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Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#31
I'm working full time, but when I'm not, I'm either working on a few board game designs I can playtest against myself, or working on an update to my Proximity 2 game that I released on Xbox 360 a long time ago.

Video trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqe0hS7AvOE

Wasn't paying too close of attention to Monogame for the longest time, so the XNA code stayed dormant for years, but then I finally sat down to see how hard it was to port it to Monogame and I had it running in 24 hours. So I decided to sit down and rework and clean up the UI, upscale all the graphics (requiring me to remake them in Illustrator, since I originally made them in 720p in Photoshop), adding support for up to 6 players, support for localization to more languages, adding in-game achievements, adding new game modes (still trying to get a single player mode that feels good), support for larger maps, and recently trying to get socket programming working so I can add IP-based online multiplayer (maybe eventually with a server for a later release, we'll see).

Also debating switching the graphics to 3D, but that may be too much, and I'm not so confident I can rewrite shader code for each platform. I had trouble as it is getting a line effect I had in XNA working in Monogame on Windows.

Planning to release it on Windows and Mac first, and then expand out from there. Probably mobile (I released it once on iPhone but it was a port to Objective-C and that code is now ancient), then hopefully get it on the Nintendo Switch before the next console generation, then probably Playstation and Xbox.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#34
I'm working on what I'm calling a "provenance server" that tracks the spread of information. It's a little hard to explain. In my notes I wrote "better Twitter" and "no bullshit".

Rather than track people surreptitiously it's completely public and voluntary. It allows for feedback to let people "+1" items on several dimensions (basically a big bag of emotional adjectives) and I want to rank the "truthiness" of facts, from physical laws and math (at one end) to opinion and interpretation at the other, with a (metaphorical) low-pass filter for BS and crap.

All information on the network is public, there is no walled garden or silo. The idea is to think things out together, in public, avoiding repetition and noise.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#36
Initially worked on a game very similar to Avalon / The Resistance but using different concepts for good and bad (Firefighters vs Arsonists). Lost interest in this eventually since playing Avalon on netgames.io with friends has been good enough despite a few minor bugs.

Started a different side project that attempts to create a large collection of newsletters:

https://www.radletters.com/

Also learning more about Docker and Kubernetes to get a better sense of how the architecture works.

Re: Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

#37
Also made my own bread. I stale it for four days and make French toast with it. It is night and day better than using store-bought bread.

I also ported a set of APIs I wrote in Ruby over to Python so I could finally learn Python. Mission accomplished!

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