Overview
A control-point conquest game where the battlefield is a whole planet. You orbit it, zoom from the globe down to a city street, capture cities, build units and fight an AI opponent — while every crater, fire and smoke plume changes the planet's climate.
Problem
Make a planet feel alive and stay readable as a strategy map: smooth orbit and zoom, thousands of objects on a sphere, and destruction that has consequences — using nothing but Three.js.
My role
Concept, game design and direction: the rules, the balance and the look. The code was written with AI assistance and verified with automated play-throughs.
Challenges
- Edit the terrain live — craters, scorching, flattened city ground — without rebuilding the mesh.
- Draw trees, buildings, vehicles and aircraft on a sphere at once, day and night.
- Build an orbit camera with no gimbal lock and no OrbitControls, from globe view to street level.
- Make destruction matter: connect explosions to fire, pollution, sea level and the victory conditions.
Solution
A cube-sphere terrain whose height, colour and normals are updated locally on impact; instanced meshes for trees, buildings and vehicles; a quaternion-based camera; procedural shaders for clouds, atmosphere and ocean; and a small ecosystem model that feeds back into the game.
Architecture & approach
- Deformable cube-sphere terrain with an exact height lookup, so units, roads and projectiles follow craters.
- Instanced rendering: 15,000 trees, about a thousand buildings with procedural night windows, hundreds of cars, airliners and ships.
- Hand-written HDR pipeline: MSAA scene buffer, bloom, tone mapping, depth of field, sun shadows, cloud shadows baked from a cube map, four quality presets with automatic downgrade.
- A* pathfinding on a 9,000-node graph laid over the sphere; roads generated from the same graph.
- Rules layer: a five-mission campaign with stars and guided tutorial, fog of war and six command stratagems (decoy armies, radio silence, espionage, blitz…) in the spirit of information-warfare strategy games, control points, tickets, economy, research, six unit types including indirect-fire artillery and an ecological engineer that repairs the damage, an AI that deceives and gathers waves, and an orbital strike.
- Ecosystem model: burned forest and pollution lower the biosphere, raise the seas and darken the sky.
Technology
Outcome
A complete, playable game on this site: free, with no ads and no tracking, and nothing beyond Three.js — camera, particles, shaders, audio and interface are all hand-written.
Lessons learned
- Consequences need tuning: the first ecosystem model collapsed within minutes and had to be rebalanced so war hurts the planet without ending the game.
- A headless simulation loop makes AI and economy tuning fast: play a whole match in seconds, then read the numbers.