Balloon Chucker — v0.3

Current draft

She is meticulous, science-oriented, not interested in sports, and still an eager participant. She is smart for her age and slightly less smart than she believes herself to be. An ordinary children's backyard-science book taught her about water pressure, elasticity, fill volume, and projectile arcs; she reads it as the definitive manual of balloon warfare. The comedy does not come from the science being foolish — it comes from her confidence that reading the theory completed the training. Her race is visible and ordinary; specific family, cultural, and neighborhood details remain unknown until there is something truthful to say, not invented to decorate a demographic cell.

What changed

• Gave the mechanics-first Chucker a specific originating girl: Black, approximately eight or nine, defined by the same specificity as any other principal kid.
• Added the shoulder sash of roughly eight ready balloons and the heavy reserve pail as her equipment and tactical silhouette.
• Established her private-notebook honesty as the counterweight to her public confidence: she does not interrupt gameplay to explain a miss, but she privately records the real error.
• Rejected puddle refilling and any player-managed reload chore.
• Ordered her visual presentation as competence first, load constraint second, execution error third, so incompetence never becomes her identity.

Why it changed

The artbook requires a kid, not a test rig disguised as a roster entry. The deterministic throw and squad role from v0.2 needed a specific originating character whose flaws and equipment explain the existing scatter without retroactively inventing mechanics.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• docs/art/prompts/balloon-chucker-studies-v2.md: five paired high-fidelity/low-poly studies generated 2026-07-25, approved by Anthony for GitHub storage and public Artbook display the same day (see the artifact records). Canon corrections from v1 fixed her race, age, sash/pail silhouette, and the competence-first visual order.
• Inherited mechanical evidence: TUNING.md "Stage 1 Sprint 1 delayed-throw gate," "Stage 1 Sprint 2 MG0," and "Stage 1 Sprint 2 MG1" (see v0.2); no new mechanical evidence was produced for this revision.
• In play, a miss receives no explanatory interruption; in story, marginalia, or post-action material, she may cite wind or balloon variance aloud while privately writing "let go too soon" or "let go too late" — she is not a fraud, her private record is more honest than her public confidence.

Rejected or alternate directions

• Puddle refilling as a reload mechanic (conflicts with the approved no-refill direction).
• A generic bucket-only silhouette with no sash.
• Stopping play to explain a miss.
• Treating eight visible balloons as a hard ammo cap before balance evidence exists; the sash is a concept-art loadout, not a persistent ammo counter.
• An eight-throw cooldown rule — recorded only as a future balance proposal, not current character truth.

Still unresolved

Featured question: does she read as a capable young grenadier whose coordination sometimes betrays her—or merely as a kid who is bad at throwing?

Secondary unknowns:

• her exact civilian name;
• her exact family/cultural context;
• whether the sash is tape, loops, or another art-safe attachment that preserves the improvised read;
• whether the pail and sash remain legible in the low-poly lane;
• whether an eight-throw cooldown is ever needed after playtesting.