Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?

Over four decades ago, when I was in my pre-teens, my family had a TRS-80 Model 1 (or was it a 3?), and I created a simple game for it in BASIC. In the game, a maze-like wall of blocks would be built as you watched, each block one of the system's super-chunky monochrome pixels. When the wall became almost, but not quite, impassable, you'd hit the space bar to halt the construction and begin the next phase of the game.

In this phase, you had to use cursor keys to move your character, again, a super chunky pixel, from the bottom of the screen, through the maze-like wall, to the top of the screen. If you reached the top, you won the game and were awarded a score equal to the number of blocks placed in the wall, minus your number of steps.

What made the game surprisingly fun was the tension you felt when the wall was being built. If you pressed the spacebar too soon, the wall would be too easy and your score would be low. But if you waited a little too long, the wall will be impassable and you'd lose. No points.

This dynamic was especially fun when multiple people played in sequence against one another, trying to get the high score.

Anyway, I remember that game took a weekend to write when I was a kid.

I also remember that my father, for some reason, really liked that game. He would comment for years after about how much he liked it and would like to play it again. But we no longer had that old TRS-80.

Fast forward to 2023. As a Christmas present for my dad, I recreated the game in a web browser. Again, it took about a weekend's worth of on and off work.

He was surprised and delighted by this gift. Over the next few weeks he'd send me the occasional email proclaiming his new high score.

Anyway, the whole thing runs client side, so if you want to experience 45 year old gaming, here you go:

https://blog.moertel.com/wall_of_denial/

Scores over 3200 are considered pretty good.

P.S. Although the laughably bad on-screen instructions don't say so, you can play the game on a phone. Move your character by clicking the top, left, bottom, or right of the game screen.

Fantastic :D this is what personalized tech mean! Not some privacy invasive, data harvesting, adware service...

Congrats! I remember when this came out. It was very cool.

What did AWS do?

I wonder what it is with calendars.

This weekend I went looking for calendar widgets and after trying approximately 5 I couldn't find any where the UI felt intuitive.

I made my own instead. Maybe I'll strip out the internal stuff and share it and it can be yet another unintuitive calendar widget for the next person.

Possibly this https://github.com/intitni/CopilotForXcode