Far Shore

Far Shore is a stone-skipping game you play with one swipe. You stand at the near end of a garden pond at golden hour, with lily pads on the water, and a sand ring and a red flag on the beach 34 metres away. Swipe up and the stone leaves your hand. Nothing steers it after that.

The swipe carries the whole throw. Its lean is the stone's tilt: straight up throws it steep, a swipe leaned about 40° gives the 20° tilt that skips best (the angle found for real stones in a 2004 Nature paper), and a sideways sweep throws it flat. The speed of the last tenth of a second is the power, and a curve in the swipe adds spin, which keeps the tilt steady. Lily pads are springboards. Reach the beach and the stone skids up the sand, and if it stops in the ring by the flag, that's a perfect landing.

Every throw earns shells, and shells buy a stronger arm, a quicker wrist and a steadier grip. Reach a far shore and a farther one opens: a millpond with a crosswind that gusts mid-flight, a mountain lake with ice floes that stop a stone dead, a choppy fjord, then a sea loch with a lighthouse at dusk, a sound full of sailing boats, and on with no end, each lap at another time of day: by night, in a squall, at dawn. Rare stones wash up on the far beaches, and each one skips differently: river glass that the wind finds, a heavy disc that shrugs it off, a skipping shell that bends back against it.

The idea is Jeff's. It's built with three.js (WebGPU, with WebGL 2 as the fallback): the water, the banks, the trees and every sound are made in code. The promo above was rendered from the real game, and every throw in it is a real one, found by sweeping the game's own physics.