Waystone

The concept is the contract

The platform's concept-image service was out of credits on the day this piece was built, so the concept pack was authored in the lab instead: clay maquettes of every silhouette the piece promises, rendered before any final art existed, beside a palette with hex values and the material and lighting rules the art phase had to satisfy. It is still a contract — and it is the one the finished stones were audited against, silhouette by silhouette.

The authored concept board: clay maquettes, palette hex values, material and light rules

The same cairn live in the engine, on real granite under a real shadow map

Gray boxes before art

The whole loop ran as primitives first: the hoist, the drop, the settle test, the wind, the lost-stone rule, the restart. Round 2 caught a real bug the screenshots could not — the gust fired on a placed % 3 test, and because a gust does not place a stone, the turn loop re-triggered the same gust forever. It also showed the hoist hovering off the top of the frame and the camera sitting too low. All three were fixed before a single stone was sculpted.

Blockout: the plinth and stones as boxes and cylinders — the physics is already the real physics

The same cairn with its Blender granite on

Sculpt, chisel, bake

Each waystone is fused from overlapping primitives, voxel-remeshed, then displaced with two layers of noise and planar-decimated so the surface breaks into chiselled facets instead of melting into a blob. That high-poly sculpt is baked down to a low-poly hull — normal, ambient occlusion and base colour — with lichen driven by a noise mask that is gated on the surface normal, so sage and rust grow on the upward faces and never on the face a stone rests on.

The collider is the stone

A sculpted stone with a box collider is a defect class, not a shortcut: the stack would balance on geometry the player cannot see. Here every stone's ConvexPolygonShape3D is generated from its own baked mesh at load, and the engine's stack maths — the height read, the hoist's hover point, the centre-of-mass lean — all use the measured half-extents written out by the Blender build, not numbers typed into the game.

Six stones in, leaning — the plumb gauge reads what the contacts are actually doing

The gust: a real impulse on every stone, scaled by mass and by how high it sits

A game about wind, with no wind noise in it

The platform banned looping ambient noise beds the day this piece was built, which is an awkward ruling for a game whose antagonist is the weather. So the wind here is never a recording: the gust is composed — a tremolo-string swell that resolves into a timpani and horn hit — and it is shown, in grass and grit torn sideways and a direction arrow in the HUD. The dusk atmosphere is a slow contrabass and viola drone under a harp figure. Every other sound is an event the player just caused.

Measured, honestly

Audited with Playwright on this host's software renderer — no GPU, and a machine running four other labs' Blender jobs at the time. The frame rate below is the floor.

Real engine features, earned

Tuned constants