Why a game
Some things you have to stand on
An animation can show you a surface. It can't let you misjudge a slope, drive up it too fast, and roll back down. That difference matters more than it sounds: coordinates stop being a pair of numbers on a page when a readout in the corner of the screen changes as you walk, and "steep" stops being a word when a vehicle won't climb it.
So the world is deliberately literal. The terrain is generated from the function, not
decorated to look like it. Flat plane, saddle, ripples from sin(x) cos(y), a bell
from exp(-(x²+y²)/8) — each one is a place you can be standing in a
second or two, with no page reload.
Things to try
| Function | What you get |
|---|---|
| 0.15x | A constant 15% ramp — a slope you can pace out |
| sin(x)cos(y) | Egg-carton hills, peaks and saddles side by side |
| x²/20 | A valley that steepens — the derivative growing under your feet |
| exp(-(x²+y²)/8) | A single smooth hill on a flat plain |
What's in there
- A live coordinate and heading readout — the same
(x, y, z)the series draws, moving as you do. - Vehicles — a recon 4×4, a helicopter, and a drone you fly remotely while your character stands on the ground.
- Layer view — strip the world back from finished graphics to clay to bare grid, which is roughly the pipeline a scene goes through.
- An origin axis toggle — east red, north green, up blue, so you can always find where zero is.
Where it meets the videos
The game is the same project as the series by another route. Chapter 4 explains coordinates as counts of basis vectors; the game hands you a live one. The two-variable chapter in production is about nudging a point on a surface — which is a thing you can now go and do.