Exp 002liveBuilt over two days, September 2026 · still up

NEON MIDNIGHT

A cyberpunk afternoon.

2 days
three.js
Supabase Realtime
no server code
runs on the real clock

Dad from SUPER & ARCHER: a cartoon man with swept-back brown hair, in a white shirt over a black tee.

Ethan Lance

Go there

Opens in your browser. Nothing to install, and it's free.

A rain-slick neon street in NEON MIDNIGHT. Shopfronts glow with signs in Vietnamese, a runner in a lit visor stands on the crossing, and a pink hologram sun burns at the end of the block. — Two in the morning, which is also what time it was.

The opposite of a summer afternoon#

Summer Afternoon, by Vicente Lucendo, is a warm little village you wander around in a browser. I've opened it more times than I can defend.

I wanted to know how much of that feeling was craft and how much of it was just sunshine. So I built the same shape of thing at midnight, in the rain, with the sunshine replaced by neon and a hover bike.

A city that runs on your clock#

Day and night are tied to the real wall clock, twenty-four minutes to the day, and everyone in the city shares the hour. Turn up at two in the morning and you get two in the morning.

There was a version where you could pick the hour. It was worse. Being able to choose the light turned every hour into a menu item.

A wide neon street at night with a huge pale hologram sun sitting low between the buildings at the end of it. — The hologram sun, which is where the light comes from.

Saigon, sort of#

The signage is Vietnamese first. There are pylons and cable runs overhead, motorbikes in the street, and vendors who call out as you go past. It's a homage, not a map.

Most of the two days went into the wet street shader and the shadow maps, because a neon city that doesn't reflect anything is just a dark city with stickers on it.

A neon crossing lined with shopfronts whose signs read BÚN BÒ HUẾ, NHẬU, GIẶT ỦI NHANH and CÀ PHÊ SỮA ĐÁ, with a runner standing on the zebra stripes. — Bún bò Huế, laundry, iced coffee. The signs came first.

Other people#

Multiplayer runs on Supabase Realtime straight from the browser, with no server code at all. Anyone else on that street is an actual other person, wearing whatever they picked out of the wardrobe.

The free tier goes to sleep after about a week of nobody visiting, and the city quietly drops back to solo. Which is its own kind of accurate.

Standing inside a field of glowing pink and cyan neon reeds taller than the character, in the middle of a city block at night. — The park block. The grass is the one thing I kept from the original.

Go there

Opens in your browser. Nothing to install, and it's free.

You can work in the same order. Build one yourself →