Pixel Reveal

one flat tile that splits into four, then sixteen, and keeps halving until the tiles stop being tiles and the picture arrives over the top.

key insight: nothing fades in. every level is a box filter over the one below it, so the picture is complete from the first frame and the filter is what throws it away. a reveal built as an opacity ramp says nothing about why detail arrives in the order it does.

there are no levels either, which is the change that mattered most. it is a quadtree: every tile splits on its own schedule and inherits it from its parent, so detail spreads out of the places it already reached and the canvas holds four or five tile sizes at once.