The forms — iconkind

One family, five bodies

Five ways to be a kind.

A character is built in four steps. The FORM is the body it has. The KIND is its colour and its five trait scores. The CALLING is what it does all day. Only then is it a CHARACTER with a name. Change the form and everything above it still holds — which is why a mermaid and a sheep can be recognisably the same family.

iconkind

The original. A head, a body, two legs and six things you can change about them.

Every other form is this one with something taken away or put back.

200 × 240 · eye line 129 · 9 slots · 282 parts

Meet the cast

merkind

iconkind minus the legs. Everything above the waist is the same person; below it, a tail.

The proof that a form can be subtracted from and still belong.

200 × 272 · eye line 129 · 9 slots · 213 parts

See the merkind

dinokind

A snout, a tail and back plates — and the head still more than half the figure.

Built to ask whether the family read survives a different silhouette. It does.

200 × 240 · eye line 118 · 8 slots · 29 parts

See the dinokind

palkind

The animals. A coat, sometimes a tail, and a muzzle where the mouth zone was.

The sheep, the cat and the fox all come off this one rig.

200 × 240 · eye line 122 · 12 slots · 498 parts

See the palkind

treekind

A trunk, a canopy, a face and roots. No costume, no hat, no badge and nothing to carry.

Four slots the form does not HAVE, rather than four it has not got round to.

200 × 300 · eye line 129 · 4 slots · 89 parts

See the grove

fishkind

Seen from the SIDE, which no other form is — because a fish is its profile. Head-on, a mackerel and a bass are the same blob.

It costs the second eye and keeps the eye line. The family rule is where the eye sits, not how many there are.

240 × 150 · eye line 62 · 4 slots · 34 parts

The forms

The contract

What makes them one family

Not a style guide anyone has to remember. Every rule below is a file, and every form is checked against it before it can ship — each one measured against that form's own numbers, so a mermaid is held to the same rule as a sheep and to different measurements.

Eye Line Fixed

Every expression shares ONE eye line, so a character keeps its proportions when it starts talking. Move it per face and the head appears to change size between moods.

Mouth Zone Clear

The cramping was never the head shape, it was the collar. A costume that rides into the mouth zone leaves a character unable to speak in any expression that has a mouth.

Badge Mount Bipolar

The badge must read on ANY body. A mount containing both a light and a dark element always has one of the two separating it from the ground, whichever way the body colour goes. This is the same lesson the DNA bars taught: value, not outline.

Value Not Outline

The clean style sets svg-asset's colour to transparent, so nothing inherits a stroke. Art drawn for the outlined style survives that change looking identical in source and invisible on screen.

Three Values

Head, torso, feet. A character wearing one value from the chin down reads as a blob with a face; it is what separated the Explorer from every other archetype before the costumes were rebuilt.

Two Loose Objects

Exactly two things may float free of the body, and they sit on opposite sides so the silhouette is broken only at the hem. It is the whole no-clutter rule: you cannot make it cluttered without breaking it.

Sewable

These get made. One closed silhouette; handles are ARCHES, which is a seam, not a stick; nothing below the minimum feature, because a 3mm fabric rod cannot be cut, sewn, or survive a child.