Hi HN. Sillage (French for the wake a boat leaves behind) is a small browser game with no goal.

You're a blob: hold the mouse or a finger down to swim toward it, and fast currents carry you into the next world. Creatures and backgrounds inspiration come from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

On the creative process:

I've wanted to make something like this for years, since reading Jenova Chen's thesis on flow in games (https://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/missionstatement.htm) - whose studio later created games like Flower or Journey - and Daniel Shiffman's The Nature of Code (https://natureofcode.com), which I had backed on kickstarter.

In 2012 I made this octopus: https://github.com/dhovart/octopus, and later I spent some evenings on a small game system in rescript: https://github.com/dhovart/rescript-game

All of this was before LLMs, when small idea still took me hours and most of them stayed half built.

I like shaders, especially fragment shaders - these are things that I am very slow to get right and to have full control on. You look up effects, try to implement them, tweak numbers, look at the result, change them again, and hours have past already. I spent lots and lots of time on shadertoy.

Now all of this is getting incredibly cheap to implement because of LLMs. That's part infuriating to have a robot code better than you and also very satisfying to experiment with things that are in your mind in a very short iterative cycle.

I felt like I was half art director, half manager of a talented studio crew - and I'm very pleased with the result.

Show HN: Sillage, a small contemplative game drawn after Haeckel's plates