Scene book

Twenty rooms in the Walled City

Every image below is drawn by the game's own renderer — same materials, same baked lighting, same post-processing, no offline render and no touched-up pixels. The numbers under each plate are measured from the build that produced it. All twenty together are 530,126 triangles and never more than 30 draw calls in a frame. Build time is geometry plus the shadow bake, with the textures already painted — every material in all ten scenes is generated once, on load, and then shared.

Play the demo Why it stopped being voxels

NEON THROAT — Two metres wide, nine storeys high, and every one of them selling something. — 01 NEON THROAT Two metres wide, nine storeys high, and every one of them selling something.

**37,266** triangles 29 draw calls 83 baked lights built in **289 ms**

THE WELL — The only daylight in the building, eleven floors up and falling. — 02 THE WELL The only daylight in the building, eleven floors up and falling.

**50,888** triangles 23 draw calls 13 baked lights built in **348 ms**

ELEVEN FLIGHTS — Green tile to shoulder height, and one working tube in four. — 03 ELEVEN FLIGHTS Green tile to shoulder height, and one working tube in four.

**17,914** triangles 19 draw calls 11 baked lights built in **499 ms**

THE ONLY SKY — Above the twelfth floor the building stops pretending and becomes a village. — 04 THE ONLY SKY Above the twelfth floor the building stops pretending and becomes a village.

**24,406** triangles 23 draw calls 9 baked lights built in **230 ms**

THE WET FLOOR — Six hundred watts of tungsten and a drain running the length of it. — 05 THE WET FLOOR Six hundred watts of tungsten and a drain running the length of it.

**26,250** triangles 27 draw calls 42 baked lights built in **318 ms**

FOUR TABLES, NO WINDOWS — Somebody was still playing when it emptied out. — 06 FOUR TABLES, NO WINDOWS Somebody was still playing when it emptied out.

**17,566** triangles 19 draw calls 9 baked lights built in **95 ms**

THE SUMP — Knee deep, and the only light is coming from something that should not be on. — 07 THE SUMP Knee deep, and the only light is coming from something that should not be on.

**22,122** triangles 10 draw calls 11 baked lights built in **102 ms**

THE COLD ROOM — The tiles are new. Everything else in this building is fifty years old. — 08 THE COLD ROOM The tiles are new. Everything else in this building is fifty years old.

**8,802** triangles 14 draw calls 19 baked lights built in **89 ms**

SIXTEENTH FLOOR, BACK ROOM — Rice cooker, six screens, and a door that locks. Bank your scrip here. — 09 SIXTEENTH FLOOR, BACK ROOM Rice cooker, six screens, and a door that locks. Bank your scrip here.

**14,278** triangles 20 draw calls 9 baked lights built in **67 ms**

THE SPINE — Eighty metres, forty doors, one working light. This is most of the game. — 10 THE SPINE Eighty metres, forty doors, one working light. This is most of the game.

**30,986** triangles 18 draw calls 18 baked lights built in **430 ms**

THE YAMEN — Built in 1847 for the assistant magistrate. The only roof over its courtyard is other people's floors. — 11 THE YAMEN Built in 1847 for the assistant magistrate. The only roof over its courtyard is other people's floors.

**42,136** triangles 21 draw calls 57 baked lights built in **537 ms**

TWO O'CLOCK — One hole in the slab, and for forty minutes a day it puts a rectangle on the floor. — 12 TWO O'CLOCK One hole in the slab, and for forty minutes a day it puts a rectangle on the floor.

**42,396** triangles 9 draw calls 11 baked lights built in **135 ms**

THE PUMP ROOM — Seventy-odd wells under the building, and every drop went up to the roof before it came down. — 13 THE PUMP ROOM Seventy-odd wells under the building, and every drop went up to the roof before it came down.

**23,886** triangles 12 draw calls 24 baked lights built in **221 ms**

TEN THOUSAND A DAY — Golf balls. Two machines, thirty home workers, and no reason to ever switch it off. — 14 TEN THOUSAND A DAY Golf balls. Two machines, thirty home workers, and no reason to ever switch it off.

**26,636** triangles 17 draw calls 27 baked lights built in **232 ms**

THE CHAIR BY THE WINDOW — Licensed in Guangdong, which is not the same as licensed here. — 15 THE CHAIR BY THE WINDOW Licensed in Guangdong, which is not the same as licensed here.

**13,326** triangles 30 draw calls 35 baked lights built in **155 ms**

THE GAP — Two metres eight between the blocks, and eleven floors of nothing under it. — 16 THE GAP Two metres eight between the blocks, and eleven floors of nothing under it.

**22,312** triangles 11 draw calls 23 baked lights built in **98 ms**

FOURTEEN STOREYS — The building stops at fourteen storeys because of the flight path, not the foundations. — 17 FOURTEEN STOREYS The building stops at fourteen storeys because of the flight path, not the foundations.

**59,568** triangles 21 draw calls 36 baked lights built in **798 ms**

THE BACKDROP — The backdrop paper was changed twice a year. Nothing else in the building was. — 18 THE BACKDROP The backdrop paper was changed twice a year. Nothing else in the building was.

**10,792** triangles 20 draw calls 22 baked lights built in **126 ms**

THE DRYING FLOOR — Forty racks of noodles, one gas burner, and no second staircase. — 19 THE DRYING FLOOR Forty racks of noodles, one gas burner, and no second staircase.

**25,414** triangles 14 draw calls 29 baked lights built in **233 ms**

NINE HUNDRED DEEP — A survey team measured every floor in 1993. They still missed rooms like this one. — 20 NINE HUNDRED DEEP A survey team measured every floor in 1993. They still missed rooms like this one.

**13,182** triangles 14 draw calls 18 baked lights built in **43 ms**

Why it stopped being voxels

The first version of this world was built from 60 mm voxels, and the verdict on it was that it looked like a bad Minecraft mod. That verdict was right, and the obvious fix — smaller voxels — was wrong. A voxel is a cube at every size, so halving one buys a finer grid of cubes, not a surface, at eight times the cost.

So the detail moved off the geometry and into the surface. A wall is now two triangles wearing a procedurally painted texture at 7.8 mm per texel, and the light is baked into it once, with real shadow rays, at build time. Nothing ships as an asset file: every texture in these ten scenes is generated in code when the page loads.

	Voxel build	Now
Detail resolution	60 mm voxel	7.8 mm texel
One 12 m tenement facade	~200,000 triangles	~400 triangles
A whole scene	never got there	9k – 60k triangles
Draw calls per scene	hundreds	9 – 30
Lighting	per-vertex AO, no shadows	baked, ray-traced shadows
Cost per frame to light	zero	zero
Asset files shipped	none	none

Detail went up roughly eight-fold and the cost went down, which is the only reason any of this runs on a phone.

What these are, and are not

They are authored rooms, not generated levels — composed the way key art is composed, to show what the engine can hold. A floor is still generated, not composed.

Eleven of them now turn up inside a run. The generator reserves a rectangle, stamps the room in, and routes a corridor to a door the room already had — the collision grid for each is rasterised straight out of its own geometry, so none of them had to be redrawn to become a place you can walk into. They are dealt from a shuffled bag seeded off the run code, so no room is ever met twice in one playthrough and no two runs meet them in the same order. Across 40 runs and 800 floors: 440 placed, zero repeats, zero unreachable exits. You can also walk all twenty on their own, from ROOMS on the title screen.

What it does share now is the pipeline. The same painted materials and the same shadowed light bake build the game's own floors, which is new — an earlier version of this page had to admit the demo looked nothing like these pictures. On a Galaxy S22 a generated floor runs 157,000 triangles across 77 draw calls, holds 60 fps with no adaptive downscaling, and builds in 60–143 ms. The one cost is the first run of a session, which spends about two seconds painting the material palette.