Paint the world before the first step.
Eight material layers are baked into a texture array on the GPU at startup. Triplanar sampling gives terrain and architecture bark, stone, soil and wear without a downloaded texture pack.
Actual in-game frameThe Hollow March / first-person RPG slice
The Hollow March
A small light. A large wood. Something knows you are here.
Follow the waymarkers through Mournwood and descend beneath the ruined chapter-house. A lantern, a blade and an ember bolt are what you have. The things between you and the barrow have other arrangements.
Enter Mournwood▶Keyboard + mouse · WebGL 2 · headphones recommended
Folk horror, skeletal creatures, combat, flashing spell effects and sudden sounds.
2 connected spacesMournwood and the Barrow
Combat + progressionCombos, parries and level-up blessings
Zero external assetsMeshes, textures, music and effects generated
Behind the experience
More than a beautiful walk in the woods.
A playable loop connects exploration, combat, descent and a final encounter. The interesting part is how its small systems support one another.
The arm follows the hand. Not the other way round.
Two-bone inverse kinematics connects the shoulder to the sword or lantern, with an elbow pole controlling the bend. The three-hit combo has a wind-up, a strike and a follow-through, rather than a blade rotating in isolation.
A silhouette before a stat block.
Shared procedural primitives become jointed creature rigs. Swept profiles give limbs shape; skulls have jaws and brows rather than a painted face. Instancing lets those shared pieces appear across multiple enemies.
A fight and a haunting need different music.
Nearby attackers bring percussion into the generated score. Dread has its own layer. Even the space changes the sound: shaped-noise reverb gives the forest and barrow different acoustic signatures.
← Back to Notes
What this version is
A place to explore. A direction to build on.
A vertical slice with a complete short loop, not a finished full-length RPG. Save/load and larger-world streaming remain future work. The seeded layout repeats between runs. Desktop controls only; pause options include render scale, volumetrics, bloom, grain and music.
The starting brief
This was the starting brief, supplied to Opus 5. The page presents the current project snapshot; it does not claim that every detail arrived unchanged in the first response.
Without external assets, can we build an engaging, atmospheric and jaw dropping first person rpg game, featuring a spooky woods environment and on dungeon in an old ruin with some really strange enemies and one or two mysterious enemies, atmospheric generated music and basically presenting a good slice of a future game direction and both showing what is currently possible using just a webgl web application.
Controls
Step inside.
WASD move · mouse look · Shift sprint · Space vault · left mouse strike · right mouse ember bolt · Q brace/parry · E interact · Tab journal · Esc pause. If pointer lock is unavailable, drag to look or use the arrow keys.
The return link above the player unloads the experience and its sound.