A few months ago I opened Neal Agarwal's Cursor Camp for the first time. You know that feeling when a website completely derails your afternoon? That was me. I spent two hours just watching dozens of cursors wander around a pixel campground, kicking a soccer ball, sitting by the fire.
And then I thought: what if this world kept going even after I closed the tab?
That question eventually turned into CursorCamp Sandbox, a fully interactive browser companion built from scratch. No game engines, just Canvas 2D, SVG, and TypeScript. Here's how a moment of curiosity became a 6,000-line obsession.
The Moment It Clicked
The original Cursor Camp is a genius piece of ambient design. There are no objectives, no tutorials, no signups. You just move your cursor and discover things. The campers (other cursors) wander around doing their own thing. It feels alive, but it's ephemeral — close the tab and it's gone.
I wanted to make a version that felt permanent. A place you could return to. Same whimsical energy, but with persistence, more interactivity, and deeper secrets to uncover.
What I Actually Built
The sandbox ended up with:
55 AI campers, each with a 5-phase movement state machine (idle → accelerate → cruise → decelerate → overshoot). They wander between points of interest, occasionally chasing the soccer ball, randomly joining and leaving throughout the day
An 8,000×5,000 pixel procedurally-generated world with oceans, rivers, roads, a soccer field, running track, vegetable garden, and scattered decorations — all generated from math, no external assets
Dynamic weather — rain and snow with particle systems, wind that drifts over time
Spatial audio — 11 independent sound sources that fade as you move around. The DJ booth has a 4-track playlist that crossfades
17 hidden seashells, a soccer goal, interactive houses you can enter, and benches you can rest on
The entire thing runs at 60fps in a browser with zero dependencies beyond React and Next.js.
The Hardest Part Wasn't the Code
It was resisting the urge to add objectives. I kept wanting to add quests, levels, progression systems. But that would've missed the point. The magic of Cursor Camp is that nothing asks anything of you. You're just... there.
The hardest technical challenge was the camera system. With an 8,000×5,000 world, you can't just center on the player — that would be disorienting. I ended up with a dead-zone approach: the camera only pans when your cursor approaches the screen edges, giving the feel of looking around a physical space.
Why I'm Sharing This
Fan projects don't need to be commercial to be worth building. This one taught me more about Canvas rendering, procedural generation, and game feel than any tutorial ever could. And it brought a small community of people who just wanted to hang out at a virtual campfire.
If you've ever been inspired by someone else's creative work, I encourage you to build something in response. Not a clone, not a competitor — just your own take. It's the most fun you'll have coding.
The sandbox is free and open at https://www.cursorcamp-sandbox.com. No signup, no downloads, no objectives. Just a camp that's always open.
Built with React, Next.js, TypeScript, and exactly zero game engines.
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