Interactive Experiences
Blue Moon
A playable world for Pretty Machine. A ride from dawn to neon.
- Ownership
- Creative Direction, Game Design & Development
- Current status
- Live, playable browser game.
- Designed for
- Clarapetra listeners and curious players exploring music through an interactive world.
- Case study
- 2 min read
Executive summary
The decision brief
Ownership, the central tradeoff, collaboration boundaries, and what the current record supports.
-
01 Role
Creative Direction, Game Design & Development
-
02 Key decision / tradeoff
Give the artist's visual world a destination and a playable rhythm: a continuous road carries the rider from first light to neon while the player chooses the soundtrack.
-
03 Collaboration boundary
An independent Clarapetra project directed by John N. Farmer with AI-assisted creative and development workflows. The experience combines custom art direction and implementation with adapted 3D assets credited by the project.
-
04 Current evidence
The live game offers a complete route, four environmental chapters, selectable music, and playable steering, braking, and boost. The project image is a capture of its live start screen.
Documented period · 2026
Scope & evidence
Outputs, evidence, and limits
Outputs describe what was made or delivered. The evidence boundary below states what has—and has not—been validated.
Responsibilities
- Creative direction and artist-world extension
- Game and interaction design
- Environment and audiovisual direction
- Browser development and performance tuning
Documented outputs & delivery record
- A playable browser game with an eight-kilometer route across four continuous chapters.
- Ten selectable Pretty Machine tracks accompany a world that responds to the soundtrack.
- Keyboard, mouse, and touch steering combine with braking, boost, obstacles, and near-miss scoring.
Full story
How the work took shape
From listening to riding
Blue Moon extends Clarapetra’s artist world into a motorcycle game. The helmeted Pretty Machine persona becomes the rider, the soundtrack travels with the player, and the horizon becomes a place to reach.
The experience begins on a Montana-inspired highway south of Butte, looking toward Mount Fleecer. Across eight kilometers, the landscape moves through four chapters: Fleecer Dawn, Blue Moon, City on the Horizon, and Neon Desert. It is a compressed, fictional journey that moves from open country at first light into a luminous desert city.
A road with a rhythm
The core interaction is immediate: steer, avoid obstacles, brake when space gets tight, and spend rechargeable boost to accelerate. Near misses reward confident riding, while motorcycle integrity and the remaining distance make the stakes visible. Pause, restart, and a locally saved personal best support repeat play.
Keyboard, mouse, and touch controls offer different ways into the same ride. The chase camera keeps the rider and the road ahead in view as the environment changes around them.
Music as part of the world
Ten tracks from Pretty Machine are selectable during the ride, opening with Anaconda. Switching tracks keeps the journey moving. Audio analysis influences the scene’s light and effects, carrying the album’s identity into the environment.
The visual direction connects the pink racing suit, cyan helmet, blue moon, and neon architecture with the wider Clarapetra project. Three.js, React, TypeScript, Web Audio, and custom shaders bring that world into the browser, with graphics settings and reduced effects available inside the experience.
Building on shared assets
The project combines custom visual direction, environments, controls, and audiovisual behavior with adapted 3D assets. The motorcycle is adapted from ROY’s Ducati Panigale V4 under CC BY 4.0; the anatomical base is credited to Dan Ulrich / Blender Studio under CC0. The costume, helmet, textures, and fitted rig belong to the Clarapetra Pretty Machine project.
Play Blue Moon to enter the ride, choose a track, and follow the road from dawn to neon.
A relevant next step
Have a world people should be able to step into?
Let's connect music, identity, and interaction in an experience people can explore for themselves.