An entire week on ember particles

The intro is sixty seconds of black, then a slow crawl of text, then Constantinople burning. The burning is one still image, two flame layers, and roughly two hundred ember sprites drifting up the screen on randomised easing curves.

It took a week. Most of that week was tuning the colour ramp on the embers — too orange and they look like a screensaver; too pale and they look like ash, which is fine, but the brief was embers. I ended up with three classes (spark, glow, soot) drifting on three different vertical-velocity bands.

I keep telling myself this is feature work. It is not. It is the first thirty seconds the player sees. Nothing in the codebase will matter as much as those thirty seconds.