jonwheatley / pixel-path

# Pixel Path
A Claude Code skill that turns any two places into a pixel-art fly-through of the real road. Ask Claude for "a pixel
path from Bath to Bristol" and it:
- routes the trip
- bakes the real buildings, land cover, landmarks, hills and horizon along it from OpenStreetMap and elevation data
- generates scenery art for the region with RetroDiffusion (affiliate
 link)
- checks its own work with screenshots
- hands you a page where you zoom along the route. Scroll to go faster, slower or backwards.
*Bath, England: real streets from OpenStreetMap, art generated with the `moderate` kit.*
## What it is for
A first-person, pixel-art view of any real road, built from the real map. Useful wherever you want a real place or route
on screen:
- **Games:** a real road as a level for a driving, racing, idle or endless-runner game, instead of a made-up one.
- **Showing a journey:** a commute, a delivery round, a marathon or cycling stage, a road trip you took, a move between cities.
- **Content:** trip recaps, travel posts, video intros, stream backgrounds and lo-fi loops.
- **Places and history:** Route 66, a pilgrimage route, the road in a news story, a preview of a neighbourhood.
- **Learning:** a commented pseudo-3D renderer and an OpenStreetMap bake pipeline to read or build on.
## What you get
A folder with an `index.html`. Open it through any static web server and you are moving down the real road:
- **Buildings on their real footprints.** Every building that faces the road is a block on its real line, with the
 kind of picture its type and height call for. A long frontage becomes a row of different buildings, and cracks and
 short lots are closed.
- **More of the real place.** A second row of buildings shows across squares and car parks, tall buildings make a
 skyline, and landmarks stand at their real places.
- **The real ground.** Fields, forest, water, parking lots and sidewalks are drawn per pixel from the map. The hills
 are real, and so is the horizon, marched over a 61 × 61 km height grid with the Earth's curvature.
- **Signs drawn by code,** so the names are exact: town names, distances, street names, brown landmark signs and
 railway crossings.
- **No interface** apart from a small credits line:
 - Scroll (or drag on a touch screen) to speed up from a crawl to very fast. Keep going the other way to slow down
 and reverse.
 - The arrow keys do the same, and Space pauses.
 - `I` shows where you are and `M` shows a small map.
## Three levels of detail
Before anything slow happens, the first step prints an estimate for your route, and the skill asks you to choose.
Only the art costs money: $0.18 a picture at RetroDiffusion's `rd_pro__default` (October 2026). Cost depends on the
number of regions (distinct looks along the route), not on distance.
| level | pictures per region | 1 region | 2 regions | what you get |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| placeholders | 0 | $0 | $0 | code-drawn stand-ins for every picture |
| **sparse** | 4 | $0.72 |