I wanted to build a mipmap version of r/place — zoom out and you see the whole world, zoom in and you're placing individual pixels at real geographic coordinates.
The map is the canvas. Seoul, Tokyo, New York — pixels live at actual lat/lon positions and persist there. Watch others paint in real time as you explore.
A few things I focused on:
- WebGL-only renderer (dropped Canvas2D after profiling showed it was the zoom-out bottleneck)
- SSE updates scoped to your current viewport only
- Seeded pixel art in cities around the world to make it feel alive from day one
Free to use. Still early — curious what people think.
Hardest part was keeping 60fps across zoom levels -- ended up going WebGL-only after profiling showed Canvas2D was the bottleneck during zoom-out. Happy to dig into the rendering architecture if anyone's curious.
Also genuinely curious: for those who've built r/place-style projects, what drove retention beyond the first day?