I finished the first phase of development on Gravity Games, which is now split out into its own repository:

This moved out of the main AlanCoding.github.io repo because the main site is still a Jekyll-powered GitHub Pages site, while Gravity Games needs an npm build. Keeping the built game in a separate repo means the personal site can stay simple and static, and the game repo can use a modern browser-game toolchain without making this site’s build process more complicated.

The first game in the repo is Track Planet, available at Gravity Games: Track Planet. It is a small spherical-world running prototype: a 400 meter circumference planet, track lanes wrapped around the globe, chase camera movement, radial gravity, jumping, velocity readouts, and some early event hooks for achievements.

Tech stack

The app is built with Vite, TypeScript, and Three.js. Vite handles the dev server and production bundle. TypeScript keeps the game code organized enough that the physics, input, scene construction, and game-specific code can keep growing without turning into one giant script. Three.js handles the rendering: the planet, track, player model, scenery, camera, lighting, and primitive geometry.

I also added Rapier, through @dimforge/rapier3d-compat, but Track Planet is not using Rapier as a normal flat-world gravity engine. Rapier’s world gravity is disabled. The game applies its own radial 1/r^2 gravity toward the center of the planet, then uses Rapier for rigid bodies, collision events, fixed-step physics, debug rendering, and objects like the shot put and pole placeholder.

That split is important. The game is about weird local gravity, not a normal floor with a down axis. So the physics architecture treats radial gravity as game logic, while Rapier provides the collision machinery where it helps.

Repo layout

The source is split into reusable engine code and game-specific code:

  • src/engine/ has shared browser input, Rapier world setup, and planet placement helpers.
  • src/games/track-planet/ has the Track Planet scene, constants, player model, track assets, world props, ramp geometry, entities, and gameplay loop.
  • src/main.ts wires the simple game index and hash routes.

The public route uses a hash path: /gravity-games/#track-planet. That keeps GitHub Pages deployment simple because the server only needs to serve the one built app entry point.

Deployment

The repo deploys with GitHub Actions using GitHub Pages artifact deployment. On push to the deployment branch, the workflow checks out the repo, sets up Node, runs npm ci, runs npm run build, uploads the generated dist folder as a Pages artifact, and deploys it.

That means dist/ is not committed. GitHub Pages serves the build artifact, not the repo root. The Vite base path is configured in one place in vite.config.ts, defaulting to /gravity-games/, with VITE_BASE_PATH available if the repo name ever changes.

Where it is going

Track Planet is still an early prototype, but it has crossed the line from “can this render?” into “there is a real game architecture here.” The current controls already cover walking, strafing, aiming, jumping, throwing a shot put, and spawning a placeholder pole entity. The next phases can build on that instead of rewriting the base.

For now, the useful milestone is separation of concerns: the Jekyll site remains the blog and index, while Gravity Games gets to be a proper npm-built browser game repo.