Inspired by @simonw: In 1984 I lived on the third floor of a squat grey building at 78 Engelsa iela in Rīga, Latvia. At the end of a long gravel road, past the rusting garages and the old ladies' gardens, stood a horse chestnut taller than the building itself.

We climbed it, turned it into a pirate ship and an observation post, roasted its chestnuts in the fall, and lay under it on summer nights looking at the stars. I spent a lot of time just looking at it from my window. I even wrote poems about it.

I've rebuilt that place as a small game you can play in the browser: Kashtan (Каштан).
You can walk the road, watch the tree go through the seasons (bare and snowy, white candles in May, full of birds in summer, chestnuts falling in October), climb it, lie under it at night, or sit at my old window. The room is there too: light-blue wallpaper, the bookshelf, the desk lamp, an Elektronika calculator, and Uspensky's "Post Machine" on the table. Click a book and it takes you to my Post Machine simulator.

The neighbourhood cat still shows up out of nowhere. It rains, because it's Latvia. In winter, icicles grow on the eaves.

Everything is generated in code: the tree, the textures, the weather and the music. It's one HTML file built with Three.js, which I made together with Claude Code.

Play it here: https://rioffe.github.io/kashtan/

Headphones recommended.

#Riga #Latvia #ThreeJS #GameDev #ClaudeCode