Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

I've been working on pieces of it on and off for years and as it stands it's very incomplete. More of a collection of systems and interesting mechanics that I've been trying to figure out how they fit together.

For some reason I always find it difficult to make games, I can build complex systems spanning multiple servers that interface with clients, but the second the "what do I build next" becomes less a problem to solve with existing constraints and more an artistic decision, that the two sides of my brain decide they aren't really able to agree >_My creative side suddenly becomes the worst kind of client wanting all kinds of weird stuff that it thinks are cool and my dev side goes, great, but that's super vague, how does it work? What do I need to build?

    "But this would be really cool!"

    "Ok, but you're going to have to make some choices here so I can start implementing something, what do you want this or that?"

    "Ahh, I don't want to pick and also now that you've said that, that makes me think of this other thing that would be interesting, can we fit that in there somehow?"

    "How?"

    "You are the one who knows how to build stuff, you figure it out!"

    ~Brain locks up~

It's super rough, you've been warned =)...

The gameplay is still sort of non-existent, performance is pretty bad, there's still a lot of existing pieces from those old projects that I need to work out if I should add into it and code quality is kind of all over the place as I'm still really trying to work out how to build stuff like this and I know if I let my dev side have too much leeway it's going to take over and I'll probably no longer be able to figure out what my creative side wants to do.

It's a fiddly balance that I'm still trying to figure out.

I've intentionally not said anything about the game itself, you're welcome to ask me for details, but there are also bits of info littered about here and there[3].

- [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130124211012/http://www.dev.gd..., original HN discussion [1]

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5096009

- [2]: Itch: https://folcon.itch.io/fruit-economy, GH: https://github.com/Folcon/fruit-economy

- [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791490

I also love low-fi websites like this. I think websites shouldn't be a large drain on resources, and should embrace standard HTML as much as possible.

This has the opportunity to curve timewasting scrolling by making it more a periodical read. As such, I'd like the return of the timestamps and to implement hourly pagination, so that there's an 'end' point and a easy bookmark to start where you left off.

A ML pipelining/build library. Think like make but for ML models, but written in Python code and invalidating results based on data and code changes using Merkle DAGs. Similar to DVC, but again using pure Python instead of YAML files, and (arguably) more powerful caching. I use it myself and find it very useful, but don't have the energy to polish and promote it :) Maybe that will change in the future though!