FogMap: Fog-of-War for Your Own Town

The idea

FogMap takes the fog-of-war mechanic from strategy and RPG games — the part of the map you haven't explored is hidden under fog, and it clears as you go there — and points it at your actual town. It's a PWA: open it, grant location access, and the map around you starts as fog. Walk somewhere, the fog around your position clears permanently. The city becomes a thing you reveal by physically visiting it, instead of something you already have fully mapped in your head from Google Maps.

Points of interest (POIs) sit under the fog too — coffee shops, breweries, landmarks — themed with fantasy icons instead of generic pins, so finding one reads more like finding a location marker in an RPG than checking off a listing.

It's built as a local-first PWA: offline-capable, GPS only active while the app is open (no background tracking), progress stored locally rather than synced to an account. That scope was a deliberate choice in the requirements doc, not a limitation discovered later — the open questions log even flags cloud sync, social features, and geocaching-API integration as explicitly out of scope for this phase.

The interesting bit: continuous vision radius, not click-to-reveal

The first working version of the fog mechanic was circle-based: explored locations were stored as an array of {lat, lng, radius, timestamp} entries, and fog was cut out of an opaque canvas layer wherever one of those circles existed. It worked, but it didn't feel like exploring — testing it felt like clicking to punch holes in a black rectangle.

That got reworked into a continuous vision-radius model instead: there's no array of past reveals, just fog rendered everywhere except a ~40m radius around the user's current position, recalculated in real time as position updates, with a soft gradient at the fog edge and an ~800ms fade instead of an instant cutout. The framing in the project notes is "carrying a lantern in the fog" — permanence comes from a separate "explored areas" layer underneath, while the vision circle itself is just what's currently lit. It's a small architectural change (state-array-of-circles → live radius-around-position) but it's the difference between a debug tool and something that feels like a game mechanic.

The other concrete design choice worth noting: the UI direction is explicitly Morrowind-inspired — dark leather/parchment textures, Cinzel and Crimson Text for type, aged-gold ornate borders, fantasy category icons for POIs (a hammer for shops, a sword for landmarks, etc.). It's a deliberate rejection of the standard "clean modern map app" look, on the theory that a fog-of-war exploration mechanic should feel like a game, not a fitness tracker.

Where this stands

This is a proof-of-concept, not a product, and it's currently paused. The requirements doc is dated January 12, 2026 and explicitly scoped as "Draft — POC/MVP." The most recent status notes, also from that date, list the fog rework and Morrowind theming as done, but POI marker visibility, mobile GPS behavior, and PWA install/offline behavior are all logged as "needs testing" — meaning they were implemented but not yet verified working. There's been no further activity on the project since that date. Open product questions (map tile provider, POI data source, town-boundary definition, whether there's any account/sync layer at all) are still unresolved in the requirements doc, not decided-and-implemented.

So: the core mechanic works and the fog-reveal rework is the part I'd actually call interesting engineering. Everything past that — real device testing, POI data sourcing, any notion of shipping it — hasn't happened yet.