spiralganglion

Glad you dug it!

But wait — which live demo are you referring to? There's no live demo of PlayBook.

Also, the demos featured in the talk are gathered from several different prototypes created over the past two years. PlayBook is, in some sense, a loose series of prototypes exploring this idea space, not a single "product"-like piece of software.

Developers deserve to be paid for their work. Adam's work on Allume is ongoing, so he deserves ongoing income.

Yeah, I'll take the blame for that :)

Backstory: when we first set up the sandbox, we offered a handful inputs that devs could optionally use in their letters. You could click and drag directly on the letter, drag a little token on a "Kaoss Pad"-like control surface, scrub a timeline, toggle a big global mode switch, and more. Everyone used a different subset of the these inputs, based on whatever seemed like the best fit for the idea behind their letter. Some people even bypassed all that and implemented their own input handling (like Lilith did for the bullet hell game in C0). But most folks actually didn't add any interactivity at all.

When I curated the letters for our home page, I wanted to strike a balance between a few things. I wanted to encourage playfulness, for instance by having unpredictable things happen depending on what/how you interacted ("output randomness", to borrow a gamedev term). And while I did make some changes to some letters (adding some additional interactivity, simplifying some inputs), I didn't want to go too far and ruin the authorial intent behind the letters.

But, like you and the other commenter here found, there is inconsistency that errs on the side of frustrating. That's something that irked me too — I just ran out of time for polish and had to ship.

In any event, thanks for kicking the tires on it. Even if it didn't quite clear the bar for playful interaction, I hope it was fun to look at.

Don't miss our "Lab Day" talks from this year's Local-First Conf, which are posted on our own channel: https://youtube.com/@inkandswitch

Credit to Roman Komarov who came up with the approach [1], and Todd Matthews [2] who made the art assets.

1: https://kizu.dev/svg-linked-parameters-workaround/ 2: https://www.seaofclouds.com

This page doesn't need JS. It doesn't need a loading indicator for said JS. It could just be html and css, otherwise unchanged.

Splinter Cell, from 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20220207182149/https://gfycat.co...

Automerge started as a research prototype and is now a widely-used substrate for building local-first apps: https://automerge.org/

Our GitHub has a boatload of experiments: https://github.com/orgs/inkandswitch/repositories

This is a fun afternoon just waiting for you: http://feelingisreality.com

Muse started as a research project and turned into an app: https://museapp.com/

Some of our essays have embedded versions of our prototypes you can play with:

* Crosscut: https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/

* Potluck: https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/

Alex Warth is currently working on a remake of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad: https://github.com/alexwarth/sutherland

There's probably a bunch more I'm forgetting.

We recently open sourced Inkling [1] (which is a spiritual successor to Crosscut) and the iPad Wrapper [2] app we used to prototype Crosscut, Inkling, and other projects. We're also going to share some more similarly-interesting non-essay output from our research in the near future.

[1] https://github.com/inkandswitch/inkling

[2] https://github.com/inkandswitch/wrapper

Worked on my iPhone.

I've felt since I was young that I'd like to choose when and how I will die. I'm perfectly comfortable with the thought. I'm in my 30s and have a lovely life and family. I'm in no rush to end things. But when I'm old and the scales tip, I'd like to be the one to decide that it's time. I might not ever get there, but I want the option.

They have a link to a source for that claim... and the source says 300 to 400 milliseconds. So whoever wrote and edited the OP article just messed this up.

(Author here)

Yes that's the point. Tried it on a lark, and it created weird feelings so I leaned into it. This is my personal website, and I've been trying to make it more deeply personal lately.

Talked about it a bit in this thread: https://mastodon.social/@spiralganglion/112747815905067127

> Metroidvania game where you lose abilities as you progress

This is brilliant. It solves the inherent tension of metroidvanias wanting both ever-increasing power and ever-increasing challenge. Rather than unlocking new areas, each time you lose abilities, it changes your relationship to existing areas. But the knowledge you gain — room layouts, enemy placement, hazards, short cuts, etc — becomes way more helpful when you can't just fly (perhaps literally) across the map.

Both

Nice! Have you explored showing live values flowing through the nodes? This seems like a good use of animation.

I'll also take a moment to plug my Visual Programming Codex[1], which collects VPLs as though they're butterflies. I'm adding Flyde to the backlog of projects to document, but I'd also suggest looking around there for ideas. There are a ton of valuable new things you can do once you start visualizing programming, especially if you're visualizing the execution behaviour. I'd love to see you push this further.

[1] https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex

My preferred alt frontend for HN is https://hckrnews.com

I use it in "Top 20" mode. It helps me keep up with the bigger stories just by checking in once a day. Loads super fast, has worked great for many years now.

Sorry for the slow reply — I was ill. I appreciate your thoughts, and they largely capture how I feel about the medium too, though I'd argue that television is definitely the bigger thought-polluting opiate of the masses.

It's funny that you say "transmitting vibes" almost as though that's a bad thing. At least, I think the vibes are necessary, but not sufficient. I also, personally, think that "entertainment" gets short shrift, though nailing down why would take us on a tour through the sort of define art and the point of a game is to be fun, right? morass of culture literacy / criticism, and HN is definitely not the venue for that.

In any event, thank you for the blog post. It made for some spirited opening banter on our latest bonus episode. And hopefully you'll make it out to the next meetup. I don't live anywhere near London sadly, but I've seen the videos and some of the demos people show are delightful. I need scissors, 61.