Browser games WILD, KAMENE and IZRAKUMI

01, Chapter

WILD. A night on the forest trail

The player is a volunteer on a night-time wildlife count, walking a forest trail from dusk to sunrise. Six stations hold six different field tasks. Players identify silhouettes on a ridge, read tracks in the mud, find eyes in the dark with a lantern beam, walk around a 3D animal to find three field marks, count horses as a herd runs past and carry out the dawn count. Every animal found goes into a field journal with three verified facts.

The game is built with three.js and WebGL 2. The forest is generated with instanced geometry, so it takes only a few dozen draw calls, the lighting has seven moods, and the animated animal models load only when they are needed. The game is covered by 220 automated tests and a full automated play-through in Chromium and Firefox.

03, Chapter

KAMENE. A bumblebee's working day

A fast 2D arcade game. The player flies a bumblebee across a Latvian summer meadow, pollinates flowers in the order shown at the top of the screen, keeps the nectar topped up and brings it home to the nest before sunset. There are five days, from a morning meadow to a late-summer heath, each harder than the last, and after each one the player learns a true fact about bumblebees. Hazards always give a warning before they strike: gusts of wind, rain showers, crab spiders in the flowers and the red-backed shrike.

Every image is drawn by code that imitates a risograph press, with four spot inks, halftone dots, ink dropout and slight misregistration. The game is built with PixiJS 8, its physics runs at 120 steps per second, and every player gets the same levels.

05, Chapter

IZRAKUMI. A palaeontologist's work in two parts

In the field, the player uses a pick, a brush and a hand lens to uncover a fossil in layers of sediment without breaking the bone. In the lab, the pieces go onto a light table and have to be fitted back together over a blueprint by dragging and turning each one. There are five specimens, from an ammonite and a trilobite to a cave bear and the skull of a woolly rhinoceros, each with a short true fact.

The dig is drawn with Canvas 2D in four sediment layers, the light table is built with SVG, and every drawing is generated in code as an ink drawing with stippled shading. Pieces can be turned with a second finger, the mouse wheel, buttons or keys.

07, Chapter

The shared foundation

The games have no accounts, cookies, analytics or external requests. They work in Latvian and English, with touch, mouse and keyboard, and respect the reduced-motion setting. All the sound is generated in code with Web Audio, with no audio files, and it can be switched off.

The leaderboard is a single small PHP file with no database and no personal data, with limits against abuse. After a game, players can create and share a result card drawn by their own device.

08, Chapter

The result

You can try the games at wild.createit.lv, kamene.createit.lv and izrakumi.createit.lv.

• Three games in three technologies: 3D with three.js, 2D with PixiJS, and Canvas 2D with SVG.
• Three art styles, all drawn in code.
• They run on phones and computers with nothing to install, in two languages.
• Automated tests and full play-through checks for every game.