The road is a formula

There is no level file in asdf. The road you fly down is never stored anywhere, not as a spline, not even as a list of coordinates; it is a formula, and the world exists only in the moment the formula is evaluated. Sideways position is three sine waves I layered over the distance you have travelled, height is two more, and every part of the game that needs to know where the road is, the glass ribbon, the craft, the camera, the gates, asks those same five sines.

Banking on a derivative

The curves bank like a velodrome, and even the banking is arithmetic: the tilt is proportional to the path’s curvature, derived analytically from the same sines and modulated by a slow mask so that the steep phases arrive in waves. The physics never learns about any of this. Steering and jumping live in a flat two-number space, how far along and how far across, and a single function maps that space onto the tilted surface for everything that renders.

A window that slides

What you see is a short ring of ribbon segments recycled as you fly: whenever a segment falls behind the camera, its vertices are refilled by evaluating the formula at new distances ahead. The road behind you stops existing. The road ahead of you doesn’t exist yet. Between the two, roughly a screenful of world is real at any given moment, which is why the game occupies the same memory on the first run and after an hour of play.

Randomness that repeats

The obsidian spires along the shore look scattered, but their scatter is a hash of the absolute segment index each one belongs to, so the recycling cannot shuffle them; fly the same distance twice and the same needle stands in the same place, leaning the same way. Determinism of that kind is a courtesy I owe the player. A track that repeats itself exactly is a track that practice can learn.

The sky in the glass

The track’s black glass reflects the sunset, and the reflection is honest. The sky is a small function shared by two shaders: the dome overhead samples it upward, while the track samples it along each reflected ray, so the sun’s streak travels across the glass as you bank and swerve, because both surfaces are consulting the same formula. No environment map is involved, and none would follow the horizon this faithfully.

One number to collide with

Collision collapses into a comparison, because along a one-dimensional road your position is a single number. An obstacle is hit when your previous distance and your current distance bracket its own; a test that merely asked about proximity each frame would tunnel straight through crystals at boost speed, while a crossed interval cannot miss.

Nothing to load

All of this means the world weighs nothing. The geometry costs no download and no loading screen, since it is regenerated from arc length the instant it is needed, and apart from the two songs there is not a single asset in the repository. The world is never shipped, only computed.