A browser-native 3D space exploration prototype inspired by the emotional journey of Interstellar. This project documents that movie experience through an interactive game: leaving Earth, crossing the solar system, entering the Saturn-side wormhole, and discovering the Gargantua system with Miller, Mann, and Edmund's planets.
After watching, or really rewatching, Interstellar, I wanted to capture the feeling of that journey in a playable form. The goal was not to recreate the movie exactly, but to translate its sense of distance, isolation, wonder, danger, and discovery into a small 3D browser game.
This project also became an experiment in AI-assisted game creation. I wanted to test how far GPT-5.5 could help take an idea from inspiration to an animated 3D prototype: planning the flow, shaping the journey, creating procedural planets, tuning the spaceship feel, and building cinematic moments directly in code.
Another early inspiration was Facebook Research's AI4AnimationPy. That repository explores animation-oriented ideas, and it sparked the broader question behind this prototype: how can AI tools help create interactive animated experiences faster, while still keeping the human creative direction at the center?
- Free-flight third-person spaceship controls.
- Earth launch, Moon, Mars, asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, and a distant unreachable Sun.
- Saturn-side wormhole that gates the second galaxy.
- Gargantua system revealed only after crossing the wormhole.
- Miller as a blue water world, Mann as a white-grey frozen world, and Edmund as a rocky habitable world.
- Landable planets with local scenery vignettes.
- Cinematic travel effects such as atmospheric launch sweep, Mars dust, asteroid near-misses, Saturn ring particles, wormhole ripples, and Gargantua stress fields.
- Gargantua gravity warning and ship destruction on black-hole collision.
- Procedural planets, ship, starfield, wormhole, and black-hole effects.
- React
- TypeScript
- Vite
- React Three Fiber
- Three.js
- Node.js 20 or newer.
- npm.
npm installnpm run devOpen the local URL printed by Vite. In this workspace it is usually:
http://localhost:5173/
npm run buildnpm run lintW/S: thrust and brake.A/Dor arrow keys: steer.Shift: boost.E: land or interact near landable worlds.Space: cross the wormhole when close enough.R: take off from a surface or restart after destruction.
This is an original local prototype with procedural visuals. It is inspired by cinematic space-travel concepts rather than an exact recreation of film assets.
The project is meant to be both a game and a development journal: a way to remember the feeling of Interstellar, while also exploring what modern AI-assisted coding can do for 3D interactive storytelling.