Allow me to present something silly I’ve been working on lately. It’s called Pixelburg (and it’s in Dutch) and it’s a project two friends and I started a little while back, after playing SimCity on the Super Nintendo and consuming quite a lot of alcohol. Pixelburg is a fictional city based on the urban developments in the Netherlands after World War II. Right now its 1954 CPT (Central Pixelburg Time) and the development of social housing is in full swing.

I wrote the code which allows us to build city tiles (50x50px images drawn in a vector editor), publish a newspaper and post articles on its history and citizens. It’s not the most beautiful piece of coding I’ve produced, but it gets the job done and allowed me to invest a lot of time in using jQuery and utilising the XML capabilities of PHP.

We placed the first tree on January 1st 2010 at 0h00 and now Pixelburg is becoming quite the city with its 7 neighbourhoods and a nascent industrial estate. The city is already teeming with colourful citizens, like a corrupt real estate developer, a 200 year old farmer, a celebrity chef who specialises in cooking croquettes and a xenophobic granny who opposes the development social housing around her home at every turn.

Come visit Pixelburg. Please beware that Pixelburg does not support small screen resolutions and any version Internet Explorer.