starwick - you can walk it now

big one. til now starwick was a sky in front of ur face, a floating eyeball. now its a place u stand in and walk, where relighting a star changes the ground around u and the music shifts with where u are.

what i built

the realm is procedural. terrain is a seeded heightfield, no file, jus noise sampled into a mesh, and the same function feeds the walk code so u follow the slopes instead of clipping through em. first-person now, joystick to move, drag to look, a lantern, ground-snap. the camera stopped flying and started walking, sounds small but was secretly half the work. crystals mark each star-site, a constellation hangs above one, trace it to relight and the crystals warm blue to gold while a beacon lights toward the next.

the bar that refused to be a circle

the relight fires a shockwave ring out from the star. except it kept rendering as a flat white bar, like a highlighter line drawn across the screen. took me a while to clock it, the torus mesh sits in one plane and i was aiming the wrong axis at the camera so the ring was permanently edge-on. point its actual face at the cam and it pops into a clean expanding circle. one line. i stared at that strip way too long.

sound that follows u

the score’s layered now, a drone underneath, a pad that swells near a site, a motif while u trace, tension on a choice, full bloom on relight. the stars pulse in time, brighter when it swells. nones recorded, all synthesized in code and mixed live by where u are.

where it stands

u can walk the realm, find a site, trace the constellation, watch it warm the world, and the score moves with u. still one realm for now, more biomes next.