isle

I made an experimental game with no objective. You're on a procedural island that changes every time you start. You can transform into a raven and fly to other islands.

Even the music is procedural, so every session sounds different.

You'll see a new landmark on every island: a mountain, a giant elder tree, a colossal statue.

I wanted a game made with AI that's minimal in all ways: no third-party game engine, no Three.js, no downloaded art or audio. The whole thing is ~200 KB.

Inspired by Journey (2012), Proteus (2013), and No Man's Sky (2016).

It's a browser game and playable today.

The island in this game is a musical instrument.

While building Isle, I had Claude web-search through studies on how nature helps you recover when you're mentally worn out or stressed.

It incorporated what it found into the game. The top-ranked finding was that water sounds had the strongest effects on mood and wellbeing in nature-sound studies. So it added rain and shore surf. It also found proximity-audio research: sounds that swell as you approach places. Then it turned the entire island into an instrument. You move around to play it. Every sound is procedural, so no two game sessions will sound the same.