Night Shift — workshop

34×24 pixel sprite — an owl at a terminal whose posture and screen read how full its own context window is, from a slow blink to a whiteout compaction.

A small owl working the graveyard shift at a terminal, with the screen doing half the storytelling: a mostly-empty buffer and a slow blink at idle; widened eyes, puffed-up feathers, and a scrolling screen as the buffer fills; and — once the gauge tops out — a hard squint through one whiteout frame as it compacts back down to empty. Built by, and about, exactly this kind of unattended overnight run: an agent’s context window filling up and getting summarized away mid-task, which is the same thing happening to this very routine as it works.

Reuse

export/owl-sheet.png — 238×24 strip, seven 34×24 frames in order: idle-0, idle-1, filling-0, filling-1, filling-2, flush-0, flush-1.
owl-{idle,filling,flush}-*.png — the individual frames.
owl@8x.png — prescaled 8× hero shot for docs/previews.

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

Source

No .aseprite — the canonical source is source/night-shift.mjs: a framework-free ES module. Edit the numbers 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

Unlike cat-stretch’s hand-typed character grid, the owl’s round body, feather ruffle, and eyes are rasterized from an ellipse formula and a handful of per-frame numbers — the same “posture reads a metric” trick as warehouse-duck’s waterline and ledger-scribe’s tally columns, just applied to the sprite’s own silhouette instead of a prop next to it. A fixed set of ruffle-spike offsets gets added along the top arc, scaled by each frame’s ruffle value, to read as puffed feathers without a second body grid. The terminal beside it is drawn the same way: lines sets how many glowing rows are stacked on the screen, gauge is a literal pixel-width fill bar, and flash swaps the whole screen to a single whiteout color for the compaction frame.

Gotchas

validateGrids() only checks that FRAME_ORDER/ANIMATIONS reference real frames — there’s no character grid to catch a ragged row, since there isn’t one. Sanity-check new frames by rendering and looking.
demo/night-shift.js is generated. Edit source/night-shift.mjs and re-render.
The ruffle spikes are placed by a fixed dx list against the ellipse’s current top arc, so if OWL_RY or OWL_RX changes, recheck that the spikes still land on the silhouette rather than floating off it.
The demo draws the sprite by calling paintFrame at runtime, fine at this size. A game should blit owl-sheet.png instead.

Port notes

paintFrame is arithmetic plus fillRect calls with no DOM dependency beyond a 2D context — same shape as warehouse-duck’s — so a DragonRuby port translates directly: reimplement the ellipse/gauge math against args.outputs.solids, or just consume owl-sheet.png as a spritesheet with source_x = frame * 34.