Trevor Kist

Games · 2026

The Reef

One persistent underwater world. Plant, feed, prune, graft. The reef grows while you are gone.

Play here
Press play to start right here.
Open in a new tab
Read Trevor’s narration

The Reef is one underwater world that everyone shares. You plant seeds and tend them with four verbs: plant, feed, prune, and graft. Nobody places anything. The reef grows on its own between visits, downward into the dark where bioluminescence takes over. Three JS with a deterministic growth engine, and Supabase underneath: anonymous identities, edge functions, and a cron that commits a growth epoch every thirty seconds. Each player gets twelve tending points a day, and other players show up as what they planted, not as avatars.

  • 30 secgrowth epochs
  • 12tending points per day
  • 600ktriangle budget

The starting point

The Reef is one underwater world that everyone shares. You plant seeds and tend them with four verbs, plant, feed, prune, and graft, and the reef grows procedurally between visits, downward into the dark where bioluminescence takes over. Nobody places anything. Geometry only ever grows.

What I built

Three.js and TypeScript with a deterministic growth engine in its own package, and Supabase for the world: Postgres, anonymous identities, edge functions, and a cron that commits growth epochs every thirty seconds. Each identity gets twelve tending points a day. The build is contract-driven, with twelve rules of the world and a performance budget (60fps target, 250 draw calls, 600k triangles) checked every phase. Other players show up as what they planted, not as avatars.

Current state

Phase two is done: growth epochs, spore seeding under a structure cap, a custom bloom pass for the bioluminescence, and the tending HUD. The genesis reef is pre-grown to day 45 on first boot.

  • The Reef, screenshot 1