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Playground

Things I built for fun.

Each of these started with a question I wanted to answer. Can three simple rules make a flock? Can a whole world come from one seed? Is a bank shot geometry or luck? I built them to find out.

The character

There's a little character who lives on this site. A and D run him along the headings, W jumps and S drops through. Press F to turn gravity off and he'll float wherever you point him. While he's floating, E opens whatever he's hovering over, so you can use him as a slow, silly mouse for the whole site.

Shift + P anywhere

Polished

Seed World

A world you can walk forever, stored nowhere. Every tile is a pure function of the seed.

  • Procedural
  • Value noise
  • Canvas
Polished

Boids

Three local rules, no leader, and a flock appears. Turn one off and watch which part dies.

  • Three.js
  • Emergence
  • WebGL
Polished

Game Of Life

Tiles that read their eight neighbours and move. Nobody writes the rules — the world invents one every time it sees an arrangement it has not met before.

  • Cellular automata
  • Emergence
Polished

Fibonacci

The ratio of consecutive terms converges on the golden ratio. Here is the number and the picture.

  • Maths
  • BigInt
  • Canvas
Playable

Ricochet Arena

Shells reflect properly off walls, and the enemies aim where you are going rather than where you are.

  • Game
  • Collision
  • Ballistics
Polished

Chess

Legal move generation verified against published perft counts — plus the mode where both sides move at random and a lone king beats a full roster.

  • Game
  • Rules engine
  • Search
Polished

Luck Ranked

The winner is drawn after you click, so there is nothing to read and no way to be good at it. It ranks your luck instead.

  • Game
  • Statistics
Polished

Shell Game

The other half of that idea: the ball goes under a cup before the shuffle, so following it is possible — and the scoreboard says whether you did.

  • Game
  • Statistics
Polished

Music Bounce

Pick a slice of the spectrum, say what the cube should do when it gets loud, and let the track draw the path.

  • Web Audio
  • FFT
  • Canvas
Polished

Step Sequencer

A drum machine with no samples in it. Every sound is built from oscillators and noise, and the whole pattern fits in a link.

  • Web Audio
  • Synthesis
  • Sequencer
Polished

Chime Box

The walls are the instrument. Turn quantise off to hear exactly what quantising does.

  • Web Audio
  • Physics
  • Generative
Polished

Music Timeline

Drag clips around and it stays in time, because the playhead comes from the audio clock rather than a timer.

  • Web Audio
  • Scheduling
  • Timeline
Polished

Reactive Music

A spectrum you can watch, and beat detection that works on a quiet track and a loud one alike.

  • Web Audio
  • FFT
  • Canvas

The serious work is next door.

See the workBrowse the lab