Skydrift
A relaxing browser flying sim where you steer a bird in V-formation over an open ocean through day, night, and storms. Built on top of the open-source birds.cafe prototype, with six new hand-built island biomes added to actually fly toward and land on.
Skydrift is a small, quiet game about flying. You steer a bird in V-formation across an open ocean, watching the sky shift through day, night, and storm, with nothing to chase and no score to beat.
It's built on top of birds.cafe, a lovely little open-source solo bird sim by kanavtwtgg, a click-and-relax toy with no missions, no scores, just wind and ocean. I used that flying feel as the starting point and spent most of my time on what wasn't there before: six hand-built island biomes worth actually flying toward and landing on, since the original just scattered uniform, decorative islands with no identity of their own.
For a recruiter reading this: each biome (volcanic, sakura, arctic, desert, tropical, stargazer) gets its own procedurally generated terrain with real beaches and irregular coastlines, ground collision so the bird actually lands and rests on the surface instead of clipping through it, hand-built low-poly creatures unique to that biome, a signature prop, and its own particle atmosphere that crossfades in as you get close, all layered on top of the original's flat, uniform ocean and single weather system.
How it works
The client keeps the same stack birds.cafe shipped with (vanilla JS, Three.js, ES modules loaded straight from a CDN import map, no bundler) for the flight physics, weather system, and V-formation flock renderer, extended rather than replaced.
Islands are still scattered procedurally the way the original did it, but each one now gets assigned one of six biome presets that override its palette, weather bias, wildlife, and particle effects within an invisible influence radius around the island, while the open ocean between them keeps the original's calm weather system untouched.
Each biome got its own low-poly creatures and a signature prop, built from scratch rather than imported, since the project has no asset pipeline to host external models: crabs and seagulls for the tropical island, koi for sakura, penguins and a seal for arctic, camels for desert, an owl for stargazer.
Ground collision was added so the flock's leader bird can actually land and rest on an island's terrain instead of flying straight through it.
A continuous day/night arc replaced the original's four hardcoded lighting presets. The sun now traces one smooth circular path so it visibly climbs out of the sea at dawn and sinks back into it at dusk, instead of snapping between fixed positions.