tilakverse

• What's inside
• Tech stack
• Getting started
• Scripts
• Project structure
• How it works
• Assets and credits
• Deployment
• Disclaimer

The six pages are one feed: scroll to the end of any of them and the next begins under it, with a divider saying what comes next, and the address, the menu and the theme follow whichever page is on screen. After the sixth, an end card. Each page is still its own address, so every link works as before.

All of the content (roles, projects, skills, education) lives in src/data/. Every page and the terminal read from there.

The front door (/) is a map of the whole site as places in space. The Universe | Classic switch at the top of every page moves between the map and the plain pages, landing on the same place in the other (Experience's page and its station, say), and the front door opens on whichever you picked last. A first visit opens with a crawl, then puts you in a cockpit (the Millennium Falcon, an X-wing, Rick's space cruiser or Walt and Jesse's RV) and launches you into the map. Fly to a planet to open its page.

On foot, W A S D walk, Shift runs, Space jumps, F or a click fires, X switches to the other one of your crew and V looks out of their eyes. Every planet is its own place down there, under its own sky: Middle-earth's is the Shire on the day of the party, Breaking Bad's the desert where the RV cooks, Rick and Morty's the Smiths' street with a portal open on the lawn, Cybertron's plating under Kaon's towers, the Avengers compound with the Quinjet on its pad, the lot out back of Dunder Mifflin, Dot Matrix in four greens with a cartridge for each project, a sandstone courtyard at dusk for the music, an airfield on Earth with a signpost to every place I've been, a Caribbean beach with the Black Pearl at anchor, and the Graysons' city round Omni-Man's crater. People stand about and have a line for you when you come up to them (Gandalf, Saul, Jerry, Dwight, Thor, Jack…), and every landing has a door: walk up to it (Bag End's, the RV, the portal, the Game Boy, the plane…) and G takes you into that world's page. The Galactic Federation's squads come over the horizon now and then. On the Death Star you come down beside its trench, on hull plating with blocks and towers standing on it, and can walk up to the rim and look down into the trench run.

The hangar fits each ship out its own way, like a space sim's outfitting screen, and remembers it. Paint jobs are the site's own colour schemes: the six companies' come with the Cartographer achievement, and each fan scheme's with the easter egg that unlocks it. Parts bolt on and change how it flies and fights: strap-on boosters (solid rockets, an afterburner, repulsor pods, portal-fluid tanks), thrusters, twin or fusion guns, plating or fast-charge shields, and fins. Each draws power from the ship's plant and adds mass, so you can't fit the best of everything; the best parts are earned with achievements in the worlds. Other pilots see your paint and parts. The X-wing and the Falcon you fly are other people's models from Sketchfab (CC BY, credited on the map), brought to web size by scripts/sketchfab-batch.mjs; while they load, versions modelled in code (universe/hulls.js) stand in.

The hangar's first tab is the shipyard: fly the crew's own ship, or a garage build of your own, put together the way No Man's Sky puts its ships together. A build is a module for each slot (a hull: Dart, Saucer, Hauler or Needle; a cockpit; wings; engines; a tail; extras such as running lights or a turning radar dish) snapped onto the sockets its hull has for them, each one changing how it flies, and the hull its power plant. Roll picks a whole ship from a seed, the commoner modules more often; any slot can be picked by hand; a build's code (GB-021301.k3) passes it on. Builds are modelled in code (universe/shipyard/), take the paint jobs and the hangar's parts, fly in the galaxy and land on its worlds, and other pilots see them.

Other pilots on the site at the same time show up in your sky. You can fly with them, fight hunters together, or shoot each other down. Land on a planet where someone's already down and you come down beside them, and your crews walk about together. Two of the same person (two Ricks, two Walts) meet as that person from another dimension. Off the map, in Middle-earth's towns and on its map, at Avengers HQ, in Albuquerque, on Dot Matrix island, in Dunder Mifflin's office, in the Smiths' street, on the Citadel's concourse and in the music courtyard, everyone else online shows up as a pale ghost from another world (a Frodo, a Spider-Man hologram, a Walt's Aztek, a Jim from another branch, a Morty or a Rick from another dimension, or in the courtyard a floating lamp) with their name over them; nothing passes between you but where each of you is.

The map is big: the planets are a hundred and more ship-lengths across, the fandoms far out in deep space, and between them the wonders: a ringed gas giant, an ice giant, two other suns with worlds of their own, a black hole, two nebulae, the Citadel of Ricks, a pulsar, a binary star, a rogue planet with no sun and a wreck field round a white dwarf, with a rim of ice right round the edge of the map.

Things happen while you fly. Hunters come after you (the Empire, the Galactic Federation, the Council of Ricks), a Star Destroyer drops out of hyperspace and launches its fighters, someone calls for help with pirates on their tail, a convoy goes by, a comet crosses the sky, a star blows far out. A star flares and its shockwave rattles the ship. A rift tears open ahead of you: fly into it and it takes you somewhere else on the map. Something enormous swims past: a pod of purrgil, or a Cromulon with something to say. A stream of rocks crosses your path: shoot them, or steer round them. And now and then a bounty hunter comes for you alone: Boba Fett in Slave I, or Phoenixperson (shoot one down for the Wanted achievement). The crew have a word about all of it.

Space is busy, too. Ships come in to land on the planet you're at, shrinking down onto it, and others launch out of it; freighters, saucers and haulers curve round it on their way somewhere. A wing of fighters that's come past you peels apart behind you, each rolling away to its own side. When a fight starts the ordinary ships near you run for it, and convoys are longer, with an escort in the middle of the long ones.

And you're not always alone in a fight. When the hunters have been on you a while, or your shields are low, a wing of friends comes up from behind more often than not: X-wings for Luke and Han, Birdperson for Rick, either for Walt and Jesse. They cover you, going after the ones coming at you, a pass at a time, and peel away once the sky is clear.

Other people have fights too. Now and then, out ahead of you, a freighter is under attack: a Rebel transport with TIEs on it and two X-wings fighting them off, or a family saucer with the Galactic Federation on it and Birdperson in its defence. You see the flashes first. Fly in and help (the guns lock on to its attackers like any others), and if the freighter makes it, its crew thank you.

Every ship carries three guns, each in its crew's own terms: its blaster, a spread that throws a fan of five shorter shots, and heavy ordnance (the X-wing's proton torpedoes, the Falcon's concussion missiles, the cruiser's portal grenades, the RV's fulminated mercury), a slow round that homes on whatever the guns have locked and hits ten times as hard, from a rack of four that refills one at a time. Other pilots see which you're firing.

And the Citadel of Ricks can be brought down. A shield covers it while any of the four generators out on its arms' domes still runs; knock them all out with anything, then only heavy ordnance hurts the core, and the Council sends its hunters once you start. It goes up in fire and portal fluid and its wreckage drifts where it was, for everyone online, until the Ricks bring it back through a portal five minutes later (a siege nobody finishes is patched up four minutes after the last hit). The siege is shared without a server: each pilot speaks only for the damage they did, and every browser adds the shares up the same way (universe/siege.js).

Star Wars on the map isn't a planet but a universe of its own: the galaxy itself in miniature, a spiral of stars with its systems lit where they are, behind a hyperspace gate the Empire's Star Destroyers guard. Fly into the gate (or pick it and go) and you jump to lightspeed into /galaxy: eighteen star systems from the films (and from the two shows set after them, The Mandalorian and Ahsoka), from Tatooine, Hoth and Endor to Coruscant, Scarif, Nevarro and Mandalore, each with its region and grid square from the films' atlas, its era and films, and the moment it's remembered for playing out round it (Death Squadron over Hoth, the Battle of Endor, the Death Star rounding Yavin with its trench to fly, the Razor Crest with a TIE on its tail over Nevarro, the Mandalorians taking back Mandalore). Every pilot online sees the same moment at the same time, and meets the other pilots in the same system.

Every other system's star is up there in the sky, where it really is from where you are (Hoth's close by from Bespin, high above the galaxy's band; Coruscant's a bright star toward the core). Turn the nose toward one and its name comes up; put the nose on it and press J (or tap Jump), or just fly on out of the system toward it, and you jump.

Keep jumping and the Empire notices. Somewhere between your tenth and fifteenth jump an Imperial Interdictor cruiser is waiting on the lane: its gravity-well projectors pull you out of hyperspace a long way short of where you were going, its TIEs launch, and the hyperdrive won't take again (nor the sublight drive open up) until you're clear of the well: shoot its fighters down, run for the well's edge, or ride it out. Then it jumps away, and the count starts over.

Every planet from the films you can stand on (all but Alderaan, which is gone) is a world of its own to land on and walk: /galaxy/tatooine/surface. Your ship comes down out of the sky and sets down, and you and your crewmate climb out onto the sand, the snow, the forest floor, a platform over Bespin's clouds or a Coruscant rooftop. Each world has the places from the films to find (the Lars homestead, Mos Eisley and the Sarlacc on Tatooine; Echo Base on Hoth; the Ewok village and the shield-generator bunker on Endor…), named on a compass until you've found them, with what the crew have to say about each; its people and creatures going about their business, who'll talk if you go up to them; speeders, speeder bikes and tauntauns to ride; walkers, ships going over, the weather and the sound of the place. Online, the other pilots down on the same world are there with you. Get back in the ship to take off, back up to the system.

The flying keys are the universe map's. Every system has a mission: the trench run, boarding the Death Star and Endor's speeder bike chase (four scout troopers racing through the redwoods for the bunker; shoot them off their bikes or shove them into a tree before one gets there) and Lothal's star map (race Sabine's speeder bike between the rock spires to the old Imperial tower, open the map, then hold the tower against Shin Hati and her mercenaries) and Dagobah's Do or Do Not (run the swamp with Yoda on your back, face what's in the cave, then raise the X-wing out of the bog) are playable now; the rest have briefings, with their own opening crawls, for games still being built (the plan).

Each planet on the map that has a world gets a page of its own, with its own art direction, soundboard and usually a game.

• ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A jumps to lightspeed.
• ⌘K / Ctrl+K opens a command palette that can go anywhere on the site and run its tricks.
• There are dozens of achievements to unlock. Scranton's Dundies hand them out as awards.
• The fan colour schemes the eggs unlock each bring a live background to the portfolio pages: a dogfight crossing the stars for the Jedi and the Sith, Heisenberg's blue crystals, Iron Man's HUD tracking the pointer, Dunder Mifflin's paper and paper airplanes, invaders marching over a synthwave grid, diyas and sky lanterns, a ship on the horizon at Tortuga, Cybertron's energon and insignia, the Shire's fireworks or the Eye of Sauron watching you, and portals. Click on empty page for a surprise. The company schemes get quieter ones drawn from the work (AWS's racks and smile, RTX's engineering drawing, Bose's sound, Pendar's spectra, Empowerreg's knowledge graph, SRC's radar), and each project's page gets one of its own (the Game Boy's dot matrix, Claude's spark, DevSpace's minimap, GitHub's contribution graph, the shell's prompt, FUSE's file tree, the finance platform's candles, PyTorch's network, a GPU die). Either can be switched off under the colour picker.

• React 19 with React Router 7 (hash routing, so it works on static hosting)
• Vite 8 (Rolldown) for the dev server and build
• Tailwind CSS 3 plus per-company and per-world themes
• Three.js for every 3D scene and game, loaded only when needed
• Nostr public relays for multiplayer, with events signed using @noble/secp256k1. There's no backend.
• Vitest for tests and ESLint for linting
• GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages for deploys

You need Node.js 22 (the version CI uses) and npm.

git clone https://github.com/tilakpatell/tilakverse.git
cd tilakverse
npm install
npm run dev

The site is then running at http://localhost:5173.

To try a lower graphics tier on a desktop, add ?quality=low (or mid or high) to the address.

The asset pipeline scripts regenerate committed files. You don't need them to run the site.

The scripts that call Meshy (scripts/meshy*.mjs) read MESHY_API_KEY from .env.local; scripts/meshy.mjs <step> hd makes Rick and Morty again at about 40,000 faces and 2k textures from their own concept images. Sketchfab downloads are brought down to web size by scripts/sketchfab-import.mjs and scripts/sketchfab-batch.mjs; the wardrobe's portal gun by scripts/sketchfab-gear.mjs.

├── .github/workflows/ci.yml       # lint, test and build on every pull request
├── .github/workflows/deploy.yml   # lint, test, build and deploy on every push to main
├── docs/                          # architecture notes, research and design plans
│   └── autopilot/                 # the self-improvement loop: its backlog and switches
├── public/                        # static files: models, textures, audio, photos, résumé PDF
│   ├── cc0/                       # CC0 materials and HDRIs (credited in its README)
│   ├── games/                     # game assets, credited in credits.json
│   └── models/                    # glTF models (Meshy-generated and Sketchfab)
├── scripts/                       # asset pipelines and the GitHub snapshot
└── src/
    ├── data/                      # the content: roles, projects, skills, education, places
    ├── pages/                     # one file per route
    ├── components/
    │   ├── universe/              # the universe map: flight, targeting, HUD
    │   │   └── online/            # multiplayer over Nostr
    │   ├── galaxy/                # a galaxy far, far away: the systems, hyperspace, the galaxy map
    │   │   └── surface/           # its worlds from the ground: land, terrain, sky, the places, people and rides
    │   ├── cockpit/               # the welcome, the crawl and the launch
    │   ├── worlds/                # world registry and the download gate for phones
    │   ├── games/                 # shared game code: GPU check, gamepad, sounds
    │   └── <world>/               # one folder per hidden world
    ├── stages/                    # the live demos on project pages
    ├── lib/                       # device tiers, GPU detection, audio, textures
    │   └── three/                 # shared renderer, adaptive pacing, useScene hook
    └── theme/                     # company themes and the theme provider

A few of the design decisions behind the site:

• Content is data. Pages render from src/data/, so updating a role or project is a one-file change.
• 3D first, with fallbacks. Scenes render in WebGL wherever it's available, lower their own resolution and effects when frames run late, and fall back to SVG or 2D only when WebGL isn't there at all. Shaders compile in the background before the first frame, so a scene scrolling into view doesn't stall the page.
• Every device gets a budget. src/lib/device.js sorts each device into a high, mid or low tier once, and every renderer starts from that tier's pixel ratio, antialiasing, shadows and bloom. On phones, heavy worlds ask before downloading anything.
• One runtime for the worlds. The full-screen worlds plug into one world runtime (src/runtime/): one renderer (WebGPU where the browser has it and a world's shaders allow, WebGL otherwise), one frame loop, one input reader, one audio bus, one save store, one asset cache and one quality controller. A world is a module; two modules can hand over to each other without a cut. Earth is on it; the rest follow one at a time (the design).
• Game logic is plain, tested code. The games keep their rules in a rules.js that's separate from the rendering and covered by Vitest. The same goes for the starfighter's flight model and targeting.
• Multiplayer without a server. Pilots meet in a room on public Nostr relays over ordinary WebSockets. Every event is signed with a per-visit key and checked on arrival, and signing happens in a Web Worker so it stays off the render loop. Pilots never see each other's IP addresses. Each walkable world is a room of its own, joined with the same key, so the ghost walking your town is the person in the roster, a block holds everywhere, and the roster names the exact world or town each person is in.
• No runtime calls to asset services. Every model and texture is generated or downloaded ahead of time and committed, so the deployed site only ever loads its own files.

For the details of each subsystem, see docs/architecture.md.

• CC0 materials and HDRIs come from Poly Haven and ambientCG. They live in public/cc0/, which also lists what was made for this site and what's under other licences.
• Game assets are CC0 and credited one by one in public/games/credits.json. Portal panic uses Kenney's kits.
• Sketchfab models are used under Creative Commons Attribution licences. Each one's author, licence and source are in src/data/modelCredits.json, and they're credited on the pages that use them.
• Characters and buildings in the worlds were generated for this site with Meshy.
• Earth's globe is NASA Earth Observatory's Blue Marble Next Generation (July, with topography and bathymetry), Black Marble 2016, cloud and GEBCO images, all public domain, brought to 8K and phone sizes by scripts/build-earth.mjs. Its plane is a 737 from Sketchfab (CC BY 4.0), repainted without its airline's livery by scripts/earth-plane-livery.mjs.
• Rigged characters from Sketchfab (Invincible's Omni-Man and Thragg, Avengers HQ's Spider-Man) are brought to web size with their skeletons whole by scripts/sketchfab-characters.mjs, and posed in the browser by src/lib/three/rig.js, which poses any humanoid skeleton the same way.

Every push to main triggers .github/workflows/deploy.yml. It installs dependencies with npm ci, then lints, runs the tests and builds, and deploys dist/ to GitHub Pages at the custom domain in public/CNAME. A failing lint or test stops the deploy.

The site's routes are hash routes (/#/projects/x), and what follows the # never reaches a server, so every build also writes a page of its own for each route (dist/projects/x/index.html: scripts/prerender.mjs) with that page's title, description, preview card and canonical address, and a first line that moves the visitor onto the app's own address. A link like tilakpatell.com/projects/gameboy-emulator shows its own card wherever it's shared, and sitemap.xml lists them all.

A deploy replaces every file in /assets (they're named by hash), so a page that's already open, or an index.html a cache still holds, can ask for files that are gone; behind the intro, that used to surface only at the cut to the universe, as "This page didn't load". A page that hits one reloads from the new build (src/lib/stale.js, through ErrorBoundary), past any cached index.html, playing the intro again if it was partway through; it won't reload twice within a minute, so an outage can't loop.

Working with Claude Code? Agent skills live in .claude/skills (their sources are pinned in skills-lock.json). Lint and tests skip them.

The site improves itself. A scheduled Claude Code session comes round (every four hours), makes one improvement well (something faster or better-looking more often than something new), checks it with node scripts/autopilot-check.mjs (lint, the tests, the build, every page in a headless browser), opens a pull request, waits for CI, merges it, and logs it on /changes, the ship's log, with a screenshot. Any change there can be taken out again by telling a Claude session Revert change 12. The protocol is .claude/skills/autopilot/SKILL.md, the queue is docs/autopilot/backlog.md, and the switches (pause, runs a day, the plan's limit) are in docs/autopilot/budget.json. docs/autopilot/README.md has the details.

This is a personal, non-commercial portfolio. The hidden worlds are fan-made tributes: Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Marvel, Breaking Bad, The Office, Rick and Morty, Pirates of the Caribbean and Invincible belong to their creators and studios, and Game Boy is Nintendo's. The site isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.

There's no open-source licence on this repository. The code and original content are © Tilak Patel. Third-party assets remain under their own licences, listed above.