Sukhna Lake 3D: a morning jog in Chandigarh, in your browser
Sukhna is a free 3D game about one simple pleasure: a winter-morning jog along the dam at Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh. The lake, the 2.5 km promenade and the Shivalik hills behind them are laid out at their real shape and real size, so a length of the dam takes about as long here as it does there. It runs in the browser on a laptop or a phone, with nothing to install.
Watch the 30-second trailer · Source code on GitHub
What you can do
- Jog the dam from end to end, or turn on auto-jog and just watch the water go by. Your distance, pace and lengths are counted.
- Follow the real sun. The sky tracks the actual sun over Chandigarh on 15 January, always in the right part of the sky. The game opens at golden hour, 07:45, just after the real sunrise; pre-dawn, sunrise, bright morning and sunset are each a press of T away (the time button on touch).
- Go boating. Buy a ticket at the counter, walk down to the jetty and pedal a swan boat out onto the lake, past the rowing eight on its training lane.
- Change the weather between clear skies, rain, and the thick winter fog that January brings to Chandigarh.
- Join the laughter club in its circle on the promenade, say hello to the morning walkers, high-five a passing runner, and stop at the stall for a cutting chai.
- Sit on the water steps or a bench and a soft lo-fi track starts playing while the light changes over the lake.
How it was made
The layout comes from real data. The promenade's curve, the lake's outline and islands, and the streets and building plots around them are taken from OpenStreetMap. The ground and the hills, out to about 45 km, come from elevation data, and the sun's position is worked out for the exact date, time and place. On top of that sits a cel-shaded world built with three.js: the parapet, palms, people, boats and birds are all modelled and animated in code. Every sound, from birdsong to the lo-fi music, is synthesised in the browser as well; there are no audio recordings.
The whole game was built live on stream at kick.com/asumagg, with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, doing the programming alongside.
Questions
Is this the real Sukhna Lake?
Its shape and size are real: the walk follows the dam's actual curve for its full 2.5 km, the water has the lake's true outline and islands, and the hills sit where they really are. The look is a stylised, hand-drawn-style take rather than a photographic copy, and some details are made up, such as the lamps, the benches, the people, and exactly where the steps down to the water are.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. On a phone or tablet you get a thumb stick to jog, a drag to look around and buttons for everything else, and the game picks lighter graphics on its own. A recent phone runs it most smoothly; if frames start to drop on a slower device, the game lowers its quality by itself.
Is it free? Do I need to install anything?
It is free, with no ads, no sign-up and nothing to download. It runs in any recent version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari that supports WebGL 2.
How was it made?
With three.js and real map data: OpenStreetMap for the dam, the lake and the city, elevation data for the terrain and hills, and a solar calculation for the sunrise. It was built live on stream with Claude Code, and the source code is open on GitHub under the MIT licence.
What time of day is it in the game?
A mid-January morning. The game opens at golden hour, 07:45, just after the real 07:19 sunrise, and the clock runs four times faster than real life. Pre-dawn and the other times are one press of T away (the time button on touch): pre-dawn, sunrise, golden hour, bright morning and sunset.
Can I go boating on the lake?
Yes, on clear or foggy mornings; the counter closes in the rain. Get a ticket at the shack by the Boating gateway at the west end of the dam, go down the steps to the jetty and press E beside a swan boat to take it out. W and S pedal, A and D steer, and you dock again back at the jetty.
Credits
- Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
- Terrain from Mapzen / AWS Terrain Tiles (SRTM and other sources).
- The rendering engine is adapted from sakura-crossing by Kenton Wang (MIT licence).
- Built with three.js. Code © 2026 Vikrant Negi, MIT licence.
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