Stele — Carved High-Score Monument for Unity

Your leaderboard already works. It just has nothing to show.

Every leaderboard asset on the store sells you transport — Nakama, PlayFab, Steam, Unity Gaming Services, dreamlo, RankHub. They save the scores, sort them, paginate them and hand you back a list. Then you draw it yourself, as a vertical stack of text in the engine's default UI, and it looks like a spreadsheet.

Stele cuts that list into a monument. A shaped stone or brass board with an arched head and a plinth, a carved margin band, an order emblem beside every entry, a feat device saying what the record was for, and the names and scores struck into the face as incised letterforms.

48 hand-authored marks. 7 stocks. No images.

There is no atlas, no sprite sheet, no font and no shader anywhere in this package. Every mark, every face treatment, every margin motif and every letter is a signed-distance function drawn in code by a software rasteriser included in the source. The package ships zero image files — you can check.

What is in the corpus

• 8 order emblems — laurel, crown, star, chevrons, palm, oak cluster, rosette, honour bar. One per rank band, chosen by your own word.
• 16 feat devices — swift, endurance, flawless, deathless, chain, streak, depth, summit, milestone, mark, hoard, slayer, compass rose, builder, survivor, first. What the record was actually for.
• 14 margin motifs — meander, egg and dart, guilloche, bead and reel, cable, dentil, chevron, vine, chain, rope, zigzag, fret, wave, lotus.
• 10 ground treatments — plain, veined, speckled, tooled, pitted, banded, brushed, crazed, scanline, mossed. What the face of the stone actually looks like up close.

Two axes that multiply

The stock is a property of the board; the order is a property of one entry. They are independent, so seven stocks across eight orders is fifty-six distinct emblem renderings before a single feat device or margin motif is chosen. Slate is dark and its letters are gilded to be read. Marble is the palest and its letters are shadow. Cathode is not stone at all — it is phosphor on black glass, an arcade cabinet's own board, and it steps deliberately sideways off the ladder so the set does not read as one gradient.

The top three rows are a different shape

A board of N identical rows is a spreadsheet however well each row is drawn. So ranks 1 to 3 are cut as honour blocks at 1.85 times the height of a list row, with a larger emblem, the rank set above the name rather than beside it, and lettering as large as the block will hold. The field is divided in units rather than fixed pixels, so three entries fill the board as three big blocks and twenty fill it as three blocks and seventeen tight rows, with no dead space at the foot either way.

Weathering, from something your leaderboard already knows

Give an entry the date it was set and its wear is derived from its own age against the oldest record on the board. A wall of long-standing records reads uniformly rubbed, and one fresh entry among them is visibly newly cut. Leave the dates out and it falls back to rank depth, more gently. It is optional, and it is the difference between a board that varies and a board that repeats.

It talks to nothing

var board = new Board { Title = "HALL OF RECORDS", Stock = Stock.Slate };
board.Entries.Add(Records.Entry(1, "VESPER", Records.Points(1284900), "champion", "flawless"));
Texture2D monument = SteleBoard.Compose(board, 700, 1100);

No SDK, no service, no async call, no failure mode. You hand it a list; where the list came from is not this package's business. Keep whichever backend you already have.

Also in the box

• An editor window (Window > CSAF > Stele) — type your own rows in, watch it cut, save a PNG. It names every character it cannot cut, by row.
• A demo scene that needs no Canvas and no UI package: open it, press Play, arrow keys walk the seven stocks.
• Composition off the main thread — Bake is pure arithmetic and touches no Unity API, so the work can leave the frame a score screen opens on.
• Raw, commented C# source. Add your own marks; the licence explicitly permits it.

Requirements

Unity 2022.3 or newer. No package dependencies. Render-pipeline agnostic — Built-in, URP, HDRP or a custom pipeline, because there is no shader and no material in the art path. Deterministic: the same board yields byte-identical pixels on every machine.

Honest note on cost. These are signed-distance fields evaluated per pixel on the CPU, so a board costs seconds rather than milliseconds and the cost is proportional to pixel count. Compose ahead and cache, or bake to a PNG in the editor. The Readme ships measured figures and says plainly that the high number is an observation and not a ceiling.

AI disclosure: Code — yes. Graphics — yes. Sounds — no (the package contains no audio). Text and dialog — no. There is no image model anywhere in the art path: the graphics disclosure is because the code that draws the marks was AI-written, and the output is generated offline and byte-identically by that code.