Projects-Portfolio
Seedworlds
One word. One complete world.
Type a single word — meadow, harbour, ember — and Seedworlds grows an entire world from it: a language with its own sound rules and vocabulary, a land with biomes, rivers and named places, six creatures that live in those places and carry names from that language, and a creation myth that tells the story of that land in its own words.
Every layer is derived from the seed. The same word always grows the same world — byte for byte — and every layer is consistent with every other: the myth names the rivers on the map, the creatures live in regions the cartographer drew, and the region names come from the same tongue.
Live demo: richard-ws.github.io/Projects-Portfolio/experiments/seedworlds/app/
The four forges
| Forge | What it grows |
|---|---|
| The Tongue | A phoneme inventory, syllable rules, and a 49-word vocabulary (water, love, mountain, fear…) from the seed |
| The Land | Value-noise terrain with biomes, downhill-flowing rivers, lakes, and named regions built from the language’s words |
| The Bestiary | Six creatures — named from the tongue, sized, dieted, and placed in real regions of the map |
| The Telling | A creation myth whose every name is a real place or creature from this world |
How it works
app/rng.js deterministic seed → random streams (xmur3 + mulberry32)
app/language.js The Tongue — phonotactics, vocabulary
app/land.js The Land — layered value noise, biomes, rivers, toponyms
app/bestiary.js The Bestiary — creatures bound to real regions
app/myth.js The Telling — story assembled from the world's own names
app/world.js orchestrates the chain from one seed
app/app.js browser viewer (tabs, canvas map, shareable #seed= URL)
All generation is pure client-side JavaScript with zero dependencies —
no build step, no server, no API calls. The viewer runs on GitHub Pages and
works with a mouse or touch. A world is shareable: the seed lives in the URL
hash (…/app/?seed=meadow).
Reproduce
# Tests — hermetic golden-value + invariant suite (node:test)
bash scripts/test.sh
The test suite freezes golden outputs for the meadow and harbour seeds.
If anyone changes the generator, those snapshots break loudly — the promise
“same seed, same world, forever” is enforced by CI.
Design notes
- Determinism everywhere. Each layer draws from its own sub-stream
(
seed::layer), so adding a feature to one forge can never silently change another forge’s output for existing seeds. - Phonotactics over randomness. Syllable templates only ever use licensed consonant clusters built from the tongue’s own sampled inventory — words are alien but pronounceable.
- Consistency as a feature. Region names, creature names and myth names all resolve against the same vocabulary, so nothing in a world is ever “placeholder English.”