Credits and sources
An unofficial fan concept. Not affiliated with HBO or George R. R. Martin. Made in Gainesville by Appel Studios in October 2026, to show what an interactive website can feel like.
Who
Concept, direction, 3D, shaders, code, copy and sound design: Eli Appelbaum, Appel Studios.
What it is made of
- The sword
- Modelled from analytic cross-sections and baked in Blender 5.2 (Cycles) by our own script. The direwolf on the pommel is our drawing. Nothing is borrowed from any film, series or game.
- The six scenes
- Photoreal plates generated by us from our own prompts (Higgsfield, gpt_image_2_5), given depth by Depth Anything V2 Large run on our own machine, and shown as depth-relief meshes.
- The frost and the crack
- Written as GLSL post-processing effects. The frost grows from two macro photographs of hoar frost we generated from our own prompts (stars and ferns), and is wiped through a painted mask; the crack is a baked radial fracture from our own generator.
- The map and the mark
- The parchment ground of the map is generated from our prompt; every label and pin is ours. The direwolf head on the site's icon is our own drawing, traced to a silhouette. It is not the series' sigil.
- Environment light
- HDRIs from Poly Haven (CC0): blaubeuren_church_square on the site, birchwood in the Blender previews.
- Sound
- Cut from the Sonniss #GameAudioGDC bundle (royalty-free, commercial use permitted): packs by Epic Stock Media, Ivo Vicic, InMotionAudio, Cinematic Sound Design, Alexander Kopeikin, The Noisery, David Dumais Audio and 344 Audio. The direwolf howl is a public-domain recording from Wikimedia Commons (Wolf howls.ogg). Sound is off until you turn it on.
- Type
- IM Fell English SC by Igino Marini and Spectral by Production Type, both under the SIL Open Font License, self-hosted.
- Stack
- Vite, React, TypeScript, three.js, React Three Fiber, drei, postprocessing, GSAP ScrollTrigger, Lenis. Hosted on Vercel.
The world this leans on
Winterfell, House Stark and the North belong to George R. R. Martin and the rights holders of A Song of Ice and Fire, and to HBO for the television series. This site uses none of their footage, stills, music, artwork, typefaces, marks or models. The lore here is written in our own words from the published books. If you hold rights in this world and want something changed, write to us through appelstudios.com and we will act on it.
Full provenance
Every file on the site, its source and its licence is listed in the project's asset log (ASSETS.md in the repository), and the whole build is described in the case study.