Somewhere

Procedurally generated watercolor paintings of places that feel familiar. Every painting is a new building, designed from the architectural rules of a real place and then set out in pencil, drawn in pen and painted in watercolor, live in the browser. Sixteen places so far, from Shōwa-era Tokyo and the Straits Settlements to Lahore's Walled City and the French Quarter.

Overview

• Rules, not templates — each place is a rulebook: plot widths, storey heights, materials, window types, roofs, signage script, plants and street life, with building types by period (a haveli, a tube house, a Creole cottage)
• Dice — every choice is a weighted roll of a seeded random generator, so a building is reproducible from its seed but no two visitors get the same one
• Painting — a perspective projection and a sun position; walls, windows and shadows are laid down as layered watercolor washes and wobbly pen lines, back to front, on a textured paper
• Blueprint — "Watch it being built" replays the real run: the dice rolls, the volumes, the camera maths, then the paint job item by item

Static site. No build step, no backend, no tracking.

Running locally

Serve the folder and open it in a modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge):

python3 -m http.server 8000

then visit http://localhost:8000. Fonts load from Google Fonts, so you'll need internet the first time.

Features

• Sixteen places, each with its own rules, building types, scripts and languages on the signs
• Painting animation: pencil set-out, ink, brush-stroke washes, planting
• Layer toggles for paint, ink and plants
• Export as SVG (vector, sharp at any size), PNG (3300 × 4125) or GIF (the painting process)
• Blueprint mode with a live pseudo-code console showing the real values
• History of every painting in the visit, with back and forward
• Feedback and place requests from the About dialog

Stack

• Vanilla JS / CSS, no framework, no dependencies
• Canvas 2D renderer with a recording context that turns the same drawing calls into SVG
• Paper texture as an SVG feTurbulence filter, with a port of the reference algorithm for canvas
• Hand-written GIF encoder (median-cut palette, LZW)
• Feedback delivered by FormSubmit