Elemental Sandbox
A skillshot VFX sandbox built with Three.js, Vite and hand-written GLSL.
Five abilities and two ways to aim them. Four are line casts: press the key to arm, a League-of-Legends style arrow appears on the ground and swings with the mouse, click to fire. The fifth is a far cast: the arrow is replaced by a circle with a deliberately thick boundary that follows the cursor and answers the only question a ground-targeted AoE has to answer before you commit — how much space is this going to take.
Q — Frost Lance. A fracture front races out along the line while a field of ice crystals tears up out of the floor behind it — small and dense at your feet, opening into a wall of blades at the far end, with a cluster thrown up around the impact point.
E — Storm Lance. A bolt leaves the caster's hand and a bundle of lightning filaments is drawn out behind the strike front, holds while it gutters and re-strikes, then blows out. Sparks come off it the whole way, the floor underneath takes a branching electric burn and a dark scorch, and the far end gets a shell of ionised air.
R — Cinder Fall. A burning rock is lobbed downrange on an arc, trailing a raymarched wake of burning gas and heating up the whole way: the lava seams splitting its surface prise wider and brighter as it comes in. It detonates on arrival, throws its own shattered chunks across the floor, and tears the ground open into a network of molten cracks that keep glowing while the crater burns out.
F — Nova Beam. The caster winds a ball of light up in both hands, pulling motes in out of the air, then lets a column of it out along the line — white-hot core, cyan sheath, gold ribbons spiralling around it and shock discs racing down it. It holds there, burning into the floor and throwing spray back up the beam, before collapsing to a thread and blinking out. The only cast in the sandbox that is still happening a second after it landed.
V — Voltaic Snare. The far cast. A leash of current is whipped out across the floor, and where it lands the ring snaps open past its own radius and pulls back onto it: a violet column tears up out of the middle, tendrils crawl outward to the boundary, arcs run around the rim and the whole disc burns. It holds there re-striking and hauling the air up into the pillar, then collapses to a thread. The circle you measured out before the click is exactly the circle you get.
Everything you can see is generated. There are no textures, no sprite sheets and no meshes on disk except the character: the crystals are procedural geometry, the bolt is a strip of ribbon placed entirely by a vertex shader, the meteor is an icosphere cratered and sliced by fracture planes on the CPU, the beam is a parametric tube drawn three times at three radii, the snare's whole cage is that same ribbon strip threaded along four different parametric paths, the arrow, the targeting circle, the rime, the burns and the molten cracks are signed-distance and noise shaders, and the mist, sparks, chips and glitter are GPU particles.
Every parameter is a live slider — 938 of them — and they stay live while the simulation is paused. That is the point of the project: freeze a frame mid-eruption, mid-strike or mid-burn with P, then reshape the silhouette, the palette and the timing against a still image.
