PARISON

A parison is the first bubble — the breath a glassblower traps in a gather of molten glass before it becomes anything at all. In an 1890s Stourbridge glass cone, seated at the gaffer's chair with a blowpipe across the rails, you have one shift to turn breath into ware.

How to play

Hold W to blow, A/D to turn the pipe, S to reheat at the glory hole, Space to press the tool where you aim it (1/2/3 pick jacks, block or paddle). Match the ghost silhouette of each commission on tonight's docket — bull's-eye globe, finger bowl, apothecary flask, waisted vase, cut decanter, stemmed goblet — then crack it off with Enter and take the score. The shift bell decides when you're done; you're paid by the move, so every accepted piece counts. Press H or ? any time for the full controls.

The twist is thermodynamic

The glass on your pipe is a real spring-mass soft body with internal gas pressure and temperature-driven viscosity — nothing is animated. Hot glass flows like honey: sag becomes permanent in seconds, and the only stability is to keep the pipe turning. Cold glass holds its shape but cracks under the tool. Heat is your only currency and it only flows one way — and the piece's own blackbody glow, white-gold through cherry red to dead grey, is the only thermometer you get. Overblow a thin hot wall and it bursts; stop turning and it droops off the pipe; chase a perfect profile too long and you'll be shaping stone.

How it was made

Rebuilt from the ground up in one self-contained HTML file: a fixed-timestep viscoelastic contour sim — one creep law (the rest shape relaxing against real VFT glass viscosity) produces inflation, sag, tool marks and freezing alike — with per-segment wall thickness conserving glass volume exactly, and every failure mode read off the physics. Tuned with scripted pilots in a real browser until a greedy held breath bursts at eight seconds and a patient turning hand earns the move.