How it works
1. Exploring the city
The home page shows the whole city on a single horizontally-scrolling canvas. The far left is the entrance — a retro PXVILLE arch with flickering marquee bulbs — backed by a forest of trees that mark the edge of the world. Everything to the right of the banner is user-submitted.
- Click and drag anywhere to pan horizontally.
- Use the mouse wheel for horizontal scroll. Shift + wheel for faster scroll.
- Arrow keys jump one full segment (10 buildings) forward or back.
- Pinch-zoom works on touch devices and the canvas stays crisp at any zoom.
2. Submitting a building
Click Build a Building in the top bar to open the procedural builder. Inside you can:
- Pick one of four tiers: House, Shop, Apartment, or Tower. Each tier has a distinct shape and scale.
- Cycle through color themes, window shapes, door styles, roof types, shape variants (including L-shape extensions), and — for shops — awning colors.
- Customize the wall color directly with a color picker. The building recomputes night-mode shading automatically.
- Give the building a display name (shown on the sign) and a short URL slug. Optionally, add a link URL the building will open when clicked in the city.
- Use the on-canvas edit toolto draw on top of your building — windows, walls, or doors get targeted separately so you can't accidentally paint over the sign.
When you hit Submit Building, the building is placed at the next available spot on the right side of the city and goes live immediately for all visitors.
3. Your edit code
On success, you'll see a modal with an edit code that looks like K7M-PQ9-R2X. This is how you prove the building is yours for future edits.
- Copy the code straight to your clipboard.
- Download it as JSON for safekeeping.
- If you left an email in the submit form, we also email the code to you. Check spam if you don't see it.
Save this code somewhere safe. There's no password recovery — if you lose it, you lose the ability to edit the building. (Admins can step in for takedown requests, just not rename/re-color edits.)
4. Editing later
Click Edit my buildingin the top bar. Paste your code. You'll be taken back to the builder with every setting restored exactly as you left it. Change anything visual — colors, windows, roof, owner name, link URL — and save.
For consistency, the building name and slug are locked after first submit. The tier and position are also fixed — otherwise a bigger resize could overlap a neighbor. Choose those carefully on first submit; everything else can change later.
5. The crowd
Every building adds one animated pixel-art character to the sidewalks. Their behaviors vary — some wander close to their building, some stroll across the whole city, a few are chatty and occasionally stop to chat with a speech bubble. They enter and exit buildings at random, fading in and out at the doors.
Each new character picks a sprite variant that isn't already on screen, so the crowd looks varied rather than all cloned.
6. Weather, time, and sound
The weather you see is the real weather at your location via OpenWeatherMap. Rain, snow, fog, storms all play out visually and have matching ambient audio. The time of day tracks your system clock — sunrise, sunset, stars, moon, and a brighter or quieter crowd depending on the hour.
A soft music loop plays underneath, alternating between two tracks. You can mute or adjust the volume from the speaker icon in the top bar. Settings persist across visits.
7. Finding a specific building
Use the search bar in the top bar to look up a building by its display name, its URL slug, or its address (e.g. A042 for the 42nd segment). Selecting a result scrolls the camera to that building and highlights it briefly.