V I B E S

A vaporwave-inspired first-person vibe-tuning puzzle: explore 10 music-genre worlds, grab objects and resize them by distance to tune each scene's sound and light until it clicks.

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V I B E S is out. It started as a small experiment and grew into ten scenes, so here’s how it got here.

The seed

V I B E S began as a spin-off of a puzzle game about perception. The idea was simple: whatever you pick up keeps the size it appears on screen. Grab something up close and drop it far away, and it grows. Do the opposite, and it shrinks. Near and far become your volume knob. I wondered if that idea could be relaxing instead of tricky, and the answer was a mall at closing time.

Three rooms, then a lot more

The first version had three scenes: Mallsoft, Future Funk and Chillwave. Each had three pads, and the size of what you put on them tuned three dials for the music, the sky and the lights. Hold them all in the green and the room resolves. Then the playtest notes started coming in, and the game kept growing:

The sky and the color of the whole scene now shift with the dials. Every dial adds or removes a layer of music. Objects start bigger, so they’re easier to read at a glance. Every scene got an after-hours sandbox you can wander as long as you like. After that came Synthwave, a Faux-Utopian atrium, a Vapornoise basement, a Frutiger Aero meadow, and a Grand Closing where everything must go. Finish it and a window called BONUS.EXE appears, with two last places: a quiet poolroom and a candlelit hall below.

The music is the point

Nothing in V I B E S is a recording. Every genre has its own sound engine that plays live in your browser, so changing a dial changes the music in real time. Getting each genre to sound right as pieces fade in and out took the most iteration of anything in the game.

How it was made

It’s a single HTML page of about 5,500 lines, built on three.js, with models put together from simple shapes and all the sound generated in code. I built it as a team with Claude. Claude wrote the code, and I wrote and designed the game, ran the playtests, and made the calls on what felt right. Every round of notes (“make this bigger,” “move that,” “this scene feels tame”) went back into the build.

Small things I’m proud of

•Scenes unlock in order, and your progress saves.

• Nothing chases you, nothing counts down, and there’s no game over. The whole point is to dig the V I B E S and have some sandbox fun.

• My daughter has played it and loves it, which is the best review it could get.

Thank you for spending some of your attention in here. If you find a scene that feels off or a dial that doesn’t make sense, tell me in the comments and I’ll fix it.

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