David Lu rebuilt Line Rider in the browser to finish his 11-year track

In 2008 David Lu set out to make the best Line Rider track of all time for a 96-contestant community competition, aiming to show mastery of every movement style the physics bugs allowed. The obvious play was to push the old Flash-era editor harder: he pulled an all-nighter, rushed an unfinished, unscened version, and released it as a beta. It still won first place, but the vision was not complete, and the project nagged at him for a decade.

Around 2010 the community shrank and the tools became difficult and tedious. Instead of grinding or abandoning the track, Lu worked on the medium itself: he studied engineering and then art, and he recreated Line Rider again and again — Python in 2011, a track-gallery web proof of concept in 2014, and finally a full browser recreation in modern web technologies in 2015. After years of development and contact with the game's owners, that recreation became the official version on linerider.com. He kept in mind that he would use it to finish Omniverse II.

The rebuilt platform changed what was drawable. A hacked-in curve tool let him expand his grid across the whole track and build polyhedra with perspective; live coding let him procedurally generate the lines of the ending animation, backed by a rudimentary 3D renderer with no z-culling. He redid the last quarter of the old beta, recycled earlier sections as narrative, and replaced the planned monument set pieces with the track's escape story, writing on the wall and a final portal.

He met the end-of-2019 deadline, eleven years after starting, completing the project and going beyond his original vision. Colleague Bevibel Harvey made a video essay about the track, and his making-of account drew a 1,080-point Hacker News discussion in November 2020, where commenters described the result as beautiful, complete and one of the most incredible expressions of passion they had seen.

When the tool caps the work, rebuild the tool

The tool was the bottleneck: the curve tool and procedural line generation turned sections that were impossible by hand into work he could execute, so rebuilding the editor unlocked the artwork.

The investment compounded: the same browser recreation became the official version on linerider.com, so the engineering served the game's owners and the whole community, not just one track.

A platform he controlled carried him through: new tools and a hard deadline made a huge project tractable after the old editor had stalled it for years.

The finish landed in front of a fresh audience: viral music-synchronized tracks from 2016 and 2017 had brought Line Rider back into cultural consciousness, so the completed work met new artists.

When a platform's tooling caps what you can build, rebuild the platform: the tools you create for one project can become the product, and the investment compounds for you and the whole community.

Omniverse II was finished by the end of 2019, eleven years after the first lines were drawn, and Rabid Squirrel (Bevibel Harvey) made a video essay about it. Lu's account of the project drew 1,080 points and 149 comments on Hacker News in November 2020. He said he would never spend so long on a single track again, but would keep building and maintaining Line Rider — the browser version that had become the official game — starting with camera controls and parallax layers for richer depth.