Hodos started in 2022 as a school project built with three friends. We wanted to push what’s possible in the browser, so we built an artistic procedural fantasy map generator running entirely client-side on JavaScript and WebGL. Four years later, I picked it back up to take it further.
Under the hood, it stitches together Voronoi diagrams, Lloyd relaxation, and layered noise algorithms to produce a unique map from every seed. Continents emerge, biomes take shape, altitudes rise and fall, and rivers find their way downhill to the sea or into lakes. Zooming in generates finer detail on the fly (jagged coasts, islets, smaller tributaries) in a pool of Web Workers, so the page stays responsive. Everything is rendered live through GLSL shaders, down to the hill shading and the small marks that dot the forests.
Every map can be shared by link, overlaid with a square or hex grid for tabletop games, exported as a PNG, or printed across several pages.
Hodos, voyagez avec audace !