Ask HN: What projects are you working on this weekend?

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The first is try to make a website for small, quick games I develop. I'm going to try to make some light scaffolding to help facilitate this. In particular, one of my games I've come up with so many small tweaks to over the years, that I'd like them to actually get out in the world instead of just living in a notebook.

The game is called Proximity[1], it's a simple turn-based game I initially released 18 years ago that I've been working on sequels off and on since) and I was thinking I could call the site 'Proximity Variations', kind of like the composer Elgar did 'Enigma Variations' (name might be a bit pretentious, but it was the inspiration for the idea). I need to make a really lightweight version of the game first for that though.

The other is the heavyweight sequel to the game (technically Proximity 3, I released Proximity 2 a while back) I'm working on in Unity. I've got a lot of ideas for new and interlocking mechanisms to make it a game that's still pretty simple to understand, but has deeper strategy.

I was actually relatively far along in developing a sequel to the game using Monogame, but giving modern VR a try managed to shake my brain off the design guard rails and I came up with so many cool ideas to deepen the core system without it getting too complicated I felt I might as well switch engines since I was already fighting Monogame to do anything more than some basic 3D anyway. Game already looks prettier in Unity.

I also think it might be a good idea to build in support for VR at some point, maybe not for the initial release, but keep it in mind as I'm building the game.

There's also a board game design I kind of want to get polished up for pitching to publishers at Gen Con later this year, but I haven't done too much with it recently. It's an area control game about building pyramids. Basic theme, but a clever core mechanism. I took it to a Protospiel convention (for board game designers and playtesters) and got a lot of positive feedback and some good ideas for making it better.

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

The entire thing is in one big repo with code for all marginalia.nu projects. Needs structure to be accessible to more devs.

Also reworking the test strategy as what I did before makes a lot of assumptions that do not generalize, experimenting with TestContainers for E2E-tests.

I just finished the first one: [name-redacted][0] – a simple website to visualize your Bitcoin holdings value over time. It is powered by an SQLite3 embedded database, WASM (WebAssembly) SQLite client, and one GitHub Action (every day at 00:00 UTC it runs to fetch the Bitcoin price and insert it into the SQLite database). The code is open source and the README contains more info of the technologies I used [1]

[0] [url-redacted]

[1] [url-redacted]