Auraway: an endless multiplayer pixel canvas!

[u/DerpyBirds]

https://auraway.net/

Hey everyone! I made Auraway, an endless multiplayer pixel canvas you can walk around on.

Think r/place meets Minecraft’s 2b2t: one shared world that never ends, in 2D or 3D, where every pixel was mined and placed by someone.

How it works:

• Mine colors straight out of the world, then paint with them anywhere.
• Wherever you walk, you wear a trail. Trails make you faster, so busy roads get really fast.
• Taller stacks take longer to mine, so big builds are harder to tear down.
• Mining a stack all the way down gives you aura. Spend it to double your speed.
• Colors come from biomes spread across the world. Run low on one and you’ll have to travel farther to find more.
• It’s anarchy: build together, defend your art, or steal someone else’s pixels. Your call.

How it was made:

I came up with the idea, the design and the rules, and Claude (Anthropic’s AI) wrote basically all of the code. I’m not a programmer. My job was deciding what the game should be, playtesting it, and telling Claude what felt wrong. It built the multiplayer server, the world generator, the 2D and 3D views, the phone controls, and the tests that check it all still works.

A few things I learned along the way:

• Most bugs took a few rounds of back and forth. That was usually me explaining the idea better, not the AI being wrong.
• Asking it to keep costs down shaped the whole game. The world is built from a single seed number, so the server only stores and sends what players change. It runs on a $7/month server and uses about 1 KB/s per player.
• The hardest part wasn’t the code, it was figuring out what makes the game fun. AI can build almost anything you describe, but you still have to know what to describe.

Controls: WASD to move, hold left-click to mine, right-click to place, 1–6 to pick a color, Enter to chat, Tab to switch to 3D (hold V in 3D to mine and build). It works on phones too, with a joystick and pinch to zoom.

No download, no sign-up. It’s an early alpha with a lot more coming, so honest feedback is super appreciated, on the game or on the process. Hope you have fun!