The player starts with a level-1 tether anchored on the home world:
a circular zone 5120 px from the planet's center. The ship may fly
anywhere in the UNION of its tethers' zones — where zones overlap there
is no line and no wall — and the union's boundary is a hard barrier,
rendered as a thick cyberpunk glitch dotted line (marching dashes,
additive glow + RGB fringe, ambient glitch bursts with dash flicker,
radial displacement and data drops, contact shudder + camera kick +
throttled console toast where the ship bumps it).
- data/tether.json: level radii (5120 x 1.25^lv), the starting tether,
barrier line/look, glitch and contact tuning (manifest-registered)
- js/tether/Tether.js: pure range math (union membership, clamp to the
nearest union boundary point + normal, visibleArcs = each tether's
share of the union boundary) — Node-tested
- js/tether/TetherField.js: scene-facing field — add/remove/setLevel
seam for future builds/upgrades, per-frame ship constraint, and the
barrier renderer (on-screen dot culling only)
- js/scenes/GameScene.js: home tether at the system origin, HUD
readout (level / range / anchor per tether), click-to-fly and
autopilot targets clamped to the union boundary, contact feedback,
destruction on shutdown
- dev/tether.test.mjs: 29 checks incl. the two-direction boundary
property (no line in overlaps, no gaps in the line) and a numeric
nearest-boundary cross-check (worst 0.79 px)
- dev/smoke-game.mjs: ?tethers / ?homeLevel / ?report dev hooks for
manual and headless verification
- README + PROJECT_NOTES: the system, its rules and its layering
Verified in headless Chromium: clean boot (menu + game), barrier
rendering (calm and glitch-burst frames), union boundary with two
tethers (arcs meet at the rim crossings, lens is line-free), ship
clamped exactly onto the rim from outside, contact toast fired.
- Discovery rule: ship within `discovery.distance` (540 px) of a world's edge discovers it once per system; state is pure, save-ready (`Discovery.toJSON/fromJSON`)
- Off-screen compass (`DiscoveryCompass`): themed screen-edge arrows with type/name chips point back at discovered worlds; geometry helpers (`edgeAnchor`, `circleInView`, `lerpAngle`) exported for Node tests
- Solar-system layout: `layoutSystemPlanets` places generated worlds in a deterministic annular band around the home world, enforcing edge-to-edge separation and per-class scale/tint from `data/planets.json`
- All system planets are solid to the ship (collision + click-clamp), not just home
- Rim ping + HUD toast on discovery (`celebrateDiscovery`)
- New planet class pools (rocky/gas/ice/lava) with frames, `classScale`, `classTint`, and `typeLabels`
- Smoke-game dev hooks: `?ship=x,y` and `?near=px` for screenshotting discovery/compass states
- Node test suite (`dev/discovery.test.mjs`) covering rule boundaries, per-system state, JSON round-trip, layout bounds/determinism, compass geometry, and class pools
- Main menu Galaxy Seed panel: displayed, editable, rerollable; the menu
previews what the seed builds (galaxy name, scale, archetypes) before
committing. Same seed always generates the same galaxy.
- js/galaxy/Galaxy.js: seeded roster of 40k systems (disk + core + spiral
arms, type weights, radial bands) with spatial hash for neighbor queries;
contents generated lazily on arrival — identical to eager generateAll()
because each system draws from Rng.derive(seed, 'system', id).
- js/galaxy/SystemGenerator.js + data/systems.json: six themed archetypes
whose attributes (star classes, planet count spread, class weights,
moons, belts, habitability, hazard) steer content generation.
- data/galaxy.json layout/distribution knobs, incl. distribution.rules[]
hook for future proximity/clustering rules; data/naming.json name pools.
- GameScene: current system name/identity HUD (lazy content generation
on arrival); dev boot without a menu falls back to a dev galaxy.
- dev/galaxy.test.mjs: determinism, distribution, bands, lazy==eager,
neighbor brute-force checks (40k roster in ~70ms).
- Docs: world model, determinism rules, roadmap update.
- Boot the game from a static server with no build step (Phaser 4 vendored in lib/)
- Main menu (New Game button) and GameScene where clicking makes the ship fly there
- All tunables live in data/*.json (game/menu/ship), loaded via manifest + Config singleton
- Ship behavior driven by arcade physics (thrust, drag, maxSpeed, arrival) with a Node test harness (dev/ship-behavior.test.mjs) and a dev smoke page that boots straight into GameScene
- Project conventions documented in docs/PROJECT_NOTES.md; README rewritten to describe layout, run instructions, and dev tools
Brian Fertig
Brian Fertig