A hometown bus simulator from real map data

This one sits between work and home. I wanted a small driving game where you pilot a trolley around downtown and pick up riders. It did not stay small. What is in the game is covered in A driving game set on our real bus routes. This post is about how it grew.

How it grew

Version one was a first-person trolley on a made-up grid of streets.

Then I asked for our real routes. Claude read the published transit schedule data, the same feed trip-planning apps use, and rebuilt the game around the five actual routes with their real names, colors and stops.

Then I asked for the real city. I supplied public map data: streets, addresses, parcels and the city limits. Claude rebuilt the world at true scale with real street names and more than forty thousand building footprints, later filled in with public building datasets.

Then we added the fun parts:

A second vehicle, a 35-foot bus, modeled from a photo of the placard and the operator's manual.
Controller support and two-player split screen.
A radio with original music.
A free-drive mode with item crates. The items are local: hot sauce rockets, blue crabs, a crawfish that slows you down and Mardi Gras beads as a shield.
A five-lap grand prix on a real street circuit, with a five-light start and a podium.
Driving physics based on the real weight and power of the vehicles.

People who have tried it like it. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a weekend toy and got a proper name: LC Transit Simulator.

The data problems were the real work

The first street file only had roads ending in Street, Drive, Road and Lane. No avenues, no boulevards, no highways. We needed a different file.
The big map files were too large to upload in chat. Claude read them straight from my computer instead.
Bus stops first appeared in the middle of the road and had to be moved to the curb.

Making it look like home

I want the buildings to look real. My first idea was to use online street-level imagery. Claude explained that the terms of service for those services rule that out. The better plan is to film the routes myself with a 360 camera that records GPS. I picked a camera and have filming notes: where to mount it, what time of day and how fast to drive. I have not filmed yet.

Where it falls short

It is still in progress and not posted here yet. The buildings are plain blocks until the filming is done.

Try this yourself

A prompt like the one I used. Paste it into any AI chat and fill in the brackets.

Build me a small driving game that runs in a web browser as one HTML file. I drive a [bus] around [a simple grid of streets] and pick up riders at stops. Use keyboard controls.

When it works, tell me what you could not test. Then I'll tell you what to change next.

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.