/higgsfield-scene-engine

name: higgsfield-scene-engine
description: "Tests whether a scene is structurally worth generating before any shot is prompted — a five-element engine of Goal, Obstacle, Tactic, Reversal, and Value Shift. Use when the user has a scene, sequence, beat outline, or script and wants it audited or strengthened; when a sequence generates cleanly but lands flat and nobody can say why; when shots look good individually but the run of them does not build; or when the user asks 'is this scene working', 'what's weak here', or 'why doesn't this land'. Upstream of prompting — it decides WHICH shots deserve the credits, not how to write them. Pairs with higgsfield-character-design (who the characters are) and higgsfield-shotlist-director (turning the settled scene into shots)."
user-invocable: true
metadata:
  tags: [higgsfield, story, scene, structure, sequence, audit, dramaturgy, pre-production, reversal, value-shift]
  version: 1.1.0
  updated: 2026-09-26
  parent: higgsfield

Higgsfield Scene Engine — is this scene worth generating?

<!-- CONTENTS — generated by scripts/build_index.py; do not hand-edit --> **Contents**

• [The five-element engine](#the-five-element-engine)
• [1. Goal](#1-goal)
• [2. Obstacle](#2-obstacle)
• [3. Tactic](#3-tactic)
• [4. Reversal](#4-reversal)
• [5. Value Shift](#5-value-shift)
• [The causal chain](#the-causal-chain)
• [Audit procedure](#audit-procedure)
• [Audit output](#audit-output)
• [Where this sits before prompting](#where-this-sits-before-prompting)
• [Same words, different layer — the term map to `higgsfield-acting`](#same-words-different-layer--the-term-map-to-higgsfield-acting)
• [Related Skills](#related-skills)

<!-- /CONTENTS -->

`[EMPIRICAL — Tigran's tig-scene-engine skill (2026-06-26), re-derived 2026-08-22]` **These definitions are bespoke and deliberately not the textbook ones.** Apply them as written; do not substitute standard screenwriting glosses, which are looser and will pass scenes this engine fails.

**Why a prompter carries this.** Every shot costs credits and iterations. A structurally dead scene generates just as cleanly as a live one — the model has no opinion about whether a beat earns its place — so the failure surfaces only after the footage exists and the cut does not build. This skill is the cheapest pass in the repo: it runs on text, before any generation, and its whole job is to stop you paying to render a scene that cannot work.

It decides **which** shots deserve the spend. `higgsfield-shotlist-director` turns the settled scene into shots; `higgsfield-acting` writes the performance inside them.

---

The five-element engine

1. Goal

The single, unchanging thing the hero is fighting for: to fix what has already been established and reach, as fast as possible, the result that resolves it. "Already established" means *anything* set up earlier — deep backstory, a few scenes ago, or one minute ago.

• **The major goal never changes**, and the hero is never wrong about it. He can be wrong

about **tactics**, never about the goal.

• **Every scene goal must be a causal link toward the story goal.** *Test:* if you can

remove the scene and the chain still holds, the scene fails. No orphan scenes.

• "What he *ought* to do" is not a separate thing to test — the right move is dictated by

**Obstacle + Stakes**. A hero taking a tactic the stakes would not justify (showering while the building burns) is a flaggable inconsistency: name it as bad writing or as deliberate self-sabotage.

2. Obstacle

A strong circumstance that **jeopardizes** either one stage of the path or the whole goal. It *threatens*; it does not merely *cost*.

• It can be a **branching search space** (many places to look, limited time) or a **single

hard wall** (a dead battery — you cannot search a dead machine). A wall typically spawns a fresh sub-goal with its own terrain.

• Name its **scale**: *local* (threatens the current stage) or *global* (threatens the whole

goal).

• The obstacle is **what forces the hero to choose or change a tactic.** No jeopardy → no

tactic needed → no scene.

• *Audit test:* name what is at risk, and at what scale. If nothing genuinely is, the

obstacle is fake and the scene goes slack.

3. Tactic

The move the threat **forces** the hero to choose — a reasonable guess on his current, often incomplete, knowledge. This is **search under uncertainty, not error-as-stupidity.**

• A "wrong" tactic is not dumbness; it is a plausible probe of a space he cannot fully see.

The engine is a **knowledge gap**: the distance between what he believes and what is.

• **Each failed tactic must return information** that narrows the search and reshapes the

next move. The drama is the narrowing, not the punishment.

• ✅ good: the tactic is a reasonable bet on current info, **and** its failure teaches

something new.

• ❌ weak: a tactic he had no reason to try, or a failure that returns **zero information** —

a wheel-spin. A failing tactic is only a weakness when the failure teaches nothing.

4. Reversal

A turn against expectation. Three forms:

1. **My own action flips on me** — what I did *for* something starts working *against* it (I shower to make the pitch; the shower makes me late and I miss it). 2. **Hidden agency revealed** — the thing or person I thought I was acting *on* was acting *on me* all along. The thriller move; it often fires exactly when the knowledge gap closes. 3. The general case: the situation turns opposite to what the tactic intended.

**Placement:** at least one reversal **per sequence**. A single scene may be pure escalation, but a *resolved sequence* with zero reversals **fails**.

A **sequence** is the run of scenes from when a specific jeopardy opens to when it resolves — overcome, or it defeats him and forces a new path. Sequences **nest**, and each resolving unit needs its own reversal. Flag which scale you are auditing.

5. Value Shift

**The change in the A