Starwick - you can walk it now

Big one. Up to now the game was a sky in front of your face - pretty, but you were a floating eyeball. This update turns it into a place you stand in and walk across, where relighting a star physically changes the ground around you, and the music shifts depending on where you are.

What I built

• A procedural realm. The terrain is a seeded heightfield - no heightmap file, just noise sampled into a mesh, with the same function feeding the walking code so you actually follow the slopes instead of clipping through them.
• First-person walking. Floating joystick to move, drag to look, a carried lantern, gravity-ish ground-snap. The camera stopped flying and started walking, which sounds small and was secretly half the work.
• Star-sites you find. Crystal formations mark each site, a constellation hangs above one of them, and you trace it to relight it.
• The world reacts. Relighting a site warms its crystals from cold blue to gold and a beacon lights up pointing you to the next one. The change is local - it happens where you are, not as a global filter.

The bar that refused to be a circle

The relight has a shockwave - a ring that expands out from the star. Except it kept rendering as a flat horizontal white bar. Looked like someone drew a highlighter line across the screen.

Took me a while to realize 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 the ring’s actual face at the camera and it pops into a clean expanding circle. One line. I stared at a glowing strip for longer than I’ll admit.

And a camera that rendered nothing

My screenshot oracle kept saving pure black for one shot. Same code worked for the next shot in the same function. Turns out a freshly created camera doesn’t render to its texture on the first frame - it needs a beat to warm up, or an explicit render call. The second shot worked because the camera was already warm. Forced a synchronous render and the black frames went away.

Sound that follows you

The score is layered now - a drone underneath, a pad that swells as you get near a site, a motif while you trace, a tense layer during a choice, and a full bloom on relight. And the stars pulse in time with it - brighter when the music swells. None of it is recorded; it’s all synthesized in code, mixed live by how close you are and what you’re doing.

Where it stands

You can walk the realm, find a site, trace the constellation, watch it warm the world, and the score moves with you.