Skywyrm — a aurora serpent minted from a rappter genome
An aurora ribbon serpent that slithers a sine spine around the frame, grown from a real rappter genome and saved as a live .egg.
What this is
Skywyrm is a completely new creature — a aurora serpent — with its own model and its own animation, hatched fresh every time from a real .egg "rappter" genome. It is not a re-skin of the stock holographic blob. Model: A long follow-the-leader chain of spine nodes rendered as a smooth tapering ribbon (per-segment aurora quads + blurred aura stroke + bright inner filament) with an eyed bulb head and dorsal fins — grown from segments/body_r/limbs, never a blob.
Press New Skywyrm and a brand-new, unique genome is minted, hashed to a 12-character id, and rendered live. Press Save .egg to download the real cartridge — the same .egg format the OpenRappter ecosystem hatches — or Load .egg to bring one back byte-exact.
How it moves
The head leads a slithering sine wobble along a macro path that loops the whole canvas (ring/star/blob from form.shape); the body trails at fixed spacing so waves propagate down the spine, the aurora hue scrolls continuously, and comet-glow trails smear over a seeded starfield.
The genome behind it
Every Skywyrm is packed as a genuine rappter .egg: base64url-encoded JSON carrying three layers — form (body, limbs, segments, symmetry), surface (palette, pattern, glow), and motion (breathe, drift, pulse, reach), plus this species' own extension genes. The id is the SHA-256 of the canonical genome sliced to 12 hex, so the egg is content-addressed and verifiable: change one gene and you get a new creature and a new id. The prompt above is exactly how this species' genome is minted — copy it, change what matters to you, and hatch your own.
Prompt
Mint a Skywyrm: pick one aurora hue-family (boreal green→teal→violet, rose, solar, ice, flare, or abyss) and jitter each base hue ±15° into a 3–5 stop high-saturation palette. Give it a long body — form.segments 7–12, shape biased to 'ring' (also star/blob) so the head traces a looping macro path, body_r 0.24–0.5 for ribbon width, plus Skywyrm extensions taper 0.7–1.7 (head→tail thinning), head 1.15–1.85 (head bulb), and petals 3–6. Surface picks pattern glow/stripe/spot/solid with glow 0.45–0.95 and a shimmer/bands hue-scroll character. Motion binds drift 0.15–0.85 to the slither WAVELENGTH (more drift = longer wave, fewer bends) and reach 0.32–0.9 to the slither AMPLITUDE, with breathe/pulse/slither driving width-breathing, glow-pulse, and micro-wobble — every mint reproducibly unique via its genome id.Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or Copilot. Change one thing that matters to you.
What I learned shipping it
- Additive ('lighter') ribbon compositing plus a translucent background-redraw each frame gives glowing comet trails AND keeps a seeded starfield crisp — a full clear would kill the trails, a plain fade would smear the stars
- Follow-the-leader (hold constant spacing behind a moving head) is the cheapest way to a convincing serpent: the slither must be injected as a perpendicular sine wobble on the HEAD so it propagates down the body as it advances along the arc
- Right after regenerating, the chain initializes straight and needs ~1–2s to develop its S-curves — sample screenshots deeper into the timeline (t1/t2), not immediately, to prove the animation and avoid a misleading straight-comet frame
- Load playwright from a repo that actually has it and import the CJS build as a default export (const {chromium}=pkg) under Node 25 — named ESM import fails