Afterburn

## Problem

Sometimes you build robots and battery packs; sometimes you need to fly through a neon dream at 600 km/h. What started as a weekend experiment in pure-code atmosphere grew a real flight model, a combat mode, and a landing sequence — still no 3D models, no textures, no audio files.

## Solution

A vanilla Three.js flyer, rebuilt from the ground up. Flight mode is the endless run — gates, streaks, crystal, the odd whale in the haze. Sortie mode is five waves of hostile jets and then you have to land it. The jet flies to your cursor with throttle, rudder, airbrake and afterburner on the keys, and the world cycles through eight named sectors and four dream palettes — violet dusk, abyssal teal, ember rose, mint hollow.

## Features

• Two modes — Flight (endless gates and streaks) and Sortie (five waves of bandits, then a landing graded TOUCHDOWN or HARD LANDING)
• Real flight model: throttle, rudder, airbrake, afterburner, aileron rolls
• Named maneuvers — cobra, immelmann, split-S, and the reversal for shaking a bandit off your six
• Combat kit: cannon, lock-on missiles (FOX TWO), and a white-crystal laser that sweeps for six seconds
• Sortie HUD with radar, rear-view mirror, wave counter and kill tally
• Eight procedural sectors — the valley, the canyon, the mirror sea, spire forest, the graveyard…
• Fully procedural world in four dream palettes — no imported assets, audio synthesized in-code
• Best score persists on-device

## Tech Stack

## Challenges

• Making an infinite world feel varied using only procedural generation — eight sector recipes mixing canyons, lakes, spires and monoliths
• Tuning a flight model that reads as a dream in Flight mode and holds up in a dogfight in Sortie
• Combat legibility with mouse-only aim — lock cones, threat callouts, and a rear-view mirror instead of a hard camera swing

## Lessons Learned

• Constraints breed atmosphere: zero assets forces every visual to earn its place in code