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More Perfect — A Million Sovereign Points That Hold Whatever You Commit to Them

My second entry for Built on Yesterday, the final week of Summer into AI. This time "yesterday" is only two weeks back. In Week 2 I shipped Perpetual Union: about a million points of light on your GPU, each one its own independent agent with no central control, all springing toward one fixed shape — the flag. Drag across them and they scatter; let go and, with no one giving the order, they re-form. It always bugged me that the shape was fixed, so this week I generalized it.

About a million glowing points of light on a black field, assembled into a waving American flag — red and white stripes rippling, a blue star field at the corner — under the title MORE PERFECT.

What it is

More Perfect is the same half-million-plus sovereign points and the same no-conductor physics — but now they'll hold whatever you give them. Type 1776, WE THE PEOPLE, your own name, and the particles assemble it out of nothing. Tear it apart with your cursor and it finds its way back on its own. It's still one self-contained HTML file, still running entirely on your GPU with no libraries.

How it’s built

  • The trick is small and satisfying: your text gets drawn to an invisible canvas, and every "ink" pixel of it becomes a target position in a texture. Each particle is assigned one of those pixels and springs toward it — so the letters are literally made of a crowd of independent points, each holding its own spot in the whole.
  • I ease off the turbulence once a word is forming so the letters stay crisp and legible instead of smearing, and swap the flag's red-white-blue for a warm gold while it holds text — a small signal that you're looking at something you committed, not the default union.
  • Everything else is inherited straight from Perpetual Union: the ping-pong float textures that carry each particle's position and velocity, the additive-blended points, and the HDR bloom that makes the whole field glow. The only genuinely new part is the text-to-target step — proof that the interesting extension wasn't more scope, just one new idea bolted cleanly onto something that already worked.
The same million particles, now glowing warm gold, assembled into the number 1776 against the black void.
Type a word and the same crowd of independent points leaves the flag and forms it instead — here, 1776, in gold.
The particles forming the phrase WE THE PEOPLE in glowing gold letters.
Every letter is literally made of hundreds of separate points, each holding its own spot in the whole.

On the theme

A union that only ever holds one shape is a poster. A union that holds whatever the people commit to it — and re-forms when it's torn — is closer to the real thing. Built on yesterday in the most literal way: the same engine, the same million points, one new degree of freedom.

Try it →Code →All the builds →

Shout-out

Part of the competition is cross-referencing other builders. So: shout-out to Jake Strait — who nobody out-shipped on flags, fireworks and Americana this whole summer; the man committed to volume. This is me going the other direction with the same raw material: one patriotic particle build, grown up into something you can put your own words into. Different instincts, same flag.

Built for Summer Into AI 2026 (Competition #2), hosted by Eric Rhea. More in the build log.