Scenes · Study 079
Night City
A parallax night skyline: three layers of towers drift at different speeds, windows flick on and off, and a lit train crosses the bridge.
What you're looking at
The city is three rows of rectangles. Far towers are paler and move slowly, near ones are darker and move faster, which is all the eye needs to read depth. Each window decides whether it is lit from a hash of its position, and a slow second hash lets a few of them change state every several seconds.
The idea behind it
Parallax scrolling comes from early animation, where background art was painted on separate layers and moved past the camera at different rates. Side scrolling video games adopted the same trick in the 1980s to suggest depth on hardware that could only move flat tiles.
Try this
Move the pointer left or right to change the direction and speed of travel.
