The Everpainting Spire

A calm, painterly wander across five floating islands. Walk, skate and glide through a world that is still wet, paint it with your brush, wake what sleeps along the way, and lay the last stroke on the Spire yourself.

Play it in your browser

There is no combat and nothing to fail. If you fall, the paint carries you back.

A note before you play: this game changes as it goes. It begins gently, but its later parts are frightening, with blood and death, and are not for children.

Controls

Key	What it does
W A S D	Walk
Mouse	Look around (arrow keys also work)
Shift	Skate
Space	Jump; press again in the air to jump once more; hold in the air to glide
Click, or J / F	Swing the brush: it paints the ground and whatever stands nearby
Q, right-click, or 1–0	Change paint
E	Hold to paint a sketched bridge; press to rest at an easel or step through a door
G	Sketchbook: your paintings and everything you have found
C	Photo mode
H	Map
M	Sound on or off
P	Cycle the brushwork filter
Esc	Settings

What there is to do

• Paint. Every swing lays real strokes into the ground and soaks colour into trees, rocks and walls. Flowers come up where you walk.
• Follow the route. Paint the sketched bridges, gather three sparks of inspiration, and reach the Spire.
• Rest. Sit at an easel and the painter paints the view in front of it. Each finished picture is yours to save.
• Look around. There are sleeping companions to wake, sketches waiting to be painted into being, springs that colour their waterfalls, and a few places no path leads to.
• Keep going. The ending opens more of the world, and a second journey lets you start again with what you earned.

The journey is saved in your browser as you play.

The Underpainting

The second level: a world still in pencil, where colour does things. It begins at night, and each thing you finish brings the morning closer.

• Water (Turquoise or Sky): paint a dry spring and water follows its channel, turns a wheel, and the wheel works a lift to the next terrace.
• Growth (Leaf): paint a sketched seed and a vine grows along the trellis drawn for it, into a bridge or a ramp.
• Warmth (Ember or Gold): painted ground gives off rising air. Jump in, hold Space, and it lifts you high enough to glide to places that were out of reach.
• Blank (Cream): takes paint back to paper. It wipes away old paint, and cools ground you warmed.

It ends on the Blank Page, where four wells each want one of the four, under the hand that drew it all.

You reach it by stepping into the unfinished canvas in the Spire's atelier, after the ending. To try it straight away, add ?underpainting to the address.

Varnishing Day (in progress)

A third level is being built: the gallery where the painting hangs, the day before the doors open. The pictures on its walls are nearly finished. Each has too much of one thing and not enough of another, and here the brush learns to carry: stand by something, press E to lift it, and lay it down in another picture.

• The Flood: a drowned orchard. Lift the water and the ground comes back, ring by ring.
• High Summer: a parched field with a dry spring and a dry mill pond, each waiting for a brushful.

The brush holds one thing at a time, and anything laid down can be lifted again. You reach the gallery through a frame that stands on the Blank Page once the Underpainting is finished; after that a frame in the atelier leads straight there. To try it straight away, add ?gallery to the address.

Running it yourself

You need Node.js 18 or newer.

npm install

npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5183.

To make a production build in dist/:

npm run build

Pushing to main builds and publishes the game to GitHub Pages (see .github/workflows/pages.yml).

How it is made

The game is written in plain JavaScript with three.js and built with Vite. It has no art or sound files:

• The world is generated in code: geometry coloured stroke by stroke, and island ground painted onto canvases with thousands of brush strokes.
• The painterly look is a post-process: a Kuwahara filter smears each frame like a palette knife, then a relief pass lights the paint as if it were thick.
• The music and sounds are synthesised with the Web Audio API. The music gains layers as you progress.

Source layout

File	What is in it
src/main.js	The game loop, rules, camera, menus, saving and restoring
src/world.js	Islands, bridges, the Spire, sky, sea, clouds and winds
src/player.js, src/painter.js	The painter: movement, animation, and the model with its cloth cape
src/post.js	The painterly post-process
src/paint.js	Brush strokes on the ground and colour soaked into objects
src/bloom.js	Flowers, buds and blossom that follow the painter
src/vista.js	Easels and the pictures painted at them
src/entities.js	Particles, sparks and companions
src/sketches.js, src/setpieces.js, src/secrets.js	Sketches, the island set-pieces and the hidden places
src/interior.js, src/sights.js	Inside the Spire, and the far-off sights
src/underpainting.js, src/seedbed.js, src/lastpage.js	The second level: running water, growing vines, warm air, and its ending
src/gallery.js	The third level: the gallery, its pictures, and lifting and carrying
src/day.js, src/audio.js	Time of day; music and sound
src/hud.js, src/settings.js, src/save.js	On-screen prompts and map, the settings panel, and storage
src/util.js	Shared helpers: palettes, noise, stroke geometry

Licence

MIT