Tinyfolk

A world made of letters

Everything on screen is text. It's a grid of cells, each holding one hand drawn glyph in one colour, like an old terminal. The ground is drawn in chunks of 32 by 16 cells as they come into view and cached, so walking back over the same ground costs nothing. Only the living bits, like water, flames, windmill sails and grass in the wind, redraw ten times a second.

The whole island comes from one seed. Every browser builds the exact same world from the same number, so the world never has to be downloaded or saved anywhere.

One round island

A walled city sits in the middle, surrounded by six lands, from the Sun Sands to the Frozen North. Each has its own ground, villages and hidden spots for people who wander far. There are 116 buildings in total.

People with their own day

Three hundred characters, townsfolk and animals are put together from parts instead of being drawn one by one, so one set of pieces covers all of them. They walk with a four step stride and breathe when standing still. Townsfolk follow routes timed to a shared clock, so every player sees the same person in the same place without the game sending a single message about it.

Light that follows the hour

A day lasts ten minutes and everyone shares the same hour: warm in the day, amber at dusk, dark blue at night. Every flame, lamp and lit window throws a soft round halo onto the ground and the people nearby. The halos go on a light map with the canvas's lighter blending, so overlapping lights just add up. On top, a CRT pass adds scanlines, bloom and a slight colour fringe.

Weather by land

Snow falls in the north, fog sits over the marshes, ash drifts over the Ashlands, and rain runs on a shared schedule. Same trick as the townsfolk: friends standing together get rained on together, with nothing sent over the network.

A map you can read

The map of the whole island is painted a few rows at a time while you play, so the work is spread over many frames and it opens instantly when you need it. It's shaded as if lit from the north west, shows every house, road and tree, and you can drag it and zoom around the pointer.

Real time, and built for phones

Multiplayer runs on Supabase Realtime: presence for who's online, broadcast for positions and chat. Positions go out at most every 80 ms. Other players glide toward their latest position at max(40, distance × 10) pixels a second, quick enough to catch up and slow enough not to snap.

On phones you touch anywhere to steer. If frames start taking longer than 40 ms, the game lowers its resolution on its own instead of stuttering. The project runs Biome, knip and tsr for code checks, Vitest for unit tests, Playwright with Axe for accessibility, and Lighthouse CI for performance.