January 2026—While printing physical maps for MAPSGAME, I cut apart one of them on a whim. And fitting it back together is surprisingly fun!
Could it be a different gameplay loop to make historical maps accessible? That also makes you engage instead of just looking at the map?
April 2026—Within a week of prototyping (Claude Opus writing ThreeJS code, and my trying it out), there’s a playable version that’s actually fun!
I thought about building it in Godot at first, but that so so much slower at least for me.
April 2026—Small tangent: I tried out some image-to-3D AI models for a day, to maybe turn the maps into historical city models.
While this does work quite impressively, the output is not very consistent and requires lots of follow-up work. Seems like the models are made to generate individual assets, not entire environments.
May 2026—This being a promising idea, I spent a few more weeks making a complete demo out of the game prototype. (the 2d version)
It now has 10 cities across Belgium and The Netherlands for you to unlock progressively, sound effects, progress bars, gameplay tweaks, and general polish.
Am giving it to some people for feedback, to decide if it’s worth continuing. If you want to try too, pls reach out!
