Dev Log

So I had this idea. I wanted to make history feel physical, like it actually happened somewhere. Drop a pin. Show the year. Make people guess. That felt more like a game than a textbook.

The first version was a disaster. I tried drawing the world map myself using canvas polygons. Two days of tweaking coordinates and my map still looked like a deformed potato. Africa was a blob. Europe looked like it had been through a war. I finally gave up and switched to a real image.

Getting the map to work took way longer than I expected. Online images were slow. Base64 was huge. SVG was a nightmare. Eventually I just told people to drop a jpg in the same folder. It’s not fancy, but it works and it’s fast.

The pin placement was its own headache. Every event needed exact coordinates. Battle of Hastings needed to hit England. Columbus needed the Caribbean. Hours of refreshing the page and tweaking numbers by tiny amounts. My eyes hurt.

But building the event list was actually fun. I dug through Wikipedia looking for interesting stuff. War, science, politics, exploration, culture, disaster. Each event needed a year, location, description, and a fun fact. I probably spent too much time down rabbit holes. Did you know Beethoven was completely deaf when he conducted his ninth symphony? Or that the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows? I don’t regret a single minute of that.

Difficulty levels were tricky. I mixed obscurity with age. Ancient stuff is harder. Recent stuff is easier. It’s not perfect but it works.

Design wise, I wanted the game to feel warm — like an old atlas, not a corporate dashboard. Parchment colors, a compass rose, serif fonts. I wanted people to feel like they were opening a book from their grandparent’s shelf.

The quit button was a small thing that took too much thought. I realized people need an easy way out. So I put one in the corner and added Escape key support. Small detail, big difference.

What I learned: the little stuff matters. A good map makes the game feel real. A fun fact turns a correct answer into something you actually remember. A visible quit button shows you respect the user’s time.

I also learned that AI is useful for grinding through boilerplate and generating ideas faster than I could alone. But the creative stuff, the polish, the decisions about what actually feels good — that’s still on me. The AI sketches scaffolding. I build the house.

The result is a game that loads instantly, works on any device, and teaches you something without feeling like school. It’s not perfect. I’d love to add more events, better visuals, maybe some sound effects. But it’s solid, it’s fun, and I’m happy with it.

If you play it and learn one thing you didn’t know before, I’ll consider it a win.