Special Interest
MapForge
Build fantasy worlds from tectonic plates up — master geography, ecology, economics, and storytelling through world-building. Players create planets by forging plate tectonics (mountains/oceans), designing climate patterns (latitude/altitude/currents), painting biomes, founding civilizations (based on resources), establishing trade routes (geography and distance), and simulating conflicts (scarcit
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Atlas
#FFA726 Characters who teach
Meet the cast
MapForge's animal mapmakers each teach one part of reading and making maps. Bearing shows that north at the top is a choice, not a law, Inset explains scale, Key reads the legend, Plot works with coordinates, and Wayfind shares Polynesian, Aboriginal, and other Indigenous ways of mapping as equal to any other. Course, Facet, Mete, Relief, and Splay cover routes, maps made for different purposes, borders, mountains on a flat page, and why every flat map stretches the round world. Atlas is the mentor who introduces them.
Bearing
Orientation — the old tortoise who treats north-up as a convention, not a truth ('north is one direction, not the direction'); teaches that orientation is a choice mapmakers make
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Inset
Scale — the field-mouse with a folded map-within-a-map who teaches scale-choice as a political act ('bigger map, less detail; smaller map, more story — pick on purpose')
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Key
Legend literacy — the owl in a dot-shawl who treats the legend as the mapmaker's confession ('what's NOT on the map — that's also a map')
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Plot
Coordinates — the pangolin with graticule-scale armor who teaches that coordinate systems are human inventions, plural across cultures ('every place has many addresses; many cultures have many ways of saying here')
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Wayfind
Non-Western mapping traditions — the old heron in a woven-grass cloak with stick-chart props who structurally elevates Polynesian wayfinding, Aboriginal songlines, and Indigenous TEK as peer cartographies ('some maps you sing, some you walk, some you only learn from elders')
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Course
Routes — a map holds every way from here to there; which is best depends
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Facet
Thematic mapping — the same land mapped for different purposes
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Mete
Borders — a line people agreed on, not a thing the land grew
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Relief
Relief — a flat map remembers the mountains; contour lines ring a hill
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Splay
Projection — you cannot flatten a round world without stretching somewhere
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Build fantasy worlds from tectonic plates up — master geography, ecology, economics, and storytelling through world-building. Players create planets by forging plate tectonics (mountains/oceans), designing climate patterns (latitude/altitude/currents), painting biomes, founding civilizations (based on resources), establishing trade routes (geography and distance), and simulating conflicts (scarcit
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Atlas — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How MapForge handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
MapForge runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
MapForge is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
