Chutes and Ladders runs on one piece of board-game logic: land on a chute and you slide down, bypassing whatever's between you and where you're headed; land on a ladder and you climb up and over it instead. Most of the time the smarter move is the chute — bypass the issue rather than grind up and over it. This piece is built out of exactly that choice, made over and over, mostly by the code itself rather than by a visitor walking through anything.
Not a metaphor sitting on top of the work — the actual decision logic running inside it. Every cycle, something gets bypassed and something gets climbed.
A seed-driven Three.js volumetric piece where invisible canvas data, not a literal palette, drives geometry: red offsets raster position, green selects spectrum color, blue pushes depth. Raymarched through a GPU voxel atlas, it wanders, listens through Web Audio, runs approximately eight minutes, dies, then resurrects identically from the same fixed seed.
Strip the title away and the technique underneath is a hand-rolled G-buffer — the same trick deferred renderers use in games, where a layer of invisible data sits behind the visible color and a later pass reads it back to decide what actually gets drawn. A 2D canvas paints raster offsets into red, spectrum selection into green, and depth into blue. A fragment shader reads those three channels back and raymarches them into a volumetric field. Nothing about the color you see is the color the system is actually thinking in.
Seed 77823 governs all of it deterministically: an eight-minute life, a 4.2-second fade once the lifebar fills, then a rebirth that reseeds the same RNG and regenerates the identical field. It does not evolve from cycle to cycle and it does not stay dead — it bypasses both of those harder outcomes for the same clean reset, every time.
The system defaults to bypass. A person sitting at the keyboard is the only thing in this piece that ever climbs.