Sakura Crossing — 桜踏切

An explorable Japanese suburban neighbourhood in blossom season, built as a real 3D scene in Three.js and rendered to look like a hand-painted 2D animation background.

It starts at a level crossing and grows outward from there: a shopping street, a community shrine up a flight of stone steps, a high school on the rise behind the station, a pedestrian overbridge, a branch library, a residential lane, two back alleys, a summer-festival ground caught mid-preparation, a community-bus turnaround at the far corner where the estate runs into a hillside, and the housing in between — with a drainage channel running the width of the town between two arms of a range of low hills, and a railway that goes the whole way round the planet and through the hills twice on its way. There are no people anywhere in it, and there are not meant to be — everything the place has to say about itself is said by what has been left out, pinned up, parked or forgotten.

Needs Node 18 or newer, and nothing else — three.js and Vite are the only two dependencies.

npm install
npm run play     # build + serve the production bundle, port 5179 — just want to play
npm run dev      # dev server with HMR, port 5178 — for working on it

Then open the printed URL and click to explore. Keep the terminal open; closing it stops the server. A plain file:// open will not work — the project is ES modules, so it needs to be served over HTTP.

The background-music