Cross Sea
The throttle is always open. The only question is what you do in the air.
What it is
Open water with a swell running, and a machine light enough to be thrown by it. You hold and drag to steer. There is no throttle to manage; it is always open.
You jump off the wave tops. What decides a run is not the jump, it is the landing: come down with the hull matching the face you are landing on and you keep your speed. Come down wrong and the nose digs in.
The sea closes in
You are riding inside a shrinking patch of open water. It contracts the whole time, and clean landings buy some of it back, but never all of it. The sea is always winning slightly.
So a run is not survival, it is a rate. Ride well and you slow the close. Drop off the plane and you plough: your streak is gone, and only clean landings win water back.
The hard part is in the air
You leave the water climbing a rising face and come down on a falling one, so the correct nose attitude changes while you are airborne. Doing nothing walks you away from the answer. Holding the nose down is worse.
The clean band is a narrow middle you have to actively hold, which is why there is a guide for it: a strip on the left showing the face coming up, how wide a clean landing is, and where your nose actually is.
How to play
- SteerHold and drag anywhere
- Set your attitude in the airSame drag, while airborne
On a desktop the mouse drags exactly like a finger. Or use the keys: Left and Right, or A and D, steer. In the air, Up and Down, or W and S, set your angle.
What isn't settled yet
Two strangers have played it and enjoyed it. Neither was asked whether they understood why a landing was judged the way it was, which is the thing the whole run turns on and the thing that is still untested.
Build Log
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Build 68
The title screen now shows the rider on the water you have picked, on the ski you have picked, riding the real swell while the menu waits. Change the water or the ski and the picture changes with it. On a phone the menu sits low to leave the top of the screen clear; on a wide screen the ski waits beside the menu.
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Build 66
Rebuilt how the sea and everything on it is drawn. The water reflects its own sky, spray and wake are droplets and foam, the ski sits in a soft shadow, the rider wears a vest and helmet in his ski’s colours, and clouds fill the sky. Every change was measured first: light on the ski’s edges helped on the dark waters and hid it on the bright ones, so it is used only where it helps.
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Build 61
The ski has a soft shadow on the water now, and on the dark North Sea and Dusk waters a thin edge of sky light along its sides. Measured, they made it easier to see there: the share of its outline lost against the sea fell from 43% to 30% and from 52% to 36%. On the bright waters the edge light made the outline harder to see, so it stays off them, and Lagoon, the brightest, has no shadow at all.
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Build 55
The engine was a stack of oscillators through one filter: every harmonic present, phase-locked, unvarying, which is what a buzzer is. It is a train of firing events exciting a resonant exhaust now.
Earlier builds (2)
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Build 54
The game spoke on every landing, and most of what it said named a mistake. A landing is the heartbeat of a run, not an event. Nothing speaks twice inside two seconds now and the same news waits eight, and the first time each kind of trouble happens it says what to do (MATCH THE WAVE, LAND FLATTER, KEEP IT ON THE PLANE) rather than only what went wrong.
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Build 52
Landings are scored on how closely the ski matches the wave face, and the only cue was a tint on the handlebars, behind the rider's arms. A strip on the left now shows the face you are about to meet, its clean band drawn at the same 0.25 rad the landing is judged on. One function feeds both, so the cue cannot drift from the score.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are the ones already on your device; nothing is downloaded. Cover drawn from the game’s own sea, ski and rider code.
Cross Sea is original work by Launchway Games.