mainstreet
A small, cozy, pixel-art town game you play in a browser — about twenty minutes at a time, one short story to a visit, set in real places.
What this is
You walk around, talk to whoever is out, read the signs, and follow one small story to the end of it. Nothing to farm, nobody to fight, no timer running. Every town in it is a real place, drawn with affection for the place and for the people who live there.
The buildings are painted by people
Every painted building in the game was drawn by a person, usually someone who lives there or loves the place. The buildings nobody has painted yet stand as plain placeholder boxes on purpose, waiting for whoever knows what they look like. The code, the maps and the tools are built with help from AI, and that includes the plain placeholder look itself — the boxes, the tiles, the simple townspeople — before anyone paints over it. But the finished art you see once a building, a face or a portrait is actually painted is never AI-made.
Painted so far
- Heartbreak Hotel — Tom
- Middle Brook Cafe — Tom and Lana
No account, nothing to install. Every painter is thanked on a small plaque beside that building’s door.
Open source
The code is on GitHub under Apache 2.0, and anyone may read it, run a town of their own, or send a fix. It is a small engine plus world packs, and a world pack is only pictures and words.
Licences, in plain words
The code is Apache 2.0. Everything in the towns — art, maps, words — and everything you contribute is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: anyone may copy, share and adapt it, as long as they credit whoever made it. Your name stays on your work, on the plaque beside the door and here on this page.
Write to us
Have a story idea, a bit of local lore, someone who should be in it, or something we should fix?