2D interactive world
A 2D interactive world of Boulder you can walk, fly, and drive
Transformation Agency (in-house) · Boulder, Colorado
Joeville is a browser-based, real-photo-grounded voxel world of Boulder, Colorado. Walk Pearl Street with dozens of townspeople, fly Wizard Joe over a map built from real aerial imagery, drive the canyon, and talk to whoever is in the scene with you.
A living voxel Boulder in the browser: real streets, real crowds, real voices.
What it is
Joeville is a 2D interactive world of Boulder. Every street scene is grounded in a real photograph, re-rendered as a voxel diorama and reverse-engineered into walkable geometry. You arrive through a cinematic intro where Wizard Joe flies in, lands, and greets you in his own voice with captions. Then the town is yours: a living Pearl Street with dozens of pedestrians and street performers, a town map built from real Boulder aerial imagery that Joe can fly over and swoop down into, and a first-person drive up the canyon or along 28th Street.
Why we built it
We wanted a place, not a product. A world where a town could see itself, where stories could be set, and where a cohort could meet inside something instead of on a video call. It became our test bed for everything we now sell: AI-directed art pipelines, crowd and character systems, voice, multiplayer, and the governance that keeps a shared world safe. Golden Game was built on top of it.
What we built
- Nineteen photo-grounded voxel scenes with geographic neighbor portals and perspective-correct character scaling.
- A living crowd: eight-direction walk cycles, pathfinding on real walkable geometry, seated NPCs, meet-and-chat encounters, and five Pearl Street performer acts with gather-and-watch crowd AI.
- A flyover town map from stitched satellite imagery with geo-accurate landmarks, altitude control, and swoop landings straight into a street.
- First-person pseudo-3D driving with two Boulder loops, stoplight logic, speed-reactive engine audio, and a trip summary when you park.
- A cast of 147 characters and a Character Animator that turns a description into a validated 30-frame sprite atlas.
- Wizard Joe’s cinematic intro: choreographed flight, landing, gestures, and face-anchored speech bubbles timed to his recorded voice.
- Per-scene voice chat, a reactive backend, and a constitutional multiplayer layer so humans decide and AI assists.
What it shows
If you want people to feel a place, whether that is your town, your campus, or your brand, we can build a world for it and populate it. The same systems scale down to a single interactive scene on a landing page.
In the wild
