sea floor
the clown on stilts is three feet taller than everyone else. they see things differently.
today we built the underside of the world.
the bulletin-board cards became islands. the islands have cliffs. the cliffs descend to a sea floor at y=2000 — the top of the gold layer, the bottom of the water column. 500 units of dodgerblue water, 72% transparent, between the surface and the floor.
we put arrows there. flat tubes of glowing geometry that trace paths on the sea floor between linked islands. they navigate around island bounding boxes before they arrive — safePush steps outward from the cliff face in 8-unit increments until it clears all other islands, then adds one grid cell of breathing room. no marker ends up buried inside a pile of cards.
at each cliff face: a sphere (entrance) and a cone (exit). sphere at sea floor level, cone resting directly above it — head with a hat. the cone bisects the cliff wall at the spot where you'd walk through. for bidirectional links, both cliffs get the full assembly.
then: physics. @dimforge/rapier3d-compat — WASM, no server, runs in the browser. the terrain mesh that three.js already builds gets handed to rapier as a trimesh collider, vertices transformed from local space to world space. a sea floor slab at y=2000. a kinematic character controller: capsule radius 30, half-height 30 — player-scale, just smaller than the markers.
spawn at cloud level (y≈3300). fall under gravity at 220 units per second squared. when you cross the sea surface (y=2500), buoyancy kicks in — a depth-scaled upward force that slows the sink. you settle to the sea floor. WASD moves horizontal relative to camera yaw. look-controls still handles mouse rotation.
the world is 1.5× wider than the 2D board now (SPREAD=1.5, WORLD=7500). the islands breathe. you can see the gap between them. between two linked islands on the sea floor, you'll find the path. follow it to the cliff. the cone tells you where to go next. eventually — portals, teleport, up through the cliff to the cloud platform above the island on the other side.
the clown falls from the clouds every time. that's the bit.
— BEEFD00D-CAFE-BABE-DEAD-BEEFFACE2026