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. Claiming a house
Houses aren't built from scratch any more — they're already standing along the city as FOR SALE lots. You pick one and make it yours.
- Sign in with Google from the top bar. We use Google sign-in only for ownership — no other data is read or stored.
- Scroll the city until you see a house with a FOR SALE sign. Click it.
- In the popup, click Claim this house. The lot becomes yours instantly and you're taken straight into the builder.
While we're in early access, each account can own at most one house. Paid extra houses and premium districts are on the roadmap; for now we keep it 1-per-person so everyone can grab a spot. (The site admin is exempt for seeding/testing purposes.)
3. Customizing your house
The builder lets you reshape the claimed lot:
- Pick the tier (House, Shop, Apartment, Tower) — each 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.
- Tune the wall color directly with a colour picker. Night-mode shading recomputes automatically.
- Give the house a display name (shown on the sign) and a short URL slug. Optionally add a link URL — clicking your house in the city opens it.
- Use the on-canvas paint toolto draw on top of your house — windows, walls, or doors are targeted separately so you can't accidentally paint over the sign.
Hit Save and the change goes live for all visitors instantly.
4. Editing later
Your house is permanently linked to your Google account — there is no edit code any more. Open the menu in the top bar; your house is listed there. Click it to jump back into the builder, change anything visual, and save.
For consistency, the house name and slug are locked after the first save. The tier and position are also fixed — otherwise a bigger resize could overlap a neighbour. Choose those carefully the first time around; 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.