Coast

Executive Summary

Coast began as a small experiment: could momentum and gravity make steering a simple ship worth learning? Cadet Level 1 turns that experiment into one approachable passage. Clear a gravity body and sparse amber wreckage, then cross the destination ring. Contact ends the attempt; the debrief lets you retry or copy feedback for the person who shared the game.

Before You Play

Use a desktop Chromium browser with WebGL 2, a keyboard and mouse, and a flight area of at least 800 × 600 pixels. The play page has a Full screen button. Briefing and help remain readable in smaller windows, but flight is designed for desktop.

Begin starts the run with full energy. For a first try, switch assist off with F, hold W for about 2½ seconds, then release and coast. Let gravity bend the route and make small corrections. There is no docking or speed requirement at the cyan opening.

Controls and Accessibility

W / S

Thrust forward or backward along the ship's nose.

Arrow keys · Q / E

Pitch and yaw · Roll left and right. Controls follow the ship's axes.

F · P · R

Toggle settling assist · Pause/resume · Reset the flight. R also retries from the debrief while you are not typing feedback.

Assist starts on and uses energy to settle motion or hold against gravity. With assist off, momentum persists while gravity keeps pulling. Turning does not turn existing drift, so reverse thrust is not always a brake. Maneuvers share a finite energy reserve; an empty reserve cannot stop the ship.

Large drift and spin cues supplement the numeric readouts. Menus and the debrief support keyboard navigation, but flight relies on a visual 3D scene and is not a nonvisual experience. There is no sound, controller mapping, touch flight or saved progress. Leaving the flight pauses it; return and resume explicitly. Feedback stays in page memory only, can be copied manually, and is never submitted automatically.

How We Made This with Generative AI

Mike Besso set the direction and judged each small playable step. OpenAI Codex assisted with implementation, deterministic checks and browser inspection. Human playtesting led to gentler controls, an optional settling assist, finite shared energy and larger motion cues. The result preserves the accepted flight model in one authored Cadet course.

The Gory Details

The simulation advances in fixed steps. Ship-relative thrust and angular controls use a quaternion orientation; position and velocity stay in world coordinates. One gravity body bends motion, visible-hull contact ends a run, and a swept crossing detects arrival at the ring.

Powered speed is limited to 8 units per second and spin to 45 degrees per second on each axis. These limits constrain powered increments; gravity can still accelerate the ship, and existing motion is not erased when energy runs out. The energy scale is a gameplay allowance, not a physical fuel calculation.

Tests check deterministic flight, contact and the authored route. Browser checks cover the controls and presentation. Those checks do not establish enjoyment or make this a realistic spaceflight simulator; the next useful evidence is how people learn and replay the passage.