Drunk Map

With inflation making a night out increasingly expensive, getting drunk can cost a small fortune. To save your wallet, I created Drunk Map - a way to experience the dizzying effect of looking at a map while inebriated, without spending a cent on today’s sky-high alcohol prices.

There’s no practical purpose to Drunk Map, but it serves as a neat demonstration of how you can access and customize individual map layers in MapLibre. These styling options are powerful tools that can be applied to animated maps, interactive features, or data visualizations.

Playing with Layers in MapLibre

One of the great features of MapLibre (and Mapbox GL) is that the map isn’t just a static picture. Every element - roads, parks, city labels, boundaries - lives on its own layer. This means you can:

• Move layers independently using *-translate properties.

• Animate colors, widths, and other style attributes frame by frame.

• Combine multiple effects to make a map “come alive.”

In this example, I took several common layer types:

• Symbol layers for city and town labels

• Line layers for administrative boundaries

• Fill layers for parks

…and applied smooth animations to each. Labels drift in a circular pattern while pulsing through a rainbow of colors. Boundaries subtly shift left and right while their color slowly changes. Parks float gently and slowly drift through a range of green hues.

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Why This Matters

Even though this map isn’t “practical,” it’s a great demonstration of MapLibre’s flexibility:

• You can animate individual layers independently.

• You can interpolate style properties over time, creating effects from subtle color shifts to full-on cinematic motion.

• You can react to data or user input, opening the door to interactive data visualizations, animated simulations, or just plain fun maps.

Think of it as a playground: a space to explore what your maps can do beyond static cartography. Once you understand how to manipulate layers directly, you can start building more useful - but still dynamic -maps: tracking moving objects, showing seasonal changes, or animating flows through cities.

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Try It Yourself

You can experiment with:

• Adding new layers (water, roads, or points of interest).

• Changing animation speed, amplitude, or color schemes.

• Making interactivity trigger special effects (hover a city and have its label pulse).

Even without practical use, it’s a visually compelling example of MapLibre in action, and a stepping stone toward more advanced animated and data-driven maps.