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The Wheel - design direction + build target (2026-07-13)

Updated Jul 13, 2026 · Affirmology_WheelDesign_Direction_v1.md

The Wheel - design direction + build target (2026-07-13)

Jeff's clarified vision, tonight. This is what v3 of the prototype designs toward and what DATA builds from. It replaces the "swap one constellation at a time" feel, which read as a flat left/right list.

The core feeling

One giant sky map, not twelve separate screens. The whole zodiac lives on a single large canvas arranged as a WHEEL around a central Sun. The viewport is a camera that zooms into one constellation at a time. You do not page between screens, you move across one continuous space.

Jeff's words: "almost like one giant image file that is zoomed in and scrolled to specific points, with the wheel feel." And: "the swipes are more of a slightly angled rotation, rather than a pure left and right."

The five rules

1. Sun at the center. Big, alive, majestic. The Sun IS the person. It is always the pivot the whole sky turns around.
2. Twelve constellations ring the Sun, each at its own angular slot (30 degrees apart), painted onto the one big map.
3. Rotation, not paging. A swipe rotates the whole wheel by one slot along an ARC. The motion is a slight angled turn, never a flat horizontal slide. The focused constellation counter-rotates so it always sits UPRIGHT and readable at the focal point (top-center of the view).
4. Swipe down = the Sun. The camera dives to center, to the person: their favorites, their treasure, the pieces they keep. Swipe up = beyond the rim. Out past the twelve to the outer-tier journeys (Chiron, Gene Keys long path, the Becoming).
5. An interface lives under the focused constellation. Not a separate screen you enter. In the same view, beneath the upright constellation, its audios appear as a panel: each star is an audio slot, with its state and its action (play / request / in testing). Turning the wheel swaps the sky above and the interface below together.

Star + label rules (from Jeff, carried from the wheel work)

• Code stars only for gameplay, at true relative positions, whole-pattern rotation only, never rearranged.
• Labels must never overlap each other. Place each label on the outward side of its star, and where two would collide, offset along the radius or drop the lower-priority one. This is a hard visual bug to avoid, Jeff called it out directly.
• Empty star = gold outline + faint shimmer. Filling = vessel fills across its fractions. Full = solid equal glow. Hover/tap lights the label and the star outline together.

How to build the "one giant image" cheaply and correctly

• The painted SKY + FIGURES are one layer: a large pre-rendered map (or per-wedge plates composited into one ring), positioned once. The camera rotates/zooms over it. The code stars + labels + the interface are separate layers on top, driven by the FINAL alignment spec (Affirmology_WheelAlignment_FINAL_v1).
• Rotation is a transform on the map layer plus a counter-transform on the focused wedge so it reads upright. No re-rendering art per turn.
• R2 art rule (hard, from SHARED_CONTEXT 7/12): never overwrite an art key. Publish a new versioned key (v2, v3_...) every time, or the CDN serves stale art to every device. The stale-figure bug Jeff hit was exactly this; it is fixed under v2_ keys now.

Prototype plan (v3, code-star simulation)

v3 will fake the giant map with a large virtual sky: all twelve constellations placed on one big ring around the Sun, a camera that rotates the ring by slot with an arc/angled feel and keeps the focused one upright, the interface panel mounted under the focused constellation, swipe-down-to-Sun and swipe-up-to- rim, and non-overlapping labels. It proves the navigation and the interface-underneath before any final art is rendered. Then this doc plus the FINAL alignment spec is the build brief for DATA.

Open, waiting on Jeff

• Nav bar icons: Jeff is sending reference examples; hold the restyle until they arrive.
• Whether the big map is one baked image or per-wedge plates composited (affects the art pipeline, not the interaction). Recommend per-wedge plates on the ring so a single wedge can be re-rendered without rebaking the whole sky.