Permacraft

A permaculture design game that uses real elevation and map data. Pick your address and the game map will look like the land it represents in real life. Have fun designing, then make it a reality!

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Inspiration

Jess (my wife and teammate) was taking a permaculture course and the design was all in Google Slides. We wanted something that felt more like the farming games we love but used real data so we could use it to actually plan out our future vision.

What it does

It takes real work elevation data, map data, and enables you to design where your plants, veggies, and paths go in 3d.

How we built it

Bolt.new to start everything and make most edits. Everything runs in Bolt.new! Expo for iOS workflow. Gemini for the logo. Claude to help brainstorm around technical problems when Bolt was telling us "your project is very large" (switching to diff edits helped out with that though)

Challenges we ran into

Getting the right data for elevation was difficult at first. In the end this API was what helped the most: https://www.gpxz.io/docs/api-reference-raster

The game engine was something that took many iterations to work well on both web and iOS. There are still tweaks that need to be made to get 100% iOS support. We got it close enough to ship a beta though!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That fact that is runs on web and mobile, with a full login system is so cool. The map editor enabling us to create a set of curated maps is great. And the different views, especially the top down and first person, are very useful. The elevation data with real world buildings and roads overlayed makes it seem like you really are designing your own real world food forest. We want to develop it more so we can use it more, which feels awesome.

What we learned

3D assets and coordinates are more difficult to understand than we thought it'd be originally. Luckily we found CC0 models on https://quaternius.com/ that helped us with the 3d assets. We built a coordinate tool in Bolt to help us determine how to translate real world map data into the game map.

In the end we had over 10 versions of the app created. Each of them has a Bolt version so we could keep track over time.

What's next for Permacraft

Launch the game out of beta, including launching on the App Store, and build a community that shares their best permaculture designs!

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Updates

posted an update —

Notes from beta players so far:

  • The 5 min demo flow sometimes tell you it's over right away. Able to work past it by creating an account or refreshing. (can reproduce)

  • Create account / login can 429 from Supabase sometimes, so need to catch that and fail gracefully (I personally haven't seen this happen so need to find a way to reproduce)

  • Loading an additional map within the same session can cause the player character to 'freeze'. Everything else works, like moving the camera around the map and placing tiles, just with the player model static in the same place they were on the last map (can reproduce)

Find something else? Excellent. Let us know!

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