Pixel Pawns

QMap c28 visualizes live AI agent sessions, and c45 introduces a policy-based governance system for sandboxing agents. Both need a coherent visual vocabulary — a set of recognizable characters representing the entities in an agent's world (agents, tools, files, secrets, policies, etc.). The current voxel models are temporary placeholders with no shared design language. A designer needs a clear, self-contained brief to create a semantically meaningful set of pawns that work across 2D pixel art, 3D voxel, and ASCII block art.

Produce a design brief that a designer can execute independently. The brief describes 11 entities with enough context — what each thing is, how it behaves, what states it passes through — that the designer can invent appropriate visual metaphors without follow-up questions about the system.

• In: Design brief, entity taxonomy with descriptions and states, visual language for policy events, cross-medium requirements, deliverable spec
• Out: Actual pixel art, voxel models, or code — this cycle produces a brief only

• cycles/c47.pixel-pawns/brief.md — the design brief
• Glossary: "Pixel Pawns" term added to QMap's CLAUDE.md

A self-contained brief ready to hand off. The designer reads it, understands the entities and their relationships, and produces a coherent set of pixel pawns without needing to understand the codebase or ask clarifying questions about what these things are.