Responses by Matt DesLauriers, creator/artist.

Background: Wayfinder is an animated interactive journey across the poetry of Canadian landscapes. The interactive experience creates a peaceful, contemplative escape through an illustrated world dotted with haiku-like verses. The game, which is free to experience in a browser, is designed for a general audience, young and old.

Design core: Wayfinder was conceptualized around guiding a character through a richly crafted, natural landscape. Through my own artistic practice that encompasses generative art and creative coding, Wayfinder brings to life illustrations by Tiffany Beucher and stylistic compositions by animator Guillaume Le Roux. The procedurally generated world and the algorithmically constructed poetic verses—created through user interactions—provide a unique experience to each player.

Favorite details: There’s a lot of aspects of Wayfinder I’m proud of, including the interactivity, procedural assemblage of illustrations and poetic verse, fluidity of motion, optimizations and performance, and an engineering system that enables such technically and visually distinct ideas to come together into a cohesive experience.

Challenges: One challenging aspect was giving more creative authorship over the in-game look and feel and the animations. I ended up spending a lot of time building new tools and remixing existing software to help allow Tiffany and Guillaume to impact the look and feel of the real-time game engine more directly.

Time constraints: The project had a small team and budget and evolved over many months, mostly out of passion. We had to find many creative workarounds to ensure we could finish the whole experience within a reasonable time frame while also including as many details and flourishes as possible. One example of this is the level design—all three biomes follow similar patterns of pseudorandom biome generation, rather than crafting a particular level design for each biome. This creative decision drove some other notions of the project: the procedurally generated experience creates a unique experience for each player.

Technology: The project uses a wide range of open-source JavaScript libraries and tools. A game engine was built on top of three.js and its 3-D editor to use WebGL2 with a full-fledged Entity Component System inspired by Mozilla’s ECSY project. The UI was developed with Svelte. There is no back end as the site is entirely static, although Node.js was used in many parts of the project to build tooling for 3-D-asset optimization, sprite packing, image compression and other things.

Special technical features: To construct the haiku-like verse throughout the experience, I developed a series of natural language processing–based tools to extract several thousand appropriate haiku verses from a larger dataset within certain syntax constraints. These were then fed into a GPT-2 AI (machine learning) notebook to create new iterations along a similar vein. The final verses in the game, which allows for countless user-generated poems, are ultimately adapted from the original data, machine-trained outputs, and a lot of manual rewriting by myself and the rest of the team. This process was a huge part of the project that is easily overlooked alongside the art and animations and required an entirely different technology stack and development approach.