I've just moved away from hosting on AWS to buying a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060 and installing docker compose on it. Traffic comes in using a cloudflare tunnel. The only costs are electricity (it's very low power and virtually silent) and the domain (if you need one), and I'm thrilled with it.
I enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke the most this year. It has wonderful world building that was reminiscent of The Library of Babel. I'm currently really enjoying We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. So far it's a very fun spacefaring adventure.
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.
I've recently solved an issue with cron jobs that was driving me mad for ages. I feel that I'm pretty much nearing a first tagged release, but I feel that I need to work on branding and messaging a bit before I do. I can't tell if I'm procrastinating that final push to something that makes it more official or not.
Every time I see a title like this, I ask myself if I'm not being open enough, if my biases are interfering with any potential progress I could be making when it comes to utilising AI. Then I find out that the content is just more slop and it further solidifies my position on all of this. What a waste of energy. It really saddens me.
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.
This has been a productive weekend so far. I've recently solved an issue with cron jobs that was driving me mad for ages, and finally feel like I'm close to a first tagged release. I have just popped linting into the GitHub CI.
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.
Stuck on a frustrating little bug at the moment, once I get through that I feel like I'll probably work on some CI utils to ensure that the code stays up-to-scratch and tag the first release.
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.
In the last month or so I've been solely focused on plans and content for my instance for my local town, so there hasn't been any programming for a little while but I'll be jumping back into it in weeks to come.
I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.
In the last month or so I've been solely focused on plans and content for my instance for my local town, so there hasn't been any programming for a little while but I'll be jumping back into it in weeks to come.
I love this "local first" focus, which for me translates into "relevant first". My app Plantshare (posted about it in this HN post) is not very useful if you're the only user for 40km around, but I've seen local pockets of signups that gain momentum and are then useful in that locality and the users make local connections.
I think the biggest hurdle for this would be to gain traffic in place of an existing entrenched local Facebook group or similar.
Yeah I think established Facebook groups are probably the biggest hurdle. To me, the benefits of not using Facebook are self evident, but a lot of people don't know about the issues around that or don't care. I think creating features that can't be achieved on Facebook could help. Outside of that, I think it's just a matter of providing meaningful content yourself. For Plantshare, I imagine it would be beneficial to be close to you because you, the developer of the app, presumably have a wide variety of plants because that's your interest. And if it's a success for you and your local community, you've succeeded, and any other pockets of success are a bonus. This is at least the way I'm looking at my project here. I still do intend to continue to work on the open source side of things though of course.
For some reason I've been really enjoying stories with endless and well described repeating rooms. Borges' Library of Babel got me started, I have just finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi - which was so wonderfully described, I don't know if I'll find anything to beat it. I'm now on A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, which outright mentions Borges' novel. If anyone has any similar recommendations I'd love to hear them.
Hey, I hope this comment doesn't bring you down. You asked for feedback with the aim of doing better -- I'm not going to pull my punches.
In my opinion, your game isn't performing well because the gameplay isn't very compelling. In best combo mode, I can see a grid of arrows, I'm informed that clicking one of these arrows will clear more than the others. It says that I should find "creative ways" to clear the grid. I'm not sure that such a thing is possible. At worst, this is a game of guess the 1/25 arrow to click. At best, it's a game of tracking backwards through the arrows. As somebody who enjoys puzzle games, I don't personally find this a fun mechanic.
My initial thought was that the art might be the problem. That perhaps if these were frogs that ate each other in order or if these were bubbles that popped in a satisfying way, this might be more enjoyable, but if you haven't got compelling gameplay, dressing it up isn't going to help. My recommendation is to focus on creating challenging and enjoyable gameplay first.
Perhaps play some other puzzle games and ask yourself what it is you're enjoying about them.
Since writing this comment I've given it some more thought and decided that I wasn't being constructive enough, so here's something a bit more positive:
Given the issue described above, if we were to add a translation task to the player, this would feel more like a puzzle. For instance, if instead of a downward facing arrow, we had a blue tile. Blue tiles move down, orange tiles move left etc. This way, we can use the exact mechanic you've built here but start the player off with a 1x2 grid, and progressively grow to a larger grid with more colours/rules. This to me seems more fun than what it currently is, and it lends itself to a more compelling art style -- even Tetris pops with colours. Going off the art idea I had in my previous comment, perhaps blue frogs are always eaten by the frog below them, green frogs are always eaten by the frog to the left of them. It could be called Frog Eat Frog or something.
I appreciate your feedback very much. I will go back to the drawing board :) I will try to keep the main mechanic but I will enhance it somehow. I will give it some identity and some special tiles.
