The VFX audition gallery
117 candidates, four review passes, and the verdicts behind them
Three of the 117, playing as rendered: The X-Cancel, Boss Transition, Muster Fireworks.
Visual effects for For What Lies Beneath, auditioned the way casting works: batch-generate candidates, render each one, keep a verdict per candidate across passes. What survives these passes is what the game gets — the system generates at volume, and human judgment is the selection function. All 117 candidates ship here with their blurb, wave, backdrop, verdict, note and complete per-pass history across four passes dated 2026-07-19 — counting each candidate’s current verdict as captured for this build: 68 accepted, 4 killed, 45 still in review, and 8 changed verdict between passes.
Read the candidates as ideation-pipeline outputs: the pipeline’s job is to propose at volume, and the gallery closes the loop — every proposal enters an accept / tweak / kill cycle, where an acceptance ships, a tweak note becomes the work order for the next pass, and a kill is a recorded decision rather than a silent deletion.
That last group is what a finished effects reel cannot show: witness_thread reads tweak on
pass 1 and kill on passes 2 and 3; impact_frame was kept carrying the note “the sparkle
effect kills it, needs more work but i like as a starter” — a critique passed forward rather
than a rejection.
The same pipeline shape reaches past effects. For the game’s title screen, a vision model watched twelve title-screen references and narrated their beats — what moves, what holds, what the first keypress does — and a builder–critic loop coded five complete Godot title flows from those narrations, judged blind A/B against each other. One control mattered enough to name: the judging seat sees the candidates in swapped order across rounds, which caught it favoring whichever flow it saw first — so describing was split from judging, and the positions rotate. The reel below plays all five flows end to end, studio card to save-slot screen.
What the judging seat actually sees: two candidates at the same beat, labelled only LEFT and RIGHT — and shown again with the positions swapped before any verdict counts.
The style studies that came first. Before the title flows, the same look-dev loop surveyed the UI languages of seven games — Final Fantasy Tactics, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Persona 5, Into the Breach, Disgaea, Shin Megami Tensei V, Slay the Spire — and rebuilt each as a named FWLB house style: original characters, systems and numbers throughout, the studied game’s visual grammar credited. The eighth tour walks the game’s own menu system, opening on a classic-JRPG study. Each study ran research → plan → build → QA before its tour was recorded.
Five candidate title flows, one reel — the audition pattern applied to a whole interactive sequence rather than a single effect.
Verdicts are read-only here — in the live gallery a verdict and its note write into the manifest and wake an orchestrator agent, which dispatches a worker to act on the note; a request for a new candidate makes a worker render one in Godot; live reload’s server-sent-events channel is stubbed. Record and reel both ship whole: every candidate’s clip is bundled and plays, the original 763 MB render set re-encoded for the web to 87 MB with the pixel art intact.
The authoring engine behind the candidates: the instruments; the lane this gallery reports into: workshop. Part of a private personal-project repository.