Paint a picture. Walk around inside it.
MAPVIS turns a flat image into a map a character can actually move through. You bring one picture. It leaves as a map with ground, walls, height and things that move.
One picture, start to finish. Nothing is built out of tiles and nothing snaps to a grid, so a map looks like exactly what it was painted as. A harbour looks like a harbour, not like a harbour assembled from forty reusable harbour pieces.
You paint the rules onto it. The quay above is ground. The water is not. The sea wall is something you pass behind rather than walk through. You draw each of those onto the picture itself, at full resolution, one pixel at a time if that is what it takes.
Height is a value under every pixel. The stairs here climb four levels and the retaining walls beside them do not, because each pixel carries its own elevation rather than belonging to a layer. Walk up the steps and you rise. Walk into the wall and you stop.
Anything that should move comes off the painting. A trader, a cart, a gull, a lantern flickering over a door. Each one is given a behaviour rather than an animation, so it wanders or drifts or paces on its own and never loops back to the same frame at the same moment.
Then you walk it yourself. Before a map goes anywhere, you put a character on it and try the route. If a doorway is a pixel too narrow, you find out here.
Before you describe a map, you choose whose hand draws it. A style card carries the craft and nothing else: the projection, how chunky the pixels are, how edges are outlined, where the light falls, how saturated it all is. It never carries a subject.
Typing a kind fills in what the engine needs of that class and nothing about the place. An island gets a transparent coast, because the engine draws its own moving ocean underneath it. A room gets character scale and no sky. Two people both typing "island" get two different islands drawn by the same hand, which is the whole point: a kind is a scaffold, never a copy.
The hand then stays on the map. Every prop generated for it afterwards is drawn the same way, so a bookshelf made for a room belongs to that room. Published maps carry the card's name, so anything reading a bundle can say which hand drew it.
Choosing Other sends your words as you typed them, with no card at all.
Islands sit on one shared chart, and the points on it are marked by hand. A berth is where a ship ties up, and its heading is one thing only: how she lies once she is moored. While you place or turn one, the hull is drawn on the water at that heading at its real size, so you set it by eye rather than by picking a word and hoping. A bow pointing into the land is refused when the chart is saved.
The run-in is a separate mark, drawn as a short dotted line into the berth: it is where she comes in from, so an arrival is a turn onto the heading rather than a nose into the dock.
A finished map is a bundle: the picture, the ground and height data, everything placed on it, and the names you gave the places that matter. Games read it over a plain HTTP API, and every version is kept forever, so a game can point at the exact map it was built against and never have that map change underneath it.
Naming is the part worth caring about. A door you called harbour_gate is harbour_gate to whatever
reads the map, and renaming it later moves every reference with it.
Source is visible under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. The artwork is pixel art made with PixelLab and is subject to PixelLab's terms, not to that licence. Maps made in MAPVIS belong to whoever drew them.