Clankie's character
Clankie appears in more than one body: the logo, the app's world (the garden
sprites in clankie-app), and the desktop pet (sources in branding/pet/).
Each body has its own pipeline and canvas, because each is drawn at a different
size for a different job. This page is the one model they all follow, so a
refinement in one body doesn't drift away from the others.
The reference
The master is clankie-logo-512-alpha.png: a 22×28 grid at 12 px a cell. When
two bodies disagree about a shape, the logo wins. A body may simplify the logo
for its size, but it may not restyle it.
| Body | Canvas | Seen at | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logo | 22×28 | Any, integer scale | Front |
| Desktop pet | 32×40 cell, 22-wide figure | 2×–6×, up close | Front |
| World | 24×28 | Small, among stations | Front, side, back |
| Subagent | 11×15 (world sproutling) | Beside its parent | Front |
Anatomy
From top to bottom, every body keeps these parts in this order:
- Sprout. A stem with two leaves, light on top and dark underneath. It's wider than the head and is his main expressive part.
- Head. It's a screen: a cream bezel, a brown inset line, and a cream face. The eyes are dark and set wide, and the pink cheeks sit just below them. When the eyes are a single pixel, put each cheek down and out from its eye, never straight under it, or it reads as a tear. Leaving out the bezel turns him into a brown box. The old sproutling did that.
- Suit. A khaki torso with a small leaf emblem on the chest, shaded at the bottom.
- Feet. Short and stubby, on one fixed baseline per body.
Palette
Every body uses these exact hex values. A new colour is allowed only for a prop or effect, and the body that adds it lists it in its own README.
| Role | Hex | Role | Hex |
|---|---|---|---|
| leaf light | #c6d668 | face | #f2e5c8 |
| leaf dark | #7d8f41 | face shade | #e3d3ae |
| stem | #6f5f36 | eyes | #262f3a |
| frame | #806440 | cheeks | #f3b2a4 |
| outline | #503b2c | body | #dfddb6 |
| body shade | #b2ae7e |
Each worker is identified by the colour of its leaves, never by tinting its body. Both bodies use the same variants:
| Variant | Light | Dark |
|---|---|---|
| green (Clankie) | #c6d668 | #7d8f41 |
| teal | #63d0bd | #34988c |
| amber | #f0b24a | #c47a2c |
| dusk | #b79ce2 | #7d5cb0 |
| azure | #8fc9ff | #4a73b8 |
| gold | #f0d696 | #c9a34e |
| onyx | #9da7b1 | #2c3138 (plus a full charcoal body ramp) |
The sprout says how he is
His face stays simple, so the sprout carries his mood. Every body uses the same motion for the same state:
| Motion | Means |
|---|---|
| Small sway, rare 1 px fidget | Idle, fine |
| Spins like a propeller | Thinking or working |
| Perks straight up | Needs you |
| Soft half-mast droop | Asleep |
| Hooked over, leaves slumped | Failed (world wilt) |
Asleep, he also sits and his screen dims, with flat -.- eyes. The screen
never goes dark: a dark screen means unreachable (the pet's offline), and the
two must never be confused.
The propeller spin is his signature. It started in the pet's think loop, and
the world's sproutlings use it too. Keep it wherever he or a worker is busy.
Subagents
A subagent is a smaller Clankie, not some other creature. It has the full
anatomy: the sprout, the bezel head with eyes and cheeks, the suit with its
chest leaf, and feet. It's about half his height. Its loop is a rest, a sway,
then a quick double spin of the sprout. The world's sproutling
(scripts/garden-sprites/channelkit.mjs in clankie-app) is the reference at
11×15. The pet's worker minis follow the same design at pet scale. They show
which worker they are by leaf colour, as above, not through a tinted torso.
Reviewing a pass
A pass on one body isn't finished until its matching animations sit next to the other body's, at the same apparent size, on both a light and a dark background. Look for drift in the proportions and the sprout's motion vocabulary, and check that each loop runs without a pop. These animations should match: idle, blink, walk, sleep, talk, celebrate/happy, and think/work.
Known drift as of 2026-10-04:
- The world's figure matches the logo closely. The pet's head is wider and sits lower on a shorter suit, so it reads as a different build. This is the biggest gap.
- The pet minis tint a magenta torso mask instead of using leaf variants.
- The pet has only a front view, so it has no side or back walk to compare.