Ledger Scribe — workshop

34×26 pixel sprite — a bookkeeping clerk whose posture and tally columns read how well the ledger balances, from steady strokes to a snapped quill.

A bookkeeping clerk hunched over an open ledger, with the books doing the storytelling: even, upright strokes and two matched tally columns when debits equal credits; a lower hunch and faster scribbling as one column outgrows the other; and — once it won’t reconcile — a snapped quill and spilled ink pooling across the page. Nods to a system design deep-dive on payment ledgers and why double-entry accounting is really just an invariant check running in production.

Reuse

export/scribe-sheet.png — 238×26 strip, seven 34×26 frames in order: balanced-0, balanced-1, drifting-0, drifting-1, drifting-2, broken-0, broken-1.
scribe-{balanced,drifting,broken}-*.png — the individual frames.
scribe@8x.png — prescaled 8× hero shot for docs/previews.

Render at integer scales with nearest-neighbor filtering or the edges smear. balanced plays at 1.5 fps, drifting at 4 fps, broken at 1 fps (ANIMATIONS in the module carries all three).

Source

No .aseprite — the canonical source is source/ledger-scribe.mjs: a framework-free ES module holding the clerk as a character map (one char per pixel, palette at the top). Edit the grid and regenerate everything with:

node source/render.mjs

(needs site/node_modules installed — the script resolves Playwright from there.) That one command rewrites export/, media/, thumb.png, and the demo’s bundled copy of the module, so nothing drifts.

How the frames are built

One static CLERK grid — hair, glasses, collar, torso, reaching arm — is painted at a per-frame clerkTop offset plus a hunch that pushes everything from the collar down further forward as the ledger drifts, the same posture-reads-a-metric trick as warehouse-duck’s waterline. The ledger itself (desk, open page, two tally columns, quill, ink) is drawn entirely from numbers rather than a second sprite: each frame’s debit and credit counts are literally the pixel heights of two columns growing up from the page’s baseline, so a balanced ledger draws two equal stacks and a drifting one visibly pulls apart. While writing, the quill is a short interpolated stroke from the clerk’s wrist to the debit column’s current height; once quill: 'snapped', both pieces drop onto the page instead and an ink pool spreads from the spine outward with ink.

Gotchas

validateGrids() throws if the CLERK grid is ragged or FRAME_ORDER/ ANIMATIONS reference a missing frame — call it after editing, or just run render.mjs, which calls it first.
demo/ledger-scribe.js is generated. Edit source/ledger-scribe.mjs and re-render.
The quill’s “write” stroke is computed from the wrist position (clerkTop + 16 + hunch), so if you add a frame, its hunch has to stay consistent with any new pose or the stroke will visibly miss the hand.
The demo draws the sprite from the character map at runtime, fine at this size. A game should blit scribe-sheet.png instead.

Port notes

paintFrame is grid-walking plus a handful of arithmetic overlays with no DOM dependency beyond a 2D context — same shape as warehouse-duck’s — so a DragonRuby port translates directly: keep the grid as strings, map cells to args.outputs.solids, or just consume scribe-sheet.png as a spritesheet with source_x = frame * 34.