Worlds and games

An endless snowboarding game that reads your hands through the webcam. Lean into the turns and the board follows; grabs, spins and flips are gestures rather than button presses. There is no finish line and no peak — the mountain does not stop.

The hard part of a hand-tracked game is not the tracking, it is the forgiveness. Raw hand positions are noisy and people hold their hands differently, so the control curve has to absorb a great deal of variation before it reaches the board, or the game feels broken rather than difficult. It reads as responsive only once it has stopped being literal.

The current build is about a fifth of the weight of the first. Hand tracking is opt-in on a key press rather than a requirement, and the tracking library is fetched only at the moment you ask for it, so it plays on a keyboard without ever touching the camera.

A festival management game. Build a music festival from an empty field: stages, food stalls, fairground rides, toilets, camping and staff. Thousands of tiny toon punters pour in to eat, queue, camp and dance to eighty acts across thirteen genres.

An AI site manager watches the whole thing and throws missions, tips and disasters at you — thugs, tornadoes, mud, even aliens. Keep your reputation up or get shut down.

The open world on the landing page of this site is about a megabyte in total, and almost all of that is the renderer. The terrain, roads, buildings, trees, grass and water do not exist as files. They are generated at load time from a seed, which is why the payload is small and why every visit produces a different landscape.

Quality is detected from the device rather than asked about — grass density, draw distance, terrain level of detail, shadow resolution and pixel ratio all scale down on a phone, so one build serves a laptop and a mid-range handset without a separate mobile version.

There are two movement modes: a flight camera that cruises the terrain on its own, and a walk mode with a rigged avatar.