a pool of light around the hero until a fire lights them.
- 115 new pixel sprite strips in the Old-Master palette, and 30 new sound effects from the SFX library.
- A headless test suite (`node tools/sim-tests/run.mjs`, about 500 checks) walks into real rooms, fights every type and confirms each vault room can be cleared.
- A 10-minute trailer, filmed inside the game: `tools/trailer/` holds the director bots, the frame-by-frame browser capture, the edit as code, the compositor and the sound mix. New QA hooks for it: `setCinema` (a directed camera), `tickQuiet`, `renderFrame`, `setCapture` and `setRestoration`.

## 2026-10-10: v2.0, The Varnish

- New theme: the colony is an Old-Master painting, and the brass clockwork Varnish is draining its colour.
- Restoration: 114 surface scenes start as grisaille while machines hold them. Clearing a scene glazes it back into colour for good. Each save slot tracks its own progress, with a counter in the HUD.
- 3D view rebuilt around an over-the-shoulder chase camera. First person is still available in Settings.
- New hero: a fine-voxel wood-elf apprentice on a jointed rig (hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, elbows, hands, blinking eyelids, a trailing scarf) carrying the glowing Ion Cutter.
- Animation in the Pixar manner: a volume-preserving squash-and-stretch spring on the whole body, and a strike keyed in beats. She sinks into her back leg and cocks the cutter, then the hips lead, the chest follows, the shoulder follows that and the elbow snaps straight, before a follow-through and settle. There is also a hurt recoil, an item held overhead with a knee up, and footfall squash in the walk.
- 14 idle animations. The reed pipe comes with her; each item you collect teaches one more (whetstone, juggling, boomerang, bow, candle, jig, apple, tincture, wand, book, ring, boulder press, key). Stand still for a few seconds and she turns to the camera and plays one. New ones are announced and played next. Props, particles and little synthesized tunes come with each. The Gallery lists them and plays any you have unlocked.
- Machines in 3D hop and squash as they walk, and pop in when they appear.
- Fixes from the first phone playtest: B now erases on the name screen, and the chosen letter is a solid gold block that reads in sunlight. Walking out of a cave no longer pulls you back in when the stick drifts sideways, because a cave door is only entered walking up into it and the exit spot is ignored until you step away. Double-tap and pinch no longer zoom the page.
- Three everyday idles that need no item (a stretch and yawn, scanning the horizon, a butterfly on her finger), and the reed pipe now comes up less often.
- The 3D chase camera sits further back and higher, more so in portrait, with a Close / Standard / Far setting.
- Swipe to turn the 3D camera, then keep your finger down: the camera keeps circling the Apprentice that way until you lift or move, like Super Mario 64's camera.
- Inside caves and vaults the camera no longer looks through the walls: everything above the floor on the camera's side of the hero is stippled away, like a dollhouse.
- The paint veil switches off while a cut scene plays, so it can never sit over one or linger after it.
- Vault and cave room changes are covered by a painted veil: umber oil strokes drag across the screen in the direction you travel, then wipe off. Fog in vaults and caves is tighter, so neighbouring rooms sink into dark umber.
- Rig lab: `character-labs/apprentice-rig.html` shows the hero alone, with the walk, strike, hurt and every idle.
- Machines and items appear as crisp pixel billboards in 3D. Scenery between the camera and the hero is stippled away.
- Combat feel: hit-stop, camera shake, brass-gear bursts, footfall dust and aim assist.
- Oil-paint screen filter for 3D: Kuwahara strokes, linen weave, varnish grade and vignette. It adapts if frames run slow and turns off with Reduced effects.
- Painted sky panorama, Bruegel trees, gilded vault entrances and an earth-palette voxel world.
- Seven easel paintings: key art, sky, four cut-scene panels and a painted cast sheet.
- Five action cut scenes, skippable and replayable from the Gallery.
- 2D atlas repainted in an earth palette, with a redrawn wood-elf hero, clockwork beetles and ornithopters.
- New bitmap font (canvas and WOFF2) and a pixel-art UI of parchment, umber and gilt 9-slice frames.
- 25 effects and 9 per-room atmospheres from the SFX library, chosen by waveform and spectrogram.
- New pixel loader: a per-file grid and file report, hash-versioned URLs, no-store retries, Try again, Reset game cache and Continue anyway, with lazy loading for large media. `tools/build-release.mjs` regenerates the manifest.

## 2026-10-09: v1.x (relay-zero-v2 prototype)

- First-person voxel view over the source simulation, continuous movement, wildlife and environment lighting.