Kaidan-do Book Store

A second-hand bookshop on a slope, to walk through

Lab Build · Playable

Five Steps Up, Books All the Way

Kaidan-do (階段堂, “the staircase shop”) is an old house on a hill road down to the sea, turned into a second-hand bookshop. The ground slopes, so the back half of the shop sits a metre higher than the front. It was modelled by script in Blender from a single illustration and made walkable in Godot. No spaceship this time — the Lab pipeline pointed at something small and warm.

Play in Browser

Browse the Shelves

Click inside the view to capture the mouse. Esc releases it. Open in its own tab
W A S D / arrowsWalk
MouseLook around
ShiftWalk faster
SpaceJump
ESit down, get up
  • You start in the street, facing the shop front.
  • The sliding doors open when you walk up to them, including the back door.
  • Seats: the owner's chair behind the counter, the reading bench upstairs, the bench outside.
  • Sound is on — a quiet piano, floorboards underfoot, and the sea once you step outside.
Specifications

The Shop in Numbers

6.4 × 12 mShop floor
1 mFront to back rise
38 mOf bookcases
14Bookcases
11Hanging lamps
6Places to sit

Front room at street level with the large-format wall, two island shelves, the new-books table and the counter. Five steps up: the back room, a closet, a toilet and the back-door room where the overflow stock piles up under the stair to the owner's flat.

Tour

Front Door to Back Door

Kaidan-do bookshop front seen from the street, with signboard, lattice windows and a small shrine
The streetLattice shop front under a tiled pent roof, the signboard, a free-books shelf and a red post box.
Small wayside shrine on a stone base beside the shop
The shrineIt has always stood beside the shop. What it has to do with the owner is anyone's guess.
Aisle between two island bookcases under hanging lamps
The islandsTwo back-to-back runs of shelving: paperbacks on one, local history and the sea on the other.
New-books table with covers facing out, the counter and steps behind
New booksThe one table of new stock, covers out, with the counter and the steps beyond.
Counter with cash register, desk lamp and the owner's chair beside the steps
The counterCash register, desk lamp, a red book left open. Press E to take the owner's chair.
Five wooden steps up to the raised back room, shelves either side
The stepsThe hill carries on through the building. Shelves line the face of the drop.
View from the raised floor down over the front room towards the shop windows
Looking backFrom the raised floor the shelf tops become the balustrade, stacked with whatever didn't fit.
Raised back room with a free-standing bookcase, toilet door and the glazed back-door room
The back roomMore shelves, the closet with its futon, the toilet and the glazed door to the back.
Back-door room with a blue door, cardboard boxes and a steep stair covered in books
The back doorOverflow stock, a blue door to the lane, and the stair to the private floor — half buried.
Project Recap

From One Drawing to a Shop You Can Stand In

The second Lab build reuses the pipeline from the EML-850 Trailblazer, on a very different subject. Again nothing was modelled by hand.

  1. Reading the illustration

    The source is one cutaway drawing with a small floor plan and handwritten notes: the land's slope is kept, so the back is raised like a mezzanine; books that don't fit go by the back door or upstairs; the first floor is the owner's home. Those notes set the layout — a sunken front room, five steps, and a raised back with closet, toilet and back door.

  2. Walls from boxes, not from cuts

    The ship was carved out of a solid block. A timber house is the opposite: posts, panels and lattice. So the script assembles walls from pieces around each opening and builds every window and sliding door as a real frame with glazing bars and panes.

  3. Thousands of books, cheaply

    Each shelf bay is one box with a strip of painted spines on its face. A generated texture holds four kinds of row — mixed hardbacks, paperbacks, large-format and old browns — and every bay picks a row and a random offset, with some bays part empty and a few books lying flat. Loose piles and the face-out covers on the new-books table use two more generated sheets, with made-up titles.

  4. The slope

    The steps are drawn as steps but walked as a hidden ramp, so you glide up instead of bumping each riser. Outside, the ground climbs alongside the building so the back door opens at the higher level.

  5. Doors, seats, sound

    Doors, sitting and footsteps came straight over from the ship, re-skinned: wooden lattice leaves instead of bulkhead doors, floorboard footsteps, a piano loop, and the sea fading in when you step into the street.

  6. Walk test

    A scripted walk goes in from the street, round every aisle, up the steps, into the toilet, out of the back door and behind the counter. It caught two things on the first run: a pile of books blocking the toilet door, and a basin that made the doorway too tight to enter.

Under the Hood

How It's Put Together

  • Blender 5.1, driven by Python — about 520 lines for the shop, 260 for textures
  • About 13,600 triangles and fifteen generated textures
  • Godot 4.7 — player, doors, lamps and audio shared with the Trailblazer build
  • Built in the open with an AI coding assistant driving Blender and Godot through scripts
Honest Limits

What's Still Rough

  • Books are painted onto boxes — you can't take one down
  • The owner isn't in; his chair is empty
  • The first floor is a shell: lit windows, nothing inside, and the stair is blocked
  • Neighbouring houses and the street are stand-ins
  • The layout is an interpretation of the drawing, not a measured copy

Credit: the shop and its name come from an illustration titled “階段堂書店 Kaidan-do Book Store”. The illustration is not ours and is not reproduced here; the 3D model, textures and code are. Sound effects and music come from licensed libraries.

More From the Lab

The bookshop is the second build on the bench. The first one flies.

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