◂ Gote
WebGPU · playable in the browser

Gote Desert

A desert that remembers what you did to it. Carve a slope and the sand does not dent, it collapses, slides, and settles back to its angle of repose, the roughly 34 degrees at which dry sand stops moving. Every dune and every grain of shading is generated on the GPU at load. Nothing here is a texture or a model that someone drew.

Before you press play Desktop Chrome or Edge, on a keyboard. This runs on WebGPU, which phones and Safari do not reliably support yet. On an unsupported browser you get one line of text instead of a picture, which is the build telling the truth, not a broken page.

Controls

The panel is where the demo shows its working: the camera positions the whole project is graded against, a switch for every layer of the sand material so you can turn one off and see what it was carrying, the wet-sand toggle, the brush size, the angle of repose itself, and the freezes that stop time so a single frame can be measured.

Progression

Every build ever shipped, oldest first, each one still playable at its original link. Nothing here is a video of an old version. It is the old version.

    What is real, and what is not

    Working now

    • A figure that walks, runs, jumps and glides, and leaves footprints in sand it actually deforms.
    • Music and wind, generated by the page itself. No audio file ships with the build.
    • Carving, and sand that avalanches back to its own repose angle instead of holding an impossible wall.
    • Pouring, which builds a cone through discrete slides rather than growing smoothly.
    • Carves that cast their own shadows, because the deformation is real geometry and not a decal.
    • Wet sand: darker, stands steeper, crumbles as it dries.

    Not built yet

    • The bending. Lifting a mass of sand into the air and throwing it is the centre of the project and it is still ahead. Right now you shape the ground, you do not command it.
    • The figure's look. What walks the desert is its skeleton, on purpose. The finished character is a design job, not a coding job, so it is not being drawn in code.
    • Wind that drifts the ripples, and the blowing layer above the sand.
    • The post-processing chain, so the image is raw. No bloom, no depth of field, no grain.