TITLE: NEON BONSAI — a living tree instrument
PROMPT: Build 'NEON BONSAI', a living tree instrument: a procedural bonsai grown from recursive branch strokes on canvas, glowing with neon gradient bark; leaves as luminous particles; fireflies orbiting; a reflection pool below mirroring the tree with ripple distortion. Palette: black garden, hot magenta trunk fading to cyan tips, gold fireflies. Interactions: GROW replays growth from seed with easing; WIND slider sways branches with layered noise; SEASON chips (spring sakura pink, summer cyan, autumn ember, winter bare-with-snow); PRUNE removes the branch nearest a click with a snip animation and regrows elsewhere; chime on new growth (WebAudio, gesture-gated). A sci-fi tea garden.
DESCRIPTION: A procedural bonsai grows stroke by stroke from a seed on a black garden canvas: recursive branching (depth 7, 2–3 children, golden-ratio-ish taper) draws each limb as a glowing neon line whose color interpolates from hot magenta at the trunk to electric cyan at the tips, with per-depth shadow bloom. Leaves are luminous particles clustered at branch tips that wobble on their own phases; sixteen gold fireflies orbit elliptical paths through the canopy, twinkling. Below the waterline a reflection pool mirrors the entire tree in horizontal bands — each band sheared by its own phase of layered sine noise, so the reflection ripples more the deeper it goes — with a shimmering surface line and expanding ellipse ripples when you touch the water. GROW replays the seed-to-tree growth with per-branch eased timing; WIND drives a three-octave layered noise sway scaled by branch depth; four SEASON chips rebuild the palette — sakura pink, chlorophyll cyan, ember orange, and winter's bare violet-blue limbs with drifting snow. PRUNE finds the branch segment nearest a click, snips it with an expanding ring, drops its leaves, then regrows a replacement shoot elsewhere with a rising four-note pentatonic chime.
TECHNIQUES: Canvas 2D with DPR-aware sizing; seeded LCG RNG (mul32-style) for reproducible trees; recursive branch graph with born-times mapped to a global eased growth scalar; three-octave layered sine wind field shared by pose and reflection; color lerp on hex channels for trunk→tip gradients; banded reflection via clip-rect slices with per-band horizontal shear; snow as recycled particle field; nearest-segment hit testing for pruning; WebAudio sine arpeggio with exponential envelopes, AudioContext created only after first pointer gesture (try/catch, silent without gesture); reduced-motion collapses transitions; fully offline, system fonts, responsive via clientWidth/Height re-read on resize.
INTERACTION: On load the tree grows from seed. GROW replays it with easing + chime. WIND slider 0–100 sways the canopy with layered noise. SEASON chips rebuild palette and regrow (spring pink / summer cyan / autumn ember / winter bare + snow). Click any branch within 26px to PRUNE — snip ring animation, leaves fall away, a new shoot regrows elsewhere with a chime. Click the pool to send ripple ellipses across the reflection. Fireflies and leaf shimmer run continuously.