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Sparks & Sprites — live demos

Every demo shows editable code next to its visual (or audible) result. Nothing moves or sounds until you press Run. The loop is: run it unchanged → change one number → run again. That loop is real programming; it just doesn't feel like a test, because it isn't one.

Sprite basicsLoad, attach, place — with an image generated from pure code Movement personalitiesOne dot, eight souls: human, alien, robot, stately… SparksThe four-line particle physics, click to burst FlameRise, shrink, fade, wobble, add — fire from 35 lines Additive glowLight that adds up where it overlaps DissolveThe noise-threshold trick, per pixel, readable TrailsThe don't-clear-the-canvas trick Fragmented trailsA comet of pieces: fire, stars, drops, sparkles WaterdropsFall, splash, ripple — a particle's death as an event HaloAn additive ring with a ±3% breath Chrome & liquid metalA mirror with opinions: bands, glints, molten wobble Living buttonsPlasma underlays and rings that thank you for tapping The elemental button bestiary104 buttons possessed by fire, lightning, mercury, frost… The cube codexOne protagonist, 104 character effects: firebursts, halos, dashes… The glyph grimoireOne phrase, 104 text effects: typewriters, scrambles, glows, split-flaps… The locomotion lexicon208 movement styles, A to Z eight times (+208 rhymes): springs, steering brains, vehicles, IK, verlet, A*, gaits, cameras and clocks — plus input & intent, collision & contact, platformer verbs, vehicles & flight, squads & maps, cloth & sand, rewinds & beats, and game verbs The flipbook folio104 VFX baked into transparent sprite sheets, A to Z four times — two teaching laps, two genre laps The stagecraft almanac104 scene & screen effects (+104 rhymes): CRT and dither passes, frozen and X-rayed sprites, visibility polygons and fog of war, muzzle flashes and decals, spring water and wildfire, particle machinery, the HUD, and the sound half — drawn The world workshop13 generators, 26 worlds: Poisson scatter, noise terrain, Voronoi, L-systems, cellular caves, BSP rooms, two mazes, wave function collapse, autotiling, loot tables, a spawn director, versioned saves, and one seed for everything The depth atlas104 illusions of depth in 2D (+104 rhymes): skies, fogged mountains, lit balls, cubes from squares, smoke near & far, waves, ribbons, shadows, focus Responsive cursorA soft circle that follows, sheds sparkles, pops on press ParallaxDepth from three multiplications — you are the camera Infinite scrollOne tile, endless world Starfield & ambienceSparks at one-tenth speed — snow, motes, fireflies Screen shakeThe kind version: trauma², smooth noise, fast calm Sound blipsCoin, laser, hit — synthesized from nothing three.js planetReal 3D: a noise-displaced world + starfield, ~60 lines Babylon sceneDrag-to-orbit, glow, and 2D GUI — batteries included

Part of Sparks & Sprites — a plain-words study book of programmatic images, movement, sound, and VFX across Godot, Unity, Unreal, and the web. Godot versions of these demos live in the repo's demos/godot/ project; Unity and Unreal equivalents are explained at the foot of each demo page and in the chapters.