I was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG). Some years ago, my career was derailed by major health developments. Since then, I haven't been able to work as I once did. I didn't expect I'd be able to meaningfully contribute to a game again.
Earlier this year, a colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. :) Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state.
Tentatively called Vestiges, it's a single player 2D roguelite strategy game with meta progression, some narrative, and a card minigame (the latter inspired by work I did on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories.
I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.
ksaun
I made Beacon, a mobile app for answering: “which of my friends is free to talk right now?”
It’s basically a one-to-many phone call that only one person can answer. Send a beacon to a group, and everyone gets rung at the same time. The first person who answers gets connected for a 1-1 call, and for everyone else the signal drops silently. No missed-calls or pressure to answer. Works pretty well given most people keep their phones on silent (and there are in-app settings for quiet hours too).
It works best if you're able to join with at least four people you don't speak with as much as you'd like. I have a couple dozen connections on the app now, and it feels like magic to me. Would love feedback from both introverts and extroverts who still like phone calls, or wish they had more of them:
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky [1], a simpler Kagi alternative, based in the EU.
Last month we reached 200 monthly active accounts (we’ve passed 250 now), and last week we launched support for XMR/Monero payments via ProxyStore [2]!
You can also see in our homepage that more independent bloggers and privacy-minded people have written about us!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL,into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here in HN)!
Uruky is paid and you can get a free 2h trial when you signup if you pass a proof-of-work captcha (another suggestion made here on HN, and it uses a local Altcha).
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications. This month was Caddy [3]!
Feature-wise, for July we’ve already shipped a lot of visible and less visible things. We’re currently looking into increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web, and plan to add a couple of new search providers in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you for your kindness!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service, here.
A newspaper for kids - printed and delivered monthly. Full of puzzles, math, nature facts, science experiments, card games, outdoor scavenger hunts, etc...
I wanted something for my kids to do for hours every month that is fun, education, and most importantly, screen free.
I built a custom newspaper builder along with it to help me design it. I'm not a designer so tools like phoshop don't ocme easy. This allows me to have different layouts for pages and create different re-usable elements.
wwalker2112
I heard an episode of the Odd Lots podcast about HayWire (haywireag.com), a site that pulls public data from government PDFs + APIs, uses LLMs to parse it and turns it into an easily readable website that has all of the latest info on hay prices.
The host made an offhand mention that there's probably a bunch of other similar sites that could be created with all the of useful but difficult-to-access government data out there. That sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl!
All pretty fascinating topics to learn about, plus it's been interesting to see how much of the website setup I can fully delegate to Claude. With Cloudflare to buy domains and put the sites up, a Google Service Account with access to Google Search Console and GA4 to create those properties and a Buttondown API key for weekly email sending, it's almost all hands off for me. Though it refuses to take control of the browser and create a new Buttondown account, which I was surprised is a red line.
idopmstuff
1. Translating 1000s of NeoLatin, Chinese and Sanskrit books for the first time
At the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, we’ve created https://SourceLibrary.org, a collection of over 15,000 translations of Renaissance and premodern books in NeoLatin, Chinese, Sanskrit, etc. There are a lot of beautiful books to look at — and you can use it with Claude code. API keys available: https://SourceLibrary.org/developers.
2. Replicating the design patterns of contemporary AI services
I’ve created a web app, desktop application and API for organizations needing European hardware and data protections. It’s a nice interface on top of Scaleway in France, so low carbon too. See https://makemode.eu
Support, feedback or even participation on these projects is very welcome.
dr_dshiv
An automated, full garment knitting machine that can fit on a desk.
There are only a few knitting machines that can automatically do everything required to knit a complete garment, and they are large, heavy and extremely expensive. I'm aiming to trade off speed against size and cost to create something akin to a 3D printer for knitwear.
I've been testing out various ideas for six months now, and I think I have a workable concept, but there's still a lot of work to do!
Foffle
Just finished Veritas - Truth Across Cultures[1]. The idea is that many different cultures have written sayings that are basically the same. Similar to how one would give more credence to more than one person saying the same thing, the same is true for cultures. So, this is like my catalogue of what diverse cultures agree on. I have been promoting this book. [2][3]
SideQuests HQ is a mobile app that turns real life into a series of small, optional quests.
The idea came from noticing that most productivity apps optimize for work, and most social media optimizes for consumption. There aren’t many tools that encourage you to actually do interesting things in the real world.
The app generates challenges across categories like meeting new people, exploring your city, learning something new, creating, or helping someone else. Complete a quest, skip it, or save it for later.You can also add your own quests. There’s no streak anxiety, no leaderboard. The app is just quests designed to make life a little less repetitive.
I've been migrating marginalia search off docker-compose and onto systemd.
Between NUMA-concerns and the need to use multiple public IPs, I'm coaxed into a pretty exotic setup no matter what I choose to go with. Was pretty finnicky to set up, but it seems to work pretty well all said and done. Systemd is certainly feeling less floaty than docker (and even moreso kubernetes, which was never an option).
I also shaved like 10ms off response times since I no longer need an additional reverse proxy to deal with docker's networking magic, and can point nginx straight to the network namespaced services' IPs.
This in service of sequestering all wide domains (as in having tens of thousands of subdomains) to their separate crawler and index partition, as their (per top-domain) rate limits are part of why crawls take so long for the main crawler. Couldn't do that on docker because its ipvlan management is so jank you need spare IPs to reliably restart services.
comments (10)
Earlier this year, a colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. :) Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state.
Tentatively called Vestiges, it's a single player 2D roguelite strategy game with meta progression, some narrative, and a card minigame (the latter inspired by work I did on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories.
I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.
ksaun
It works best if you're able to join with at least four people you don't speak with as much as you'd like. I have a couple dozen connections on the app now, and it feels like magic to me. Would love feedback from both introverts and extroverts who still like phone calls, or wish they had more of them:
iOS TestFlight access here -> https://trybeacon.chat/
Android also in beta here -> https://appdistribution.firebase.dev/i/afe3c44d8443c4c0
cjflog
Last month we reached 200 monthly active accounts (we’ve passed 250 now), and last week we launched support for XMR/Monero payments via ProxyStore [2]!
You can also see in our homepage that more independent bloggers and privacy-minded people have written about us!
The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL,into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here in HN)!
Uruky is paid and you can get a free 2h trial when you signup if you pass a proof-of-work captcha (another suggestion made here on HN, and it uses a local Altcha).
Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications. This month was Caddy [3]!
Feature-wise, for July we’ve already shipped a lot of visible and less visible things. We’re currently looking into increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web, and plan to add a couple of new search providers in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you for your kindness!
[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service, here.
[1]: https://uruky.com
[2]: https://digitalgoods.proxysto.re/en/brand/uruky
[3]: https://caddyserver.com
BrunoBernardino
I wanted something for my kids to do for hours every month that is fun, education, and most importantly, screen free.
I built a custom newspaper builder along with it to help me design it. I'm not a designer so tools like phoshop don't ocme easy. This allows me to have different layouts for pages and create different re-usable elements.
wwalker2112
The host made an offhand mention that there's probably a bunch of other similar sites that could be created with all the of useful but difficult-to-access government data out there. That sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl!
Working on a few of them, including The Waterline (https://the-waterline.com/) for water info for the western US, The Scramble (https://the-scramble.com/) for egg prices, and The Dwell (https://the-dwell.com/) for container ship dwell times.
All pretty fascinating topics to learn about, plus it's been interesting to see how much of the website setup I can fully delegate to Claude. With Cloudflare to buy domains and put the sites up, a Google Service Account with access to Google Search Console and GA4 to create those properties and a Buttondown API key for weekly email sending, it's almost all hands off for me. Though it refuses to take control of the browser and create a new Buttondown account, which I was surprised is a red line.
idopmstuff
At the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, we’ve created https://SourceLibrary.org, a collection of over 15,000 translations of Renaissance and premodern books in NeoLatin, Chinese, Sanskrit, etc. There are a lot of beautiful books to look at — and you can use it with Claude code. API keys available: https://SourceLibrary.org/developers.
2. Replicating the design patterns of contemporary AI services
I’ve created a web app, desktop application and API for organizations needing European hardware and data protections. It’s a nice interface on top of Scaleway in France, so low carbon too. See https://makemode.eu
Support, feedback or even participation on these projects is very welcome.
dr_dshiv
There are only a few knitting machines that can automatically do everything required to knit a complete garment, and they are large, heavy and extremely expensive. I'm aiming to trade off speed against size and cost to create something akin to a 3D printer for knitwear.
I've been testing out various ideas for six months now, and I think I have a workable concept, but there's still a lot of work to do!
Foffle
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7FLQDYD
[2] https://www.chestergrant.com/7-truths-from-veritas-by-cheste...
[3] https://www.chestergrant.com/what-different-cultures-agree-o...
chegra
SideQuests HQ is a mobile app that turns real life into a series of small, optional quests.
The idea came from noticing that most productivity apps optimize for work, and most social media optimizes for consumption. There aren’t many tools that encourage you to actually do interesting things in the real world.
The app generates challenges across categories like meeting new people, exploring your city, learning something new, creating, or helping someone else. Complete a quest, skip it, or save it for later.You can also add your own quests. There’s no streak anxiety, no leaderboard. The app is just quests designed to make life a little less repetitive.
Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.sidequests...
adim86
Between NUMA-concerns and the need to use multiple public IPs, I'm coaxed into a pretty exotic setup no matter what I choose to go with. Was pretty finnicky to set up, but it seems to work pretty well all said and done. Systemd is certainly feeling less floaty than docker (and even moreso kubernetes, which was never an option).
I also shaved like 10ms off response times since I no longer need an additional reverse proxy to deal with docker's networking magic, and can point nginx straight to the network namespaced services' IPs.
This in service of sequestering all wide domains (as in having tens of thousands of subdomains) to their separate crawler and index partition, as their (per top-domain) rate limits are part of why crawls take so long for the main crawler. Couldn't do that on docker because its ipvlan management is so jank you need spare IPs to reliably restart services.
marginalia_nu