Director’s commentary

Making of

How the game was built, one topic at a time, with the real code. The engine is open source under the MIT licence.

1. One wrong digit in a DATA lineWhy a single mistyped number could sink a whole type-in program, and how Disk 1 models READ, DATA and a seven-year-old's typos so that Mum can fix them.
2. Digging for Angelfire and GeoCitiesLooking for a 1999 Angelfire site and a 2001 GeoCities page in the web's archives, what the game shows while they're missing, and the one real thing on them: the hit counter.
3. Seven ages on one skeletonHow the game plans to show me at seven ages, from three to 42: proportions as head-to-body ratios, one shared skeleton, faces swapped by UV offset, and placeholder people until the photo-based Meshy models exist.
4. A CRT in TSLThe monitor on the Disk 1 desk: curved glass, scanlines, an aperture grille and phosphor glow, written once in TSL for WebGPU and WebGL 2, with a live minigame canvas on the tube.
5. Felt tip on cereal boxHow Disk 2 gets its homemade look: a shared toon material with a warm rim, felt-tip outlines found from depth and normals, and procedural paper grain, all in TSL.
6. Turning the carpet into the seaThe engine machinery behind Disk 3's big moment: looks built from uniforms, tweened rather than rebuilt, so a cosy living room can become the Caribbean without a cut.
7. Thumbs as a joystickTurning thumb taps into a joystick waggle for Disk 4's 100-metre sprint: cadence physics, the alternation rule, shake mode on iOS, the ruler cheat, and a leaderboard that marks it.
8. Running Flash in 2026Can a Flash game from 2001 still run in a browser today? With Ruffle, yes. Where the original files are, and the period-style rebuild standing in for them until they turn up.
9. Faster in chunksThe 2005–06 hotel search behind Disk 8: results streamed into the page without a reload, a .NET backend asking the supplier on several threads, and the two puzzles that teach it.
10. Hotspots you can Tab toHow a point-and-click game in WebGL stays playable by keyboard and screen reader: real buttons projected over the 3D scene, tap and long-press input, a polite live region, reduced motion, and a Read instead link from the first frame.
11. Holding 60 fps on a phoneQuality tiers from a GPU estimate, a governor that steps down when frames run slow, a render loop that idles at 30 fps and stops when hidden, budgets that fail the build, and fog doing the work of a whole street.
12. 59 props from MeshyThe pipeline behind every object in the game: one style preamble, a concept image, Meshy-7 image-to-3D, and an optimiser that turns 59 generated models into 4.7 MB a phone can download. Plus how the hero prop gets eaten.
13. No audio filesEvery tune, sound effect and background bed in the game is synthesised in the browser as it plays: a tracker-style sequencer, recipes for every sound, ambience beds, ducking under narration, and unlocking on the first tap.