How the places get into the games

Studio notes.

Most of these games are set somewhere real. This is where the real part comes from.

01 · Lake Pepin

The lake is real.

Lake Pepin is the widest water on the Mississippi, and Lake City sits on it. The boating game starts from public survey data and is built up one layer at a time. Scroll, or pick a step.

Grey relief of the Lake City shore: the bluffs, the roads and the marina point The same relief with Lake Pepin filled in, darker where it is deeper The same view coloured by what covers the ground: trees, lawn, sand and town The same view rendered in the game, with the town and the marina
Lake City and the marina point from above, the same camera in every step.

02 · Leaf Truck

The streets are real.

The town grid comes from OpenStreetMap. Leaf Truck builds Lake City on exactly that grid, and Garden and Oak Streets get the deepest piles. Drag across the picture.

Leaf Truck's Lake City from above: houses, trees and leaf piles The OpenStreetMap street grid of the same blocks, Garden and Oak Streets in green
Streets: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). The same camera on both sides.

Flower Town and Pioneering are laid out on the same street data.

03 · Frontenac Ski Club

The hill is real.

The ski hill in Frontenac closed years ago. The game is the hill as its 1999 trail map drew it: fourteen named runs on the Mississippi bluffs. Here it is from where a trail map would paint it, out past the lodge looking up. Pick a run.

Frontenac in the game, looking up the hill from beyond the lodge: runs cut through dark woods on the bluff

04 · Cold Creek Paintball

The woods are real.

The paintball field is real ground: about six and a half acres of wooded bluff from the same USGS lidar, falling about 150 feet from the field edge at the top down to a creek. The creek runs where the lidar found it. Both teams start low, at opposite ends, with the hill above them both. Drag across the picture.

The paintball field in the game from straight above: woods in autumn colour, the creek showing through The bare ground from the lidar survey: the creek looping under the bluff, with the north and south bases marked
The same camera on both sides. The land is private, so the game never names it.

05 · The tools

How it’s made.

  • Engines. Most of the games are written in Three.js; Eva’s Blobber Ball is Godot. Everything runs in the browser, with nothing to install.
  • Public data. Elevation from the USGS lidar survey (the lake shore, the paintball woods), ground cover from USDA aerial photography (NAIP), streets from OpenStreetMap.
  • AI help. Much of the code is written with AI tools (Claude and Cursor). The places, the rules and the calls are mine.
  • Checks. Before an update goes live, each game is tested automatically: it loads, a round plays itself to the end, and the score reaches the leaderboard.