A homepage you drive around

Somewhere to tell the story

“I made my personal site mostly for family. Social media is messy and can get hard to use for some. I wanted somewhere I could tell the story of where my ancestors came from and how we came to exist in Grande Prairie as a happy family. I wanted to make it with easter eggs for them to discover if they wanted to/ there’s games and puzzles and such, a literal arcade, a map you race around and collect coins while exploring the “back Quarter”. TBH, I doubt it will see much traffic until I pass on but that’s ok, for now I am here :)”

The homepage of my personal site is not a page. It is a quarter section of farmland you drive around in a buggy, and every building on it is a part of the site: the farmhouse is the page about me, the medic hut is the page about my diagnosis, the church on the hill holds the family histories. Drive up to one and press Enter to step inside.

I grew up on that land. We moved north to the Peace Country when I was ten, and the farms came one after another — a bird farm at Teepee Creek, LaGlace, a pig farm, then Little Smokey with no gas, a wood furnace and a rabbit trapline. The Back Quarter is that country rebuilt from memory and handed to a visitor as the way in. A menu would have done the job. This does the job and says something while it does it.

A homepage has to stay a homepage

Nothing heavy of its own loads until the visitor asks for it — its engines sit behind a click — the farm is a real image before any of it boots, and every destination in the world is also an ordinary link in the ordinary menu. If the graphics fail, or a visitor never touches them, the site still works exactly as a site should. A world you can drive around should be the reward for wanting one, never the toll gate on the way in.

Performance budget: zero new bytes on first paint beyond the preview image (≤ ~180KB webp) + the invitation chip. Pixi/Matter/engine/painting lazy-load on engagement only.

Right in the code, wrong on the screen

1. Glow that never switched on

   The bloom effect, the glow around lights at night, was committed as “the lights glow”. Its files had been bundled from search hits that were only checks for the pieces it needed, not the pieces themselves. The effect failed as it loaded, and the fallback quietly started the farm without it, so nothing looked broken.

   Kind of miss: a tooling error · receipts-001, R-160

2. A fix that made a new noise

   The campfire’s crackle clicked like tiny firecrackers. The fix sent every pop through the same tuned filter, so every pop rang the same note.

   Kind of miss: looked right but was not measured · receipts-001, R-163

3. Animals that were said to wander

   The cows and sheep shipped with “graze/wander AI”. Each move was a single push that the physics’ friction killed in under a second, so for six days they stood still between moves.

   Kind of miss: looked right but was not measured · receipts-001, R-164

I looked, I listened, I watched

1. I looked

   I caught it. The fix came three minutes after the commit that claimed the glow: the missing pieces went in, in the order they depend on each other.

   Falls under: “done”, “verified” and “deployed” are claims; prove them from outside · receipts-001, R-160

2. I listened

   Both times it was my ear: first the firecrackers, then “the fire sounds like tin bashing.” The third version is a low ember roar with short pops, each through its own randomly tuned filter. Nothing rings.

   Falls under: test the thing itself, not a proxy for it · receipts-001, R-163

3. I watched

   I said the animals were too still. The cause was in the physics, and a walk now holds its heading for a few seconds and is pushed every frame. The agent’s test browser can’t run the animation, so only someone driving the farm could have seen it.

   Falls under: a build or a script cannot judge how something looks · receipts-001, R-164

A farm that is also a menu

A vehicle that can turn on the spot does not feel like a vehicle. For most of the build the buggy could pivot in place, and turning felt harsh. The fix was not more physics, it was less permission: in the 3D world the yaw rate now follows forward speed, so she has to be rolling before she will turn, and she eases into it. Grip drops in the wet. Reversing flips the steering sense, the way it does in a real yard.

Bloom is a night instrument. Glow is driven by the same day factor that runs the sky, so it climbs after sunset and falls away at dawn. I learned that the hard way: the glow was first tuned at dusk, and in daylight the white church blazed featureless white. Light has to behave like light, or the farm stops being a place.

Drive it on thomascheesman.ca, on a computer — the 3D world is what the button opens, and it doesn’t load until someone asks for it. A phone gets a still of the farm and the ordinary menu.

The honest limits

Checked in September 2026. The farm can’t be driven on a phone or tablet yet, and the barn doesn’t open anything. The site’s decorative background still loads the 3D library, about 600 KB before compression, for every visitor once the page is idle, including phone visitors, who can’t drive the farm at all.

The files behind every claim above

• Why I built it, in my words

  reviews/copy-review-005.md, Q-BQD2 · 2026-09-26

• Every miss above in the receipts inventory, with its sources

  plans/receipts-001.md §3F · 2026-09-26

• The rules the corrections fall under

  CLAUDE.md

• The site itself

  thomascheesman.ca