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. Start ploughing instead of skimming and the wave leaves you behind.
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
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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The game kept calling the player sloppy, and it was not lying — a hands-off run landed clean 16 times out of 55, with over half of all landings arriving with the nose pinned at its physical limit. The verdict was right and the cue was a whisper: the game already knew the answer and showed it by tinting the handlebars, 111 pixels of them, behind the rider's arms, in a frame where the hull is 1803. So the fix was to the cue, not to how strictly landings are judged.
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The guide has to agree with the scoring, so both now call the same function. The landing predictor also measured height above the mean sea plane rather than above the actual water, and assumed a flat surface to fall onto — but about a third of contacts happen with the face rising into the hull. Agreement between what you are shown and how you are judged went from 83–86% to 98–100%.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover art was composited from a base image created with Grok (xAI).
Cross Sea is original work by Launchway Games.