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47431
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the LAST SIGNAL by @Makkonen | Stardance
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Makkonen
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1
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82.0
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1366
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-12T09:50:10Z", "hours": 82.0, "multiplier": 16.6, "payout": 1366, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "How to play Go to my itch.io page (the demo link) and download the game, extract the .zip file and launch the file called LAST SIGNAL.EXE If you are on another OS than windows Just go to the GitHub readme and there will be an link to my unity play page. MY CUSTOM SHADER DOESNT WORK IN THE BROWSER SO PLEASE TEST THE ACTUAL VERSION IF YOU CAN! What did i make? I made an horror game in unity from scratch with the following made by me: All of the 3D models All of the scripts Whole storyline Majority of the music All of the scripts What is it about? LASTSIGNAL follows an story of an random guy finding himself inside weird rooms, later he realizes that this is an simulation and he has to find his way out, in the game the objective shifts from just finding an way out, to destroying the simulation and freeing everybody in there. How did i make it? I made the 3D models in blockbench, made scripts in VS code using C# and made the storyline in my head :D Controls In the game you will use your mouse to look around and WASD to move, you can interact with objects by looking at them and pressing E. In the end of the game in the parkour sections you will have to use SHIFT to sprint and SPACE to jump. Secrets and easter eggs I have made paper files all around the game telling the stories of other people in the simulation, i also made easter eggs hinting at stardance and my other projects. Minigames LASTSIGNAL has many minigames like hacking, password remembering and submitting codes.", "repo": "https://github.com/MakkonenHugo/LASTSIGNAL", "demo": "https://hugo-virtanen.itch.io/lastsignal"}]...
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[{"post_id": 66471, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 66471, "ts": "2026-09-12T09:49:21Z", "hours": 0.8703, "text": "Last changes before shipping Itch.io and unity play I have made an working itch.io page and an unity play page Small changes I have made small changes all around the game, like in level 2 i added an fade transition when leaving I also made changes to the first room with better dialogue and more interactable stuff. Bug fixes I fixed bugs like in the first parkour section where the teleport back up wasnt working, or when some sounds didnt work in some levels So this is my LAST DEVLOG (pun intended) and thanks to everyone who has been liking my devlogs and stuff!"}, {"post_id": 66048, "ts": "2026-09-11T16:40:58Z", "hours": 8.6517, "text": "Improvements! Sounds Now every time dialogue shows up, an small keyboard soundeffect is played with every character, i think it improves the game alot! Now some objects have interaction sounds, for example, when listening to the radio, you will hear the radios startup beep. Every level has either ambiance sounds or music of some kind! New physical stuff Now, every level has new stuff to interact with or just for show, like: wires, coffee cups, vents, pencils, trash cans! I have also positioned some stuff better, for example in level 2, jeff is now more away from the radio, but still looking at it! Easter eggs and stuff to find I have added “documents” and “logs” about previous subjects all around the game, for example in level 2 there now is an table with some guy called Gary’s note. In level 4 there is an hint to LuckyOS in an paper stack, and in Level 9, you can find an laptop that has an reference to StarDance! Ending changes I made small improvements to the ending scene, like how the fire is and how Jeff appears sometimes. I also now have completely finished the first and second parkour sections!"}, {"post_id": 64923, "ts": "2026-09-09T17:20:23Z", "hours": 8.1214, "text": "Ending! Parkour After level 9 you will get to have some “fun”… Its an PARKOUR SECTION! Actually two of them, in the first one you have to jump to different platforms while an REALLY good breakcore track plays and alarms are yelling, i also added alarm lights so it sets the vibe. In the second section you will have to just run straight and avoid obstacles in the way. Ending In the end you will go into the main server room and open up an… OPERATING SYSTEM! It has currently one app only but i might make it better (or worse). In the OS you will click on an Simulation Manager icon, and it opens an app, where you DELETE the whole simulation. But you realise IT ISNT ENOUGH! So you do the only logical thing… BURN THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN! So after you delete the simulation, you interact with anything in the room (exept the pc) and the scene fades to an burning server room with the pc setup completely in pieces, and even Jeff kinda flickers in the room from time to time! Bad ending So now in level 8 you have another portal, the stay portal! Its only an model right now but i will make it so it will lead to an bad ending. You gettng turned into… JEFF 2! (get it cuz you are Jeff too, but also the second jeff so jeff2) Intro or startup! I added an small animation when you start the game, it first shows my studios logo, and then it does this typewriter effect with. “LASTSIGNAL” “Finding signal…” “SIgnal lost” and then an glitch effect! The whole thing is packed with soundeffects too so it feels nice!"}, {"post_id": 64080, "ts": "2026-09-08T07:21:49Z", "hours": 8.1936, "text": "New levels and effects! Level 7, the CHASE I really dont want to be the guy to spoil anything, but i kinda have to. Level 7 will be an ACTION filled level, it will be really short, around 1 minute, but it will be fun! In the level you will have this GIANT hallway in front of you with GIANT furniture, and then an small table and radio infront of you! When you listen to the radio it will say: “ITS A TRAP! RUN!” And then chase music that I MADE will start playing, and your camera will start to shake violently, your mouse gets locked to an few degrees and these red messages will start showing saying “RUN” “IT’S BEHIND YOU” and so on, right now its so if you dont get out of the level in an generous 50 seconds, the level restarts, no “you died” nothing, just an do it again. Level 8 Level 8 will feature an big gray room, with nothing than an radio, when you listen to the radio the lights dim and your mouse gets locked, music starts playing and the radio starts speaking, this dialouge contains TOO MUCH spoilers, so i will not put it in this devlog, after that you will turn around and walk into an EXIT portal, you get sent straight THROUGH the floor, your vision will pixelate to 16 and 9 pixels (REALLY PIXELATED) and you will get teleported to… the real world! Level 9, the real world In level 9 the first thing you will realize is that this is an office, there are many office desks with computers on them, in the real world there is NO PIXELATION! You will realize that the door is LOCKED! With an same kind of lock than in level 4, but now there aren’t just papers on the ground… There are THE PC’s! You will need to check them for vulnerabilities and HACK them for the door code! (in this level there even is an STARDANCE easter egg :D) Small stuff Password minigame I added an password remembering game to lvl 6! In there the game you will have to look at passwords, remember them, and type them! Right now it serves no purpose but idk i might make it have something after completeon! Minigame visual upgrade! Some people might remember my other project, the hacking panel, so i made the matrix rain feature from there to LASTSIGNAL! Now everytime you are in an minigame, there will be green glowing text in the background!"}, {"post_id": 62911, "ts": "2026-09-06T13:28:14Z", "hours": 9.3292, "text": "New levels! Storyline impact Level 5 will be kind of an “filler level”, it introduses the player to the new objective of the game, destroying the signal world! Thats right, the games objective has switched from just getting out, to putting an stop to this! MASSIVE graphics update! I made an custom shader, to make the game PIXELATED! I know, “so many games are pixelated do something of your own” IM NOT GOOD WITH MODELING, OK!? My models are pretty bad and i dont want it to be the downfall of my game. But thats not really the reason, the reason is, that when an game is pixelated, it looks good if done right, and also when the graphics are bad, the players have to use their imagination, and THAT is the true reason, i want the players to imagine, to theorise what is going on and how everything looks. I also made an crosshair, because my very nice and good playtester @silvonik left some REALLY GOOD feedback and gave me the idea to make an crosshair! Thank you silvonik :D Level 5 In level 5, you spawn into an two section room, in the first section there will be an laptop and the radio, the radio has some interesting dialogue that tells you how to HACK THE SYSTEM until the message cuts off, and another voice comes trough telling you the message cannot be played, the hacking minigame is this pause at the right time type of game, i added some… “interesting” log messages to the screens right, “hugoAPT” comes from “sudoAPT” but sudo is LITERALLY JUST MY NAME. In the second section, theres an actual pc and an monitor, where by pressing E you can actually watch cameras from the levels you have survived. Level 6 THATS RIGHT! Level 6 is already in developement and it will feature… FLICKERING LIGHTS, who doesnt love those? AN HALLUSINATION, of Jeff… You havent seen him in some time? NORMAL MUSIC THAT BECOMES DISTORTED, thats one way to make ambiance… SELF SLAMMING DOORS, wow so spooky! DISTANT SOUNDS, are they there or are you going crazy? MOVING OBJECTS, level 2’s chair is proud! The level itself is just an box and an hallway, lets just say that the hallway leads to some prettyyyy… “Intensive” stuff… MORE SETTINGS! I realized that the settings was looking an little thin… so i got into work and i made more. Headbob toggle, some people might get nauseous or feel discomfort if the camera is shaking all over the place, so you can now toggle it! Crosshair, i added an toggle to the crosshair, because it could ruin the immersion for some people. Sensitivity, this one is kind of self explanatory, every game needs an sensitivity slider."}, {"post_id": 61000, "ts": "2026-09-03T18:13:08Z", "hours": 8.1131, "text": "AHH EVERYTHING IS BREAKING! Bug fixing Soo it has not been rly “sunshines and rainbows” developing LASTSIGNAL so ive spent an long time fixing bugs, here are an few i have fixed: Camera glitching when spawning, radio not working, objects not vanishing, objects not spawning, interacion breaking COMPLETELY, TWO “press E to interact” prompts, “press E to interact” flashing, interaction detector NOT SEEING THE OBJECTS, after interacting some objects you cant do anything anymore. Level 4 developement So now the good stuff, Level 4 is mostly done! (yay) Ill still polish it an little bit but its in good shape! Level 4 is an GIANT in terms of the LORE, it features the radio not working as normal… it wont open the door because the door has an CODE LOCK! You will have to look at manu pieces of paper to find the code and put the code into the number pad next to the door to get out. This levels background music is activated when interacting with an laptop, the laptop has been live streaming for infinite hours? its really clear time works differently here… (go crazy with the theories) The level tells about “subjects” and that there have been many befor you here… Or have there!? Is this just all mind games? Are you actually just sleeping?(ill answer this one: no you are not sleeping it would be so boring if you were) Level 3 changes I have changed the radio messages to imply more of that sweet LORE. The radio goes along the lines of “Do you know that Jeff guy? Hes weird, but hes been here more than you have, more than anyone has, i cant say too much now… Somebody is ALWAYS LISTENING” Wow so lore :O ! Small stuff I have updated the lvl 1 dialogue to again, make more LOREEEEE! And i also added some more credits to the main menu! Nothing much this time!"}, {"post_id": 59087, "ts": "2026-08-31T18:21:29Z", "hours": 5.6414, "text": "Small changes and level 4 development Level 1 update In the last devlog, i promised an level 1 update, so that is what i made, first i modeled an office desk, drawers, and stacks of paper, i put them on the empty side of the room. after that i created two scripts (similar to the chair event) First is an script that makes an object/objects vanish when you are not looking (after listening to dialogue) And the other one does the complete OPPOSITE, it makes an object/objects appear when you are not looking, (you guessed it, after listening to dialogue) So now, when you inspect the office desk, an paper stack appears in front of the door, the paper tells you to look at the desk again, but when you turn around the desk is gone, and when you look back at the paper, its NOT THERE! Level transition rework Before, you just walked into an trigger and it teleported you into the next level, now it does just that but with an cool ANIMATION (so cool) So now loading to the next level, you will have an fade in and out animation! Level 4 Im happy to say, level 4 IS IN DEVELOPEMENT! (hooray, took me long enough) Level 4 is going to be an studio room that gets the player REALLY thinking what is going on… But if that gets you thinking, just WAIT WHAT LEVEL 5 IS GOING TO BE! Plans for the future In the next devlog i think i will add more settings and make the main menu better, maybe ill even add some cheat codes or something in the README… AS ALWAYS STAY TUNED FOR FUTURE STUFF!"}, {"post_id": 58063, "ts": "2026-08-30T12:33:06Z", "hours": 5.5022, "text": "(major) Third level update! Lights out update First off, i updated the lights out mechanic, so now it isnt as snappy and is pretty smooth, the table is where it was before and everything looks nice :D New trigger! Now after the lights go out, you walk to the the door, where its still locked, so you have to go back, but at the door you just walked through an invisible trigger that spawned the radio and an mysterious object…(an sign) when you walk to the other side of the hallway, you see an sign, the sign says “why do you want to leave?” Hmm, who could have put that there… and when you interact with the radio and turn around, THE SIGN IS GONE :O More mysterious stuff After interacting with the radio, you will see more stuff that was not there in the beginning, an cardboard box, and an MICROWAVE? (sorry i ran out of ideas) Just kidding, i chose those two because they are random and get the player to question what is happening, and also to indicate, the mc doesnt feel hunger or thirst, so maybe this is all an dream? Maybe none of this is real? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT! Lvl 1 styling Im also working on making the first level better, i already modeled an desk and drawers for it so stay tuned… Bug fixes! Yes so game developing isnt all sunshine and rainbows because of THE BUGS! Today i fixed an bug where the camera would randomly just tweak out and move on its own, and i also fixed an bug with the interaction detector where the text would just start flashing REALLY fast and it REALLY got on my nerves but they are fixed now!"}, {"post_id": 57335, "ts": "2026-08-29T13:36:10Z", "hours": 8.1325, "text": "BIG changes and lvl3 test version Changes to looking around For an long time i was trying to make an little change how looking around feels, by making the look speed accelerate and decelerate when moving the mouse, but that made an very big problem, the camera would just snap around when looking at an interractable object, so i tried to fix it numerous times but with no luck, but FINALLY after 2 days of bug fixing i finally got it to work and the game feels smooth to play! Camera overlay Now, because of the looking around effect(idk what to call it sry :D ) looking around feels kind of heavy, so i thought that it could be that the mc would be holding an camera! So thats what i did, the camera has an battery indicator and then the cool part, the time recorded is ACTUALLY the time the scene has been loaded! Level 3 Level 3 now has an event called lights out event, “what does it do?” well when you are close to the door, suddenly the lights go out and when they come back, the door is suddenly farther away. It works using an empty game object that i put my script in and made it an trigger, when the lights are out you get teleported to an different hallway that is identical to the first one exept its bigger, so it creates the illusion that the hallway has stretched."}, {"post_id": 55102, "ts": "2026-08-26T15:39:45Z", "hours": 5.5144, "text": "This is another big devlog First off, i added an pausemenu where right now you can only exit the game, resume, and adjust your settings. The “settings” is only the games volume right now but there will be more once i just think about what… Another big thing is the main menu I added an mainmenu that shows up when you start the game where you can “continue” (right now just start from lvl 1 bc the game has no checkpoints but i will add them later) tweak the settings, quit the game and wiew the credits, there currently is no settings or credits but i will add them an little bit later. The design for the settings and menu Both the settings and mainmenu have this starry live wallpaper feel and if you look closely, you might see an shootting star… I also added an glitch hover effect to the buttons because it fits the weird theme of the game. (every buttons effect is different) And i also started working on lvl3 its an hallway that doesnt behave like an normal hallway… But there really isnt much there so you will hear more about lvl3 in the next devlog :O (i also just now discovered headings so thats nice)"}, {"post_id": 53224, "ts": "2026-08-23T17:45:03Z", "hours": 3.3136, "text": "Alright, things just got interesting… First off i added an walking sound effect so now when you are walking in lvl2 you will be rustling the grass below you, and it also depends what sound it is on what surface you are walking on (GTA 6 has some competition am i right) And then i spent TOO LONG on making this headbob feature so now when you are walking your head will bounce up and down! And then i added this weird chair that moves after you inspect it and look away! And i made some bug fixes like how the interaction box was too small for some reason and also i made some little changes like wich way the door opens and stuff. :O"}, {"post_id": 51628, "ts": "2026-08-21T12:28:14Z", "hours": 6.0508, "text": "Alright this is an pretty big devlog. Well first, i added an door opening feature, where after the radio event, you can interract with the door and open it! I also made some small bug fixes like the camera snapping into somewhere else when you tried to interract. And now is the interesting part, i made an second levelm, but first, how do you get into the second level? Well after opening the door in lvl 1 you jump into the void and pass 3 triggers, first one plays an swoosh sound effect, second puts an picture where i drew LASTSIGNAL, and the third teleports you to the second room. Now, the second room is not an room at all, it is an grassy field with an bed in the middle, an house, and ofc Jeff and the radio, the gameplay is: spawn, look around, inspect stuff, find Jeff and the radio, get scared bc of jeff(probably just me), listen to what the radio has to say(actual lore now), open the door and get out of there. The level is focused around dreamcore and liminal spaces so it ofc has some lil creepy but calming music too!"}, {"post_id": 47959, "ts": "2026-08-16T07:29:31Z", "hours": 1.2506, "text": "so we now got alot of stuff so first i remodeled jeff and made him tall so now hes kinda scary, and going with the scary theme i also made the room pretty dark and added some fog, i put an light source on the table so players wouldnt have problems using the radio. The first room is purposelly small not much to do but now im making the second room/level, im thinking ill make it this low poly grass field kinda like an liminal space or something.AND i also added an ambiance soundtrack that (sadly) isnt self made but if i find some good free software i will make everything myself"}, {"post_id": 47334, "ts": "2026-08-15T06:45:18Z", "hours": 1.9967, "text": "Alright, big game update, i added an door to the room(3D modeled myself) and added that guy whos name is jeff(also modeled) and an table and an radio ontop of the table(also modeled) and then made an system where when you are close enough and looking at something you can press E and inspect it, i will probably add an inspection to everything bc its so easy to do! And i added an little gameplay too, first you spawn in, inspect jeff, the table and then you inspect the radio, first it says the radio isnt plugged in but then an voice comes through, jeff is gone, and the door is open. Pretty nice :O"}, {"post_id": 46472, "ts": "2026-08-13T18:26:56Z", "hours": 1.6111, "text": "I 3D modeled (Myself) an little test room and wrote “LAB” in it so i could test my scripts, but as you can see, its just an gray box. I think even though this is just an test room, it will be seen in the game at some point for the weird feeling. And then i added two C# scripts, one for walking around and the other one for looking around. I also made an little soundtrack for the game but it doesnt show in the time. I will make an actual map and something more tomorrow :O and also if you have any ideas let me know!"}]...
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Title: the LAST SIGNAL by @Makkonen | Stardance
D Title: the LAST SIGNAL by @Makkonen | Stardance
Devlogs:
I 3D modeled (Myself) an little test room and wrote “LAB” in it so i could test my scripts, but as you can see, its just an gray box. I think even though this is just an test room, it will be seen in the game at some point for the weird feeling. And then i added two C# scripts, one for walking around and the other one for looking around. I also made an little soundtrack for the game but it doesnt show in the time. I will make an actual map and something more tomorrow :O and also if you have any ideas let me know!
Alright, big game update, i added an door to the room(3D modeled myself) and added that guy whos name is jeff(also modeled) and an table and an radio ontop of the table(also modeled) and then made an system where when you are close enough and looking at something you can press E and inspect it, i will probably add an inspection to everything bc its so easy to do! And i added an little gameplay too, first you spawn in, inspect jeff, the table and then you inspect the radio, first it says the radio isnt plugged in but then an voice comes through, jeff is gone, and the door is open. Pretty nice :O
so we now got alot of stuff so first i remodeled jeff and made him tall so now hes kinda scary, and going with the scary theme i also made the room pretty dark and added some fog, i put an light source on the table so players wouldnt have problems using the radio. The first room is purposelly small not much to do but now im making the second room/level, im thinking ill make it this low poly grass field kinda like an liminal space or something.AND i also added an ambiance soundtrack that (sadly) isnt self made but if i find some good free software i will make everything myself
Alright this is an pretty big devlog. Well first, i added an door opening feature, where after the radio event, you can interract with the door and open it! I also made some small bug fixes like the camera snapping into somewhere else when you tried to interract. And now is the interesting part, i made an second levelm, but first, how do you get into the second level? Well after opening the door in lvl 1 you jump into the void and pass 3 triggers, first one plays an swoosh sound effect, second puts an picture where i drew LASTSIGNAL, and the third teleports you to the second room. Now, the second room is not an room at all, it is an grassy field with an bed in the middle, an house, and ofc Jeff and the radio, the gameplay is: spawn, look around, inspect stuff, find Jeff and the radio, get scared bc of jeff(probably just me), listen to what the radio has to say(actual lore now), open the door and get out of there. The level is focused around dreamcore and liminal spaces so it ofc has some lil creepy but calming music too!
Alright, things just got interesting… First off i added an walking sound effect so now when you are walking in lvl2 you will be rustling the grass below you, and it also depends what sound it is on what surface you are walking on (GTA 6 has some competition am i right) And then i spent TOO LONG on making this headbob feature so now when you are walking your head will bounce up and down! And then i added this weird chair that moves after you inspect it and look away! And i made some bug fixes like how the interaction box was too small for some reason and also i made some little changes like wich way the door opens and stuff. :O
This is another big devlog First off, i added an pausemenu where right now you can only exit the game, resume, and adjust your settings. The “settings” is only the games volume right now but there will be more once i just think about what… Another big thing is the main menu I added an mainmenu that shows up when you start the game where you can “continue” (right now just start from lvl 1 bc the game has no checkpoints but i will add them later) tweak the settings, quit the game and wiew the credits, there currently is no settings or credits but i will add them an little bit later. The design for the settings and menu Both the settings and mainmenu have this starry live wallpaper feel and if you look closely, you might see an shootting star… I also added an glitch hover effect to the buttons because it fits the weird theme of the game. (every buttons effect is different) And i also started working on lvl3 its an hallway that doesnt behave like an normal hallway… But there really isnt much there so you will hear more about lvl3 in the next devlog :O (i also just now discovered headings so thats nice)
BIG changes and lvl3 test version Changes to looking around For an long time i was trying to make an little change how looking around feels, by making the look speed accelerate and decelerate when moving the mouse, but that made an very big problem, the camera would just snap around when looking at an interractable object, so i tried to fix it numerous times but with no luck, but FINALLY after 2 days of bug fixing i finally got it to work and the game feels smooth to play! Camera overlay Now, because of the looking around effect(idk what to call it sry :D ) looking around feels kind of heavy, so i thought that it could be that the mc would be holding an camera! So thats what i did, the camera has an battery indicator and then the cool part, the time recorded is ACTUALLY the time the scene has been loaded! Level 3 Level 3 now has an event called lights out event, “what does it do?” well when you are close to the door, suddenly the lights go out and when they come back, the door is suddenly farther away. It works using an empty game object that i put my script in and made it an trigger, when the lights are out you get teleported to an different hallway that is identical to the first one exept its bigger, so it creates the illusion that the hallway has stretched.
(major) Third level update! Lights out update First off, i updated the lights out mechanic, so now it isnt as snappy and is pretty smooth, the table is where it was before and everything looks nice :D New trigger! Now after the lights go out, you walk to the the door, where its still locked, so you have to go back, but at the door you just walked through an invisible trigger that spawned the radio and an mysterious object…(an sign) when you walk to the other side of the hallway, you see an sign, the sign says “why do you want to leave?” Hmm, who could have put that there… and when you interact with the radio and turn around, THE SIGN IS GONE :O More mysterious stuff After interacting with the radio, you will see more stuff that was not there in the beginning, an cardboard box, and an MICROWAVE? (sorry i ran out of ideas) Just kidding, i chose those two because they are random and get the player to question what is happening, and also to indicate, the mc doesnt feel hunger or thirst, so maybe this is all an dream? Maybe none of this is real? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT! Lvl 1 styling Im also working on making the first level better, i already modeled an desk and drawers for it so stay tuned… Bug fixes! Yes so game developing isnt all sunshine and rainbows because of THE BUGS! Today i fixed an bug where the camera would randomly just tweak out and move on its own, and i also fixed an bug with the interaction detector where the text would just start flashing REALLY fast and it REALLY got on my nerves but they are fixed now!
Small changes and level 4 development Level 1 update In the last devlog, i promised an level 1 update, so that is what i made, first i modeled an office desk, drawers, and stacks of paper, i put them on the empty side of the room. after that i created two scripts (similar to the chair event) First is an script that makes an object/objects vanish when you are not looking (after listening to dialogue) And the other one does the complete OPPOSITE, it makes an object/objects appear when you are not looking, (you guessed it, after listening to dialogue) So now, when you inspect the office desk, an paper stack appears in front of the door, the paper tells you to look at the desk again, but when you turn around the desk is gone, and when you look back at the paper, its NOT THERE! Level transition rework Before, you just walked into an trigger and it teleported you into the next level, now it does just that but with an cool ANIMATION (so cool) So now loading to the next level, you will have an fade in and out animation! Level 4 Im happy to say, level 4 IS IN DEVELOPEMENT! (hooray, took me long enough) Level 4 is going to be an studio room that gets the player REALLY thinking what is going on… But if that gets you thinking, just WAIT WHAT LEVEL 5 IS GOING TO BE! Plans for the future In the next devlog i think i will add more settings and make the main menu better, maybe ill even add some cheat codes or something in the README… AS ALWAYS STAY TUNED FOR FUTURE STUFF!
AHH EVERYTHING IS BREAKING! Bug fixing Soo it has not been rly “sunshines and rainbows” developing LASTSIGNAL so ive spent an long time fixing bugs, here are an few i have fixed: Camera glitching when spawning, radio not working, objects not vanishing, objects not spawning, interacion breaking COMPLETELY, TWO “press E to interact” prompts, “press E to interact” flashing, interaction detector NOT SEEING THE OBJECTS, after interacting some objects you cant do anything anymore. Level 4 developement So now the good stuff, Level 4 is mostly done! (yay) Ill still polish it an little bit but its in good shape! Level 4 is an GIANT in terms of the LORE, it features the radio not working as normal… it wont open the door because the door has an CODE LOCK! You will have to look at manu pieces of paper to find the code and put the code into the number pad next to the door to get out. This levels background music is activated when interacting with an laptop, the laptop has been live streaming for infinite hours? its really clear time works differently here… (go crazy with the theories) The level tells about “subjects” and that there have been many befor you here… Or have there!? Is this just all mind games? Are you actually just sleeping?(ill answer this one: no you are not sleeping it would be so boring if you were) Level 3 changes I have changed the radio messages to imply more of that sweet LORE. The radio goes along the lines of “Do you know that Jeff guy? Hes weird, but hes been here more than you have, more than anyone has, i cant say too much now… Somebody is ALWAYS LISTENING” Wow so lore :O ! Small stuff I have updated the lvl 1 dialogue to again, make more LOREEEEE! And i also added some more credits to the main menu! Nothing much this time!
New levels! Storyline impact Level 5 will be kind of an “filler level”, it introduses the player to the new objective of the game, destroying the signal world! Thats right, the games objective has switched from just getting out, to putting an stop to this! MASSIVE graphics update! I made an custom shader, to make the game PIXELATED! I know, “so many games are pixelated do something of your own” IM NOT GOOD WITH MODELING, OK!? My models are pretty bad and i dont want it to be the downfall of my game. But thats not really the reason, the reason is, that when an game is pixelated, it looks good if done right, and also when the graphics are bad, the players have to use their imagination, and THAT is the true reason, i want the players to imagine, to theorise what is going on and how everything looks. I also made an crosshair, because my very nice and good playtester @silvonik left some REALLY GOOD feedback and gave me the idea to make an crosshair! Thank you silvonik :D Level 5 In level 5, you spawn into an two section room, in the first section there will be an laptop and the radio, the radio has some interesting dialogue that tells you how to HACK THE SYSTEM until the message cuts off, and another voice comes trough telling you the message cannot be played, the hacking minigame is this pause at the right time type of game, i added some… “interesting” log messages to the screens right, “hugoAPT” comes from “sudoAPT” but sudo is LITERALLY JUST MY NAME. In the second section, theres an actual pc and an monitor, where by pressing E you can actually watch cameras from the levels you have survived. Level 6 THATS RIGHT! Level 6 is already in developement and it will feature… FLICKERING LIGHTS, who doesnt love those? AN HALLUSINATION, of Jeff… You havent seen him in some time? NORMAL MUSIC THAT BECOMES DISTORTED, thats one way to make ambiance… SELF SLAMMING DOORS, wow so spooky! DISTANT SOUNDS, are they there or are you going crazy? MOVING OBJECTS, level 2’s chair is proud! The level itself is just an box and an hallway, lets just say that the hallway leads to some prettyyyy… “Intensive” stuff… MORE SETTINGS! I realized that the settings was looking an little thin… so i got into work and i made more. Headbob toggle, some people might get nauseous or feel discomfort if the camera is shaking all over the place, so you can now toggle it! Crosshair, i added an toggle to the crosshair, because it could ruin the immersion for some people. Sensitivity, this one is kind of self explanatory, every game needs an sensitivity slider.
New levels and effects! Level 7, the CHASE I really dont want to be the guy to spoil anything, but i kinda have to. Level 7 will be an ACTION filled level, it will be really short, around 1 minute, but it will be fun! In the level you will have this GIANT hallway in front of you with GIANT furniture, and then an small table and radio infront of you! When you listen to the radio it will say: “ITS A TRAP! RUN!” And then chase music that I MADE will start playing, and your camera will start to shake violently, your mouse gets locked to an few degrees and these red messages will start showing saying “RUN” “IT’S BEHIND YOU” and so on, right now its so if you dont get out of the level in an generous 50 seconds, the level restarts, no “you died” nothing, just an do it again. Level 8 Level 8 will feature an big gray room, with nothing than an radio, when you listen to the radio the lights dim and your mouse gets locked, music starts playing and the radio starts speaking, this dialouge contains TOO MUCH spoilers, so i will not put it in this devlog, after that you will turn around and walk into an EXIT portal, you get sent straight THROUGH the floor, your vision will pixelate to 16 and 9 pixels (REALLY PIXELATED) and you will get teleported to… the real world! Level 9, the real world In level 9 the first thing you will realize is that this is an office, there are many office desks with computers on them, in the real world there is NO PIXELATION! You will realize that the door is LOCKED! With an same kind of lock than in level 4, but now there aren’t just papers on the ground… There are THE PC’s! You will need to check them for vulnerabilities and HACK them for the door code! (in this level there even is an STARDANCE easter egg :D) Small stuff Password minigame I added an password remembering game to lvl 6! In there the game you will have to look at passwords, remember them, and type them! Right now it serves no purpose but idk i might make it have something after completeon! Minigame visual upgrade! Some people might remember my other project, the hacking panel, so i made the matrix rain feature from there to LASTSIGNAL! Now everytime you are in an minigame, there will be green glowing text in the background!
Ending! Parkour After level 9 you will get to have some “fun”… Its an PARKOUR SECTION! Actually two of them, in the first one you have to jump to different platforms while an REALLY good breakcore track plays and alarms are yelling, i also added alarm lights so it sets the vibe. In the second section you will have to just run straight and avoid obstacles in the way. Ending In the end you will go into the main server room and open up an… OPERATING SYSTEM! It has currently one app only but i might make it better (or worse). In the OS you will click on an Simulation Manager icon, and it opens an app, where you DELETE the whole simulation. But you realise IT ISNT ENOUGH! So you do the only logical thing… BURN THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN! So after you delete the simulation, you interact with anything in the room (exept the pc) and the scene fades to an burning server room with the pc setup completely in pieces, and even Jeff kinda flickers in the room from time to time! Bad ending So now in level 8 you have another portal, the stay portal! Its only an model right now but i will make it so it will lead to an bad ending. You gettng turned into… JEFF 2! (get it cuz you are Jeff too, but also the second jeff so jeff2) Intro or startup! I added an small animation when you start the game, it first shows my studios logo, and then it does this typewriter effect with. “LASTSIGNAL” “Finding signal…” “SIgnal lost” and then an glitch effect! The whole thing is packed with soundeffects too so it feels nice!
Improvements! Sounds Now every time dialogue shows up, an small keyboard soundeffect is played with every character, i think it improves the game alot! Now some objects have interaction sounds, for example, when listening to the radio, you will hear the radios startup beep. Every level has either ambiance sounds or music of some kind! New physical stuff Now, every level has new stuff to interact with or just for show, like: wires, coffee cups, vents, pencils, trash cans! I have also positioned some stuff better, for example in level 2, jeff is now more away from the radio, but still looking at it! Easter eggs and stuff to find I have added “documents” and “logs” about previous subjects all around the game, for example in level 2 there now is an table with some guy called Gary’s note. In level 4 there is an hint to LuckyOS in an paper stack, and in Level 9, you can find an laptop that has an reference to StarDance! Ending changes I made small improvements to the ending scene, like how the fire is and how Jeff appears sometimes. I also now have completely finished the first and second parkour sections!
Last changes before shipping Itch.io and unity play I have made an working itch.io page and an unity play page Small changes I have made small changes all around the game, like in level 2 i added an fade transition when leaving I also made changes to the first room with better dialogue and more interactable stuff. Bug fixes I fixed bugs like in the first parkour section where the teleport back up wasnt working, or when some sounds didnt work in some levels So this is my LAST DEVLOG (pun intended) and thanks to everyone who has been liking my devlogs and stuff!
Ships:
How to play Go to my itch.io page (the demo link) and download the game, extract the .zip file and launch the file called LAST SIGNAL.EXE If you are on another OS than windows Just go to the GitHub readme and there will be an link to my unity play page. MY CUSTOM SHADER DOESNT WORK IN THE BROWSER SO PLEASE TEST THE ACTUAL VERSION IF YOU CAN! What did i make? I made an horror game in unity from scratch with the following made by me: All of the 3D models All of the scripts Whole storyline Majority of the music All of the scripts What is it about? LASTSIGNAL follows an story of an random guy finding himself inside weird rooms, later he realizes that this is an simulation and he has to find his way out, in the game the objective shifts from just finding an way out, to destroying the simulation and freeing everybody in there. How did i make it? I made the 3D models in blockbench, made scripts in VS code using C# and made the storyline in my head :D Controls In the game you will use your mouse to look around and WASD to move, you can interact with objects by looking at them and pressing E. In the end of the game in the parkour sections you will have to use SHIFT to sprint and SPACE to jump. Secrets and easter eggs I have made paper files all around the game telling the stories of other people in the simulation, i also made easter eggs hinting at stardance and my other projects. Minigames LASTSIGNAL has many minigames like hacking, password remembering and submitting codes....
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Issued YSWS by @Acidicts | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-01T17:03:11Z", "hours": 89.0, "multiplier": 15.53, "payout": 1383, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Shipped!!! There are a bunch of features and stuff that I have added to this since flavortown, from the ordering system to devlogs and ship flow. Project Info This is the ruby on rails app for the ysws draft #issued where YS: Designs made with Code WS: Clothes and other swag with those designs Features added: A bunch of features have been added and I have separated them to 3 categories Major ones for functionality, quality of life for feel and use, security for data security. New Major Features: Designs view now is more detailed including hackatime projects and images from devlogs and ships Ship flow system so you can submit to the ysws Product Design system (admin only - for making the shop items by importing from printful via api) Order system using lots of hotwired turbo (choose color, design placement rotation and scale) Notifications (3 types Normal which provides info and 2 others Boolean which gets a yes or no answer and text which gets a written answer Reviewer Panel which shows pending ships to review with some data on (need to add hackatime info for it though) Storing Reviewer proof videos in a cloudflare R2 storage Quality-Of-Life: Added better UI/UX with some issues with need for ironing out (eg font change from workbench to ‘lexend’ and ‘space mono’ Kept a consistent style through the site, although some panels might need better border colour On login it redirects to the page you logged in by Security: I added User DB encryption to protect user data stored on the postgres database instance, such as name and email Summary Made the functional part of the ysws site (Designs, ordering, shipping) Added more security for user data Improved UI(Font and colour scheme)", "repo": "https://github.com/Acidicts/Issued", "demo": "https://issued.bing-bong.uk"}]...
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[{"post_id": 78879, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 78879, "ts": "2026-10-11T21:05:08Z", "hours": 2.5772, "text": "I created the fulfilment system for a fulfilment team to use Recent changes Removed redundant save! calls and updated fulfillment tests to reduce unnecessary database operations and align test logic with current behavior 9acc056 . Added a fulfillment role, batch pipeline, and popup controller to support new workflow automation and UI interactions afa7a20 . The popup controller likely handles transient UI elements like notifications or modals. Fixed a crash in /designs preview rendering by resolving an issue blocking Ruby scan/lint CI, ensuring previews no longer fail unexpectedly ( 911f035 ). Corrected a stray question mark in a design preview image tag to prevent malformed HTML output ( 955dd6c ). Added a note about YSWS draft sponsorship documentation, possibly for tracking external partnerships or funding discussions ( d92d571 ). No performance optimizations or subsystem overhauls were addressed in this cycle. Next steps depend on external feedback and test coverage improvements implied by recent test updates."}, {"post_id": 75924, "ts": "2026-10-01T16:48:57Z", "hours": 0.6297, "text": "Deploying on coolify and fixing bugs with that + encrypting current db"}, {"post_id": 75729, "ts": "2026-09-30T21:34:41Z", "hours": 1.0775, "text": "Recent changes - Installed Bundler 4.0.4 in the Dockerfile to standardize gem management across environments ( 88ba659 ). - Ensured the verification directory exists for SVG upload tests, addressing missing file system setup in test workflows ( 83f2e53 ). - Resolved a Turbo conflict in order steps, likely related to event streaming or frame rendering in Rails views ( e8d08f4 ). Updated navigation unread counts dynamically from notification events, improving real-time feedback for user activity ( a75f6ff )."}, {"post_id": 75254, "ts": "2026-09-29T16:08:17Z", "hours": 3.9967, "text": "## Recent changes Notifications: Unanswered notifications now retain their unread status until explicitly addressed. This ensures users can distinguish between pending and resolved interactions without relying on manual state updates ( 751a370 ). Security: Authentication workflows, file uploads, and resource authorization checks have been updated with additional safeguards. Specifics include input validation and access control refinements, though implementation details are not disclosed in the commit message ( 97e48db )."}, {"post_id": 74657, "ts": "2026-09-27T21:33:33Z", "hours": 2.8042, "text": "Made Notifications Useful Recent changes Persistent unread state for unanswered boolean notifications Notifications with unresolved boolean actions (e.g., approvals) now remain marked as unread until explicitly addressed. This ensures users revisit pending decisions. Commit: 39aabb2 . Interactive notification replies with approval time tracking Added support for direct replies to notifications, along with timestamp logging for when approvals are finalized. This enables granular tracking of response times for actionable alerts. Commit: 6ac80f9 ."}, {"post_id": 74176, "ts": "2026-09-26T21:01:23Z", "hours": 9.8606, "text": "Recent changes Added ship request reviews, resubmission logic, and R2 storage integration for tracking reviewed submissions ( 41b1e43 ). Started on the review workflow Started on Resubmission logic Set up support for cloudflare R2 Guarded Hack Club token persistence behind encryption configuration, ensuring tokens are only stored when encryption is explicitly enabled ( a4b6d0c )."}, {"post_id": 71158, "ts": "2026-09-20T11:24:58Z", "hours": 2.1222, "text": "Recent changes Comment delete, Turbo Comment Box, and ship request fade functionality Add #destroy functionality to the comments with owner permission, path, delete button, and dependent comments. Make use of valid commentable_type/id while building comments and make responses as Turbo streams and wrap up comments within a Turbo frame. Resize the comment box according to the content changes detected by the MutationObserver. Make ship request modal and overlay fade in and out. Consider higher level ship request as blockers for all ship requests. Comment card and comment list styling."}, {"post_id": 70827, "ts": "2026-09-19T20:44:04Z", "hours": 7.9789, "text": "Recent changes Add comments to devlogs and ship requests Implement polymorphic Comment model with CommentsController, Stimulus-driven collapsing comment box, markdown preview form, and styles. Comments will be rendered by Turbo frames and allow editing by owner/admin. This is what else is included in this change: Encryption of hackclub_access_token and hackclub_refresh_token through ActiveRecord encryption, including config, env sample and migration task for already existing non-encrypted tokens. SSL enforcement in production (assume_ssl, force_ssl). Update filter_parameters to strip out sensitive information and OAuth tokens from logs. Fix ExchangeRate API call to include Bearer authentication header. Sanitization of devlogs HTML output through SafeListSanitizer. Update Design#can_make_devlog to can_make_devlog? method and restrict can_ship? check to devlogs without ship request. Add SRI integrity attribute to marked/DOMPurify scripts loaded from CDNs. UI improvements: styles for disabled buttons, utility class for hover-underline effect, devlog cards layout and info icons."}, {"post_id": 65654, "ts": "2026-09-10T22:45:01Z", "hours": 4.65, "text": "Recent changes Ship request flow and SVG conversion : Added support for processing ship requests, handling SVG conversions, and validating devlog images before submission 8ca9b5d9 . Nil safety for Hackatime projects : Wrapped the @hackatime_projects variable in an Array structure to prevent nil errors when retrieving project data a29691ff . CI environment and test ordering : Set RAILS_ENV=test for the CI setup process and reordered the sequence of test steps to improve execution reliability 2968d162 . Authorization consolidation : Refactored authorization guards and consolidated the linking logic for Hackatime projects 4c2b1836 ."}, {"post_id": 63555, "ts": "2026-09-07T13:59:01Z", "hours": 4.54, "text": "Recent changes Fixed a failure in the CI/CD pipeline commit Implemented status tracking for balance events and refined the underlying thread logic associated with them commit Refactored the token rendering component for render_encoded to allow {{design: design.id}} making a pill, to improve display fidelity and added an edit functionality for devlog entries commit Integrated support for uploading images directly within the devlog interface and established links to corresponding Hackatime projects commit"}, {"post_id": 62972, "ts": "2026-09-06T15:23:56Z", "hours": 7.4994, "text": "Added Devlogs and changed hackatime projects to be multi model per design. Move hackatime project linkage from a single designs.hackatime_project column to a has_many hackatime_projects model, syncing each project’s time and aggregating totals on designs. Add devlogs, ship_requests, ships, and comments models/routes/views for design logging and shipping, and make balance_events polymorphic.Update designs controller, helpers, and views to render multiple project pills, allow adding/removing linked projects, and show a combined hackatime/image/devlog layout. Add redcarpet for Markdown rendering and adjust CSS for dark mode, responsive galleries, and pill controls. Added Devlogs and the prep for adding the shipping flow I added devlogs to the project in prep for the shipping flow"}, {"post_id": 61811, "ts": "2026-09-04T21:55:13Z", "hours": 3.1611, "text": "Recent changes Added support for balance events and thread adjustments to improve financial tracking accuracy. This also included an update to the notification rendering system to safely handle these new data types without breaking existing templates (commit: ( faed39b57619 )). Fixed the positioning of the design box within the product editor. This specifically addresses display issues occurring when editing products via /admin/products/<id>/edit (commit: ( aa4e314b5dcd ))."}, {"post_id": 60507, "ts": "2026-09-02T21:52:42Z", "hours": 5.5383, "text": "I’ve focused on refining the shop page styling, header positioning, and cost handling logic ( d10a9c51 ). The recent batch of work involved schema adjustments for a product enabled flag, adding support for cost and thread costs ( 82f9f2d1 ), applying a schema fix ( 3f8bcb8a ), fixing CI pipeline issues ( 71e98a ), and pushing updates to production ( ca19da29 ). Recent changes Added an image variants system and updated views to utilize thumb and display variants specifically ( a2e4eb28 ). Implemented cost handling updates, including a specific support for thread costs alongside general product cost tracking ( 82f9f2d1 ). Added an auto annotaterb script executed within the Rails migration process ( 7d07d278 ). Applied schema fixes to ensure data integrity during the recent updates ( 3f8bcb8a ). Updated the RSVP page styles and refreshed the thanks template ( 217945eb ). Refined header positioning and shop page styling across the frontend ( d10a9c51 ). Added a product enabled flag to control product visibility and state in the system ( 82f9f2d1 ). Whats next: Umm, so whats next I think would be adding balance_events so you can trace changes in balances(spending/earning)"}, {"post_id": 59213, "ts": "2026-08-31T21:41:46Z", "hours": 2.8433, "text": "Since the last update, I’ve focused on enhancing the order preview system to support complex design workflows and improving image navigation for multi-image configurations. Recent changes Added multi-image preview navigation with left/right arrow buttons and an index display (e.g., “Image 2 of 5”) to streamline design review workflows ( b269fe5 ). This change directly addresses the need to review multiple design iterations in a single view without page reloads. Refactored the order preview component to support multiple print areas with independently configurable design images. This involved restructuring the preview logic to handle dynamic print area definitions while maintaining consistent state across design selections ( 0545118 ). The refactor enables customers to visualize different designs on separate print areas (e.g., front/back/ sleeves) within the same order preview."}, {"post_id": 58236, "ts": "2026-08-30T16:26:21Z", "hours": 8.9714, "text": "Print area management UI & backend ( a42a00d ): Built a full stack for managing print areas (think “where the design goes” on a shirt front or back). This includes models to store print area dimensions, controllers to handle CRUD ops, and RESTful routes to tie it all together. The frontend now lets users drag/drop to define print zones with responsive positioning ( position: absolute + transform: scale to handle dynamic sizing). Edge case: Products with multiple print areas (e.g., front + back) now render distinct configurations without clobbering state. Printful service & stock syncing ( 7b5d817 ): Added printful_id to product models to map Issued products to Printful’s inventory. UI updates to display Printful sync status (green checkmarks for success, red alerts for failures). Technical tangents The print area system was a slow make. For example: To ensure designs stay within printable bounds, I had to calculate dynamic margins based on product type (e.g., a hoodie’s print area ≠ a mug’s). This involved hacking some trigonometry into the frontend to snap selections to “safe zones.” On the backend, I’m using ActiveRecord callbacks to validate print area dimensions against product specs. If a user tries to set a print area wider than the product allows It raises a PrintAreaOutOfBounds error Future features The actual ship flow and being able to edit multiple print areas instead of just the one"}, {"post_id": 53048, "ts": "2026-08-23T13:14:54Z", "hours": 4.1422, "text": "Added Variants for size and colors with stock for each printful region facility. Stimulus target which groups the variants by colour and deletes empty groups"}, {"post_id": 50653, "ts": "2026-08-19T22:27:11Z", "hours": 3.3331, "text": "Created Printful API Integration and improved order screen to allow better customisations Add Printful import endpoint and order preview UI improvementsImplemented Printful product import, added order preview generation, UI styles, and controller changes for drag‑resize‑rotate preview."}, {"post_id": 37237, "ts": "2026-07-29T19:53:07Z", "hours": 0.3972, "text": "Improved the New Order Page to be neater, and better themed along the colour scheme"}, {"post_id": 37220, "ts": "2026-07-29T19:25:45Z", "hours": 1.2728, "text": "Rename admin-product to products and refactor CSS, controller, and views. Updated class names and CSS variables, added .no-product-grid and .dashed-break styles. Simplified image loading logic in the product preview controller, and replaced large inline layout styles with external stylesheet includes."}, {"post_id": 35739, "ts": "2026-07-27T11:35:58Z", "hours": 1.3936, "text": "Add brand colors, badge styles, and redesign pagesAdd brand color variables, badge styles, and a full redesign of design pages with responsive layouts, fixed redirect stuff, optimised by using one erb engine call for designs"}, {"post_id": 35463, "ts": "2026-07-26T22:10:06Z", "hours": 1.1911, "text": "Dropdown Styling & Component Replacement The design form’s dropdown interface was overhauled to improve visual consistency and user experience. A native <select> element was replaced with a custom-styled solution using 3ab7405 , allowing for greater flexibility in aligning with the project’s aesthetic goals. This change ensures smoother integration with the overall theme and avoids browser-specific styling quirks. CSS Refactoring & Theme Variables Design form styling was fully refactored in 928b7b0 , introducing global theme variables to streamline color, spacing, and typography management. This move simplifies future theme adjustments and promotes code reuse. Model defaults were also standardized to reduce redundancy in form initialization logic, making the codebase more maintainable. Admin Test Redirects In 2af0071 , the admin test workflow was updated to automatically redirect to the products list URL after test submissions. This improves user navigation by providing immediate feedback and next steps, ensuring a cohesive backend experience. Current Status The frontend is now more thematically consistent, with design forms serving as a primary focus area. Admin workflows are being optimized for clarity and efficiency, though backend test processing logic remains pending integration. The codebase is gradually adopting a modular structure, particularly for UI components and configuration. Things Learnt Custom dropdowns using CSS and JavaScript offer better cross-browser compatibility than styling native <select> elements. Theme variables significantly reduce the effort required for UI adjustments, especially as the project scales. Redirects in admin flows should be designed with user context in mind to avoid confusion."}, {"post_id": 34704, "ts": "2026-07-25T17:05:22Z", "hours": 1.6431, "text": "Project Summary: Admin & Infrastructure Progress Key Milestones & Features Built 🛠️ Admin Product Management UI : Added a full admin interface for product management, including preview capabilities, environment variable integration, and updated order flow logic. This enables admins to efficiently manage product listings and track orders. 🆓 Privacy Enhancements : Implemented a “hide PII” controller to anonymize user data in the UI, ensuring sensitive information is protected in user-facing tables. 🧪 Product Cost Handling : Validated GBP pricing logic for products, ensuring accurate cost handling in the British Pounds currency. 🛠️ CI/CD & Dependency Updates : Configured PostgreSQL in CI pipelines, updated database URLs, and bumped Ruby gem versions to ensure a stable, up-to-date environment. 🎨 Styling Cleanup : Replaced inline styles in admin views with stylesheet_link_tag imports, improving maintainability and separation of concerns. Current Status The project now has a functional admin dashboard for product and order management, with privacy features baked into user data displays. Infrastructure is PostgreSQL-ready in CI, and styling practices align with modern Rails conventions. Core e-commerce logic (pricing, currency) is under testing, with environment variables streamlining configuration. Lessons Learned Privacy by Design : Integrating PII protection early simplifies compliance and reduces technical debt. Infrastructure as Code : Automating PostgreSQL setup in CI saves manual effort and reduces environment inconsistencies. Maintainable Styles : Moving to external stylesheets improves collaboration and long-term code hygiene. Order Page Started Created a functional order page Currency Handling : Explicit GBP validation highlights the need for clear financial logic in order systems."}, {"post_id": 32945, "ts": "2026-07-22T13:01:39Z", "hours": 1.1947, "text": "Replace admin view inline styles with stylesheet_link_tag importsRemoved large embedded CSS from multiple admin templates and switched to external stylesheet links for consistency and maintainability."}, {"post_id": 32314, "ts": "2026-07-21T12:27:35Z", "hours": 0.3503, "text": "Add CurrencyConvertible include and cost conversion helpersInclude CurrencyConvertible in ApplicationHelper and Product, add cost_usd and cost_gbp methods, remove obsolete gbp_to_usd, usd_per_gbp and fetch_usd_conversion_rates, rename cost column comment, and adjust product inheritance."}, {"post_id": 32039, "ts": "2026-07-20T22:30:02Z", "hours": 1.2369, "text": "Update README, moved CSS files, fixed issues between pages (styling)Include planning file entry, revise README wording, and remove dashboard and notifications stylesheet files."}, {"post_id": 30900, "ts": "2026-07-18T21:33:53Z", "hours": 0.9747, "text": "feat(database): migrate from SQLite to PostgreSQL and switch to Redis infrastructure- replace sqlite3 with PostgreSQL database adapter in Gemfile and config configure Redis for caching, Action Cable, and Active Job instead of Solid adapters add guide attribute to User model for onboarding flow control implement user existence validation in ApplicationController refactor CSS architecture by moving stylesheets to components directory create shared designs.css stylesheet for design pages with responsive styling update todo partial to check guide flag before displaying onboarding prompts add migration for guide column on users table"}, {"post_id": 26210, "ts": "2026-07-10T21:30:31Z", "hours": 0.6197, "text": "Key Milestones & Features The project has made solid strides in building out core admin functionality and refining user interactions: Admin Controller Tests : Comprehensive tests for the dashboard, orders, and products controllers were added, ensuring reliability and laying groundwork for future expansions. Form Submission Control : A disable button feature was implemented in the design-form component to prevent multiple submissions, improving UX and reducing backend load. Dashboard Updates : The dashboard_controller.rb received updates (specifics pending documentation), likely enhancing core admin workflows. Current Status The admin interface is shaping up with test-covered controllers and polished frontend interactions. Testing prioritization suggests a focus on stability, while form improvements reflect attention to user-centric details. The project appears in an active development phase, with July 2026 commits indicating recent momentum. Things Learnt Test-Driven Practices : Adding controller tests early highlights the team’s emphasis on maintainable, scalable code. Form UX Nuances : Disabling submission buttons during processing is a small but impactful tweak to prevent errors and improve responsiveness. Documentation Gaps : The vague “Update dashboard_controller.rb” commit underscores the importance of descriptive commit messages for clarity in collaborative projects."}, {"post_id": 20347, "ts": "2026-07-01T22:27:04Z", "hours": 0.7008, "text": "fix(auth): update product params to include thread_cost instead of cost_gbp - replace deprecated cost_gbp parameter with thread_cost in product creation/update - adjust database migration to add thread_cost column to products table, added shop, added notification page"}, {"post_id": 19576, "ts": "2026-06-30T22:24:00Z", "hours": 1.3847, "text": "Used claude to brainstorm colour schemes and layouts. Created this new dashboard design and transitioned the rest of the site to follow the colour scheme"}, {"post_id": 13382, "ts": "2026-06-21T22:29:32Z", "hours": 0.6847, "text": "Add design image gallery with viewer page- Add image route, controller action, and full-size viewer template Add gallery grid on show page with hover overlays and timestamps Fix partial render syntax (collection with as: :image)"}, {"post_id": 12184, "ts": "2026-06-19T21:59:46Z", "hours": 2.8486, "text": "Summary Major update: background removal, UI improvements, model fixes, and CI stability. Changes Added RemoveBackgroundJob with rembg CLI for automatic background removal Created Image and DesignEditSession models; updated schema comments Added brand.css and regulated form partial for new/edit designs Added dark mode support and image preview scaling Enabled PostgreSQL extensions; switched dev DB to SQLite Removed stale migrations (verified, trust columns from users) Cleaned up model validations and associations Fixed CI test suite with updated fixtures Removed node_modules from git; added to .gitignore Removed unused editor and dashboard views Updated Gemfile/Gemfile.lock dependencies"}]...
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Title: Issued YSWS by @Acidicts | Stardance
Devlo Title: Issued YSWS by @Acidicts | Stardance
Devlogs:
Summary Major update: background removal, UI improvements, model fixes, and CI stability. Changes Added RemoveBackgroundJob with rembg CLI for automatic background removal Created Image and DesignEditSession models; updated schema comments Added brand.css and regulated form partial for new/edit designs Added dark mode support and image preview scaling Enabled PostgreSQL extensions; switched dev DB to SQLite Removed stale migrations (verified, trust columns from users) Cleaned up model validations and associations Fixed CI test suite with updated fixtures Removed node_modules from git; added to .gitignore Removed unused editor and dashboard views Updated Gemfile/Gemfile.lock dependencies
Add design image gallery with viewer page- Add image route, controller action, and full-size viewer template Add gallery grid on show page with hover overlays and timestamps Fix partial render syntax (collection with as: :image)
Used claude to brainstorm colour schemes and layouts. Created this new dashboard design and transitioned the rest of the site to follow the colour scheme
fix(auth): update product params to include thread_cost instead of cost_gbp - replace deprecated cost_gbp parameter with thread_cost in product creation/update - adjust database migration to add thread_cost column to products table, added shop, added notification page
Key Milestones & Features The project has made solid strides in building out core admin functionality and refining user interactions: Admin Controller Tests : Comprehensive tests for the dashboard, orders, and products controllers were added, ensuring reliability and laying groundwork for future expansions. Form Submission Control : A disable button feature was implemented in the design-form component to prevent multiple submissions, improving UX and reducing backend load. Dashboard Updates : The dashboard_controller.rb received updates (specifics pending documentation), likely enhancing core admin workflows. Current Status The admin interface is shaping up with test-covered controllers and polished frontend interactions. Testing prioritization suggests a focus on stability, while form improvements reflect attention to user-centric details. The project appears in an active development phase, with July 2026 commits indicating recent momentum. Things Learnt Test-Driven Practices : Adding controller tests early highlights the team’s emphasis on maintainable, scalable code. Form UX Nuances : Disabling submission buttons during processing is a small but impactful tweak to prevent errors and improve responsiveness. Documentation Gaps : The vague “Update dashboard_controller.rb” commit underscores the importance of descriptive commit messages for clarity in collaborative projects.
feat(database): migrate from SQLite to PostgreSQL and switch to Redis infrastructure- replace sqlite3 with PostgreSQL database adapter in Gemfile and config configure Redis for caching, Action Cable, and Active Job instead of Solid adapters add guide attribute to User model for onboarding flow control implement user existence validation in ApplicationController refactor CSS architecture by moving stylesheets to components directory create shared designs.css stylesheet for design pages with responsive styling update todo partial to check guide flag before displaying onboarding prompts add migration for guide column on users table
Update README, moved CSS files, fixed issues between pages (styling)Include planning file entry, revise README wording, and remove dashboard and notifications stylesheet files.
Add CurrencyConvertible include and cost conversion helpersInclude CurrencyConvertible in ApplicationHelper and Product, add cost_usd and cost_gbp methods, remove obsolete gbp_to_usd, usd_per_gbp and fetch_usd_conversion_rates, rename cost column comment, and adjust product inheritance.
Replace admin view inline styles with stylesheet_link_tag importsRemoved large embedded CSS from multiple admin templates and switched to external stylesheet links for consistency and maintainability.
Project Summary: Admin & Infrastructure Progress Key Milestones & Features Built 🛠️ Admin Product Management UI : Added a full admin interface for product management, including preview capabilities, environment variable integration, and updated order flow logic. This enables admins to efficiently manage product listings and track orders. 🆓 Privacy Enhancements : Implemented a “hide PII” controller to anonymize user data in the UI, ensuring sensitive information is protected in user-facing tables. 🧪 Product Cost Handling : Validated GBP pricing logic for products, ensuring accurate cost handling in the British Pounds currency. 🛠️ CI/CD & Dependency Updates : Configured PostgreSQL in CI pipelines, updated database URLs, and bumped Ruby gem versions to ensure a stable, up-to-date environment. 🎨 Styling Cleanup : Replaced inline styles in admin views with stylesheet_link_tag imports, improving maintainability and separation of concerns. Current Status The project now has a functional admin dashboard for product and order management, with privacy features baked into user data displays. Infrastructure is PostgreSQL-ready in CI, and styling practices align with modern Rails conventions. Core e-commerce logic (pricing, currency) is under testing, with environment variables streamlining configuration. Lessons Learned Privacy by Design : Integrating PII protection early simplifies compliance and reduces technical debt. Infrastructure as Code : Automating PostgreSQL setup in CI saves manual effort and reduces environment inconsistencies. Maintainable Styles : Moving to external stylesheets improves collaboration and long-term code hygiene. Order Page Started Created a functional order page Currency Handling : Explicit GBP validation highlights the need for clear financial logic in order systems.
Dropdown Styling & Component Replacement The design form’s dropdown interface was overhauled to improve visual consistency and user experience. A native <select> element was replaced with a custom-styled solution using 3ab7405 , allowing for greater flexibility in aligning with the project’s aesthetic goals. This change ensures smoother integration with the overall theme and avoids browser-specific styling quirks. CSS Refactoring & Theme Variables Design form styling was fully refactored in 928b7b0 , introducing global theme variables to streamline color, spacing, and typography management. This move simplifies future theme adjustments and promotes code reuse. Model defaults were also standardized to reduce redundancy in form initialization logic, making the codebase more maintainable. Admin Test Redirects In 2af0071 , the admin test workflow was updated to automatically redirect to the products list URL after test submissions. This improves user navigation by providing immediate feedback and next steps, ensuring a cohesive backend experience. Current Status The frontend is now more thematically consistent, with design forms serving as a primary focus area. Admin workflows are being optimized for clarity and efficiency, though backend test processing logic remains pending integration. The codebase is gradually adopting a modular structure, particularly for UI components and configuration. Things Learnt Custom dropdowns using CSS and JavaScript offer better cross-browser compatibility than styling native <select> elements. Theme variables significantly reduce the effort required for UI adjustments, especially as the project scales. Redirects in admin flows should be designed with user context in mind to avoid confusion.
Add brand colors, badge styles, and redesign pagesAdd brand color variables, badge styles, and a full redesign of design pages with responsive layouts, fixed redirect stuff, optimised by using one erb engine call for designs
Rename admin-product to products and refactor CSS, controller, and views. Updated class names and CSS variables, added .no-product-grid and .dashed-break styles. Simplified image loading logic in the product preview controller, and replaced large inline layout styles with external stylesheet includes.
Improved the New Order Page to be neater, and better themed along the colour scheme
Created Printful API Integration and improved order screen to allow better customisations Add Printful import endpoint and order preview UI improvementsImplemented Printful product import, added order preview generation, UI styles, and controller changes for drag‑resize‑rotate preview.
Added Variants for size and colors with stock for each printful region facility. Stimulus target which groups the variants by colour and deletes empty groups
Print area management UI & backend ( a42a00d ): Built a full stack for managing print areas (think “where the design goes” on a shirt front or back). This includes models to store print area dimensions, controllers to handle CRUD ops, and RESTful routes to tie it all together. The frontend now lets users drag/drop to define print zones with responsive positioning ( position: absolute + transform: scale to handle dynamic sizing). Edge case: Products with multiple print areas (e.g., front + back) now render distinct configurations without clobbering state. Printful service & stock syncing ( 7b5d817 ): Added printful_id to product models to map Issued products to Printful’s inventory. UI updates to display Printful sync status (green checkmarks for success, red alerts for failures). Technical tangents The print area system was a slow make. For example: To ensure designs stay within printable bounds, I had to calculate dynamic margins based on product type (e.g., a hoodie’s print area ≠ a mug’s). This involved hacking some trigonometry into the frontend to snap selections to “safe zones.” On the backend, I’m using ActiveRecord callbacks to validate print area dimensions against product specs. If a user tries to set a print area wider than the product allows It raises a PrintAreaOutOfBounds error Future features The actual ship flow and being able to edit multiple print areas instead of just the one
Since the last update, I’ve focused on enhancing the order preview system to support complex design workflows and improving image navigation for multi-image configurations. Recent changes Added multi-image preview navigation with left/right arrow buttons and an index display (e.g., “Image 2 of 5”) to streamline design review workflows ( b269fe5 ). This change directly addresses the need to review multiple design iterations in a single view without page reloads. Refactored the order preview component to support multiple print areas with independently configurable design images. This involved restructuring the preview logic to handle dynamic print area definitions while maintaining consistent state across design selections ( 0545118 ). The refactor enables customers to visualize different designs on separate print areas (e.g., front/back/ sleeves) within the same order preview.
I’ve focused on refining the shop page styling, header positioning, and cost handling logic ( d10a9c51 ). The recent batch of work involved schema adjustments for a product enabled flag, adding support for cost and thread costs ( 82f9f2d1 ), applying a schema fix ( 3f8bcb8a ), fixing CI pipeline issues ( 71e98a ), and pushing updates to production ( ca19da29 ). Recent changes Added an image variants system and updated views to utilize thumb and display variants specifically ( a2e4eb28 ). Implemented cost handling updates, including a specific support for thread costs alongside general product cost tracking ( 82f9f2d1 ). Added an auto annotaterb script executed within the Rails migration process ( 7d07d278 ). Applied schema fixes to ensure data integrity during the recent updates ( 3f8bcb8a ). Updated the RSVP page styles and refreshed the thanks template ( 217945eb ). Refined header positioning and shop page styling across the frontend ( d10a9c51 ). Added a product enabled flag to control product visibility and state in the system ( 82f9f2d1 ). Whats next: Umm, so whats next I think would be adding balance_events so you can trace changes in balances(spending/earning)
Recent changes Added support for balance events and thread adjustments to improve financial tracking accuracy. This also included an update to the notification rendering system to safely handle these new data types without breaking existing templates (commit: ( faed39b57619 )). Fixed the positioning of the design box within the product editor. This specifically addresses display issues occurring when editing products via /admin/products/<id>/edit (commit: ( aa4e314b5dcd )).
Added Devlogs and changed hackatime projects to be multi model per design. Move hackatime project linkage from a single designs.hackatime_project column to a has_many hackatime_projects model, syncing each project’s time and aggregating totals on designs. Add devlogs, ship_requests, ships, and comments models/routes/views for design logging and shipping, and make balance_events polymorphic.Update designs controller, helpers, and views to render multiple project pills, allow adding/removing linked projects, and show a combined hackatime/image/devlog layout. Add redcarpet for Markdown rendering and adjust CSS for dark mode, responsive galleries, and pill controls. Added Devlogs and the prep for adding the shipping flow I added devlogs to the project in prep for the shipping flow
Recent changes Fixed a failure in the CI/CD pipeline commit Implemented status tracking for balance events and refined the underlying thread logic associated with them commit Refactored the token rendering component for render_encoded to allow {{design: design.id}} making a pill, to improve display fidelity and added an edit functionality for devlog entries commit Integrated support for uploading images directly within the devlog interface and established links to corresponding Hackatime projects commit
Recent changes Ship request flow and SVG conversion : Added support for processing ship requests, handling SVG conversions, and validating devlog images before submission 8ca9b5d9 . Nil safety for Hackatime projects : Wrapped the @hackatime_projects variable in an Array structure to prevent nil errors when retrieving project data a29691ff . CI environment and test ordering : Set RAILS_ENV=test for the CI setup process and reordered the sequence of test steps to improve execution reliability 2968d162 . Authorization consolidation : Refactored authorization guards and consolidated the linking logic for Hackatime projects 4c2b1836 .
Recent changes Add comments to devlogs and ship requests Implement polymorphic Comment model with CommentsController, Stimulus-driven collapsing comment box, markdown preview form, and styles. Comments will be rendered by Turbo frames and allow editing by owner/admin. This is what else is included in this change: Encryption of hackclub_access_token and hackclub_refresh_token through ActiveRecord encryption, including config, env sample and migration task for already existing non-encrypted tokens. SSL enforcement in production (assume_ssl, force_ssl). Update filter_parameters to strip out sensitive information and OAuth tokens from logs. Fix ExchangeRate API call to include Bearer authentication header. Sanitization of devlogs HTML output through SafeListSanitizer. Update Design#can_make_devlog to can_make_devlog? method and restrict can_ship? check to devlogs without ship request. Add SRI integrity attribute to marked/DOMPurify scripts loaded from CDNs. UI improvements: styles for disabled buttons, utility class for hover-underline effect, devlog cards layout and info icons.
Recent changes Comment delete, Turbo Comment Box, and ship request fade functionality Add #destroy functionality to the comments with owner permission, path, delete button, and dependent comments. Make use of valid commentable_type/id while building comments and make responses as Turbo streams and wrap up comments within a Turbo frame. Resize the comment box according to the content changes detected by the MutationObserver. Make ship request modal and overlay fade in and out. Consider higher level ship request as blockers for all ship requests. Comment card and comment list styling.
Recent changes Added ship request reviews, resubmission logic, and R2 storage integration for tracking reviewed submissions ( 41b1e43 ). Started on the review workflow Started on Resubmission logic Set up support for cloudflare R2 Guarded Hack Club token persistence behind encryption configuration, ensuring tokens are only stored when encryption is explicitly enabled ( a4b6d0c ).
Made Notifications Useful Recent changes Persistent unread state for unanswered boolean notifications Notifications with unresolved boolean actions (e.g., approvals) now remain marked as unread until explicitly addressed. This ensures users revisit pending decisions. Commit: 39aabb2 . Interactive notification replies with approval time tracking Added support for direct replies to notifications, along with timestamp logging for when approvals are finalized. This enables granular tracking of response times for actionable alerts. Commit: 6ac80f9 .
## Recent changes Notifications: Unanswered notifications now retain their unread status until explicitly addressed. This ensures users can distinguish between pending and resolved interactions without relying on manual state updates ( 751a370 ). Security: Authentication workflows, file uploads, and resource authorization checks have been updated with additional safeguards. Specifics include input validation and access control refinements, though implementation details are not disclosed in the commit message ( 97e48db ).
Recent changes - Installed Bundler 4.0.4 in the Dockerfile to standardize gem management across environments ( 88ba659 ). - Ensured the verification directory exists for SVG upload tests, addressing missing file system setup in test workflows ( 83f2e53 ). - Resolved a Turbo conflict in order steps, likely related to event streaming or frame rendering in Rails views ( e8d08f4 ). Updated navigation unread counts dynamically from notification events, improving real-time feedback for user activity ( a75f6ff ).
Deploying on coolify and fixing bugs with that + encrypting current db
I created the fulfilment system for a fulfilment team to use Recent changes Removed redundant save! calls and updated fulfillment tests to reduce unnecessary database operations and align test logic with current behavior 9acc056 . Added a fulfillment role, batch pipeline, and popup controller to support new workflow automation and UI interactions afa7a20 . The popup controller likely handles transient UI elements like notifications or modals. Fixed a crash in /designs preview rendering by resolving an issue blocking Ruby scan/lint CI, ensuring previews no longer fail unexpectedly ( 911f035 ). Corrected a stray question mark in a design preview image tag to prevent malformed HTML output ( 955dd6c ). Added a note about YSWS draft sponsorship documentation, possibly for tracking external partnerships or funding discussions ( d92d571 ). No performance optimizations or subsystem overhauls were addressed in this cycle. Next steps depend on external feedback and test coverage improvements implied by recent test updates.
Ships:
Shipped!!! There are a bunch of features and stuff that I have added to this since flavortown, from the ordering system to devlogs and ship flow. Project Info This is the ruby on rails app for the ysws draft #issued where YS: Designs made with Code WS: Clothes and other swag with those designs Features added: A bunch of features have been added and I have separated them to 3 categories Major ones for functionality, quality of life for feel and use, security for data security. New Major Features: Designs view now is more detailed including hackatime projects and images from devlogs and ships Ship flow system so you can submit to the ysws Product Design system (admin only - for making the shop items by importing from printful via api) Order system using lots of hotwired turbo (choose color, design placement rotation and scale) Notifications (3 types Normal which provides info and 2 others Boolean which gets a yes or no answer and text which gets a written answer Reviewer Panel which shows pending ships to review with some data on (need to add hackatime info for it though) Storing Reviewer proof videos in a cloudflare R2 storage Quality-Of-Life: Added better UI/UX with some issues with need for ironing out (eg font change from workbench to ‘lexend’ and ‘space mono’ Kept a consistent style through the site, although some panels might need better border colour On login it redirects to the page you logged in by Security: I added User DB encryption to protect user data stored on the postgres database instance, such as name and email Summary Made the functional part of the ysws site (Designs, ordering, shipping) Added more security for user data Improved UI(Font and colour scheme)...
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1792853754.3961873
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1792940154.3961873
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34756
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Anixweb by @imnottimaq | Stardance
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imnottimaq
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1
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108.14
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1395
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-14T23:49:54Z", "hours": 83.0, "multiplier": 16.81, "payout": 1395, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Hi! I want to present my project called Anixweb. Anixweb is an open-source web client for Anixart, a mobile app popular in the Russian-speaking community. I created it because I have been using Anixart on my phone for about five years, and I have always wanted to use it on my PC. I also wanted to learn JavaScript, TypeScript, and React by building a real project. It has many of the features you would expect: watchlists, favorites, and watch history; a huge selection of anime with Russian dubs or subtitles; search and advanced filters; user profiles, friends, comments, and ratings; notifications about new releases and episodes; and much more! In addition to recreating the core functionality of the official app, I also developed two features of my own: Watch Together and Upscale. Watch Together allows you to synchronize video playback with other people. It supports both public and private rooms. You can discover and join public rooms through the room browser, while private rooms can be joined using a room code or an invitation link. Episode selection, pauses, seeking, playback position, and playback speed are synchronized through a WebSocket server. Room owners can also allow other participants to control playback and select episodes. Upscale is an optional feature that uses WebGPU and Anime4K shaders to improve the viewing experience by sharpening the image and reducing blur in real time. All processing happens locally on your device, without manually re-encoding or uploading the video. I used: React and React Router; TypeScript; Vite; HLS.js for video playback; WebSockets for room synchronization; Anime4K-WebGPU for real-time image enhancement; CSS Modules for styling. One of the hardest parts was managing the video player lifecycle: switching streams, recovering from HLS errors, preserving playback progress, and keeping multiple users synchronized without creating feedback loops. I spent more than 90 hours working on this project. Along the way, I learned a lot about accessibility, video streaming, WebGPU pipelines, API integration, localization, and managing and structuring a medium-sized React application. This is an independent project and is not affiliated with the SwiftSoft Team in any way.", "repo": "https://github.com/imnottimaq/anixweb", "demo": "https://imnottimaq.github.io/anixweb/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 80987, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 80987, "ts": "2026-10-19T14:56:50Z", "hours": 7.1439, "text": "i havent looked into original app for a while, a month ago there was a huge update which added a lot of things first one is feed, implemented it initially but it requires reputation level 3 just to be able to post, which is kinda lame but it serves as antibot i guess improve watch together (better layout, controls and permissions) now you can move around categories in home and favorites to change order, on right click you can select default one and also there is new category in api called donghua, also implemented fixed bug that prevented you from login if you already had invalid token in cookie now you can properly download episodes as mp4 instead on hls fragments, but the speeds are kinda bad (0.5 - 1.5 mbps), will look into it bunch of minor changes: broader test coverage improved import/export of lists fullscreen photo viewer fixed recommendations if no description provided, it now says “no description provided” instead of blank space"}, {"post_id": 79651, "ts": "2026-10-14T22:11:57Z", "hours": 11.3022, "text": "forgot about devlogs, hour lost basically new settings auto fullscreen on episode start custom menu on right click cloud settings which are linked to anixart account and are saved on worker import/export of mal or shikimori lists new theme settings compact mode auto pause on focus loss download episodes(hls fragments for now only, proper mp4 planned for next devlog) chat in watch together (text, voice messages, reactions) prolly there is something else i have done but i cant remember, but this is the most important changes i kinda lied about maintenance only state xd"}, {"post_id": 77952, "ts": "2026-10-08T22:55:52Z", "hours": 6.6942, "text": "revamped watch together feature (for now only initial v2 release, needs more testing) also as a part of v2 server i unified proxies and room server into one worker, dont think this will affect something, but i just didnt like the idea of keeping proxy separately as it is like 200-300 lines fixed a lot of player bugs, in particular: if you switch to another episode, resume prompt is now not skipped when you change quality, player sometimes could lose progress upscaler implementation is now much stable and reliable initial test coverage, aiming for atleast 70% coverage for the next devlog, for now 90% for core logic and 15-20% across all codebase from now on, i probably wont add new features to the project, focusing on bugfixes and layout changes etc"}, {"post_id": 45968, "ts": "2026-08-12T19:50:30Z", "hours": 3.4922, "text": "friends management screen ability to change notifications per release fixed notifications setting, apparently they were broken now you can rate release editable player keybinds updated dependencies because react router had 2 vulnerabilities small changes here and there project is almost ready to ship, will ship today or tomorrow idk"}, {"post_id": 44777, "ts": "2026-08-10T19:39:13Z", "hours": 7.7881, "text": "collections screen, ability to save/create/comment collection asked claude to unify design, looks really better now and very well rounded fixed some linter error but not all(i dont know how to fix syncronous setState) some internal stuff that allowed me to reduce code size a bit removed swiper dependency(gallery i used in release screen) new buttons in overview but they are not fully functional yet reworked comments section a bit and also there is +1 hour for room server for watch together (fully vibecoded btw)"}, {"post_id": 40331, "ts": "2026-08-03T19:29:42Z", "hours": 1.9294, "text": "did a overview screen, looks cool im getting close to ship (80-85% i would say), mostly some polishing is left and the most major feature i havent implemented yet is collections, but for now ill focus more on polishing things instead"}, {"post_id": 40053, "ts": "2026-08-03T12:34:55Z", "hours": 0.5283, "text": "franchise screen"}, {"post_id": 39783, "ts": "2026-08-02T23:41:32Z", "hours": 2.2006, "text": "changed all names to anixweb to avoid having issues with the devs of original app in the future made account edit screen where you can change for now nickname, avatar, socials and some settings related to who can send you friend requests etc. friend requests is also a thing i implemented, but honestly i dont know why it even exists. it doesnt have any functionallity like chat or something, it just exists maybe ill implement like inviting your friend to the watch together room but idk about that one, my current worker will not be enough probably if site will be used by more than 100 people at the time also added proxy for images as an option cuz for me their images storage is not reachable via standard link, and with proxy it works good and also added like roles(which is not super important, did it just for the parity with the api), but like only 0.5% users of this app have any role roles is essentially like groups for example some dubbers team"}, {"post_id": 39178, "ts": "2026-08-01T23:31:26Z", "hours": 4.9144, "text": "god it took me like whole day to do it notifications screen itself wasnt hard to do, but settings was. it wasnt documented at all so i had to pull up mitmproxy + android emulator and find out and that alone took me 2 hours (not counted in the total time) also wanted to make notifications via web push api, but it isnt possible unfortunately overhaul of api client, now its a bit more unified lazy loading of components so it takes less time to load if you open website first time upgraded node on actions small improvements here and there"}, {"post_id": 38374, "ts": "2026-07-31T18:34:22Z", "hours": 2.495, "text": "after 3 and a half hours im finally done fixed account screen implemented “watch together feature” which is beta for now as it is a buggy mess as of writing this devlog and i actually found one more bug as i am writing this, ill fix it later i promise next time will implement ability to search on english as a toggle in settings through shikimori api (kinda like myanimelist but russian) this will probably make search slower but it will work"}, {"post_id": 38180, "ts": "2026-07-31T13:26:35Z", "hours": 2.0006, "text": "added this section that api sometimes returns fixed a few bugs with player: player doesnt show controls while fullscreen if webgpu is not available in your browser quality upgrade option will now gray out controls now disappear after sometime if server returns broken hls stream, it will try to gracefully recover now also changed things around in login/register/forgot password: token is now moved to cookies instead of localstorage as its more secure(but its still not very secure because api requires to send token as a query parameter and token doesnt change between devices until password reset) cleaned up some logging to console as its not really necessary now favorites page now shows popup for user to login to access this page oh and also settings button and also asked ai to implement translation, this will be removed probably after i ship project, as this site is not meant to be used by non-russian speakers"}, {"post_id": 37921, "ts": "2026-07-30T22:32:47Z", "hours": 2.9978, "text": "anime4k upscale works, but on chromium-based browsers only(firefox has bug that doesnt let it work) settings screen fully functional started working on translation to english, honestly at first i tried to look at browser translation feature, but it was horrible, so i decided to make it will be hard to implement to properly but i think 3-4 hours and i’ll be done"}, {"post_id": 37555, "ts": "2026-07-30T11:24:59Z", "hours": 3.7247, "text": "search is now a thing and it works fine redesigned cards on home screen and you can select between horizontal and vertical card (for now only through changing localstorage xd) some improvements here and there like a little bit better design of release screen next up i will probably finally do player settings and implement anime4k maybe"}, {"post_id": 36603, "ts": "2026-07-28T20:24:18Z", "hours": 0.9431, "text": "i finally understood that i suck at design and asked ai to design it. now it looks amazing. next i will ask it to look at release screen cause i like the layout of it but design is half good half sucks"}, {"post_id": 36109, "ts": "2026-07-28T00:06:39Z", "hours": 2.8711, "text": "draft for account page, for now copied design from mobile app, tomorrow will propery design, and now im going to sleep good night"}, {"post_id": 36004, "ts": "2026-07-27T20:24:53Z", "hours": 2.6617, "text": "okay found a way to make it work edited cors proxy to also include route with anixart user agent this could be bannable, but at most they will ban proxy ip on the api and that is not crucial, cors proxy will work just fine voting, posting a comment/reply, editing comment, deleting it was implemented"}, {"post_id": 35515, "ts": "2026-07-27T00:16:28Z", "hours": 1.9069, "text": "from now on i’ll try to make devlogs more often tried to make replies to comments but hit the wall: api does not allow adding comments/replies without anixart user agent. same goes with voting on comments (like/dislike kinda like reddit system) so i spend 2 hours just to discover that it will not work"}, {"post_id": 35200, "ts": "2026-07-26T13:56:38Z", "hours": 5.2744, "text": "ok i finally deployed it to github pages and also pushed source code to github also added favorites screen where you can see your history, favorites and each list (watched, planned, watching etc) added popup when you open site first time that its not official and im not responsible for your account oh and also tabs on home screen to see latest, ongoing, announced etc probably will add settings screen next time and also finish player"}, {"post_id": 34109, "ts": "2026-07-24T16:22:08Z", "hours": 6.7553, "text": "player 80 percent ready(settings is the only thing that does not work) refactored code a bit, mostly tried to reduce eslint errors/warnings started rewriting modal logic(repeating same logic on every new modal => separate model template component from which other modals will inherit from) and also rewriting modals to use that also, the project is nowhere near mvp, so probably no github pages deploy until that (30 percent rn i would say i spent too much time perfecting release page im dumb)"}, {"post_id": 32658, "ts": "2026-07-21T23:06:39Z", "hours": 7.9831, "text": "okay, its time to make a devlog proper dub/source select modal (eyeball shows that you already watched that episode and in the future i plan to implement time where you stopped but first i need to make proper player) began defining settings proper login screen and ability to create account/recover password (to be honest i thought it was impossible to make but after some reverse engineering via mitmproxy and android 7 emulator i found out that api reference that i was using is either outdated or not properly documented) ability to view comment replies and started working full comment section tried to implement voting on comments but its impossible unfortunately, api checks for allowed user agent and i cant change that moved things around internally, now project structure is more refined i think by the time i have to do next devlog i’ll deploy this site via github actions/github pages so i dont have to pay for hosting(application is fully client-side anyway)"}, {"post_id": 31486, "ts": "2026-07-19T21:56:15Z", "hours": 8.7089, "text": "release page almost ready, final touches left also spent too much time on dealing with cors error (kodik, one of the main players, was throwing cors error, so i asked codex to create simple cors proxy and deployed it to vercel, but kodik still sent broken data, turns out it was because of us ip adress, i moved proxy to cloudflare workers and now it parses fine) used linkparser from thedesconnet/anixartjs (this stuff is too wacky for me to deal with it myself) random anime button on header proper player is still wip (1% ready xd) will ask codex to do it cuz i dont even know where to start from also spent too much time to design this page but now it looks amazing hope to make proper player by the next devlog but this whole thing is new to me so im not sure"}, {"post_id": 29843, "ts": "2026-07-17T00:02:39Z", "hours": 8.4994, "text": "god that took a while, but you can finally watch something using this site, also login works now but no new account registration"}, {"post_id": 28527, "ts": "2026-07-14T20:47:13Z", "hours": 3.0678, "text": "As of now, webpage looks like this: Now you can open release and as of now it will show poster, play button, favorite button and dropdown where you are supposed to select whether you watch it right now, plan to watch it, or dropped it(there is more im too lazy to describe them all) Next up i will implement ability to watch episodes and log into your account (maybe sign in too im not sure)"}, {"post_id": 28016, "ts": "2026-07-14T00:26:24Z", "hours": 2.2583, "text": "Today i finally started working on it, threw together something basic as im new to react/js"}]...
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Title: Anixweb by @imnottimaq | Stardance
Devlogs Title: Anixweb by @imnottimaq | Stardance
Devlogs:
Today i finally started working on it, threw together something basic as im new to react/js
As of now, webpage looks like this: Now you can open release and as of now it will show poster, play button, favorite button and dropdown where you are supposed to select whether you watch it right now, plan to watch it, or dropped it(there is more im too lazy to describe them all) Next up i will implement ability to watch episodes and log into your account (maybe sign in too im not sure)
god that took a while, but you can finally watch something using this site, also login works now but no new account registration
release page almost ready, final touches left also spent too much time on dealing with cors error (kodik, one of the main players, was throwing cors error, so i asked codex to create simple cors proxy and deployed it to vercel, but kodik still sent broken data, turns out it was because of us ip adress, i moved proxy to cloudflare workers and now it parses fine) used linkparser from thedesconnet/anixartjs (this stuff is too wacky for me to deal with it myself) random anime button on header proper player is still wip (1% ready xd) will ask codex to do it cuz i dont even know where to start from also spent too much time to design this page but now it looks amazing hope to make proper player by the next devlog but this whole thing is new to me so im not sure
okay, its time to make a devlog proper dub/source select modal (eyeball shows that you already watched that episode and in the future i plan to implement time where you stopped but first i need to make proper player) began defining settings proper login screen and ability to create account/recover password (to be honest i thought it was impossible to make but after some reverse engineering via mitmproxy and android 7 emulator i found out that api reference that i was using is either outdated or not properly documented) ability to view comment replies and started working full comment section tried to implement voting on comments but its impossible unfortunately, api checks for allowed user agent and i cant change that moved things around internally, now project structure is more refined i think by the time i have to do next devlog i’ll deploy this site via github actions/github pages so i dont have to pay for hosting(application is fully client-side anyway)
player 80 percent ready(settings is the only thing that does not work) refactored code a bit, mostly tried to reduce eslint errors/warnings started rewriting modal logic(repeating same logic on every new modal => separate model template component from which other modals will inherit from) and also rewriting modals to use that also, the project is nowhere near mvp, so probably no github pages deploy until that (30 percent rn i would say i spent too much time perfecting release page im dumb)
ok i finally deployed it to github pages and also pushed source code to github also added favorites screen where you can see your history, favorites and each list (watched, planned, watching etc) added popup when you open site first time that its not official and im not responsible for your account oh and also tabs on home screen to see latest, ongoing, announced etc probably will add settings screen next time and also finish player
from now on i’ll try to make devlogs more often tried to make replies to comments but hit the wall: api does not allow adding comments/replies without anixart user agent. same goes with voting on comments (like/dislike kinda like reddit system) so i spend 2 hours just to discover that it will not work
okay found a way to make it work edited cors proxy to also include route with anixart user agent this could be bannable, but at most they will ban proxy ip on the api and that is not crucial, cors proxy will work just fine voting, posting a comment/reply, editing comment, deleting it was implemented
draft for account page, for now copied design from mobile app, tomorrow will propery design, and now im going to sleep good night
i finally understood that i suck at design and asked ai to design it. now it looks amazing. next i will ask it to look at release screen cause i like the layout of it but design is half good half sucks
search is now a thing and it works fine redesigned cards on home screen and you can select between horizontal and vertical card (for now only through changing localstorage xd) some improvements here and there like a little bit better design of release screen next up i will probably finally do player settings and implement anime4k maybe
anime4k upscale works, but on chromium-based browsers only(firefox has bug that doesnt let it work) settings screen fully functional started working on translation to english, honestly at first i tried to look at browser translation feature, but it was horrible, so i decided to make it will be hard to implement to properly but i think 3-4 hours and i’ll be done
added this section that api sometimes returns fixed a few bugs with player: player doesnt show controls while fullscreen if webgpu is not available in your browser quality upgrade option will now gray out controls now disappear after sometime if server returns broken hls stream, it will try to gracefully recover now also changed things around in login/register/forgot password: token is now moved to cookies instead of localstorage as its more secure(but its still not very secure because api requires to send token as a query parameter and token doesnt change between devices until password reset) cleaned up some logging to console as its not really necessary now favorites page now shows popup for user to login to access this page oh and also settings button and also asked ai to implement translation, this will be removed probably after i ship project, as this site is not meant to be used by non-russian speakers
after 3 and a half hours im finally done fixed account screen implemented “watch together feature” which is beta for now as it is a buggy mess as of writing this devlog and i actually found one more bug as i am writing this, ill fix it later i promise next time will implement ability to search on english as a toggle in settings through shikimori api (kinda like myanimelist but russian) this will probably make search slower but it will work
god it took me like whole day to do it notifications screen itself wasnt hard to do, but settings was. it wasnt documented at all so i had to pull up mitmproxy + android emulator and find out and that alone took me 2 hours (not counted in the total time) also wanted to make notifications via web push api, but it isnt possible unfortunately overhaul of api client, now its a bit more unified lazy loading of components so it takes less time to load if you open website first time upgraded node on actions small improvements here and there
changed all names to anixweb to avoid having issues with the devs of original app in the future made account edit screen where you can change for now nickname, avatar, socials and some settings related to who can send you friend requests etc. friend requests is also a thing i implemented, but honestly i dont know why it even exists. it doesnt have any functionallity like chat or something, it just exists maybe ill implement like inviting your friend to the watch together room but idk about that one, my current worker will not be enough probably if site will be used by more than 100 people at the time also added proxy for images as an option cuz for me their images storage is not reachable via standard link, and with proxy it works good and also added like roles(which is not super important, did it just for the parity with the api), but like only 0.5% users of this app have any role roles is essentially like groups for example some dubbers team
franchise screen
did a overview screen, looks cool im getting close to ship (80-85% i would say), mostly some polishing is left and the most major feature i havent implemented yet is collections, but for now ill focus more on polishing things instead
collections screen, ability to save/create/comment collection asked claude to unify design, looks really better now and very well rounded fixed some linter error but not all(i dont know how to fix syncronous setState) some internal stuff that allowed me to reduce code size a bit removed swiper dependency(gallery i used in release screen) new buttons in overview but they are not fully functional yet reworked comments section a bit and also there is +1 hour for room server for watch together (fully vibecoded btw)
friends management screen ability to change notifications per release fixed notifications setting, apparently they were broken now you can rate release editable player keybinds updated dependencies because react router had 2 vulnerabilities small changes here and there project is almost ready to ship, will ship today or tomorrow idk
revamped watch together feature (for now only initial v2 release, needs more testing) also as a part of v2 server i unified proxies and room server into one worker, dont think this will affect something, but i just didnt like the idea of keeping proxy separately as it is like 200-300 lines fixed a lot of player bugs, in particular: if you switch to another episode, resume prompt is now not skipped when you change quality, player sometimes could lose progress upscaler implementation is now much stable and reliable initial test coverage, aiming for atleast 70% coverage for the next devlog, for now 90% for core logic and 15-20% across all codebase from now on, i probably wont add new features to the project, focusing on bugfixes and layout changes etc
forgot about devlogs, hour lost basically new settings auto fullscreen on episode start custom menu on right click cloud settings which are linked to anixart account and are saved on worker import/export of mal or shikimori lists new theme settings compact mode auto pause on focus loss download episodes(hls fragments for now only, proper mp4 planned for next devlog) chat in watch together (text, voice messages, reactions) prolly there is something else i have done but i cant remember, but this is the most important changes i kinda lied about maintenance only state xd
i havent looked into original app for a while, a month ago there was a huge update which added a lot of things first one is feed, implemented it initially but it requires reputation level 3 just to be able to post, which is kinda lame but it serves as antibot i guess improve watch together (better layout, controls and permissions) now you can move around categories in home and favorites to change order, on right click you can select default one and also there is new category in api called donghua, also implemented fixed bug that prevented you from login if you already had invalid token in cookie now you can properly download episodes as mp4 instead on hls fragments, but the speeds are kinda bad (0.5 - 1.5 mbps), will look into it bunch of minor changes: broader test coverage improved import/export of lists fullscreen photo viewer fixed recommendations if no description provided, it now says “no description provided” instead of blank space
Ships:
Hi! I want to present my project called Anixweb. Anixweb is an open-source web client for Anixart, a mobile app popular in the Russian-speaking community. I created it because I have been using Anixart on my phone for about five years, and I have always wanted to use it on my PC. I also wanted to learn JavaScript, TypeScript, and React by building a real project. It has many of the features you would expect: watchlists, favorites, and watch history; a huge selection of anime with Russian dubs or subtitles; search and advanced filters; user profiles, friends, comments, and ratings; notifications about new releases and episodes; and much more! In addition to recreating the core functionality of the official app, I also developed two features of my own: Watch Together and Upscale. Watch Together allows you to synchronize video playback with other people. It supports both public and private rooms. You can discover and join public rooms through the room browser, while private rooms can be joined using a room code or an invitation link. Episode selection, pauses, seeking, playback position, and playback speed are synchronized through a WebSocket server. Room owners can also allow other participants to control playback and select episodes. Upscale is an optional feature that uses WebGPU and Anime4K shaders to improve the viewing experience by sharpening the image and reducing blur in real time. All processing happens locally on your device, without manually re-encoding or uploading the video. I used: React and React Router; TypeScript; Vite; HLS.js for video playback; WebSockets for room synchronization; Anime4K-WebGPU for real-time image enhancement; CSS Modules for styling. One of the hardest parts was managing the video player lifecycle: switching streams, recovering from HLS errors, preserving playback progress, and keeping multiple users synchronized without creating feedback loops. I spent more than 90 hours working on this project. Along the way, I learned a lot about accessibility, video streaming, WebGPU pipelines, API integration, localization, and managing and structuring a medium-sized React application. This is an independent project and is not affiliated with the SwiftSoft Team in any way....
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FlatCraft by @Blxm | Stardance
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Blxm
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1
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115.21
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1405
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-19T23:31:01Z", "hours": 113.0, "multiplier": 12.47, "payout": 1405, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "FlatCraft Basic Info FlatCraft is an open source, MIT licensed 2d Minecraft inspired game. It uses LittleJS for the rendering, and vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the UI. All the rest was written by me. Challenges: One of the biggest challenge was world generation. The idea was to use simplex noise to make terrain, but there was one problem: It’s uncontrolability. I wanted real biomes, but that coudn’t happen because I didn’t know how to control simplex noise. Nor did I know how to make mountains. I solved it by realizing that this is just a silly 2d Minecraft game for a program designed to get teens to make something, not for teens to make some complex minecraft like game, so I decided to bite the bullet and to just make an array for each biome, and have that array contain the y level of the highest block, and use that array to make the terrain. It’s basically like [1,1,2,2,3,3]. Nothing complicated, and if you played this game long enough you’ll see that each biomes are litterally the same. Most Proud of: I’m actually most proud of the custom skins part of flatcraft. It’s really not that complex, but it took a mesruable amount of time to get it working. I had to learn node.js, finally had a use for a server! and used my old chromebook as my server. I made the precaution of adding a ratelimiter just in case someone tried to take it down or whatever, but yeah. That’s what I’m most proud of. What I learned: Making classes in js NodeJS LittleJS engine Stuff that didnt make it into the game: Game music Mobs Credits Art: Me, mostly me, My little brother Inspired by https://www.planetminecraft.com/texture-pack/digs-simple-pack-1-15-100-complete/ , and https://bloxd.io Programming: Me Libraries used: LittleJS", "repo": "https://github.com/BlxCode/FlatCraft", "demo": "https://flatcraft.blxm.me"}]...
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[{"post_id": 72489, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 72489, "ts": "2026-09-23T02:15:22Z", "hours": 0.3167, "text": "FIxed bug where jumping wasn’t scaled to your fps Simple really! it’s on the title Changes & Bug Fixes fixed bug where jumping wasn’t scaled to your fps that bug would have made high fps players not able to jump high, and low fps players to jump SUPER high"}, {"post_id": 71071, "ts": "2026-09-20T08:19:33Z", "hours": 1.8978, "text": "Fixed some issues regarding prod (wont get paied for this 😭) ALright, even though i just shipped, there were stuff that were broken, first of all i realized that if you have a expensive 4k 240 hz ahh monitor, the game would get very fast due to the fact that I didn’t introduce deltat time, so i introduced delta time. Bug fixes Fixed bug when you were very fast on a 60hz+ monitor Fixed glitch where the animation state changes between falling and breaking a block while breaking a block while falling"}, {"post_id": 70883, "ts": "2026-09-19T23:01:44Z", "hours": 5.6633, "text": "Sprinting this will be my last ever devlog! New Features: FULL Random world generation: It works like this: Seeds: Seeds are not that important, though they do play a part for terrain generation. Terrain: The terrain is basically just a huge array with preset Y levels depending on the terrain type, ie: mountianus, hilly, flat. Ores: Ores are truly random. It dosn’t depend on the seed. Trees: Trees are also truly random Sprinting: Double press the key in the direction you want to go to sprint that’s it! plz rate it well"}, {"post_id": 69200, "ts": "2026-09-16T16:09:37Z", "hours": 6.2003, "text": "Saving worlds… I hope Honsetly, school has been removing litterally half of the day I would have used to do flatcraft, so… yeah. im also writing this at school cuz i needed to sleep. dont tell anyone lol New Features: Saving It’s quite simple actually. Just saving an object with some world data to local storage. Honestly, that’s it. Flower flower. very cool Terrain generation Terrain generation, no ore generation lol"}, {"post_id": 66474, "ts": "2026-09-12T09:52:21Z", "hours": 5.9692, "text": "Tools Update!!!!111 3 more hard gh issues to go! yay it’s like 2:30 on a friday. not bad, but considering school is back, not good either. Honestly, i swear Idk if i can actually finish this before sep 20th, so if i can’t i’ll actually do 100 pushups. and it WILL be on a devlog. so uhh… yeh. idk why but you can see me do 100 pushups. defenatly not in a row tho my arms are actually twigs bro. ok enough yapping, let’s actually get into this. New Features: Tools!!111 tools. the final implementaiton was quite simple actually. I just added tools to the textures, and added them to the metadata, added a few bits of code for the speeding up of breaking blocks and boom! tools. Changes & Bugfixes: Compleated Metadata Drops now produce 80% less lag (by making sure that only 1 shadow per x coord can exist)"}, {"post_id": 62583, "ts": "2026-09-06T01:30:40Z", "hours": 8.5536, "text": "Lighting & Dropping stuff i’ve been slacking off recently, and I mean it. I’ve coded less, and played more games due to the uhhh looming school season starting again but like… i’ve still managed to make things like lighting, dropping stuff, and shuffeling stuff in ur inventory by using the number keys. Features Lighting At first, this was one of the reasons why I decided to switch to little js, but like their system is not designed for 2d minecraft use, so I had to improvise. The lighting system consists of two basic things. One is the ambient lighting, which basically fills the whole screen with light / filling the whole screen without light, and the second thing is like “light objects” by that, I mean like point lights, which are like round lightbulbs per say, and they emit light. Those would be used for stuff like torches. Q Dropping things with q didn’t exist in the 2 part drops update, cuz i was too lazy to implement that. But now, I added that. It’s simple really, it just creates a new droppped item every time u press q. and if u press q with control, then it drops everything in the hotbar slot hovered, and u can drop things in ur inven by hovering over it. Moving things around in ur inventory with the top number keys I added that cuz im just used to that in uhhh…. bloxd.io so yeah, i just added that. Attack anim press mouse button 0 to attack. currently just attack animation for now Changes & Bug fixes Random tick events for stuff like grass turning into dirt or vice versa *greijodkmgrfd idk, it was in my commits smth to do with promises"}, {"post_id": 58560, "ts": "2026-08-31T00:30:24Z", "hours": 1.4617, "text": "Custom Skins Settings Front End Uhhhh it’s in the title… nothing interesting. https://github.com/users/BlxCode/projects/5 New Features Custom Skins are now FULLY 100% Out! custom skins. How it works: A gallery with a bunch of skins and their ids a textbox for the skin ids reload Changes & Bug Fixes None lol"}, {"post_id": 57793, "ts": "2026-08-30T02:50:18Z", "hours": 8.83, "text": "Inventory Ok so i’ve basically just coded the inventory system. uhhh New Features Inventory System Ok so this is how it works: There is an object that has all the invetory data There is a function that renders it it works like that so u dont render the inventory every frame. that would cause SOO MUCH LAG Place blocks Uhhh… place blocks and it also checks if the block u placed collides with any blocks or players and if it is next to a block Changes & Bug Fixes Fixed some weird crouching behavior that I cant really explain cuz it’s like weird. Dont mind the fact that the game bugged out… it’s cuz i forgot to add metadata to the pine logs and rickroll block thingy"}, {"post_id": 54123, "ts": "2026-08-24T22:58:00Z", "hours": 8.3086, "text": "Drops Part 2 Last devlog, I finished the drop part of drops! This time, I finished the pickup part of drops, and the hold part, though I feel like I do need to tweak the values, I just don’t know by how much. New Features Pick up: The pickup part of drops is basically just an if statement that runs like every frame to see whether or not the player is near enough to a dropped item for them to pick it up. It’s quite simple. Hotbar: I feel like I finished the hotbar, not the inventory system yet, just the hotbar. I finished the “rendering” part, by that I mean like viewing the inventory object and rendering the stuff that is on the hotbar. Changes: Renamed the id of the Inventory div to the Hotbar Readded the FPS counter, and gave it an overhaul The lower arm animation actually plays now"}, {"post_id": 50200, "ts": "2026-08-19T10:30:30Z", "hours": 8.8847, "text": "Drops Part 1 Drops! Though… you can’t pick them up yet… uhhh, and I’m nearing the 10-hour mark, so… yeah. I also completely rewrote the movement code and tweaked the values in collision detection, so that’s like half of the time. Also, it turns out I am not an engineer, as I rewrote my own drops code TWICE in the span of TWO HOURS because of chatgippity roasting me and me roasting myself, respectively. (Also, new dev log format, yay!) New Features Drops (partially) Drops were annoying to implement, partially because I’m a skill issue, and also because I had to learn new things like making classes and stuff like that. Changes & Bug Fixes Collision system revamp The old system was weird and also sometimes inconsistent, so I rewrote the movement system and tweaked the collision system. Overall, a bit of a smaller update if you ask me, and its ONE AND ONLY FEATURE wasn’t complete. Oh well… looks like we’re going to get the next dev log soon."}, {"post_id": 46768, "ts": "2026-08-14T08:07:02Z", "hours": 8.0811, "text": "Block Breaking and Particles! half of the time was spent fixing bugs uhh… ignore that youtube video… New Features: Shadow Particles when touching ground after falling, walking, and after breaking a block Block Breaking Changes & Fixes: Added more things to the block metadata object Fixed collisions not colliding"}, {"post_id": 43802, "ts": "2026-08-09T07:19:22Z", "hours": 0.2828, "text": "Bug Fix: I didn’t include the no falling if you are crouching in the last update so i just quickly added an if statement to include that feature."}, {"post_id": 43193, "ts": "2026-08-08T09:59:34Z", "hours": 1.7314, "text": "Players! Players are finally out. After what? 2 progress updates? Wow, that was harder than I imagined. Especially the physics. I had to think creatively and outside of the box for this. Also, this devlog continues from the last one. Just pretend that the progress updates like didn’t exist or just aren’t canon. Finished Features: Players: Player Physics Player Animations Changes: Slightly adjusted dirt texture Increased label elements’ font size Patched weird css border glitch Deleted unnecessary assets (like the custom cursor that only existed for like 5 minutes, 2 months ago) What’s Next (In order): Crouching, and not falling ✅ Drawing tools (hardest one, btw) ✅ Breaking blocks with tools and fists Custom Skins (it’s literally 90 % complete now, but my server is down due to some real life events so have to wait) ✅ Sandbox world Mobs if i have time ship ps. if you are wondering why the screen recording has some static noise, it’s because i have a small desktop fan running like really close, because it’s kinda hot indoors. I don’t know why it’s making tha t sound, it dosnt make that sound irl to be clear. I think it’s because i accidently turned on my mic and my mic is currently my crappy very quiet laptop mic"}, {"post_id": 41831, "ts": "2026-08-06T09:09:42Z", "hours": 8.1389, "text": "Progress Update #3 I’m too stupid to do physics. I should have made everything with Box2D. I’m currently fiddling with side collisions, as all other collisions (I hope) are done. I’ve also finished jumping and falling physics. Also, I’ve spent another 8 hours, and I want every minute to be for my new 3d printer. Finished Features Jumping My Jumping physics thingy is like the poor and stupid man’s way to do it, but hey… at least it works. It kinda just has a jump multiplyer and it goes down every frame and every frame the player goes up something like 0.05 block units multiplied by the jump multiplier Falling Falling is basically the same as the jumping one. i added sky yes, its a sky :D only a gradient. ill add sun and moon soon prob hopefully idk if there will be night, idk if i can create a night in time. Unfinished Features Side collisions This is stupidlly harder cuz my blocks’ x center is at 0, not 0.5. this means that a block spans from like -0.5 to 0.5. My brain cant handle this… thing."}, {"post_id": 39389, "ts": "2026-08-02T10:30:17Z", "hours": 10.1594, "text": "Progress Update #2: Why, you may ask, do I do progress updates? It’s because only 10 hours MAX can be logged per dev log, and uhh… I think you get the picture. So, without further adieu, this is what I’ve been working on. Unfinished Features: Players (85% Complete) That’s a huge jump from the last time I’ve updated you on the progress on players. Now the thing is, physics is annoying. And I’m not old enough to study calculus at my high school. Which is a shame, as I really like the idea of calculating values based off of differentiating values. I’ve literally just been playing around with the physics at 3 am!??!? Wow! It’s literally 3:30 in the morning. I should go get some sleep. The jumping and crouching are a bit finicky, but I’ll fix them sometime later. Closing Remarks: First of all, a lot of the 10 hours in this progress update have been miscellaneous things like bug fixes or just general tweaks. I’ve also been realizing that this project is big. But the end of the tunnel is still nowhere in sight. Yet, if I can stop sitting around and start sprinting towards, uhh… any direction, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. I hope I can finish this project before school starts. I’ll have to grind like a lot, and especially at night because my siblings are quite brain-rotted, annoying, and loud."}, {"post_id": 33370, "ts": "2026-07-23T07:19:45Z", "hours": 2.5872, "text": "Custom Skins! After a lot of time getting the back-end setup (with some help from ChatGPT, I’d have to admit), custom skins are here! (Granted… players aren’t here yet so you can’t really try them out lol.) New Features New page ( https://blxcode.github.io/FlatCraft/upload-skin/ ) Think of it like skindex but with a worse ui Searching for skins Skin Uploading Changes & Bug-Fixes Grass Retexture Dirt Retexture"}, {"post_id": 32173, "ts": "2026-07-21T04:55:32Z", "hours": 8.2811, "text": "Progress report: I have been grinding this, and I haven’t posted a dev log in a while because I haven’t really finished anything, so this will be a progress report. Finished Features: New dirt, and grass textures The old textures suck, because in between blocks there would be like a small section where there is like no detail, so I added those details and recolored the grass bit of the grass texture because the old one was too “limy.” Added bedrock Self-explanatory; no interesting thing happened that I would want to yap about Updated Game rendering Last devlog, I ported my rendering side of the game to LittleJS, a browser game engine. Why? Because I realized that I wouldn’t have the time and effort to manually do advanced stuff like lighting and particles. Hence, I ported to LittleJS. Now, in the days after the port, I had to fix a lot of things and bugs. Originally, the game would render everything, even if it wasn’t on screen, so I fixed that. I made it so that if you couldn’t see the blocks in the camera, they wouldn’t be rendered. Unfinished Features: Flat Game Mode (90% Done): I decided that tinkering with sandbox mode first would be stupid, as I would still have to make players, inventory system, etc. I feel like I’ve finished everything, but there is something missing. The sky. I still need to make the sky. I don’t know if it should be an image or something else. Players (10% Done): All I have done for players is literally a goffy ahh skin (which I should make better) and a player variable. I think you would be able to piece together what I want for this. Custom skins (60% Done): I want to make custom skins. I have completed the UI, the security part of the server-side (aka my old broken ahh Chromebook) code, and a simple UI for it. All I need to make now is server-side code to store the custom skin and deliver it to the client."}, {"post_id": 22640, "ts": "2026-07-05T06:00:35Z", "hours": 5.6808, "text": "The LittleJS Update Yes, this doesn’t look like much, but it took 5 hours over the span of multiple days and a LOT of trial and error to get to this point! I had to learn so many things, like Promises, async and await, how to make new classes, and LittleJS. But why? Why go through so much trouble? That’s because I’ve realized that I would not, in my current state, be capable of making a full Minecraft clone using only the vanilla HTML Canvas. I chose littleJS because of the promise of fast and lean, and I had already tried it before but failed; I wanted to redeem myself. New Features The rendering part of the game is now done with LittleJS Popups now have minimum width and heights Create new world form now has placeholder text for those who are lazy to type stuff Fixes Renamed Ebony to Cedar because Ebony trees are not pine trees Removed the useless pausing system Removed all of the old rendering system (NEXT UPDATE: Create worlds from seeds 😭 i need help with this)"}, {"post_id": 14909, "ts": "2026-06-24T06:37:35Z", "hours": 4.1328, "text": "The Terrain Preparation Update This is a BIG UI update, and in the next update I’ll add scripting to most of the world menu UI, which has not yet been scripted. New Features: Play Button (shows after the loading screen is finished (in order to get the main menu audio to play)) Main menu music (from opengameart.org) World Menus UI World Creation UI Temporary Gradient Background (To be replaced by game screenshots) Scrollable Credits Fixes Fixed some spelling mistakes in the code"}, {"post_id": 10957, "ts": "2026-06-17T23:33:42Z", "hours": 2.9889, "text": "The Loading Screen Update Added a loading screen which goes to 90% and then waits for the CrazyGames SDK. Removed all NPM dependancies and replaced them with CDNs Added a squeeze in animation when closing Loading screen and Main Menu And much more! (NEXT UPDATE: Create worlds frm seeds with basic terrein 😭 i need help with this)"}, {"post_id": 8555, "ts": "2026-06-14T06:57:09Z", "hours": 1.3439, "text": "The Backdrop Update Added Backdrops to all popups Added a “pausing” system (just disabling keyboard input for now) Added Animations like popup to the main menu elements Added some NPM packages"}, {"post_id": 7631, "ts": "2026-06-12T19:08:43Z", "hours": 2.4183, "text": "main menu, new cursor"}, {"post_id": 5344, "ts": "2026-06-09T02:33:51Z", "hours": 0.4506, "text": "re-done block rendering, adding a function instead of just drawing it onto the canvas, added more textures (gems in block form) and redid dirt texture. Also added movement (only canvas movemnt)"}, {"post_id": 4754, "ts": "2026-06-08T06:28:44Z", "hours": 0.9686, "text": "maple (oak) trees and fps counter"}, {"post_id": 4657, "ts": "2026-06-08T02:00:46Z", "hours": 1.7033, "text": "Inventory UI, Block Creation, some textures"}]...
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Title: FlatCraft by @Blxm | Stardance
Devlogs:
In Title: FlatCraft by @Blxm | Stardance
Devlogs:
Inventory UI, Block Creation, some textures
maple (oak) trees and fps counter
re-done block rendering, adding a function instead of just drawing it onto the canvas, added more textures (gems in block form) and redid dirt texture. Also added movement (only canvas movemnt)
main menu, new cursor
The Backdrop Update Added Backdrops to all popups Added a “pausing” system (just disabling keyboard input for now) Added Animations like popup to the main menu elements Added some NPM packages
The Loading Screen Update Added a loading screen which goes to 90% and then waits for the CrazyGames SDK. Removed all NPM dependancies and replaced them with CDNs Added a squeeze in animation when closing Loading screen and Main Menu And much more! (NEXT UPDATE: Create worlds frm seeds with basic terrein 😭 i need help with this)
The Terrain Preparation Update This is a BIG UI update, and in the next update I’ll add scripting to most of the world menu UI, which has not yet been scripted. New Features: Play Button (shows after the loading screen is finished (in order to get the main menu audio to play)) Main menu music (from opengameart.org) World Menus UI World Creation UI Temporary Gradient Background (To be replaced by game screenshots) Scrollable Credits Fixes Fixed some spelling mistakes in the code
The LittleJS Update Yes, this doesn’t look like much, but it took 5 hours over the span of multiple days and a LOT of trial and error to get to this point! I had to learn so many things, like Promises, async and await, how to make new classes, and LittleJS. But why? Why go through so much trouble? That’s because I’ve realized that I would not, in my current state, be capable of making a full Minecraft clone using only the vanilla HTML Canvas. I chose littleJS because of the promise of fast and lean, and I had already tried it before but failed; I wanted to redeem myself. New Features The rendering part of the game is now done with LittleJS Popups now have minimum width and heights Create new world form now has placeholder text for those who are lazy to type stuff Fixes Renamed Ebony to Cedar because Ebony trees are not pine trees Removed the useless pausing system Removed all of the old rendering system (NEXT UPDATE: Create worlds from seeds 😭 i need help with this)
Progress report: I have been grinding this, and I haven’t posted a dev log in a while because I haven’t really finished anything, so this will be a progress report. Finished Features: New dirt, and grass textures The old textures suck, because in between blocks there would be like a small section where there is like no detail, so I added those details and recolored the grass bit of the grass texture because the old one was too “limy.” Added bedrock Self-explanatory; no interesting thing happened that I would want to yap about Updated Game rendering Last devlog, I ported my rendering side of the game to LittleJS, a browser game engine. Why? Because I realized that I wouldn’t have the time and effort to manually do advanced stuff like lighting and particles. Hence, I ported to LittleJS. Now, in the days after the port, I had to fix a lot of things and bugs. Originally, the game would render everything, even if it wasn’t on screen, so I fixed that. I made it so that if you couldn’t see the blocks in the camera, they wouldn’t be rendered. Unfinished Features: Flat Game Mode (90% Done): I decided that tinkering with sandbox mode first would be stupid, as I would still have to make players, inventory system, etc. I feel like I’ve finished everything, but there is something missing. The sky. I still need to make the sky. I don’t know if it should be an image or something else. Players (10% Done): All I have done for players is literally a goffy ahh skin (which I should make better) and a player variable. I think you would be able to piece together what I want for this. Custom skins (60% Done): I want to make custom skins. I have completed the UI, the security part of the server-side (aka my old broken ahh Chromebook) code, and a simple UI for it. All I need to make now is server-side code to store the custom skin and deliver it to the client.
Custom Skins! After a lot of time getting the back-end setup (with some help from ChatGPT, I’d have to admit), custom skins are here! (Granted… players aren’t here yet so you can’t really try them out lol.) New Features New page ( https://blxcode.github.io/FlatCraft/upload-skin/ ) Think of it like skindex but with a worse ui Searching for skins Skin Uploading Changes & Bug-Fixes Grass Retexture Dirt Retexture
Progress Update #2: Why, you may ask, do I do progress updates? It’s because only 10 hours MAX can be logged per dev log, and uhh… I think you get the picture. So, without further adieu, this is what I’ve been working on. Unfinished Features: Players (85% Complete) That’s a huge jump from the last time I’ve updated you on the progress on players. Now the thing is, physics is annoying. And I’m not old enough to study calculus at my high school. Which is a shame, as I really like the idea of calculating values based off of differentiating values. I’ve literally just been playing around with the physics at 3 am!??!? Wow! It’s literally 3:30 in the morning. I should go get some sleep. The jumping and crouching are a bit finicky, but I’ll fix them sometime later. Closing Remarks: First of all, a lot of the 10 hours in this progress update have been miscellaneous things like bug fixes or just general tweaks. I’ve also been realizing that this project is big. But the end of the tunnel is still nowhere in sight. Yet, if I can stop sitting around and start sprinting towards, uhh… any direction, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. I hope I can finish this project before school starts. I’ll have to grind like a lot, and especially at night because my siblings are quite brain-rotted, annoying, and loud.
Progress Update #3 I’m too stupid to do physics. I should have made everything with Box2D. I’m currently fiddling with side collisions, as all other collisions (I hope) are done. I’ve also finished jumping and falling physics. Also, I’ve spent another 8 hours, and I want every minute to be for my new 3d printer. Finished Features Jumping My Jumping physics thingy is like the poor and stupid man’s way to do it, but hey… at least it works. It kinda just has a jump multiplyer and it goes down every frame and every frame the player goes up something like 0.05 block units multiplied by the jump multiplier Falling Falling is basically the same as the jumping one. i added sky yes, its a sky :D only a gradient. ill add sun and moon soon prob hopefully idk if there will be night, idk if i can create a night in time. Unfinished Features Side collisions This is stupidlly harder cuz my blocks’ x center is at 0, not 0.5. this means that a block spans from like -0.5 to 0.5. My brain cant handle this… thing.
Players! Players are finally out. After what? 2 progress updates? Wow, that was harder than I imagined. Especially the physics. I had to think creatively and outside of the box for this. Also, this devlog continues from the last one. Just pretend that the progress updates like didn’t exist or just aren’t canon. Finished Features: Players: Player Physics Player Animations Changes: Slightly adjusted dirt texture Increased label elements’ font size Patched weird css border glitch Deleted unnecessary assets (like the custom cursor that only existed for like 5 minutes, 2 months ago) What’s Next (In order): Crouching, and not falling ✅ Drawing tools (hardest one, btw) ✅ Breaking blocks with tools and fists Custom Skins (it’s literally 90 % complete now, but my server is down due to some real life events so have to wait) ✅ Sandbox world Mobs if i have time ship ps. if you are wondering why the screen recording has some static noise, it’s because i have a small desktop fan running like really close, because it’s kinda hot indoors. I don’t know why it’s making tha t sound, it dosnt make that sound irl to be clear. I think it’s because i accidently turned on my mic and my mic is currently my crappy very quiet laptop mic
Bug Fix: I didn’t include the no falling if you are crouching in the last update so i just quickly added an if statement to include that feature.
Block Breaking and Particles! half of the time was spent fixing bugs uhh… ignore that youtube video… New Features: Shadow Particles when touching ground after falling, walking, and after breaking a block Block Breaking Changes & Fixes: Added more things to the block metadata object Fixed collisions not colliding
Drops Part 1 Drops! Though… you can’t pick them up yet… uhhh, and I’m nearing the 10-hour mark, so… yeah. I also completely rewrote the movement code and tweaked the values in collision detection, so that’s like half of the time. Also, it turns out I am not an engineer, as I rewrote my own drops code TWICE in the span of TWO HOURS because of chatgippity roasting me and me roasting myself, respectively. (Also, new dev log format, yay!) New Features Drops (partially) Drops were annoying to implement, partially because I’m a skill issue, and also because I had to learn new things like making classes and stuff like that. Changes & Bug Fixes Collision system revamp The old system was weird and also sometimes inconsistent, so I rewrote the movement system and tweaked the collision system. Overall, a bit of a smaller update if you ask me, and its ONE AND ONLY FEATURE wasn’t complete. Oh well… looks like we’re going to get the next dev log soon.
Drops Part 2 Last devlog, I finished the drop part of drops! This time, I finished the pickup part of drops, and the hold part, though I feel like I do need to tweak the values, I just don’t know by how much. New Features Pick up: The pickup part of drops is basically just an if statement that runs like every frame to see whether or not the player is near enough to a dropped item for them to pick it up. It’s quite simple. Hotbar: I feel like I finished the hotbar, not the inventory system yet, just the hotbar. I finished the “rendering” part, by that I mean like viewing the inventory object and rendering the stuff that is on the hotbar. Changes: Renamed the id of the Inventory div to the Hotbar Readded the FPS counter, and gave it an overhaul The lower arm animation actually plays now
Inventory Ok so i’ve basically just coded the inventory system. uhhh New Features Inventory System Ok so this is how it works: There is an object that has all the invetory data There is a function that renders it it works like that so u dont render the inventory every frame. that would cause SOO MUCH LAG Place blocks Uhhh… place blocks and it also checks if the block u placed collides with any blocks or players and if it is next to a block Changes & Bug Fixes Fixed some weird crouching behavior that I cant really explain cuz it’s like weird. Dont mind the fact that the game bugged out… it’s cuz i forgot to add metadata to the pine logs and rickroll block thingy
Custom Skins Settings Front End Uhhhh it’s in the title… nothing interesting. https://github.com/users/BlxCode/projects/5 New Features Custom Skins are now FULLY 100% Out! custom skins. How it works: A gallery with a bunch of skins and their ids a textbox for the skin ids reload Changes & Bug Fixes None lol
Lighting & Dropping stuff i’ve been slacking off recently, and I mean it. I’ve coded less, and played more games due to the uhhh looming school season starting again but like… i’ve still managed to make things like lighting, dropping stuff, and shuffeling stuff in ur inventory by using the number keys. Features Lighting At first, this was one of the reasons why I decided to switch to little js, but like their system is not designed for 2d minecraft use, so I had to improvise. The lighting system consists of two basic things. One is the ambient lighting, which basically fills the whole screen with light / filling the whole screen without light, and the second thing is like “light objects” by that, I mean like point lights, which are like round lightbulbs per say, and they emit light. Those would be used for stuff like torches. Q Dropping things with q didn’t exist in the 2 part drops update, cuz i was too lazy to implement that. But now, I added that. It’s simple really, it just creates a new droppped item every time u press q. and if u press q with control, then it drops everything in the hotbar slot hovered, and u can drop things in ur inven by hovering over it. Moving things around in ur inventory with the top number keys I added that cuz im just used to that in uhhh…. bloxd.io so yeah, i just added that. Attack anim press mouse button 0 to attack. currently just attack animation for now Changes & Bug fixes Random tick events for stuff like grass turning into dirt or vice versa *greijodkmgrfd idk, it was in my commits smth to do with promises
Tools Update!!!!111 3 more hard gh issues to go! yay it’s like 2:30 on a friday. not bad, but considering school is back, not good either. Honestly, i swear Idk if i can actually finish this before sep 20th, so if i can’t i’ll actually do 100 pushups. and it WILL be on a devlog. so uhh… yeh. idk why but you can see me do 100 pushups. defenatly not in a row tho my arms are actually twigs bro. ok enough yapping, let’s actually get into this. New Features: Tools!!111 tools. the final implementaiton was quite simple actually. I just added tools to the textures, and added them to the metadata, added a few bits of code for the speeding up of breaking blocks and boom! tools. Changes & Bugfixes: Compleated Metadata Drops now produce 80% less lag (by making sure that only 1 shadow per x coord can exist)
Saving worlds… I hope Honsetly, school has been removing litterally half of the day I would have used to do flatcraft, so… yeah. im also writing this at school cuz i needed to sleep. dont tell anyone lol New Features: Saving It’s quite simple actually. Just saving an object with some world data to local storage. Honestly, that’s it. Flower flower. very cool Terrain generation Terrain generation, no ore generation lol
Sprinting this will be my last ever devlog! New Features: FULL Random world generation: It works like this: Seeds: Seeds are not that important, though they do play a part for terrain generation. Terrain: The terrain is basically just a huge array with preset Y levels depending on the terrain type, ie: mountianus, hilly, flat. Ores: Ores are truly random. It dosn’t depend on the seed. Trees: Trees are also truly random Sprinting: Double press the key in the direction you want to go to sprint that’s it! plz rate it well
Fixed some issues regarding prod (wont get paied for this 😭) ALright, even though i just shipped, there were stuff that were broken, first of all i realized that if you have a expensive 4k 240 hz ahh monitor, the game would get very fast due to the fact that I didn’t introduce deltat time, so i introduced delta time. Bug fixes Fixed bug when you were very fast on a 60hz+ monitor Fixed glitch where the animation state changes between falling and breaking a block while breaking a block while falling
FIxed bug where jumping wasn’t scaled to your fps Simple really! it’s on the title Changes & Bug Fixes fixed bug where jumping wasn’t scaled to your fps that bug would have made high fps players not able to jump high, and low fps players to jump SUPER high
Ships:
FlatCraft Basic Info FlatCraft is an open source, MIT licensed 2d Minecraft inspired game. It uses LittleJS for the rendering, and vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the UI. All the rest was written by me. Challenges: One of the biggest challenge was world generation. The idea was to use simplex noise to make terrain, but there was one problem: It’s uncontrolability. I wanted real biomes, but that coudn’t happen because I didn’t know how to control simplex noise. Nor did I know how to make mountains. I solved it by realizing that this is just a silly 2d Minecraft game for a program designed to get teens to make something, not for teens to make some complex minecraft like game, so I decided to bite the bullet and to just make an array for each biome, and have that array contain the y level of the highest block, and use that array to make the terrain. It’s basically like [1,1,2,2,3,3]. Nothing complicated, and if you played this game long enough you’ll see that each biomes are litterally the same. Most Proud of: I’m actually most proud of the custom skins part of flatcraft. It’s really not that complex, but it took a mesruable amount of time to get it working. I had to learn node.js, finally had a use for a server! and used my old chromebook as my server. I made the precaution of adding a ratelimiter just in case someone tried to take it down or whatever, but yeah. That’s what I’m most proud of. What I learned: Making classes in js NodeJS LittleJS engine Stuff that didnt make it into the game: Game music Mobs Credits Art: Me, mostly me, My little brother Inspired by https://www.planetminecraft.com/texture-pack/digs-simple-pack-1-15-100-complete/ , and https://bloxd.io Programming: Me Libraries used: LittleJS...
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Black Hole Simulation by @huncikoma | Stardance
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huncikoma
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1
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99.0
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1426
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-25T14:32:04Z", "hours": 99.0, "multiplier": 14.93, "payout": 1426, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a real BlackHole simulation using python, Nvdia Cuda accelaration, It was very challenging to write the code plus understand the physics behind it as a 14 years old, the idea came from the Interstellar scene in the Black Hole simulation that the IBM supercomputer simulated. This is my version but this simulation is very power consuming, my 5070 hitting 2.2fps in the highest quality, I beg you dear reader to download and test it, because the demo site is just a demo not a real simulation, not Cuda and python like the real one if you download, and you can’t acces the settings that i made in the real so please download and try it not just the demo site because it is not the same feeling. Enjoy your trip at my simulated Black Hole. (Note: this is only works with Nvdia graphics card because of the Cuda (Sorry AMD))", "repo": "https://github.com/huncikoma-code/BlackHole", "demo": "https://huncikoma-code.github.io/BlackHole/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 54436, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 54436, "ts": "2026-08-25T13:25:05Z", "hours": 4.6667, "text": "Devlog#13 Finally, I finished the project, it is working, I created an install and a run batch file, and it is working, EVERYTHING!!! here a demonstration video (Sorry for the quality i have to shrinf from 201mb to 49mb) in the max level i’m getting 2.2 fps with a 5070!!!"}, {"post_id": 53013, "ts": "2026-08-23T12:14:59Z", "hours": 7.7, "text": "Devlog#12 Finally!!! I finished the main code, however I must do some bugfixes, and write a batch file to automaticly download python libaries, extensions , drivers to work. In the next devlog I can finally show you simulation footage."}, {"post_id": 52199, "ts": "2026-08-22T09:14:41Z", "hours": 9.1278, "text": "Devlog#11 In this section I worked a lot, I made the render section and the dynamic resolution scaling (auto mode)."}, {"post_id": 51555, "ts": "2026-08-21T10:22:36Z", "hours": 6.89, "text": "Devlog#10 Today I almost finished the Application part, doing some bug fixes, collecting the requirements, and I also did the rotating camera function and the orbit function as well"}, {"post_id": 50854, "ts": "2026-08-20T09:21:40Z", "hours": 7.7883, "text": "Devlog#9 Today I made the buffers and the screen size types to work but I can’t try it yet. because I has to finish the code"}, {"post_id": 49375, "ts": "2026-08-18T05:06:50Z", "hours": 7.5914, "text": "Devlog #8 I continued the aplication part, I made the screenshot option, this project is huge and I am very excited about it."}, {"post_id": 48740, "ts": "2026-08-17T08:35:41Z", "hours": 7.7036, "text": "Devlog#7 Finally I’m ready with the quality part, and I am working now on the Apllication and the Cuda drivers, In this section the Ai hellped me with the Cuda accelaration part because as I mentioned in my devlogs I didn’t work with Cuda before and I’m learning in the meantime with the help of Ai."}, {"post_id": 47345, "ts": "2026-08-15T07:12:43Z", "hours": 7.8725, "text": "Devlog#6 Today I worked around the graphics section more and I made the windows options: Fulscreen, windowed etc…"}, {"post_id": 46773, "ts": "2026-08-14T08:41:01Z", "hours": 5.1619, "text": "Devlog #5 In this part I fixed a lot of bugs around the cuda and the kernel section, I searched the compatible Cuda acceleration drivers."}, {"post_id": 45134, "ts": "2026-08-11T13:02:46Z", "hours": 7.0336, "text": "I made the Quallity settings for the reendering, I swear the 8K will be brutal."}, {"post_id": 39412, "ts": "2026-08-02T11:13:03Z", "hours": 8.2039, "text": "Devlog #3 — Post-processing and cameraRaw output from the renderer is HDR — values way above 1.0 around the disk."}, {"post_id": 38723, "ts": "2026-08-01T08:38:59Z", "hours": 5.7339, "text": "Devlog #2 — The render kernel Every pixel is one GPU thread, each tracing a photon backwards from the camera."}, {"post_id": 38110, "ts": "2026-07-31T10:13:41Z", "hours": 14.0203, "text": "Devlog #1: Black hole raytracer, the GPU side New project. This time it’s a real-time black hole renderer, including gravitational lensing and the accretion disk. It’s in Python, which feels familiar after working on the ISS tracker.The main idea is to shoot a ray for every pixel and bend it according to the Schwarzschild geodesic equation as it passes the black hole."}]...
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Title: Black Hole Simulation by @huncikoma | Stard Title: Black Hole Simulation by @huncikoma | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog #1: Black hole raytracer, the GPU side New project. This time it’s a real-time black hole renderer, including gravitational lensing and the accretion disk. It’s in Python, which feels familiar after working on the ISS tracker.The main idea is to shoot a ray for every pixel and bend it according to the Schwarzschild geodesic equation as it passes the black hole.
Devlog #2 — The render kernel Every pixel is one GPU thread, each tracing a photon backwards from the camera.
Devlog #3 — Post-processing and cameraRaw output from the renderer is HDR — values way above 1.0 around the disk.
I made the Quallity settings for the reendering, I swear the 8K will be brutal.
Devlog #5 In this part I fixed a lot of bugs around the cuda and the kernel section, I searched the compatible Cuda acceleration drivers.
Devlog#6 Today I worked around the graphics section more and I made the windows options: Fulscreen, windowed etc…
Devlog#7 Finally I’m ready with the quality part, and I am working now on the Apllication and the Cuda drivers, In this section the Ai hellped me with the Cuda accelaration part because as I mentioned in my devlogs I didn’t work with Cuda before and I’m learning in the meantime with the help of Ai.
Devlog #8 I continued the aplication part, I made the screenshot option, this project is huge and I am very excited about it.
Devlog#9 Today I made the buffers and the screen size types to work but I can’t try it yet. because I has to finish the code
Devlog#10 Today I almost finished the Application part, doing some bug fixes, collecting the requirements, and I also did the rotating camera function and the orbit function as well
Devlog#11 In this section I worked a lot, I made the render section and the dynamic resolution scaling (auto mode).
Devlog#12 Finally!!! I finished the main code, however I must do some bugfixes, and write a batch file to automaticly download python libaries, extensions , drivers to work. In the next devlog I can finally show you simulation footage.
Devlog#13 Finally, I finished the project, it is working, I created an install and a run batch file, and it is working, EVERYTHING!!! here a demonstration video (Sorry for the quality i have to shrinf from 201mb to 49mb) in the max level i’m getting 2.2 fps with a 5070!!!
Ships:
I made a real BlackHole simulation using python, Nvdia Cuda accelaration, It was very challenging to write the code plus understand the physics behind it as a 14 years old, the idea came from the Interstellar scene in the Black Hole simulation that the IBM supercomputer simulated. This is my version but this simulation is very power consuming, my 5070 hitting 2.2fps in the highest quality, I beg you dear reader to download and test it, because the demo site is just a demo not a real simulation, not Cuda and python like the real one if you download, and you can’t acces the settings that i made in the real so please download and try it not just the demo site because it is not the same feeling. Enjoy your trip at my simulated Black Hole. (Note: this is only works with Nvdia graphics card because of the Cuda (Sorry AMD))...
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Canvas Sweeper by @GeorgeZ | Stardance
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GeorgeZ
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1
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120.0
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1426
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-15T06:30:59Z", "hours": 120.0, "multiplier": 11.9, "payout": 1426, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Canvas Sweeper is officially shipped. canvassweeper.com The problem I wanted to solve was pretty simple: Canvas tells you what assignments you have, but it does not tell you how to fit all of that work into your actual life. Canvas Sweeper connects to Canvas, pulls your courses and assignments, tracks due dates and missing work, prioritizes what matters most, and turns everything into an actual study schedule based on your routines, school schedule, preferred study times, workload limits, and other commitments. It also includes: Google login Canvas connection + assignment sync assignment workspace smart prioritization automatic study plan generation recurring routines for school, rowing, clubs, commute, meals, sleep, work, and custom blocks student profile + study preferences Google Calendar integration Canvai ( Canvas ai ) account/privacy controls account deletion AI history deletion settings security checks, testing, Docker, CI/CD, and a self-hosted Ubuntu deployment 3 major quality-of-life improvements 1. Turns Canvas into an actual plan Instead of seeing a giant list of assignments and figuring everything out yourself, Canvas Sweeper decides when there is actually time to work on each assignment. 2. Plans around your real life School, practices, clubs, commute, sleep, meals, work, and other routines can all be added so it does not schedule homework when you are busy. 3. Automatically prioritizes important work Deadlines, missing assignments, tests, workload, and your preferences are considered so the most important work gets attention first. Why this is a QoL improvement The goal is to remove a bunch of repetitive planning. Instead of checking Canvas, checking your calendar, thinking about everything due, finding free time, and manually deciding what to work on, Canvas Sweeper brings those steps together. Working project The app is live and usable. Google login works, Canvas connection works, assignments can sync, routines/preferences can be configured, and the planning system can turn active assignments into a schedule. The Canvas integration is complete. Google Calendar can be connected, but its public OAuth configuration is still going through Google’s verification process, which can take a few weeks. Google may currently show an unverified-app warning during that connection flow, and testers can continue through the advanced option if they choose to. One note about the demo video: I currently have no active Canvas assignments, so there is nothing for Canvas Sweeper to turn into a study schedule in the recording. Effort / execution This ended up becoming way bigger than I originally expected. I built the frontend and backend, Canvas and Google integrations, database, authentication, planning logic, security systems, testing, Docker setup, CI/CD, and deployment. I also decided to self-host the actual application on my own Ubuntu server instead of using a normal app hosting platform, so I ended up learning Linux, Docker, networking, HTTPS, OAuth, APIs, databases, security, and production deployment along the way. Definitely a lot of hours went into this. Canvas Sweeper is live!!! Thanks for watching the journey!!", "repo": "https://github.com/georgeSzielinski/canvas-sweeper-demo", "demo": "https://canvassweeper.com/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 46175, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 46175, "ts": "2026-08-13T06:23:36Z", "hours": 0.3, "text": "finally found the issue - i set up google auth wrong and accidentally made it so only one person could sign up fixing that tomorrow, hopefully nothing else breaks."}, {"post_id": 45623, "ts": "2026-08-12T07:20:07Z", "hours": 0.3667, "text": "trying to get google auth working for hours and it still refuses to cooperate canvas sweeper coming soon 👀"}, {"post_id": 44990, "ts": "2026-08-11T03:50:19Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Canvas Sweeper - Authentication Testing( Devlog #16 ) Had to reconnect Supabase today, which took a bit longer than expected. I’m now testing the full authentication flow with Google OAuth and fixing the last few signup/login issues. If everything goes smoothly, Canvas Sweeper will probably launch over the weekend 👀"}, {"post_id": 44441, "ts": "2026-08-10T06:00:29Z", "hours": 4.8, "text": "Unfortunately I have somehow gone in a complete circle trying to launch this I have never deployed anything before, so I guess there’s a first time for everything. 97.3% chance Canvas Sweeper launches tomorrow. Sorry for the delay. Was definitely not part of the plan."}, {"post_id": 43753, "ts": "2026-08-09T05:24:18Z", "hours": 3.3, "text": "Canvas Sweeper Launch Prep ( Devlog #15 ) Today I finished the final prep for launching canvas sweeper online. I spent most of the time making sure everything was secure, stable, and ready instead of rushing. I completed the Docker setup, hardened the frontend and backend containers, added security checks, verified the deployment pipeline, and prepared the Ubuntu server deploymen. I also finished the final testing, image verification, and release preparation needed before putting the app online. What’s Next Finish the final server setup Connect the deployment Launch Canvas Sweeper online tomorrow THANKS FOR READING!!!!"}, {"post_id": 43155, "ts": "2026-08-08T08:27:30Z", "hours": 6.7667, "text": "Canvas Sweeper Deployment ( Devlog #14 ) I’m finally getting Canvas Sweeper ready to go online. I’m going to host it on my own Ubuntu server using Docker, then connect the frontend, backend, database, HTTPS, and the public URL. Since I already have the server, I won’t pay for hosting like Vercel or Render, which is pretty cool because I can run the whole thing myself and keep upgrading it later. Today I worked on getting the release ready and security. I added and tested rate limits, user isolation, secret scanning, CodeQL, Gitleaks, container scanning, safer Docker builds, and a full GitHub release pipeline. I also spent a lot of time fixing random CI issues that only showed up once everything started running in GitHub. What’s Next Finish the last security checks Set up the server Connect the domain Put Canvas Sweeper online"}, {"post_id": 42482, "ts": "2026-08-07T07:54:14Z", "hours": 9.0333, "text": "Canvas Sweeper - Beta Security & Release Preparation ( Devlog #13 ) Features / Improvements Added AI safety improvements: AI claim grounding so canvai cannot make stupid academic conclusions Structured ai responses tied to real evidence Prompt injection protection Ai context and replay safety improvements Added AI privacy controls: ai enable/disable preference ai history deletion Account deletion system Updated ai disclosures and privacy explanations Added security protections: User isolation testing to prevent students from accessing other users data Rate limiting for authentication, Canvas, Calendar, planning, and Canvai ai Request size limits to prevent abuse Operation locks to prevent duplicate expensive tasks Error and logging sanitization Security headers and authenticated response cache protection Secret scanning and CI security improvements Added deployment and release preparation: Beta deployment configuration Secure Docker boundaries CI/CD security improvements Dependency and supply chain checks Updated privacy policy and terms of service Data retention and deletion documentation Security Work Completed Authentication hardening Authorization and user isolation testing API abuse protection ai security review Provider security boundaries Data lifecycle controls Account deletion testing Privacy and legal preparation What’s Next!!!! Finish final deployment steps Connect the beta URL Prepare Canvai for its first public users The first public beta release should be ready tomorrow.!!!!! THANKS FOR READING!!!"}, {"post_id": 41820, "ts": "2026-08-06T08:37:50Z", "hours": 8.8656, "text": "Canvas Sweeper — Beta Preparation & AI Upgrade ( Devlog # 12 ) Recently, I finished a lot of the final polish before letting other people test it. All major pages and workflows have been added, and I have been focusing on making the experience feel like a real product. the most annoying bugs I fixed was the Canvas connection status. I probably spent 4 hours fixing a tiny red connection box that was not turning green. It ended up being sync states, cached data, and different parts of the app interpreting connection status differently. What’s Next Before releasing a beta, I’m focusing on making Canvas Sweeper safe and ready for real users: Improving security and protecting student data Creating privacy policies and terms of service Improving AI privacy, safety, and transparency Testing user data isolation Preparing the app for a private beta launch THANKS FOR READING!!!"}, {"post_id": 41188, "ts": "2026-08-05T07:36:41Z", "hours": 8.0667, "text": "Canvai AI - Making Canvas Smarter ( Devlog # 11 ) Canvai has grown a lot since the last update. I finished building the foundation for Canvai ai and started preparing the next phase of the project. Features Complete Canvas assignment integration Automatic study planning with Google Calendar Student modeling based on completed work and feedback Adaptive Planning with workload analysis, simulations, and recommendations Canvai ai foundation with NVIDIA ai integration Safe ai architecture with read-only tools and evidence-based responses Redesigned Adaptive Planning experience to match the final product design What I Learned Designing ai systems around existing data instead of replacing them Building safe ai features with strict boundaries ( so nobody drains my pockets ) Creating large full stack applications with many connected systems Improving user experience through design reviews and testing How much work goes into turning a prototype into a real product What’s Next I’m currently working on redesigning Canvai Assistant and making the ai features feel like a real assistant. The goal is to let students ask questions about their assignments, schedules, risks, and progress while keeping everything evidence based and safe. THANKS FOR READING!! Page of free Nvidia ai APIs"}, {"post_id": 40614, "ts": "2026-08-04T08:38:54Z", "hours": 5.5667, "text": "Canvas Sweeper - Building the Brain( Devlog #10 ) Canvas Sweeper has grown a lot since the last update. Over the past few missions, I built the core systems that power Canvai: Features Canvas assignment intelligence: analyzes deadlines, workload, risk, and priority Smart scheduling engine: creates realistic study plans around school, rowing, and personal commitments Google Calendar integration: lets approved study plans become real calendar events Learning system: tracks completed work and improves understanding of planning accuracy Student modeling: learns from completed sessions and creates evidence-based insights Canvai assistant foundation: explains plans, risks, and recommendations without using AI yet Advanced planning: workload forecasting, exam planning, dependencies, and what-if scenarios Built With Next.js FastAPI PostgreSQL / SQLite Docker Google Calendar API Canvas API TypeScript Python What I learned this session Building large full stack systems takes much more than just writing features Designing reliable data models before adding AI is important Creating explainable systems is much harder than creating simple automation Testing, migrations, and security What’s Next The foundation for Canvai (canvas ai) is finally coming together. The next step is improving the user experience and preparing the system for the future AI phase. I am also making the page for the ai assistant and brain. THANKS FOR READING!!!"}, {"post_id": 39930, "ts": "2026-08-03T07:42:03Z", "hours": 6.2856, "text": "Canvas Sweeper = Final Stages! hopefully ( Devlog #9 ) Canvas Sweeper is finally fully functional and looking much better than before. I’ve connected the new UI to the real app and finished most of the core planning system. Built with Next.js + React FastAPI SQLAlchemy + Alembic SQLite Canvas API Google Calendar API Docker What it can do Sync real Canvas assignments Build study plans around your schedule Review and edit sessions Publish approved plans to Google Calendar Track progress and reschedule work Next Supabase/PostgreSQL Vercel deployment ( Hopefully soon ) Custom domain ( Already setting up ) Security and privacy improvements Invite only beta Background syncing AI task breakdown and smarter estimates THANKS FOR READING!!!"}, {"post_id": 39325, "ts": "2026-08-02T07:23:28Z", "hours": 7.9786, "text": "I Severely Underestimated This UI Redesign ( Devlog #8 ) I thought implementing the new Canvas Sweeper UI would be a quick frontend update. It was not… I’ve added the new dashboard, assignments page, and plan page, but I still need to finish the rest, including settings and all the smaller screens. Then I have to connect everything properly and make sure every button, state, animation, and real data flow actually works .😬 So this has officially turned into a multi day project, but it’s finally starting to come together. After the UI is fully finished and working, I can finally move on to the AI phase. THANKS FOR READING!!"}, {"post_id": 38697, "ts": "2026-08-01T06:48:05Z", "hours": 9.1, "text": "Canvas Sweeper’s New UI Is Almost Done ( Devlog #7 ) I implemented the new dashboard, assignments pages, planner screens, settings, and the rest of the redesigned app. At the moment everything is using demo data while I connect the new frontend to the real Canvas and Google Calendar systems. This took way longer than I expected because I had to rebuild a lot of the frontend stack without breaking the existing backend, authentication, scheduling system, or calendar publishing. The hardest parts were recreating all the animations, keeping the design consistent across every page, and making sure the new UI could still work with the real data. What I worked on New dashboard Assignments and detail pages Planner and scheduling screens Settings and account pages New animations and design system The new pages should be fully functional tomorrow or the day after. After that, I’m finally moving on to the AI phase"}, {"post_id": 38032, "ts": "2026-07-31T05:52:47Z", "hours": 7.5, "text": "My Own Server ( Devlog #6 ) (Picture of the server 😬, hopefully getting a case soon) Every day this project just keeps getting bigger. What started as a software project is now growing into a hardware project too. I wanted to make my own server to run my projects locally and create a dedicated machine for development, as my computer could not handle it anymore. I built this server completely from parts I found through thrift stores, garage sales, and things I was able to get for free. It has been really cool taking old hardware and turning it into something useful. Features 🖥️ Dedicated local server for running projects ⚙️ Full-stack development environment 🌐 Local hosting for applications and services 🔒 Remote access through SSH Hardware Intel Xeon 22-core / 44-thread processor 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM 1GB DDR3 VRAM GPU 1000W Power Supply Built with Ubuntu Server OpenSSH Python development tools Full stack development tools What I Learned Setting up this server took much longer than expected. Installing Ubuntu Server, configuring everything, and fixing all the small issues was definitely a challenge, but I learned a lot about hardware, Linux, and server management. Next Steps I am currently continuing development on the full stack side of things and getting everything ready to run locally on this server. Once that is finished, I will start working on the AI phase and adding more advanced features. Also ignore whats on the homepage"}, {"post_id": 37456, "ts": "2026-07-30T06:45:05Z", "hours": 8.1889, "text": "Building the Rest of Canvas Sweeper! The animated landing page from my last devlog is officially finished! 🎉 Now we are working on designing the rest of the app to match, including the dashboard, assignments, planner, and settings pages so everything feels more polished. At the same time, I’m wrapping up Phase 4, which is all about making sure the scheduling system can create, review, and publish reliable study plans before moving on to Phase 5, where I’ll start adding AI to make planning even smarter. Working on now 🎨 Dashboard & app pages 📅 Final Phase 4 scheduling improvements 🤖 Getting ready for the AI phase"}, {"post_id": 36865, "ts": "2026-07-29T06:23:15Z", "hours": 8.1667, "text": "Redesigning Canvas Sweeper! Me and my friends took a short break from adding new features to completely redesign the Canvas Sweeper UI. I wanted the landing page to feel more like an Apple product page, with smooth scroll animations that show assignments turning into an organized study schedule. I just finished implementing the new landing page and UI style! Next, I’m redesigning the dashboard, assignments, planner, settings, and the rest of the app to match. What I worked on Animated landing page Visual Canvas-to-calendar story Cleaner typography and layout Hopefully stop looking vide coded"}, {"post_id": 36238, "ts": "2026-07-28T05:58:07Z", "hours": 8.3333, "text": "Canvas Sweeper is getting smarter (no ai yet) I have no active assignments at the moment since it is summer time but you can see all of your previous assignments and late assignments, thus canvas connection is working Since my last devlog, I finished connecting Canvas Sweeper to my real Canvas account and Google Calendar, and I started building the main scheduling system. The app can now use my assignments, deadlines, existing calendar events, sleep schedule, school, rowing, and other commitments to find free time and build a study plan around my actual schedule. The biggest challenge has been making Google Calendar publishing safe. I’ve been fixing bugs involving duplicate events, sleep hour scheduling, rescheduling, and failed calendar syncs. Next, I’m finishing testing and making sure everything is reliable before moving on to the next phase, which is to implement ai."}, {"post_id": 35635, "ts": "2026-07-27T06:03:24Z", "hours": 6.6808, "text": "After about 6 and a half hours of work, Canvas Sweeper is finally connecting to my real Canvas account and Google Calendar! 🎉 The app can now import my actual courses and assignments, and the foundation for the scheduling system is in place. Eventually, it will look at my calendar, see when I’m busy with things like school and rowing, and automatically build a study schedule around my free time. The hardest bug so far was getting rid of “Demo Mode.” Everything on the backend was working, but the frontend still thought my account was fake. After lots of debugging, I finally got it and got everything working with real data. Next up is building the intelligent scheduling engine and removing the last bits of demo and hardcoded data before the app eventually goes public"}, {"post_id": 33863, "ts": "2026-07-24T04:01:27Z", "hours": 8.5814, "text": "AI Canvas Planner Its highkey broken,I can’t fix it for now and the ui sucks but this is my newest project! AI Canvas Planner is a full stack web application that automatically turns my Canvas assignments into an intelligent study schedule. Instead of just copying due dates onto a calendar, it connects to my Google Calendar, sees my existing schedule (school, rowing, appointments, etc.), and builds personalized study sessions around my free time. Right now it’s designed for my own workflow, but once it’s polished I plan to make it public so other students can use it too. Features:: 📚 Connects to Canvas to import assignments and courses 📅 Connects to Google Calendar to see existing events and availability 🧠 Automatically makes study sessions around your schedule ⚡ Prioritizes missing assignments, upcoming deadlines, and important work 🎯 Designed to be fully configurable so everyone can customize how their schedule is built 🔄 One-click assignment synchronization 🔐 Secure Google OAuth authentication 📱 Modern responsive interface with real-time updates 🚀 Planned public release after the scheduling engine is fully completed Built With: Next.js React TypeScript FastAPI Python SQLite (development) Docker & Docker Compose Google Calendar API Google OAuth 2.0 Canvas LMS API Alembic SQLAlchemy Vitest Playwright Pytest APIs & Services: Google Calendar API Google OAuth Canvas LMS REST API Docker GitHub Biggest Challenges So Far One of the hardest parts has been getting multiple APIs to work together. Google OAuth, Google Calendar, and Canvas all have different authentication flows and edge cases. I also spent a long time fixing down timezone bugs where Canvas timestamps and SQLite stored dates differently, causing assignments to crash until I normalized everything to UTC. Another frustrating bug happened after I connected Canvas successfully. The backend was working perfectly, but the frontend kept thinking it was still in demo mode, so it showed that Canvas wasn’t connected even though all of the API requests were succeeding. Bugs like these have taught me a lot about debugging full-stack applications and how frontend and backend state can get out of sync. What I Learned Building a full-stack web application from scratch Implementing secure OAuth authentication Working with multiple REST APIs at the same time Designing database schemas and migrations Debugging frontend and backend communication Managing Docker containers and local development environments Writing automated tests for both frontend and backend Handling timezones and date serialization correctly Building software that solves a real problem I deal with every day"}]...
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Title: Canvas Sweeper by @GeorgeZ | Stardance
Dev Title: Canvas Sweeper by @GeorgeZ | Stardance
Devlogs:
AI Canvas Planner Its highkey broken,I can’t fix it for now and the ui sucks but this is my newest project! AI Canvas Planner is a full stack web application that automatically turns my Canvas assignments into an intelligent study schedule. Instead of just copying due dates onto a calendar, it connects to my Google Calendar, sees my existing schedule (school, rowing, appointments, etc.), and builds personalized study sessions around my free time. Right now it’s designed for my own workflow, but once it’s polished I plan to make it public so other students can use it too. Features:: 📚 Connects to Canvas to import assignments and courses 📅 Connects to Google Calendar to see existing events and availability 🧠 Automatically makes study sessions around your schedule ⚡ Prioritizes missing assignments, upcoming deadlines, and important work 🎯 Designed to be fully configurable so everyone can customize how their schedule is built 🔄 One-click assignment synchronization 🔐 Secure Google OAuth authentication 📱 Modern responsive interface with real-time updates 🚀 Planned public release after the scheduling engine is fully completed Built With: Next.js React TypeScript FastAPI Python SQLite (development) Docker & Docker Compose Google Calendar API Google OAuth 2.0 Canvas LMS API Alembic SQLAlchemy Vitest Playwright Pytest APIs & Services: Google Calendar API Google OAuth Canvas LMS REST API Docker GitHub Biggest Challenges So Far One of the hardest parts has been getting multiple APIs to work together. Google OAuth, Google Calendar, and Canvas all have different authentication flows and edge cases. I also spent a long time fixing down timezone bugs where Canvas timestamps and SQLite stored dates differently, causing assignments to crash until I normalized everything to UTC. Another frustrating bug happened after I connected Canvas successfully. The backend was working perfectly, but the frontend kept thinking it was still in demo mode, so it showed that Canvas wasn’t connected even though all of the API requests were succeeding. Bugs like these have taught me a lot about debugging full-stack applications and how frontend and backend state can get out of sync. What I Learned Building a full-stack web application from scratch Implementing secure OAuth authentication Working with multiple REST APIs at the same time Designing database schemas and migrations Debugging frontend and backend communication Managing Docker containers and local development environments Writing automated tests for both frontend and backend Handling timezones and date serialization correctly Building software that solves a real problem I deal with every day
After about 6 and a half hours of work, Canvas Sweeper is finally connecting to my real Canvas account and Google Calendar! 🎉 The app can now import my actual courses and assignments, and the foundation for the scheduling system is in place. Eventually, it will look at my calendar, see when I’m busy with things like school and rowing, and automatically build a study schedule around my free time. The hardest bug so far was getting rid of “Demo Mode.” Everything on the backend was working, but the frontend still thought my account was fake. After lots of debugging, I finally got it and got everything working with real data. Next up is building the intelligent scheduling engine and removing the last bits of demo and hardcoded data before the app eventually goes public
Canvas Sweeper is getting smarter (no ai yet) I have no active assignments at the moment since it is summer time but you can see all of your previous assignments and late assignments, thus canvas connection is working Since my last devlog, I finished connecting Canvas Sweeper to my real Canvas account and Google Calendar, and I started building the main scheduling system. The app can now use my assignments, deadlines, existing calendar events, sleep schedule, school, rowing, and other commitments to find free time and build a study plan around my actual schedule. The biggest challenge has been making Google Calendar publishing safe. I’ve been fixing bugs involving duplicate events, sleep hour scheduling, rescheduling, and failed calendar syncs. Next, I’m finishing testing and making sure everything is reliable before moving on to the next phase, which is to implement ai.
Redesigning Canvas Sweeper! Me and my friends took a short break from adding new features to completely redesign the Canvas Sweeper UI. I wanted the landing page to feel more like an Apple product page, with smooth scroll animations that show assignments turning into an organized study schedule. I just finished implementing the new landing page and UI style! Next, I’m redesigning the dashboard, assignments, planner, settings, and the rest of the app to match. What I worked on Animated landing page Visual Canvas-to-calendar story Cleaner typography and layout Hopefully stop looking vide coded
Building the Rest of Canvas Sweeper! The animated landing page from my last devlog is officially finished! 🎉 Now we are working on designing the rest of the app to match, including the dashboard, assignments, planner, and settings pages so everything feels more polished. At the same time, I’m wrapping up Phase 4, which is all about making sure the scheduling system can create, review, and publish reliable study plans before moving on to Phase 5, where I’ll start adding AI to make planning even smarter. Working on now 🎨 Dashboard & app pages 📅 Final Phase 4 scheduling improvements 🤖 Getting ready for the AI phase
My Own Server ( Devlog #6 ) (Picture of the server 😬, hopefully getting a case soon) Every day this project just keeps getting bigger. What started as a software project is now growing into a hardware project too. I wanted to make my own server to run my projects locally and create a dedicated machine for development, as my computer could not handle it anymore. I built this server completely from parts I found through thrift stores, garage sales, and things I was able to get for free. It has been really cool taking old hardware and turning it into something useful. Features 🖥️ Dedicated local server for running projects ⚙️ Full-stack development environment 🌐 Local hosting for applications and services 🔒 Remote access through SSH Hardware Intel Xeon 22-core / 44-thread processor 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM 1GB DDR3 VRAM GPU 1000W Power Supply Built with Ubuntu Server OpenSSH Python development tools Full stack development tools What I Learned Setting up this server took much longer than expected. Installing Ubuntu Server, configuring everything, and fixing all the small issues was definitely a challenge, but I learned a lot about hardware, Linux, and server management. Next Steps I am currently continuing development on the full stack side of things and getting everything ready to run locally on this server. Once that is finished, I will start working on the AI phase and adding more advanced features. Also ignore whats on the homepage
Canvas Sweeper’s New UI Is Almost Done ( Devlog #7 ) I implemented the new dashboard, assignments pages, planner screens, settings, and the rest of the redesigned app. At the moment everything is using demo data while I connect the new frontend to the real Canvas and Google Calendar systems. This took way longer than I expected because I had to rebuild a lot of the frontend stack without breaking the existing backend, authentication, scheduling system, or calendar publishing. The hardest parts were recreating all the animations, keeping the design consistent across every page, and making sure the new UI could still work with the real data. What I worked on New dashboard Assignments and detail pages Planner and scheduling screens Settings and account pages New animations and design system The new pages should be fully functional tomorrow or the day after. After that, I’m finally moving on to the AI phase
I Severely Underestimated This UI Redesign ( Devlog #8 ) I thought implementing the new Canvas Sweeper UI would be a quick frontend update. It was not… I’ve added the new dashboard, assignments page, and plan page, but I still need to finish the rest, including settings and all the smaller screens. Then I have to connect everything properly and make sure every button, state, animation, and real data flow actually works .😬 So this has officially turned into a multi day project, but it’s finally starting to come together. After the UI is fully finished and working, I can finally move on to the AI phase. THANKS FOR READING!!
Canvas Sweeper = Final Stages! hopefully ( Devlog #9 ) Canvas Sweeper is finally fully functional and looking much better than before. I’ve connected the new UI to the real app and finished most of the core planning system. Built with Next.js + React FastAPI SQLAlchemy + Alembic SQLite Canvas API Google Calendar API Docker What it can do Sync real Canvas assignments Build study plans around your schedule Review and edit sessions Publish approved plans to Google Calendar Track progress and reschedule work Next Supabase/PostgreSQL Vercel deployment ( Hopefully soon ) Custom domain ( Already setting up ) Security and privacy improvements Invite only beta Background syncing AI task breakdown and smarter estimates THANKS FOR READING!!!
Canvas Sweeper - Building the Brain( Devlog #10 ) Canvas Sweeper has grown a lot since the last update. Over the past few missions, I built the core systems that power Canvai: Features Canvas assignment intelligence: analyzes deadlines, workload, risk, and priority Smart scheduling engine: creates realistic study plans around school, rowing, and personal commitments Google Calendar integration: lets approved study plans become real calendar events Learning system: tracks completed work and improves understanding of planning accuracy Student modeling: learns from completed sessions and creates evidence-based insights Canvai assistant foundation: explains plans, risks, and recommendations without using AI yet Advanced planning: workload forecasting, exam planning, dependencies, and what-if scenarios Built With Next.js FastAPI PostgreSQL / SQLite Docker Google Calendar API Canvas API TypeScript Python What I learned this session Building large full stack systems takes much more than just writing features Designing reliable data models before adding AI is important Creating explainable systems is much harder than creating simple automation Testing, migrations, and security What’s Next The foundation for Canvai (canvas ai) is finally coming together. The next step is improving the user experience and preparing the system for the future AI phase. I am also making the page for the ai assistant and brain. THANKS FOR READING!!!
Canvai AI - Making Canvas Smarter ( Devlog # 11 ) Canvai has grown a lot since the last update. I finished building the foundation for Canvai ai and started preparing the next phase of the project. Features Complete Canvas assignment integration Automatic study planning with Google Calendar Student modeling based on completed work and feedback Adaptive Planning with workload analysis, simulations, and recommendations Canvai ai foundation with NVIDIA ai integration Safe ai architecture with read-only tools and evidence-based responses Redesigned Adaptive Planning experience to match the final product design What I Learned Designing ai systems around existing data instead of replacing them Building safe ai features with strict boundaries ( so nobody drains my pockets ) Creating large full stack applications with many connected systems Improving user experience through design reviews and testing How much work goes into turning a prototype into a real product What’s Next I’m currently working on redesigning Canvai Assistant and making the ai features feel like a real assistant. The goal is to let students ask questions about their assignments, schedules, risks, and progress while keeping everything evidence based and safe. THANKS FOR READING!! Page of free Nvidia ai APIs
Canvas Sweeper — Beta Preparation & AI Upgrade ( Devlog # 12 ) Recently, I finished a lot of the final polish before letting other people test it. All major pages and workflows have been added, and I have been focusing on making the experience feel like a real product. the most annoying bugs I fixed was the Canvas connection status. I probably spent 4 hours fixing a tiny red connection box that was not turning green. It ended up being sync states, cached data, and different parts of the app interpreting connection status differently. What’s Next Before releasing a beta, I’m focusing on making Canvas Sweeper safe and ready for real users: Improving security and protecting student data Creating privacy policies and terms of service Improving AI privacy, safety, and transparency Testing user data isolation Preparing the app for a private beta launch THANKS FOR READING!!!
Canvas Sweeper - Beta Security & Release Preparation ( Devlog #13 ) Features / Improvements Added AI safety improvements: AI claim grounding so canvai cannot make stupid academic conclusions Structured ai responses tied to real evidence Prompt injection protection Ai context and replay safety improvements Added AI privacy controls: ai enable/disable preference ai history deletion Account deletion system Updated ai disclosures and privacy explanations Added security protections: User isolation testing to prevent students from accessing other users data Rate limiting for authentication, Canvas, Calendar, planning, and Canvai ai Request size limits to prevent abuse Operation locks to prevent duplicate expensive tasks Error and logging sanitization Security headers and authenticated response cache protection Secret scanning and CI security improvements Added deployment and release preparation: Beta deployment configuration Secure Docker boundaries CI/CD security improvements Dependency and supply chain checks Updated privacy policy and terms of service Data retention and deletion documentation Security Work Completed Authentication hardening Authorization and user isolation testing API abuse protection ai security review Provider security boundaries Data lifecycle controls Account deletion testing Privacy and legal preparation What’s Next!!!! Finish final deployment steps Connect the beta URL Prepare Canvai for its first public users The first public beta release should be ready tomorrow.!!!!! THANKS FOR READING!!!
Canvas Sweeper Deployment ( Devlog #14 ) I’m finally getting Canvas Sweeper ready to go online. I’m going to host it on my own Ubuntu server using Docker, then connect the frontend, backend, database, HTTPS, and the public URL. Since I already have the server, I won’t pay for hosting like Vercel or Render, which is pretty cool because I can run the whole thing myself and keep upgrading it later. Today I worked on getting the release ready and security. I added and tested rate limits, user isolation, secret scanning, CodeQL, Gitleaks, container scanning, safer Docker builds, and a full GitHub release pipeline. I also spent a lot of time fixing random CI issues that only showed up once everything started running in GitHub. What’s Next Finish the last security checks Set up the server Connect the domain Put Canvas Sweeper online
Canvas Sweeper Launch Prep ( Devlog #15 ) Today I finished the final prep for launching canvas sweeper online. I spent most of the time making sure everything was secure, stable, and ready instead of rushing. I completed the Docker setup, hardened the frontend and backend containers, added security checks, verified the deployment pipeline, and prepared the Ubuntu server deploymen. I also finished the final testing, image verification, and release preparation needed before putting the app online. What’s Next Finish the final server setup Connect the deployment Launch Canvas Sweeper online tomorrow THANKS FOR READING!!!!
Unfortunately I have somehow gone in a complete circle trying to launch this I have never deployed anything before, so I guess there’s a first time for everything. 97.3% chance Canvas Sweeper launches tomorrow. Sorry for the delay. Was definitely not part of the plan.
Canvas Sweeper - Authentication Testing( Devlog #16 ) Had to reconnect Supabase today, which took a bit longer than expected. I’m now testing the full authentication flow with Google OAuth and fixing the last few signup/login issues. If everything goes smoothly, Canvas Sweeper will probably launch over the weekend 👀
trying to get google auth working for hours and it still refuses to cooperate canvas sweeper coming soon 👀
finally found the issue - i set up google auth wrong and accidentally made it so only one person could sign up fixing that tomorrow, hopefully nothing else breaks.
Ships:
Canvas Sweeper is officially shipped. canvassweeper.com The problem I wanted to solve was pretty simple: Canvas tells you what assignments you have, but it does not tell you how to fit all of that work into your actual life. Canvas Sweeper connects to Canvas, pulls your courses and assignments, tracks due dates and missing work, prioritizes what matters most, and turns everything into an actual study schedule based on your routines, school schedule, preferred study times, workload limits, and other commitments. It also includes: Google login Canvas connection + assignment sync assignment workspace smart prioritization automatic study plan generation recurring routines for school, rowing, clubs, commute, meals, sleep, work, and custom blocks student profile + study preferences Google Calendar integration Canvai ( Canvas ai ) account/privacy controls account deletion AI history deletion settings security checks, testing, Docker, CI/CD, and a self-hosted Ubuntu deployment 3 major quality-of-life improvements 1. Turns Canvas into an actual plan Instead of seeing a giant list of assignments and figuring everything out yourself, Canvas Sweeper decides when there is actually time to work on each assignment. 2. Plans around your real life School, practices, clubs, commute, sleep, meals, work, and other routines can all be added so it does not schedule homework when you are busy. 3. Automatically prioritizes important work Deadlines, missing assignments, tests, workload, and your preferences are considered so the most important work gets attention first. Why this is a QoL improvement The goal is to remove a bunch of repetitive planning. Instead of checking Canvas, checking your calendar, thinking about everything due, finding free time, and manually deciding what to work on, Canvas Sweeper brings those steps together. Working project The app is live and usable. Google login works, Canvas connection works, assignments can sync, routines/preferences can be configured, and the planning system can turn active assignments into a schedule. The Canvas integration is complete. Google Calendar can be connected, but its public OAuth configuration is still going through Google’s verification process, which can take a few weeks. Google may currently show an unverified-app warning during that connection flow, and testers can continue through the advanced option if they choose to. One note about the demo video: I currently have no active Canvas assignments, so there is nothing for Canvas Sweeper to turn into a study schedule in the recording. Effort / execution This ended up becoming way bigger than I originally expected. I built the frontend and backend, Canvas and Google integrations, database, authentication, planning logic, security systems, testing, Docker setup, CI/CD, and deployment. I also decided to self-host the actual application on my own Ubuntu server instead of using a normal app hosting platform, so I ended up learning Linux, Docker, networking, HTTPS, OAuth, APIs, databases, security, and production deployment along the way. Definitely a lot of hours went into this. Canvas Sweeper is live!!! Thanks for watching the journey!!...
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ScriptCanvas by @M-Mrk | Stardance
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M-Mrk
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73.0
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1445
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-19T12:25:53Z", "hours": 73.0, "multiplier": 19.83, "payout": 1445, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a web app where you can make simple scripts to create interesting outputs. Its really fun to see what patterns and stuff you can create from very simple logic! The web app is statically hosted on github pages and does not need any server. It is build on a very performant stack. The main UI thread dispatches a request to a web worker which on a separate thread executes optimized rust WASM. That WASM compiles the script to an AST and then evaluates it a bunch of times across all the needed scopes. Finally the web worker can message the main UI thread back. This separation is needed to not freeze the UI during script evaluation, but because there is a memory separation it was very annoying to work with. I used a vanilla-ish stack with no web framework, but with TS. I learned a lot about CSS and TS/JS. Using a framework would have probably sped up development but I wanted to first really understand what a framework would need to do under the hood before moving to that. All in all I am very proud of this project! Hopefully others find the concept as interesting as I do!", "repo": "https://github.com/M-Mrk/ScriptCanvas", "demo": "https://m-mrk.github.io/ScriptCanvas/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 70586, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 70586, "ts": "2026-09-19T12:16:31Z", "hours": 7.545, "text": "Final touches Spelling mistakes I fixed a lot of spelling mistakes in the tutorial and help box sections. I think I should keep writing tutorials and docs to times before 1 am. Plot I also added a new output the plot ! The script gets a x value and returns the matching y value. Those pairs then get displayed on a plot using graph.js. During this addition I also reworked the core rust 🦀 engine a bit so now stuff that should be output independent, like creating a Rhai engine or compiling a Rhai script to an AST, is in its own file. Then I added the rust logic and it just returns an array of X and Y value pairs when done. Adding the UI and lifecycle stuff for the plot was rather easy because I kept everything pretty modular with easy expansion in mind. However styling the plot was rather complicated and I now have a enormous JavaScript Object detailing all the small bits and pieces to make the plot look alright! Repo PixelMatrix was always a temporary name as it is only really fitting for the grid output, so I renamed this project to ScriptCanvas. I think this is more fitting because it does use scripts and it also draws those on canvas elements! I also added a README to the repo. As testing on chrome and firefox also looked good I think I am ready to ship !"}, {"post_id": 65338, "ts": "2026-09-10T12:44:05Z", "hours": 7.6142, "text": "Help, Docs and a Tutorial Help menu and Docs I added a Help modal under the “?” button. It has some actions like opening the tutorial again and features some docs. There are docs on the specific output explaining what the output expects and listing all available variables in scope of the output. So for Grid it explains how the script will be evaluated over all pixels in a grid and the script returns an RGB value setting that pixels color. Then it lists all the variables, like ‘x’ the x-coordinate of the pixel. Tutorial I also added a short tutorial which explains how to get a running script under Grid. I hope it explains all the concepts step by step and that it is understandable. Originally it was more of a tour of the UI and explained all the buttons, but I think that most of that is pretty self explanatory and the new tutorial is better at explaining how to actually use this. Next up I will add 1 more output before shipping!"}, {"post_id": 62520, "ts": "2026-09-05T22:45:09Z", "hours": 8.4306, "text": "Coming to an end I am kind off getting frustrated with this project, I cant handle this stack anymore , I yearn for hardware again. I am aiming to finish this in the next 2 weeks! Well any ways here is what I did: Output stretching Until now the grid output was always a square, so if you had a non-square resolution it would be stretched to one. Now it actually gets the shape of the resolution and it uses the most of the usable space it can. I also added a option to return to the original method. Blur Initially I had some problems with drawing pixels to the canvas. I drew rectangles to the canvas but some image smoothing settings were adding anti-aliasing and similar stuff making the pixels look weird. I fixed that by just creating raw image data, but it was a cool effect for some situations, like generating a gradient. So I added a option to toggle this image smoothing of the browser. Sadly as it is browser based I’d probably has very different results on different browsers. Small UI I did a bunch of css fixes to make the ui more resizable and trigger a bunch of stuff on resizing. Then I added a tabbar and reduced the layout. In the normal layout the editor and output are side by side and when the screen is too small only one is shown and you can switch with the tabbar. It also moves the top bar actions into a setting pop up. Tip box Some features might not be self explanatory, so I added this small tip tool when hovering above stuff for some time. To not be stuck on this for too much longer I scrapped the idea of the landing page and I will instead add a tutorial."}, {"post_id": 55286, "ts": "2026-08-27T00:47:28Z", "hours": 8.4031, "text": "Layouting, resizing and a console Console I finally got everything working together. This means that you can now use print() and debug() in the script and it’ll output to the console ! It’ll tell you what was printed and at what pixel, e.g. [x:2|y:4] => here! . I’ve attached a diagram of why some parts of this project are really painful to work with. Its largely due to the amount of wrappers needed, because of the memory and thread separation of the web worker/wasm. Reworking this was really not fun and just doing it better the 1. time would’ve saved me a lot of time. The console won’t be in use all the time and not everyone will use it so I also wanted to limit the space it takes. I firstly reduced the standard space it gets down to 5% of the view height and then made it drag resizable. You can press and hold on the drag handle of the console and stretch it out over the output and editor. This way you can decide how much screen space you want to sacrifice. I used the pointer API so in theory this should work with all kinds of stuff from fingers to pens. In the end the console was way more css intensive then I thought as it needs some and css tomfoolery in order to scroll without blowing up the DOM. Performance increases I learned about Abstract Syntax Trees and made the wasm precompile the script to an AST before rerunning it a bunch of times with different scopes. This was another substantial performance increase decreasing the per pixel time form 0.04ms down to 0.004ms. Wow was the wasm unoptimized Error highlighting I finally added error highlighting. The line with an error now gets highlighted in the editor. During adding this feature with the Monaco editor I also accidently bumped my bundled js to 500kb . This was due to it importing a bunch of syntax stuff for different languages. Thankfully changing one Monaco.something to monaco.something resolved this QoL errors get cleared when rerunning script add resolution to script scope UI I noticed that you couldn’t resize the app to something smaller. You could however make it smaller and then reload. Meaning that it was able to come up with a good layout but something was greedy and holding on to its space. Width wise this was easy to fix by adding a dynamic sizing flag to the editor and some min-width: 0 s to some elements, but height wise i couldn’t get it to work. Turns out even with dynamic sizing the editor is still not the biggest fan of being resized so I had to add a ResizeObserver and call the editors layout method to make it reconsider its size Next up I will now implement a better UI for smaller screens, but first I need to declutter my css and html to make it more maintainable . Other additions/fixes"}, {"post_id": 52430, "ts": "2026-08-22T15:34:18Z", "hours": 9.8981, "text": "Continuing on improving the ui and some refactors Number input styling Those now also have better tui like styling. I added sqaure brackets [] to the ends, the hover background highlighting and a blinking underscore if you focus on it. Though am unsure whether it is clear enough that you are supposed to enter text into them. If you’ve got any improvement ideas let me know. Loading indicator When something is loading I can add the loading class which displays the typical tui animation spinner before it. The one made up of brail dots ⠧ Central Icon I felt that the run button could be unnoticed so I added an icon to the middle of screen. It also shows the loading to make it more clear that the script is actually being run. Error pop up Instead of just having some red text in the console I add a real error pop up with a blinking dashed red outline. Performance increase I spent some time thinking about doing a bunch of stuff to make my wasm multi threaded and async, which included using nightly features, a service worker shim to change http headers, etc. Because I felt that the script running was way too slow and I wanted better performance and the ability to easily cancel the running wasm. Currently the wasm is blocking and goes over each pixel one by one. But before I implemented that I did some other performance changes, like only creating 1 shared rhai engine for all pixels. Before every pixel created its own rhai engine. This change was way more substantial than I thought, as it took the per pixel time from 0.5ms down to 0.04ms . This means 255*255 pixel or 65k pixel don’t take 12s but 2s. This is such a change that I think implementing all the async and multi threading would just be a waste of time, so I’ll stash that idea for now. console I also styled the console part and added all the ui logic. I want to give the user the option to use a print function in there script for debugging purposes. Then in the console it’ll show on which pixel the debug comes from and what it says. But as the image can get pretty big and the user might print once or more per pixel, just adding some Nodes to a console div would probably blow up everything. So at first I experimented with a canvas. The canvas overlays on the console div and then behind it is a big spacer which allows for scrolling, some code would then change what the canvas shows based on where the back is scrolled to. After I had gotten it to display some logs nicely, I realized that this way doesn’t allow the user to highlight and copy the logs, which is probably something someone might want to do. So I switched the canvas out with a normal div. Instead of drawing the logs to a canvas the logs do get added as nodes, but only the visible ones and the scrolling changes which are shown. This way the user can interact with them like normal text and the DOM doesn’t have to render 1k+ nodes. This seems to work really good, the only problem was getting the scrolling to work while the log nodes occupy the same space, but with some css trickery and EventListeners I can pass any scrolling done on the logs through to the background scrolling element. Refactoring I am still working on the wasm part of allowing the user to use print(). While implementing that i had to change what it outputs and refactored the rust project structure. When I then got to the part where the browsers main ui thread interacts with the web worker which runs the wasm, I realized how badly that part was written, with so many loose interfaces and strings. So I am currently still refactoring that and trying not to loose my mind. Still not a big fan of and"}, {"post_id": 48552, "ts": "2026-08-17T00:09:58Z", "hours": 9.9247, "text": "New UI plans and some QoL features Features Auto clamp 🗜️ It can be really frustrating if the output exceeds 255 and everything errors out. So I added a auto clamp checkbox, which just clamps the output to the expected range of 0 to 255. Hot reload I also added a check box for hot reloading. When you stop typing, the script will automatically run. No need to press the run button. Probably a bit annoying on larger resolutions so you can disable it. New UI I also started building the real UI. Initially I just did the layout: top bar with global settings middle part with editor and output console output, where print calls and errors will go. The output part also has a tool bar with output specific settings. An explanation of the app will go on the index and it will have a link to /app where the actual stuff is. This way I don’t have to give any screen space up for an introduction when not needed. Currently the index is just a redirect. Initially I wanted to go with a windows 8 panel style UI, so nothing rounded and only big rectangular tiles. But during experimenting I made the tile only as big as its text and when the background color got highlighted it reminded me of a TUI button. So from that point on I decided to try and style my entire site like that. I think I can pull this TUI look off, but the current styling is definitely not finished. I do however already like the checkboxes, which are styled like [ ] and [*], and the dropdown select. The select was way harder to do as you can’t really style the vanilla element, as it depends on os and browser styling. So you have to create your own. I would say I learned a lot new things about css. Especially stuff like ::before and ::after are super handy for the look I am going for."}, {"post_id": 42180, "ts": "2026-08-06T19:57:02Z", "hours": 10.0303, "text": "DEMO HERE and as soon as github gets itself back together I can also push the newest changes to it! Refactor, refactor and some more refactoring Actual new features I added options to the top. You can switch the output type and script language. But seeing as there currently is only 1 language (Rhai) and 1 output type (Grid) they are kinda pointless. I also added output specific options, for Grid it is currently just the resolution. Also I added a spinner to the run button to indicate that the script is running but that didn’t work until a refactor/feature mentioned later. Refactors The rest of the time was all spent on refactoring. But I do think it was worth it and it is now way easier to add new features. Modularity I introduced a state system where each output type has its own module. Each output only exposes a common interface with a init, deinit and pipeline method. This way other parts, don’t need to deal with what output is set. Each output also deals with its specific settings and UI itself. -> I fully switched from to . I was kind of fed up with the loosey goosey attitude of javascript where nothing is really defined. Typescript doesn’t fix that entirely but does help to find a lot more bugs when writing the code and not at runtime. Vite As does need some sort of bundler/builder I set up vite for the project. This also means I can make the repo more source files only. Before I had the compiled wasm also in the repo, but now it gets compiled together with vite’s build process in the github action. Probably vite also has some other performance benefits. Web Worker As I mentioned before I added a spinner to when the script was being run to show that something is actually happening, but the that wasn’t showing. Because I had everything running off of the main thread calling the WASM blocked everything else even the UI and the browser would ask whether to close the page. The solution is to move it to a web worker, which runs in a separate thread. This was probably the most difficult thing, because it required major changes and it is a bit more complicated because of WASM. When a WASM function returns something, it normally uses a pointer to shared memory, so that there is no unnecessary cloning, but because the WASM runs in the memory of the web worker the main thread can’t access it. So I had to work around that."}, {"post_id": 39133, "ts": "2026-08-01T21:00:01Z", "hours": 5.4594, "text": "FOR CURRENT DEMO CLICK HERE Rhai support I got rhai to work. It took a bit to figure out how to expect the script to return an array of 3 u8’s, but after figuring out that all rhai numbers are i64 and then figuring out how to downsize that to u8 it works! Later I then added the current coordinates into the scope and a rand function to generate noise. Monaco A bare textarea element for script input is pretty bad so I switched to the monaco editor. Its the same one VSCode uses so most of us should be pretty familar with it and its keybinds. It took some time to figure out how to load monaco from CDN and not build locally. I also had some cosmetic bugs with the minimap, so I just disabled it as the scripts should be rather short and its not that useful anyways. Using localstorage the script now also persist between sessions. Anti-Aliasing As you can see the output isn’t clear but has these weird white lines. These do go away after running the script multiple times. This due to the browser doing some post processing like anti-aliasing on the drawn rectangles and it adds some semi-transparent pixels to the edges. This is especially bad if you pass use decimal values as coordinates to draw to the canvas, which I am doing to fit my pixels on there. I tried multiple methods to disable this post-processing for drawing filled rectangles, but nothing worked. The solution is to use a hidden canvas, draw the output at native resolution to it and then transfer the image from that canvas to the real one. The putImage function does allow me to disable post processing and adjust the destination size. Now it works and the bare minimum is here . As always you can test it here ! It automatically runs off of the latest commit."}, {"post_id": 38401, "ts": "2026-07-31T19:09:15Z", "hours": 5.5975, "text": "Idea I really like experimenting with random functions and math relations and then displaying them. So I want to make this website where you can write a script to run on every pixel and then display the result. Originally this was just rust code creating ppm pictures, but a web app is more accessible. Implementation I am still not the biggest JS fan and more comfortable with rust, so I will use WASM to make rust run in the browser. This also has some performance benefits and I can easily add scripting languages Canvas The first step was to have something I can draw pixels to with JS. I went with a canvas and drawing filled rects to it. WASM Rust to WASM seems to have a very mature pipeline and its very easy. You just write normal rust code and all functions, types, etc you want to expose to JS you can use #[wasm_bindgen] from the wasm-bindgen crate. Then after installing wasm-pack you can run wasm-pack build --target web to compile the rust to wasm. It also automatically generates the JS glue and TS headers. In JS you just have to import a init function and the exposed wasm functions you want to use. The browser does the rest! Everything will run locally in the browser, which also means we can use githubs free static hosting , which I already setup with a github action, check it out here ! Currently I have only got a bare minimum UI and no language support. Next on my list is adding Rhai support (scripting language similar to rust) and getting that to actually output some pixels."}]...
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Title: ScriptCanvas by @M-Mrk | Stardance
Devlogs Title: ScriptCanvas by @M-Mrk | Stardance
Devlogs:
Idea I really like experimenting with random functions and math relations and then displaying them. So I want to make this website where you can write a script to run on every pixel and then display the result. Originally this was just rust code creating ppm pictures, but a web app is more accessible. Implementation I am still not the biggest JS fan and more comfortable with rust, so I will use WASM to make rust run in the browser. This also has some performance benefits and I can easily add scripting languages Canvas The first step was to have something I can draw pixels to with JS. I went with a canvas and drawing filled rects to it. WASM Rust to WASM seems to have a very mature pipeline and its very easy. You just write normal rust code and all functions, types, etc you want to expose to JS you can use #[wasm_bindgen] from the wasm-bindgen crate. Then after installing wasm-pack you can run wasm-pack build --target web to compile the rust to wasm. It also automatically generates the JS glue and TS headers. In JS you just have to import a init function and the exposed wasm functions you want to use. The browser does the rest! Everything will run locally in the browser, which also means we can use githubs free static hosting , which I already setup with a github action, check it out here ! Currently I have only got a bare minimum UI and no language support. Next on my list is adding Rhai support (scripting language similar to rust) and getting that to actually output some pixels.
FOR CURRENT DEMO CLICK HERE Rhai support I got rhai to work. It took a bit to figure out how to expect the script to return an array of 3 u8’s, but after figuring out that all rhai numbers are i64 and then figuring out how to downsize that to u8 it works! Later I then added the current coordinates into the scope and a rand function to generate noise. Monaco A bare textarea element for script input is pretty bad so I switched to the monaco editor. Its the same one VSCode uses so most of us should be pretty familar with it and its keybinds. It took some time to figure out how to load monaco from CDN and not build locally. I also had some cosmetic bugs with the minimap, so I just disabled it as the scripts should be rather short and its not that useful anyways. Using localstorage the script now also persist between sessions. Anti-Aliasing As you can see the output isn’t clear but has these weird white lines. These do go away after running the script multiple times. This due to the browser doing some post processing like anti-aliasing on the drawn rectangles and it adds some semi-transparent pixels to the edges. This is especially bad if you pass use decimal values as coordinates to draw to the canvas, which I am doing to fit my pixels on there. I tried multiple methods to disable this post-processing for drawing filled rectangles, but nothing worked. The solution is to use a hidden canvas, draw the output at native resolution to it and then transfer the image from that canvas to the real one. The putImage function does allow me to disable post processing and adjust the destination size. Now it works and the bare minimum is here . As always you can test it here ! It automatically runs off of the latest commit.
DEMO HERE and as soon as github gets itself back together I can also push the newest changes to it! Refactor, refactor and some more refactoring Actual new features I added options to the top. You can switch the output type and script language. But seeing as there currently is only 1 language (Rhai) and 1 output type (Grid) they are kinda pointless. I also added output specific options, for Grid it is currently just the resolution. Also I added a spinner to the run button to indicate that the script is running but that didn’t work until a refactor/feature mentioned later. Refactors The rest of the time was all spent on refactoring. But I do think it was worth it and it is now way easier to add new features. Modularity I introduced a state system where each output type has its own module. Each output only exposes a common interface with a init, deinit and pipeline method. This way other parts, don’t need to deal with what output is set. Each output also deals with its specific settings and UI itself. -> I fully switched from to . I was kind of fed up with the loosey goosey attitude of javascript where nothing is really defined. Typescript doesn’t fix that entirely but does help to find a lot more bugs when writing the code and not at runtime. Vite As does need some sort of bundler/builder I set up vite for the project. This also means I can make the repo more source files only. Before I had the compiled wasm also in the repo, but now it gets compiled together with vite’s build process in the github action. Probably vite also has some other performance benefits. Web Worker As I mentioned before I added a spinner to when the script was being run to show that something is actually happening, but the that wasn’t showing. Because I had everything running off of the main thread calling the WASM blocked everything else even the UI and the browser would ask whether to close the page. The solution is to move it to a web worker, which runs in a separate thread. This was probably the most difficult thing, because it required major changes and it is a bit more complicated because of WASM. When a WASM function returns something, it normally uses a pointer to shared memory, so that there is no unnecessary cloning, but because the WASM runs in the memory of the web worker the main thread can’t access it. So I had to work around that.
New UI plans and some QoL features Features Auto clamp 🗜️ It can be really frustrating if the output exceeds 255 and everything errors out. So I added a auto clamp checkbox, which just clamps the output to the expected range of 0 to 255. Hot reload I also added a check box for hot reloading. When you stop typing, the script will automatically run. No need to press the run button. Probably a bit annoying on larger resolutions so you can disable it. New UI I also started building the real UI. Initially I just did the layout: top bar with global settings middle part with editor and output console output, where print calls and errors will go. The output part also has a tool bar with output specific settings. An explanation of the app will go on the index and it will have a link to /app where the actual stuff is. This way I don’t have to give any screen space up for an introduction when not needed. Currently the index is just a redirect. Initially I wanted to go with a windows 8 panel style UI, so nothing rounded and only big rectangular tiles. But during experimenting I made the tile only as big as its text and when the background color got highlighted it reminded me of a TUI button. So from that point on I decided to try and style my entire site like that. I think I can pull this TUI look off, but the current styling is definitely not finished. I do however already like the checkboxes, which are styled like [ ] and [*], and the dropdown select. The select was way harder to do as you can’t really style the vanilla element, as it depends on os and browser styling. So you have to create your own. I would say I learned a lot new things about css. Especially stuff like ::before and ::after are super handy for the look I am going for.
Continuing on improving the ui and some refactors Number input styling Those now also have better tui like styling. I added sqaure brackets [] to the ends, the hover background highlighting and a blinking underscore if you focus on it. Though am unsure whether it is clear enough that you are supposed to enter text into them. If you’ve got any improvement ideas let me know. Loading indicator When something is loading I can add the loading class which displays the typical tui animation spinner before it. The one made up of brail dots ⠧ Central Icon I felt that the run button could be unnoticed so I added an icon to the middle of screen. It also shows the loading to make it more clear that the script is actually being run. Error pop up Instead of just having some red text in the console I add a real error pop up with a blinking dashed red outline. Performance increase I spent some time thinking about doing a bunch of stuff to make my wasm multi threaded and async, which included using nightly features, a service worker shim to change http headers, etc. Because I felt that the script running was way too slow and I wanted better performance and the ability to easily cancel the running wasm. Currently the wasm is blocking and goes over each pixel one by one. But before I implemented that I did some other performance changes, like only creating 1 shared rhai engine for all pixels. Before every pixel created its own rhai engine. This change was way more substantial than I thought, as it took the per pixel time from 0.5ms down to 0.04ms . This means 255*255 pixel or 65k pixel don’t take 12s but 2s. This is such a change that I think implementing all the async and multi threading would just be a waste of time, so I’ll stash that idea for now. console I also styled the console part and added all the ui logic. I want to give the user the option to use a print function in there script for debugging purposes. Then in the console it’ll show on which pixel the debug comes from and what it says. But as the image can get pretty big and the user might print once or more per pixel, just adding some Nodes to a console div would probably blow up everything. So at first I experimented with a canvas. The canvas overlays on the console div and then behind it is a big spacer which allows for scrolling, some code would then change what the canvas shows based on where the back is scrolled to. After I had gotten it to display some logs nicely, I realized that this way doesn’t allow the user to highlight and copy the logs, which is probably something someone might want to do. So I switched the canvas out with a normal div. Instead of drawing the logs to a canvas the logs do get added as nodes, but only the visible ones and the scrolling changes which are shown. This way the user can interact with them like normal text and the DOM doesn’t have to render 1k+ nodes. This seems to work really good, the only problem was getting the scrolling to work while the log nodes occupy the same space, but with some css trickery and EventListeners I can pass any scrolling done on the logs through to the background scrolling element. Refactoring I am still working on the wasm part of allowing the user to use print(). While implementing that i had to change what it outputs and refactored the rust project structure. When I then got to the part where the browsers main ui thread interacts with the web worker which runs the wasm, I realized how badly that part was written, with so many loose interfaces and strings. So I am currently still refactoring that and trying not to loose my mind. Still not a big fan of and
Layouting, resizing and a console Console I finally got everything working together. This means that you can now use print() and debug() in the script and it’ll output to the console ! It’ll tell you what was printed and at what pixel, e.g. [x:2|y:4] => here! . I’ve attached a diagram of why some parts of this project are really painful to work with. Its largely due to the amount of wrappers needed, because of the memory and thread separation of the web worker/wasm. Reworking this was really not fun and just doing it better the 1. time would’ve saved me a lot of time. The console won’t be in use all the time and not everyone will use it so I also wanted to limit the space it takes. I firstly reduced the standard space it gets down to 5% of the view height and then made it drag resizable. You can press and hold on the drag handle of the console and stretch it out over the output and editor. This way you can decide how much screen space you want to sacrifice. I used the pointer API so in theory this should work with all kinds of stuff from fingers to pens. In the end the console was way more css intensive then I thought as it needs some and css tomfoolery in order to scroll without blowing up the DOM. Performance increases I learned about Abstract Syntax Trees and made the wasm precompile the script to an AST before rerunning it a bunch of times with different scopes. This was another substantial performance increase decreasing the per pixel time form 0.04ms down to 0.004ms. Wow was the wasm unoptimized Error highlighting I finally added error highlighting. The line with an error now gets highlighted in the editor. During adding this feature with the Monaco editor I also accidently bumped my bundled js to 500kb . This was due to it importing a bunch of syntax stuff for different languages. Thankfully changing one Monaco.something to monaco.something resolved this QoL errors get cleared when rerunning script add resolution to script scope UI I noticed that you couldn’t resize the app to something smaller. You could however make it smaller and then reload. Meaning that it was able to come up with a good layout but something was greedy and holding on to its space. Width wise this was easy to fix by adding a dynamic sizing flag to the editor and some min-width: 0 s to some elements, but height wise i couldn’t get it to work. Turns out even with dynamic sizing the editor is still not the biggest fan of being resized so I had to add a ResizeObserver and call the editors layout method to make it reconsider its size Next up I will now implement a better UI for smaller screens, but first I need to declutter my css and html to make it more maintainable . Other additions/fixes
Coming to an end I am kind off getting frustrated with this project, I cant handle this stack anymore , I yearn for hardware again. I am aiming to finish this in the next 2 weeks! Well any ways here is what I did: Output stretching Until now the grid output was always a square, so if you had a non-square resolution it would be stretched to one. Now it actually gets the shape of the resolution and it uses the most of the usable space it can. I also added a option to return to the original method. Blur Initially I had some problems with drawing pixels to the canvas. I drew rectangles to the canvas but some image smoothing settings were adding anti-aliasing and similar stuff making the pixels look weird. I fixed that by just creating raw image data, but it was a cool effect for some situations, like generating a gradient. So I added a option to toggle this image smoothing of the browser. Sadly as it is browser based I’d probably has very different results on different browsers. Small UI I did a bunch of css fixes to make the ui more resizable and trigger a bunch of stuff on resizing. Then I added a tabbar and reduced the layout. In the normal layout the editor and output are side by side and when the screen is too small only one is shown and you can switch with the tabbar. It also moves the top bar actions into a setting pop up. Tip box Some features might not be self explanatory, so I added this small tip tool when hovering above stuff for some time. To not be stuck on this for too much longer I scrapped the idea of the landing page and I will instead add a tutorial.
Help, Docs and a Tutorial Help menu and Docs I added a Help modal under the “?” button. It has some actions like opening the tutorial again and features some docs. There are docs on the specific output explaining what the output expects and listing all available variables in scope of the output. So for Grid it explains how the script will be evaluated over all pixels in a grid and the script returns an RGB value setting that pixels color. Then it lists all the variables, like ‘x’ the x-coordinate of the pixel. Tutorial I also added a short tutorial which explains how to get a running script under Grid. I hope it explains all the concepts step by step and that it is understandable. Originally it was more of a tour of the UI and explained all the buttons, but I think that most of that is pretty self explanatory and the new tutorial is better at explaining how to actually use this. Next up I will add 1 more output before shipping!
Final touches Spelling mistakes I fixed a lot of spelling mistakes in the tutorial and help box sections. I think I should keep writing tutorials and docs to times before 1 am. Plot I also added a new output the plot ! The script gets a x value and returns the matching y value. Those pairs then get displayed on a plot using graph.js. During this addition I also reworked the core rust 🦀 engine a bit so now stuff that should be output independent, like creating a Rhai engine or compiling a Rhai script to an AST, is in its own file. Then I added the rust logic and it just returns an array of X and Y value pairs when done. Adding the UI and lifecycle stuff for the plot was rather easy because I kept everything pretty modular with easy expansion in mind. However styling the plot was rather complicated and I now have a enormous JavaScript Object detailing all the small bits and pieces to make the plot look alright! Repo PixelMatrix was always a temporary name as it is only really fitting for the grid output, so I renamed this project to ScriptCanvas. I think this is more fitting because it does use scripts and it also draws those on canvas elements! I also added a README to the repo. As testing on chrome and firefox also looked good I think I am ready to ship !
Ships:
I made a web app where you can make simple scripts to create interesting outputs. Its really fun to see what patterns and stuff you can create from very simple logic! The web app is statically hosted on github pages and does not need any server. It is build on a very performant stack. The main UI thread dispatches a request to a web worker which on a separate thread executes optimized rust WASM. That WASM compiles the script to an AST and then evaluates it a bunch of times across all the needed scopes. Finally the web worker can message the main UI thread back. This separation is needed to not freeze the UI during script evaluation, but because there is a memory separation it was very annoying to work with. I used a vanilla-ish stack with no web framework, but with TS. I learned a lot about CSS and TS/JS. Using a framework would have probably sped up development but I wanted to first really understand what a framework would need to do under the hood before moving to that. All in all I am very proud of this project! Hopefully others find the concept as interesting as I do!...
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1792850228.393208
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1792936628.393208
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3856
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Super Beach Ball by @Olebsbo | Stardance
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Olebsbo
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1
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76.27
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1455
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-13T00:41:48Z", "hours": 76.0, "multiplier": 19.15, "payout": 1455, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is the ship for my beach volleyball game! :D I’m really proud of this project. I had to learn so many new things about UI, music, SFX, and other things that I just never got around to in my previous projects because I never reached the point where I could actually release my previous games. I struggled a lot with these things at first, but now I really think that I can make them all work well in my future projects! I should probably mention a few things (this might be a bit long, but please try to read it, the itch.io page also has some of the same info but this one is probably better for people specifically coming from Stardance) First of all, while the game is available to play in the browser, it seems that the lighting and particles get messed up. I think it is because of Godot’s way of exporting to HTML (I think it has to downgrade the graphics a bit to make it work properly), so unfortunately, if you do play it in browser you will have to deal with some weird lighting. The particles can be turned off in the options menu. The downloaded version is just fine, so if you can use that, that would be great! Although, I perfectly understand if you don’t want to download from a random stranger on the internet, and I haven’t tested the Mac or Linux versions (look at the download info on the itch.io page for more). Second, while I have tested the game with my friends, I’m still very uncertain about how effective the tutorial is. I believe that it should be fine if you read through carefully. If you find it confusing, then I sincerely apologize and hope you don’t take it to represent the entire game, and you can tell me what you found difficult. Also, the game is WAY more fun when you play with friends/family! Like, seriously, get someone to go through the tutorial and play with you. The competitiveness makes it so much more enjoyable! And if you’re friends can’t play with you at the moment, then playing against the AI can still be fun. If there are any bugs, please tell me! Just give me the situation that it happened in and what the bug actually was. And finally, thank you for trying my game! I worked very hard on it, and I’m really glad that it turned out the way it did! And if you don’t like it… uhhh please don’t cook the rating ⊙﹏⊙∥ remember to rate fairly!", "repo": "https://github.com/Olebsbo/SuperBeachBall", "demo": "https://olebsbo.itch.io/super-beach-ball"}]...
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[{"post_id": 28064, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 28064, "ts": "2026-07-14T02:48:17Z", "hours": 0.2658, "text": "I’ve made some really quick QOL adjustments to my game! It was some pretty basic stuff that I just didn’t account for previously because I just didn’t think of it before. Some changes include: Trying to account for weird resolutions (not 16:9) by adding black bars to the side (cannot confirm if it works yet) Adding additional information to the itch.io page to remind people about the tutorial and to mention that there might be some lag at the start of the web version Sorry I had to add this after the ship, but these changes were really simple and important, so I just felt like I had to! Also, I’d assume that this isn’t considered fraud or anything because it’s just a quick QOL update after the ship that doesn’t change anything major, just makes the experience better for players, and actual games do these kinds of emergency updates all the time. Also, I haven’t seen anything about this kind of thing being a possible problem. IF YOU ARE RATING , could you please take this information into account as well? It isn’t included in the ship information, but this info is also important."}, {"post_id": 27436, "ts": "2026-07-13T00:13:54Z", "hours": 1.4775, "text": "This is my final devlog! I’ve posted the itch.io page! And then itch went down for a couple minutes… But I should be ready to ship now. If you’d like, you should be able to play the game now! Thanks for reading!"}, {"post_id": 26372, "ts": "2026-07-11T03:49:25Z", "hours": 1.8675, "text": "I’m finally finished with my beach volleyball game! (Hopefully) I’ve pretty much just been touching up on some small things like making the background look a bit more interesting and adjusting some variables to make playing the game more intuitive. It’s basically done now! I plan on playtesting it one more time, and then after that I may do some minor adjustments, but the actual game is complete and I don’t plan on changing any of the gameplay anymore. I’ve been working on this project for 75 hours now, and I’m really proud of it; hopefully the next devlog will be the final one! :D"}, {"post_id": 25683, "ts": "2026-07-10T03:24:15Z", "hours": 4.0469, "text": "I’m actually getting pretty close to being done with my beach volleyball game! q(≧▽≦q) I’m done with the music for the win screen. I’ve also added a couple of small details like some boats and birds in the background to make the ocean look a little less empty, and some general bug fixing stuff. I also changed the volleyball color slightly because I kinda realized that it looks too much like a Mikasa volleyball and while I think I’ll be fine I don’t want to get sued (´。＿。｀) In general, I’m pretty close to being done! I think I’ll keep on working on touching up some small things, but I should be ready to ship soon!"}, {"post_id": 25140, "ts": "2026-07-09T05:08:14Z", "hours": 7.6383, "text": "I’ve done some more work on the music for my beach volleyball game! I think that I’m pretty much done with the main menu theme and the gameplay theme. I just have to do the win screen music now, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how I want it to sound. I think the music could definitely be better, but since I don’t do this kind of thing much, I’m pretty happy with how it’s come out!"}, {"post_id": 23831, "ts": "2026-07-07T00:15:23Z", "hours": 9.4881, "text": "I’ve been working on a bunch of polishing for my beach volleyball game! Now there’s a bunch of particle effects! There’s wind and leaf particles in the background that appear in random quantities. As the game progresses, the amount of each slowly increases so it looks like the game is getting really intense. I included a screenshot below of me testing the particles with godot icons as placeholders, and I think it looks pretty goofy. There’s also sand particles when the players move. Also, I’ve made it so that after 10 rallies, the ball starts moving faster to challenge high level players. It also gets set on fire and becomes more and more red as it gets faster, because fire is pretty cool :D Finally, I’ve been working a bit on the audio side of things. I’m a beginner at making music and sound effects, so I don’t think they’ll be too good, but I think that it’s good to try anyways and learn!"}, {"post_id": 21922, "ts": "2026-07-04T03:24:21Z", "hours": 4.9758, "text": "I got some good feedback from some playtesters, and I’ve added some solid changes to my beach volleyball game! There’s now a tutorial manual in the menu! I found that the actual interactive tutorial can be a bit difficult in terms of fully conveying the game’s rules to the player, so I decided that a tutorial manual for some of the more complicated things would be best. I also made a couple of small changes, like adding an indicator to show which character the player is controlling and fixing some smaller bugs, like how the ball used to detect multiple spikes if you spammed the spike button. There weren’t too many major changes, but I think that I’m definitely getting toward a more polished experience now :)"}, {"post_id": 20481, "ts": "2026-07-02T02:44:56Z", "hours": 5.6242, "text": "I’ve started work on a tutorial for my beach volleyball game! I’m not gonna lie, my game is WAY harder to explain than I thought it would be 😅. Making a tutorial was pretty weird because a lot of the rules and whatnot would be pretty confusing for somebody who’s never seen volleyball being played before. I’ve tried to make the tutorial as interactive as I could, but some things are just not very easy to show and I have to use a bunch of text to explain them. I’ll have to test the tutorial on some of my friends for now, but I think it’s a good start."}, {"post_id": 19700, "ts": "2026-07-01T02:54:53Z", "hours": 3.5767, "text": "I think I’ve finally got a good end screen for my beach volleyball game! It took a while, but I think I’ve got something I’m pretty happy with! I might work on it a bit more in future, but for now I think that it works well enough. There’s currently two randomized animations that the winning team might do, and I’ve shown an example of each below in the screenshot and the screen recording respectively."}, {"post_id": 18950, "ts": "2026-06-30T04:02:23Z", "hours": 4.53, "text": "I’ve been working some more on my beach volleyball game… Do you know that thing where people say that making something only takes 20% of the time but making it good takes 80% of the time? Yeah… I’ve been working on the game end screen for like 3 hours now and I just can’t get it to look right. The screenshot below is what I got after like 5 different prototypes and is nowhere near done. A lot of the effects that I’m trying to add seem to not work very well with Godot’s control nodes either, so they looked pretty jittery when I tried to set them up. Thankfully, I did get something good done! You can now access a menu during a match which allows you to adjust settings or leave the match and go back to the main menu."}, {"post_id": 16630, "ts": "2026-06-27T01:36:36Z", "hours": 2.4983, "text": "I finally got around to adding local PVP! So far, you’ve only been able to play against an AI, but I’ve made it so that there’s an option to select local PVP now, and it actually works! The left team is controlled by WASD, and the right team is controlled by the arrow keys. It honestly took way longer to implement than I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much spaghetti code… (▔﹏▔) I had to fix so many dependencies that I made initially just to set up the gameplay quickly. Really, it probably should have taken like 10 minutes since I already had all the logic down for player movement and gameplay. Still, I was able to finish it in the end. I won’t be able to work on this project for a bit since I’ll be out over the weekend, but I’ve definitely got a good idea of what I’ll be doing next!"}, {"post_id": 16069, "ts": "2026-06-26T03:43:29Z", "hours": 5.6756, "text": "I’ve finally set up a main menu for my beach volleyball game! Honestly, it might look a bit too good, because now the actual gameplay feels like it needs to be way better (┬┬﹏┬┬) But really, I’m proud of how it looks because I’ve never done a main menu before. The buttons are super satisfying to hover over, and in general, I think it looks really professional now. Plus, it worked almost first try! ( with the help of a couple youtube tutorials, but the slide in and hover animations of the buttons, as well as a bunch of other styling choices were all done by me! )"}, {"post_id": 15698, "ts": "2026-06-25T15:01:43Z", "hours": 10.4783, "text": "I’ve made some great progress on my beach volleyball game! Now you’re actually playing on a beach! It looks a bit empty though… I’ll probably add more to it later. I’ve also been working on making the game feel good. I added a bit of screenshake whenever the ball gets hit. I’ve also made it so that the camera zooms in when the ball gets hit up. There’s also a diamond transition and a score counter whenever a point is scored. Finally, bug fixing! Originally, if the ball hit the top of the net, the AI would think that the ball had hit the ground and would stop playing, but the ball is technically still in play. To fix this, I changed it so that the AI would recalculate where to move if the ball has substantially changed its trajectory, i.e. the ball bounces off the net, so it lands somewhere that wasn’t where it originally thought it would land. Also, I encountered a pretty funny bug while making it so that the ball would spin when it gets hit. It turns out you shouldn’t make a 2D sprite rotate in ALL directions! (screenshot below) Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are going. I plan to continue polishing the game up as much as possible, so I don’t think I’ll be shipping for a while. Still, I think it should all be worth it!"}, {"post_id": 13923, "ts": "2026-06-22T20:39:01Z", "hours": 3.4772, "text": "I’ve gotten a lot of work done on my beach volleyball game! I’ve finished up all the animations, so all the player characters are actually moving and stuff. I also added some sprites for the net and the ball, so they actually look pretty nice now. I’ve also added a couple of effects to make the game a lot more interesting to look at as well as a lot more balanced. I noticed that it’s pretty much impossible to react to the enemy spikes instantly, so I added a small pause whenever one of the players spike or receive, both of which look really cool as well as make the game a lot more reasonable to play. I also made it so that the camera moves a little to follow the ball. All in all, I think that I’m on a good track to make a really solid finished product! I should probably also mention that the little blue outlines in the screenshot and the recording are debug lines to see collisions and raycasts. They’re not going to be there in the final game, they’re only there for testing. They do look pretty cool tho :p"}, {"post_id": 12886, "ts": "2026-06-21T03:23:01Z", "hours": 4.7542, "text": "I’ve finally got some player art for my beach volleyball game! I still need to set up animations though… still, I’ve got all the frames that I need, and I’ve already begun setting up animations for one of the player characters. I’m still balancing the actual gameplay, but I think that it should all be in a good state soon!"}, {"post_id": 12328, "ts": "2026-06-20T03:32:35Z", "hours": 4.41, "text": "I’ve been working some more on my beach volleyball game. Now you can play against an AI! It took me ages to figure out how to make the AI move exactly to the right location to hit the ball, but I was able to finally figure it out using a bunch of parabola equations (high school physics finally coming in clutch). Lowkey, the AI is way better at my game than me though😭 I’ll probably be able to work on some proper art soon, but for now I’m pretty satisfied with how things have turned out! Also, if you know how actual volleyball works, you probably know that people usually serve after the receive. I considered doing this, but I figured it would just complicate things, so I kept it at just a receive and a spike. And yes, I did in fact make this game because I loved the anime Haikyuu! (you should watch it too) BTW, I’m trying to upload a screen recording here, but I’m not completely sure if it will work or not. If it doesn’t, please tell me how I can make it work, and I’ll post an updated devlog."}, {"post_id": 11685, "ts": "2026-06-19T01:16:02Z", "hours": 1.4906, "text": "WHY IS HE GETTING CLOSER?!?! I’m working on a beach volleyball game. The game has 2D graphics, but I plan on making the background 3D, so the game uses 3D physics. It turns out that if you leave the Z position of the player a little off, they start sliding towards the camera. I’m still working on prototyping, so art isn’t final, but I’ve already set up a ball (the purple godot icon) that bounces and can be hit, so I should have something functional soon!"}, {"post_id": 1216, "ts": "2026-06-03T02:20:24Z", "hours": 0.4764, "text": "Just started, I’ve got a simple 3d scene set up for now with basic movement, I’m planning on eventually making it into a 2d beach volleyball game with 3d graphics (probably will have to get through finals week first tho). Should be pretty cool!"}]...
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Title: Super Beach Ball by @Olebsbo | Stardance
D Title: Super Beach Ball by @Olebsbo | Stardance
Devlogs:
Just started, I’ve got a simple 3d scene set up for now with basic movement, I’m planning on eventually making it into a 2d beach volleyball game with 3d graphics (probably will have to get through finals week first tho). Should be pretty cool!
WHY IS HE GETTING CLOSER?!?! I’m working on a beach volleyball game. The game has 2D graphics, but I plan on making the background 3D, so the game uses 3D physics. It turns out that if you leave the Z position of the player a little off, they start sliding towards the camera. I’m still working on prototyping, so art isn’t final, but I’ve already set up a ball (the purple godot icon) that bounces and can be hit, so I should have something functional soon!
I’ve been working some more on my beach volleyball game. Now you can play against an AI! It took me ages to figure out how to make the AI move exactly to the right location to hit the ball, but I was able to finally figure it out using a bunch of parabola equations (high school physics finally coming in clutch). Lowkey, the AI is way better at my game than me though😭 I’ll probably be able to work on some proper art soon, but for now I’m pretty satisfied with how things have turned out! Also, if you know how actual volleyball works, you probably know that people usually serve after the receive. I considered doing this, but I figured it would just complicate things, so I kept it at just a receive and a spike. And yes, I did in fact make this game because I loved the anime Haikyuu! (you should watch it too) BTW, I’m trying to upload a screen recording here, but I’m not completely sure if it will work or not. If it doesn’t, please tell me how I can make it work, and I’ll post an updated devlog.
I’ve finally got some player art for my beach volleyball game! I still need to set up animations though… still, I’ve got all the frames that I need, and I’ve already begun setting up animations for one of the player characters. I’m still balancing the actual gameplay, but I think that it should all be in a good state soon!
I’ve gotten a lot of work done on my beach volleyball game! I’ve finished up all the animations, so all the player characters are actually moving and stuff. I also added some sprites for the net and the ball, so they actually look pretty nice now. I’ve also added a couple of effects to make the game a lot more interesting to look at as well as a lot more balanced. I noticed that it’s pretty much impossible to react to the enemy spikes instantly, so I added a small pause whenever one of the players spike or receive, both of which look really cool as well as make the game a lot more reasonable to play. I also made it so that the camera moves a little to follow the ball. All in all, I think that I’m on a good track to make a really solid finished product! I should probably also mention that the little blue outlines in the screenshot and the recording are debug lines to see collisions and raycasts. They’re not going to be there in the final game, they’re only there for testing. They do look pretty cool tho :p
I’ve made some great progress on my beach volleyball game! Now you’re actually playing on a beach! It looks a bit empty though… I’ll probably add more to it later. I’ve also been working on making the game feel good. I added a bit of screenshake whenever the ball gets hit. I’ve also made it so that the camera zooms in when the ball gets hit up. There’s also a diamond transition and a score counter whenever a point is scored. Finally, bug fixing! Originally, if the ball hit the top of the net, the AI would think that the ball had hit the ground and would stop playing, but the ball is technically still in play. To fix this, I changed it so that the AI would recalculate where to move if the ball has substantially changed its trajectory, i.e. the ball bounces off the net, so it lands somewhere that wasn’t where it originally thought it would land. Also, I encountered a pretty funny bug while making it so that the ball would spin when it gets hit. It turns out you shouldn’t make a 2D sprite rotate in ALL directions! (screenshot below) Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are going. I plan to continue polishing the game up as much as possible, so I don’t think I’ll be shipping for a while. Still, I think it should all be worth it!
I’ve finally set up a main menu for my beach volleyball game! Honestly, it might look a bit too good, because now the actual gameplay feels like it needs to be way better (┬┬﹏┬┬) But really, I’m proud of how it looks because I’ve never done a main menu before. The buttons are super satisfying to hover over, and in general, I think it looks really professional now. Plus, it worked almost first try! ( with the help of a couple youtube tutorials, but the slide in and hover animations of the buttons, as well as a bunch of other styling choices were all done by me! )
I finally got around to adding local PVP! So far, you’ve only been able to play against an AI, but I’ve made it so that there’s an option to select local PVP now, and it actually works! The left team is controlled by WASD, and the right team is controlled by the arrow keys. It honestly took way longer to implement than I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much spaghetti code… (▔﹏▔) I had to fix so many dependencies that I made initially just to set up the gameplay quickly. Really, it probably should have taken like 10 minutes since I already had all the logic down for player movement and gameplay. Still, I was able to finish it in the end. I won’t be able to work on this project for a bit since I’ll be out over the weekend, but I’ve definitely got a good idea of what I’ll be doing next!
I’ve been working some more on my beach volleyball game… Do you know that thing where people say that making something only takes 20% of the time but making it good takes 80% of the time? Yeah… I’ve been working on the game end screen for like 3 hours now and I just can’t get it to look right. The screenshot below is what I got after like 5 different prototypes and is nowhere near done. A lot of the effects that I’m trying to add seem to not work very well with Godot’s control nodes either, so they looked pretty jittery when I tried to set them up. Thankfully, I did get something good done! You can now access a menu during a match which allows you to adjust settings or leave the match and go back to the main menu.
I think I’ve finally got a good end screen for my beach volleyball game! It took a while, but I think I’ve got something I’m pretty happy with! I might work on it a bit more in future, but for now I think that it works well enough. There’s currently two randomized animations that the winning team might do, and I’ve shown an example of each below in the screenshot and the screen recording respectively.
I’ve started work on a tutorial for my beach volleyball game! I’m not gonna lie, my game is WAY harder to explain than I thought it would be 😅. Making a tutorial was pretty weird because a lot of the rules and whatnot would be pretty confusing for somebody who’s never seen volleyball being played before. I’ve tried to make the tutorial as interactive as I could, but some things are just not very easy to show and I have to use a bunch of text to explain them. I’ll have to test the tutorial on some of my friends for now, but I think it’s a good start.
I got some good feedback from some playtesters, and I’ve added some solid changes to my beach volleyball game! There’s now a tutorial manual in the menu! I found that the actual interactive tutorial can be a bit difficult in terms of fully conveying the game’s rules to the player, so I decided that a tutorial manual for some of the more complicated things would be best. I also made a couple of small changes, like adding an indicator to show which character the player is controlling and fixing some smaller bugs, like how the ball used to detect multiple spikes if you spammed the spike button. There weren’t too many major changes, but I think that I’m definitely getting toward a more polished experience now :)
I’ve been working on a bunch of polishing for my beach volleyball game! Now there’s a bunch of particle effects! There’s wind and leaf particles in the background that appear in random quantities. As the game progresses, the amount of each slowly increases so it looks like the game is getting really intense. I included a screenshot below of me testing the particles with godot icons as placeholders, and I think it looks pretty goofy. There’s also sand particles when the players move. Also, I’ve made it so that after 10 rallies, the ball starts moving faster to challenge high level players. It also gets set on fire and becomes more and more red as it gets faster, because fire is pretty cool :D Finally, I’ve been working a bit on the audio side of things. I’m a beginner at making music and sound effects, so I don’t think they’ll be too good, but I think that it’s good to try anyways and learn!
I’ve done some more work on the music for my beach volleyball game! I think that I’m pretty much done with the main menu theme and the gameplay theme. I just have to do the win screen music now, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how I want it to sound. I think the music could definitely be better, but since I don’t do this kind of thing much, I’m pretty happy with how it’s come out!
I’m actually getting pretty close to being done with my beach volleyball game! q(≧▽≦q) I’m done with the music for the win screen. I’ve also added a couple of small details like some boats and birds in the background to make the ocean look a little less empty, and some general bug fixing stuff. I also changed the volleyball color slightly because I kinda realized that it looks too much like a Mikasa volleyball and while I think I’ll be fine I don’t want to get sued (´。＿。｀) In general, I’m pretty close to being done! I think I’ll keep on working on touching up some small things, but I should be ready to ship soon!
I’m finally finished with my beach volleyball game! (Hopefully) I’ve pretty much just been touching up on some small things like making the background look a bit more interesting and adjusting some variables to make playing the game more intuitive. It’s basically done now! I plan on playtesting it one more time, and then after that I may do some minor adjustments, but the actual game is complete and I don’t plan on changing any of the gameplay anymore. I’ve been working on this project for 75 hours now, and I’m really proud of it; hopefully the next devlog will be the final one! :D
This is my final devlog! I’ve posted the itch.io page! And then itch went down for a couple minutes… But I should be ready to ship now. If you’d like, you should be able to play the game now! Thanks for reading!
I’ve made some really quick QOL adjustments to my game! It was some pretty basic stuff that I just didn’t account for previously because I just didn’t think of it before. Some changes include: Trying to account for weird resolutions (not 16:9) by adding black bars to the side (cannot confirm if it works yet) Adding additional information to the itch.io page to remind people about the tutorial and to mention that there might be some lag at the start of the web version Sorry I had to add this after the ship, but these changes were really simple and important, so I just felt like I had to! Also, I’d assume that this isn’t considered fraud or anything because it’s just a quick QOL update after the ship that doesn’t change anything major, just makes the experience better for players, and actual games do these kinds of emergency updates all the time. Also, I haven’t seen anything about this kind of thing being a possible problem. IF YOU ARE RATING , could you please take this information into account as well? It isn’t included in the ship information, but this info is also important.
Ships:
This is the ship for my beach volleyball game! :D I’m really proud of this project. I had to learn so many new things about UI, music, SFX, and other things that I just never got around to in my previous projects because I never reached the point where I could actually release my previous games. I struggled a lot with these things at first, but now I really think that I can make them all work well in my future projects! I should probably mention a few things (this might be a bit long, but please try to read it, the itch.io page also has some of the same info but this one is probably better for people specifically coming from Stardance) First of all, while the game is available to play in the browser, it seems that the lighting and particles get messed up. I think it is because of Godot’s way of exporting to HTML (I think it has to downgrade the graphics a bit to make it work properly), so unfortunately, if you do play it in browser you will have to deal with some weird lighting. The particles can be turned off in the options menu. The downloaded version is just fine, so if you can use that, that would be great! Although, I perfectly understand if you don’t want to download from a random stranger on the internet, and I haven’t tested the Mac or Linux versions (look at the download info on the itch.io page for more). Second, while I have tested the game with my friends, I’m still very uncertain about how effective the tutorial is. I believe that it should be fine if you read through carefully. If you find it confusing, then I sincerely apologize and hope you don’t take it to represent the entire game, and you can tell me what you found difficult. Also, the game is WAY more fun when you play with friends/family! Like, seriously, get someone to go through the tutorial and play with you. The competitiveness makes it so much more enjoyable! And if you’re friends can’t play with you at the moment, then playing against the AI can still be fun. If there are any bugs, please tell me! Just give me the situation that it happened in and what the bug actually was. And finally, thank you for trying my game! I worked very hard on it, and I’m really glad that it turned out the way it did! And if you don’t like it… uhhh please don’t cook the rating ⊙﹏⊙∥ remember to rate fairly!...
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Mine and Dine - 26.2 Minecraft Mod by @RevComInter Mine and Dine - 26.2 Minecraft Mod by @RevComInteractives | Stardance...
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RevComInteractives
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1463
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-27T19:49:16Z", "hours": 29.0, "multiplier": 14.54, "payout": 420, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Mine & Dine is a Minecraft mod that aims to overhaul the minecraft cooking system, because I always thought that it was a little bit shallow and lacked depth. Therefore I have set the goal for myself to transform the cooking system into something I always wanted. My mod adds six new blockentities and over 70 new items that do exactly that. (You can find a deeper explanation of the contents in my ReadMe) This mod is by far not finished but I think it’s gotten to a point where I would say it is playable and enjoyable, that’s why I decided to ship it now. Especially now that I’ve successfully ported it to version 26.2. What I’m especially proud of is how far my skills as a mod developer have come since I started this project. I have made a couple of smaller mods before the stardance challenge but never something quite like this. I was even able to upload it to Modrinth where the whole world can see it. (Modrinth is also the easiest way to play my mod btw) This step of shipping my final project for this challenge really feels like I’ve achieved something. Thanks in advance to everyone who plays my mod, I hope you’ll enjoy it. If you encounter any bugs (And its not unlikely you do) please report them on my github page. Anyways that’s everything I have to say for now, see you around!", "repo": "https://github.com/JhStudi0/MineAndDine-26.2", "demo": "https://modrinth.com/mod/mine-and-dine"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-09-01T19:51:42Z", "hours": 57.0, "multiplier": 18.17, "payout": 1043, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Mine & Dine is a Minecraft mod that aims to overhaul the minecraft cooking system, because I always thought that it was a little bit shallow and lacked depth. Therefore I have set the goal for myself to transform the cooking system into something I always wanted. My mod adds five new blockentities and over 60 new items that do exactly that. (You can find a deeper explanation of the contents in my ReadMe) This mod is by far not finished but I think it’s gotten to a point where I would say it is playable and enjoyable, that’s why I decided to ship it now. What I’m especially proud of is how far my skills as a mod developer have come since I started this project. I have made a couple of smaller mods before the stardance challenge but never something quite like this. I was even able to upload it to Modrinth where the whole world can see it. (Modrinth is also the easiest way to play my mod) This step of shipping my first project really feels like I’ve achieved something. Thanks in advance to everyone who plays my mod, I hope you’ll enjoy it. If you encounter any bugs (And its not unlikely you do) please report them on my github page. Anyways that’s everything I have to say for now, see you around!", "repo": "https://github.com/JhStudi0/MineAndDine-26.2", "demo": "https://modrinth.com/mod/mine-and-dine"}]...
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[{"post_id": 74612, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 74612, "ts": "2026-09-27T19:38:37Z", "hours": 1.8344, "text": "Hi people! This will probably be my last update in this challenge as I have now finally fixed the bugs that were bothering me. The item renderers work now and have their actual colors. Also the progress arrow is now only one arrow and not 100. I’ll be shipping my project now in the hopes that it will get accepted and rated as well as the last time I shipped. By the way this doesn’t mean I’m done with the mod at all, I still think it could use more updates and improvements so my development is by no means finished. It’ll just happen outside of this challenge and maybe not as frequent as it did now. Anyways that’s all from me for now, I’ll hope to see you around!"}, {"post_id": 70876, "ts": "2026-09-19T22:15:59Z", "hours": 4.2711, "text": "Hi people! I’ve been busy the last couple of days and I can now announce that I can finally run my game again in Minecraft 26.2. So the majority of the update is finished! That being said there are some to be fair kind of funny bugs that I still need to fix (and honestly right now I don’t really have a clue how but oh well I guess we’ll have to see) One example is that somehow my progress arrow in my menu does this really weird thing where it just duplicates a couple times and stretches weirdly across my screen. I mean I don’t know what I did but I’m sure there’s a way to fix that. And the other thing is that for some to me unknown reason, my display items are just red. For example on my cutting board. They’re not at all supposed to look like that and the issue is consistent across all my item renders… Yeah honestly no clue why. Also the display doesnt dissapear when you craft and item but I already had that issue with the last version and I managed to fix that so I’m sure that won’t be a big problem. There are some minor bugs that I still have to resolve, like the item models of my blocks not loading in correctly or my item displays in the cooking pot not working but I’m sure that won’t be too difficult. Anyways that’s all from me for today, I’ll see you around!"}, {"post_id": 69362, "ts": "2026-09-16T21:54:54Z", "hours": 1.3753, "text": "Hi people! It’s looking a lot less red now, doesnt it? I’ve been able to update both the pan and the mixer to the newest version, and that leaves only the cutting board and the scraper before I’ll be able to finally run the game again (hopefully) So yeah I feel like I’m close to finally being finished with the update and then I can finally start working on actual new features. I want to add at least a little bit of actually new content before I ship again. Anyways that’s all from me for today, hope to see you around!"}, {"post_id": 68266, "ts": "2026-09-14T20:21:22Z", "hours": 2.2772, "text": "Hi people! My cooking pot is now working! (Hopefully) It took me longer than I expected because I had a lot of “fun” with the codec of the recipes. But thankfully now that that’s working I can recycle a lot of code for my pan and mixer which will hopefully make that part a lot easier. The cutting board and scraper will probably be another story though. But I’m positive that I’ll be able to finish everything by the ned of the week. That’s all from me for today see you around!"}, {"post_id": 67663, "ts": "2026-09-13T20:21:37Z", "hours": 2.4153, "text": "Hi people! My CornGrinderRecipeBuilder works again! That also means that I managed to get my corn grinder as a whole at least to a state where I would assume that it runs again. So yes, I have reworked both the custom block, teh block entity and the recipe handling. And let’s just say I wouldnt exactly say that I had fun… It’s just really annoying trying to find out why i cant refer to a method in another class only to then find out that I forgot that I forgot to rename one type. To apply that to what cost me the most time, I tried to call my tick() method from my block entity in the custom block (so the crafting actually progresses) but I forgot to change the type of my blockEntityType and it referred to the wrong blockentity. It took me forever to catch that problem. Anyways only five more crafting blockentities I have to port over frustrated scream . I just hope it will be easier since i now roughly know what I’m supposed to do. I can only hope now that school starts again for me… Anyways that’s everything from me today, see you around!"}, {"post_id": 66973, "ts": "2026-09-12T23:35:17Z", "hours": 6.5831, "text": "Hi people! I have been quiet for a few days now but trust me I’ve been busy. The port to the newest Minecraft version is almost complete so be on the lookout for that. Since I last posted a devlog I updated all the items, tags and the loottable modifiers. Also I updated the playerJoinEvent that gives you a cookbook when you first join into a world. Now to the places that still need updating: The ModBlocks, but just those with a blockentity with crafting functions. Therefore ModEntites and the custom recipe types and generators are obviously still missing too. And probably the least amount of work will be updating the missing recipes in my ModRecipeProvider class (It auto generates all my recipes) I have already updated the vanilla style recipes so the ones in a crafting table or oven but my custom recipes are still missing. And of course I gotta debug all my code when all that is done. Anyways I hope I’ll finish this update at some time next week so I can finally start adding some new stuff. That being said I don’t think I’ll be able to code as much starting from Monday, because where I live school is starting again so yeah… Anyways that’s all from me today, hope to see you around!"}, {"post_id": 64432, "ts": "2026-09-08T20:09:14Z", "hours": 2.0831, "text": "Hey people! So I decided to start porting my mod to 26.2 because I hate myself or something. This creenshot really captures my current state of mind quite well, and I’m really contemplating why I decided to do this. Well, it’s the next logical step that’s why I did it but it’s till so annoying. But seriously, why does Mojang have to change their code in every update? Anyways, by the time I uploaded this devlog, I was able to port most of the items plus the model generator which roughly leaves the blocks + their entities and screens and everything, the tag datagen, the cookbook pages (I dont want to) and all the recipes. Damn that’s a lot of work why did I sign up for this. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you around!"}, {"post_id": 64233, "ts": "2026-09-08T14:19:01Z", "hours": 8.0308, "text": "Hello people! I’ve been busy again. But before we dive into what I added I want to say thank you to everyone who rated my project so incredibly high. I couldn’t be happier with all the feedback you gave me. I want to address a few things though that I found which I think caused problems for some of the playtesters. I was under the assumption that the Modrinth version detection would work and therefor my mod was playable on all 1.21.X The problem is that the mod is only compatible with 1.21.1. As much as I would like to blame all of that on Modrinth I do have to admit that I could have just playtested it on the other versions. So to everyone who had problems with playing my mod I want to say a sorry and I hope that this fixes your issues. But now to what I’ve been doing the last couple of days: I’m from southern Germany and therefor I wanted to implement the most iconic dish from my region: Käsespätzle. Käsespätzle (something like cheese spaetzle in english) are like the german kind of noodles just baked with cheese. It may sound a but lame but trust me they are delicious. Now implementing them proved to be a bit more challenging than I had thought because I had no cheese whatsoever so I implemented that together with it’s aging mechanic. And furthermore spätzle are made on a special type of scraper which I also had to implement. It inserts the raw spätzle directly into the cooking pot. I’m currently also contemplating where I want to go with this mod. I’m not going to abandon it, that’s for sure but I just don’t know if i want to keep adding stuff in 1.21 or if I should migrate to the newest version of the game (that’s something that a lot of raters wanted) I’ll have to think about that a bit more but until then see you around!"}, {"post_id": 59779, "ts": "2026-09-01T18:30:25Z", "hours": 0.2781, "text": "Hello People! Today I just wanted to share a quick video with you. It shows how you make an apple pie in my mod. I thought it would be a good showcase for some of the mechanics my mod has to offer. And if the video quality isnt so good, I’m sorry but its the only way I could upload the video on this platform :( Anyways see you around!"}, {"post_id": 59078, "ts": "2026-08-31T18:05:33Z", "hours": 6.0342, "text": "Hi people! I’ve been busy the last couple of days and let me tell you I’m so close to shipping my first iteration of the mod. I’m so close to being done I just have a add a last few things and maybe film a few short showcases and then I’ll be ready to ship this thing. Anyways the most interesting additions that I added are a few new item (textures) and finally after weeks of them being untextured, my mixer and grinder have gotten their models. Anyways that’s all from me for today. The next time you’ll hear from me is probably with a ship so stay tuned. See you!"}, {"post_id": 54808, "ts": "2026-08-25T22:58:00Z", "hours": 2.2117, "text": "Hello people! As promised I have finished the cookbook (at least to a point where I’d say it’s complete enough) and I can now give you some sneakpeeks. Sadly I cant show you everything ‘cause I can only attach four pictures but I think I got a good selection. So the first picture you can see is the opening page of the cookbook, so just some general stuff. The second picture shows a segment of the contents list. All the pink things are links to the corresponding pages you can click on to quickly navigate through the book. And lastly you can see an extract from one of the recipes (in this case for an apple pie). I’m somewhat happy with the design but I’m especially happy with the display of the item on the corresponding page. It is defintely a pain to set up (at least the way I did it) but I think it’s well worth it. But I think that’s all from me for today. I’ll be adding the last textures and little things over the next few days so I can finally push out my first ship :) See you around!"}, {"post_id": 54153, "ts": "2026-08-24T23:55:27Z", "hours": 8.1442, "text": "Hello people! I havent posted anything in quite some time but trust me I’ve been busy. The reason why I’ve shown you so little is because there isn’t much that I could show you. I’ve added a lot of background stuff that I just had to add because I’m planning on shipping soon. One sneakpeak I can give you is this (see picture). Any idea what it is? Well I’ll tell you: It’s a cookbook. I think it’s nice for the immersion if you have a cookbook where you can find all the cooking recipes for my mod. I’ll show you more about it in the future once I’m done with it. Until then that’s all from me. Hope to see you around!"}, {"post_id": 50679, "ts": "2026-08-19T23:55:47Z", "hours": 1.1469, "text": "Hello people! You can now enjoy a nice apple pie at your farm because I have been busy. I added eight new items today to aid you on your cooking journey. First I added cinnamon sticks and powder. Right now you get cinnamon sticks from stripping jungle logs on a cutting board. I’m planning on adding actual cinnamon trees in the future but for now I figured jungle wood would be the most fitting since cinnamon is also a tropical plant. With the addtition of cinnamon I finally made it possible to craft pumpkin pie with the mechanics of my mod. That’s also why I added the middle row of items. On the left we have the pumkin slice which you can bake into the grilled pumpkin slice (middle). I’ll probably have to rework this texture in the future cause you can’t really tell the difference :P. And with that item you can then craft the unbaked pumpkin pie which, as the name suggests, can be baked into the minecraft pumpkin pie. The last three items I added are for my apple pie. First up we have apple chunks which you can then use to make the unbaked apple pie which of course can be baked into the finished apple pie. I hope you like my new additions and that’s also everything from me for today. See you around :)"}, {"post_id": 49899, "ts": "2026-08-18T21:16:14Z", "hours": 1.3992, "text": "Hi people! I’ve been doing a lot of background work today for future stuff so sadly I don’t have too much to show you today. I still coded some more things that I can already hsow you that are worth taking the look at. On the left is the new powdered sugar that you get by grinding sugar in the grinder. It is also used to craft the next item, the pie dough in the mixer. On the cutting board oyu can then transform the dough into the pie base. This item will be used later when making different kinds of pies. What I immediately have in mind is of course the oumpkin pie that is already in vanilla minecraft but also the apple pie and the sweet berry pie. Both of these fruits are of course already in the base game so I think the addition of a pie would make sense. I’m also planning on adding more fruit so I can add more pies. Anyways that’s all from me for today, see you around :)"}, {"post_id": 49262, "ts": "2026-08-17T23:15:11Z", "hours": 1.035, "text": "Hello People! I’ve worked a bit more on expanding the cutting board functionality. I’ve added another tool that can be used in the recipes and that’s the rolling pin (first pic, top left) It does exactly what it sounds like it flattens the ingredients, like for example with my tortilla dough (top right). You can see the process in the second picture. And because it would have felt weird to stop the production chain there, I added the function to put the raw torilla into my frying pan where it gets fired into a finished tortilla. I’m really looking forward on adding more recipes with my tortilla but for now I’m kind of missing some more ingredients, like red beans that I want to put in there. Anyways, that’s all I have time for today :( I’ll see you around :)"}, {"post_id": 48545, "ts": "2026-08-16T23:47:04Z", "hours": 1.04, "text": "Hi people! I’ve been putting my new block entities to some good use today. (From left to right) First of all I added the bun dough. You get it by cutting bread dough on the cutting board. Then there is the bun which you obviously get by smelting bun dough in a furnance. Next up is the cookie dough. You get it by mixing the needed ingredients for a cookie in a mixer. And last is the heavy cream. I’ve added the item a little while back but only now found the time and motivation (especially the latter XD) to make the texture and give it a proper crafting recipe. You get it by mixing milk and butter in the mixer. I believe that that is roughly how heavy cream is made in real life, at least after my five minute google research. I’ve also added crafting recipes for some other things but those aren’t anything special really just in a crafting table. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you around :)"}, {"post_id": 47737, "ts": "2026-08-15T21:06:10Z", "hours": 3.92, "text": "Okay damn I didn’t think that this would take me this long But hi people! I finally added a cutting board to my mod! It came up a while back as a suggestion for how to get my chicken legs and let me say I think it was a good suggestion. The cutting board just fits right in. It works pretty much as you may know it from farmer’s delight, where you put an item on it and then click on it with a tool in this case a knife (which I also added today but that was pretty simple) and it drops the outcome. I’m planning on adding onto that mechanic with more tools like a roling pin for example and definitely more recipes. I have to say now that it is in the game I really like it but damn was it annoying to implement. I mean it was my fault (I forgot one function so it didn’t work) but it nontheless send me down an existentiell crisis ‘cause there was no error message whatsoever. Don’t we love that XD Anyways that’s all from me for today, I’ll see you around :)"}, {"post_id": 47170, "ts": "2026-08-14T21:14:02Z", "hours": 0.7811, "text": "Hello people! I didn’t have a lot of time today since I’m currently renovating my new room :) and it takes a lot of time. Anyways I still managed to get something done today and that is working on the immersion of my mod. The cooking pot and pan now emit smoke when they are cooking. That’s all from me today and I’ll hopefully get back to you with more things :) See ya!"}, {"post_id": 46592, "ts": "2026-08-13T22:46:26Z", "hours": 1.5181, "text": "Hi People! Today I added another Block Entity: The mixer. It works similarly to the cooking pot and pan so I was able to copy a lot of that code. I just had to add the rest of the slots and remove the container slot. I’ll use the mixer as a way to make different kinds of doughs later but for now it can just make bread dough, you can bake into bread in a furnance. I’m really looking forward on making pasta dough and then expanding on that. I was kind of thinking of making a noodle press so you can make different kinds of pasta (I’m speaking spagetti, tortelini, etc.) I kind of want it to work like a stone cutter, where you put in the dough and then select one shape of noodle. But those are still thoughts for the future. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you next time :)"}, {"post_id": 46033, "ts": "2026-08-12T23:12:08Z", "hours": 1.6828, "text": "Hello people! I’ve been somewhat productive today: So first of all I added a provisional model for my pan. Its that orange thing next to the cooking pot. Then I’ve also reworked the crafting logic of my pan so it supports recipes that don’t need a bowl or similar, like you can see in the second picture. I feel like for the vanilla meat items that apporach makes the most sense. And I’ve added sunflower seeds, ground sunflower seeds and sunflower oil into my game. For now you just have to believe me, because I dont have any textures made for them just yet XD. In the third screenshot you can see how sunflower seeds are ground into ground sunflower seeds. In the last picture you can see the crafting recipe for sunflower oil fron ground sunflower seeds. It’s very simplified from the way one would actually make sunflower oil but it’s still just minecraft so I think it fits. Anyways that’s everything I have for you today, see you tomorrow!"}, {"post_id": 45458, "ts": "2026-08-11T22:46:37Z", "hours": 2.2208, "text": "Hi people! I’m back from my holidays in London so I can finally continue the project. It’s been a while so I felt motivated and decided to start adding a new block entity: the pan! So far the block entity already has a screen but there are still a few things missing, like the model/texture and a proper crafting system. So far I can only implement recipes with a container like a bowl or plate (since I recycled a lot of code from my cooking pot) but that wouldnt make a lot of sense if I just wanted to get e.g. the standard minecraft cooked beef since it has no container, so yeah, I’ll have to find a way to make that work. I also added a new decoravtive block: the counter. It’s the brick with a layer of polished deepslate at the top. And I’ve found out that it not only works well as a counter but also as the top of a brisk wall. Anyways that’s all I had time for today, see you tomorrow!"}, {"post_id": 40198, "ts": "2026-08-03T16:29:35Z", "hours": 1.3703, "text": "Hi people! This is probably the last devlog I’ll post before I leave for a week to go on vacation to London, unless I get a sudden sweep of motivation or somthing XD. Anyways I got some new stuff for you. So first you see the work of my boredom, my farm that I build. Then I finally added the stove with texture and everything so that’s done now. And to celebrate that I added the carrot soup that can be crafted in the cooking pot. And I’ve added the new garlic crop with seeds and the garlic itself of course. Not really sure yet what I’m going to do with that but better have it than not have it. Besides garlic bread is always an answer, am I right. Anyways that’s all from me for today, see you guys in a week or so :)"}, {"post_id": 39687, "ts": "2026-08-02T20:29:38Z", "hours": 2.6472, "text": "New Crop Alert! Meet the newest crop addition to Mine and Dine: The onion can now be grown. On my way to making my mod survival friendly this really helps quite a lot. The onion can, like the other seeds, be obtained through breaking grass. But to be honest texturing the growth stages of a crop will forever be the most annoying part of the process. I’ve also done some more tweaking, like adding sounds and map colors to my blocks. Plus a I added a German language pack to my mod. Here are some of my favourite (with that I mean wildest) translations: Vanilla Bean Seeds = Vanilleschotensamen Dark Chocolate covered Apple = Apfel mit Zartbitterschokoladenüberzug And the other ones sound kind of weird too, even though German is my mother tongue. Guess it really does’nt make a difference if you read the english version all the time without thinking of the translation XD Anyways have a good day and see you next time."}, {"post_id": 39187, "ts": "2026-08-01T23:47:08Z", "hours": 0.3183, "text": "Didn’t have time for much toady so all i did was finally create a loot table for my block entities and implemented their strength so they wouldn’t be instamine anymore. (I know the dropped cooking pot is a bit big but I’ll change that in the future.) See you next time :)"}, {"post_id": 38495, "ts": "2026-07-31T22:06:56Z", "hours": 0.8517, "text": "Here’s my devlog for toady :) So I played around a bit with my cooking pot and added the function that they only work, when they have a warm block underneath them, like the ones you can see below. What I’m working on next is probably something like a stove so you can have a nice looking block that gives off heat because all the warm blocks look a bit weird and I don’t think it would make sense to count a furnance that isn’t on as a warm block. I also made three new item models to complete them one after another. From left to right we now have the oinigiri, the salmon sushi, the cod sushi and an item model for my plate because i thought it would look better to have a 2d texture instead of the 3d model. Hope to see you in my next devlog :) and feel free to leave suggestions on what I could add to my mod."}, {"post_id": 37633, "ts": "2026-07-30T14:49:09Z", "hours": 3.5092, "text": "Now that the summer holidays have finally begun where I live I can finally show you the working cooking pot. While the model (the thing on the burning furnance) defintely needs a rework I’m pretty happy with the function. The most annoying part defintely was getting the screen (the menu) to run and look correctly. I currently have the crafting recipe for cooking rice and tomato sauce implemented and I’m working on adding the vanilla soup/stews but there are still a few textures missing until I want to show you those. Anyways feel free to leave some ideas on recipes to add in the comments, see you next time :)"}, {"post_id": 36571, "ts": "2026-07-28T19:40:24Z", "hours": 1.5392, "text": "Currently working on giving this little thing a proper function. For now it was just my earliest Block Entity experiement, but now I want to give my cooking pot an actual fuction. I want it to function similarly to Farmer’s Delight’s pot. So the crafting doesnt follow a shape, but is shapeless. I already have rewritten a lot like the custom block and block entity and I’ve written the cooking pot recipe (input). Thankfully I was able to recycle a lot of code from my grinder. The big task now is to rewrite the screen and screen handler and to make the whole thing work as a whole so I can finally craft everything I want :) Can’t wait to finish this! I’d love some suggestions on where to go on from the finished cooking pot. I’ve already thought about adding a frying pan, which would make sense in my head since you don’t cook everything in a pot."}, {"post_id": 35944, "ts": "2026-07-27T18:35:20Z", "hours": 0.7631, "text": "On my road to making my mod survival friendly, I have now added all my seeds to the loot table of short and tall grass.It took longer than I had hoped for because I may or may not have forgotten that silk touch has no effect on grass and I may or may not have tried to implement the silk touch exception regardless.Wasn’t exactly my brightest moments once i figured it out after like 20 minutes of wasting my time."}, {"post_id": 35214, "ts": "2026-07-26T14:30:57Z", "hours": 1.3289, "text": "It’s me again! My grinder now has a custom recipe type. It can now grind sugarcane into sugar as well as wheat into flour. That’s also the reason why I decided to rename it just into grinder. I think it fits the purpose a bit better. I even managed to add a way to get my recipes to get easily generated with the fabric data gen. And I added a grilled corn cib because I wanted to. Now my focus will probably shift towards making what I have survival friendly because for now the mod only work in creative. For the different kinds of seeds I think I’ll just add them to the loot table to grass, like wheat seeds. But I’m always open for better suggestions!"}, {"post_id": 34580, "ts": "2026-07-25T13:03:48Z", "hours": 1.4089, "text": "My Corn Grinder is now a Block Entity! It has an inventory now where you can input your wheat to get flour. Next I will add a custom recipe type so I can add more types of things to grind down. I was thinking about grinding corn seeds into corn flour for example so in the future I could add nachos or taco shells. I’d be open for more suggestions on what grinding recipes to add."}, {"post_id": 34344, "ts": "2026-07-24T23:15:12Z", "hours": 1.5892, "text": "So I didnt code a lot today that I can show you because it’s all still unfinished and doesnt work but I have other exciting news: My mod got approved on Modrinth so you can download it through the Modrinth Website now! Please keep in mind that I have a version from a few days back on there so it’s not perfectly up to date but it’s still a playable version (in creative, though I’m working on making it survival friendly) Here’s a screenshot of my mod’s page:"}, {"post_id": 33640, "ts": "2026-07-23T18:31:51Z", "hours": 0.6331, "text": "Hi people! Didn’t have time for much today, so all I did was restucture my Item Groups a bit to have them in a logical order. So now there are Seeds, Ingredients, finished Dishes and Utensils."}, {"post_id": 33102, "ts": "2026-07-22T18:31:45Z", "hours": 1.7647, "text": "I mentioned it in an earlier devlog and now here they are: the plates! They can be placed down to display you’re crafted dishes (and other items). The texture is still to be made properly."}, {"post_id": 32577, "ts": "2026-07-21T20:56:34Z", "hours": 0.3733, "text": "Didn’t have time for much so I just added two new items: chicken legs and onigiris. The latter already has a crafting recipe. For the chicken leg I still have to figure out how I want it to be obtainable."}, {"post_id": 31950, "ts": "2026-07-20T19:25:31Z", "hours": 2.7164, "text": "Hi guys, here’s my devlog for today. So down below you can see a few new items, some of which I havent textured yet (shame on me). (from left to right) A bowl of rice, yeast, fermented yeast, dough (which you can bake into bread) and sushi with cod and salmon. On the left you can also see that I experimented a bit with block entities and I think i will turn this conept into some sort of display plate that would also be used for crafting dishes in the future. Anyways hope you liked my little devlog for today, see you for the next one :)"}, {"post_id": 31441, "ts": "2026-07-19T20:12:44Z", "hours": 1.1936, "text": "Alright fixed it. Thankfully the mods running again and I even got the alpha-1.1 version up on modrinth for approval. I’ll keep you updated once its live."}, {"post_id": 31364, "ts": "2026-07-19T18:07:29Z", "hours": 2.9633, "text": "Currently fixing my modpack :( I tried to make it into a git repo and it broke and now I have to do it all again. Thankfully I can just copy over the code but it’s still really annoying. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime enjoy a picture of an older 3d model of mine."}, {"post_id": 30779, "ts": "2026-07-18T17:32:00Z", "hours": 0.6333, "text": "It might not look like it but this is a custom block I programmed. It’s a grinder used for grinding down things like wheat into flour. The model’s obviously not made yet but I’m definitely going to do it at some point."}, {"post_id": 30726, "ts": "2026-07-18T15:28:41Z", "hours": 0.3822, "text": "Hi people this is the first devlog on my Minecraft cooking mod in which I aim to overhaul the cooking system in minecraft. attached are some screenshots on what I’ve been working on so far. I’ve added a couple new food items and there will be many more to come."}]...
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Title: Mine and Dine - 26.2 Minecraft Mod by @RevC Title: Mine and Dine - 26.2 Minecraft Mod by @RevComInteractives | Stardance
Devlogs:
Hi people this is the first devlog on my Minecraft cooking mod in which I aim to overhaul the cooking system in minecraft. attached are some screenshots on what I’ve been working on so far. I’ve added a couple new food items and there will be many more to come.
It might not look like it but this is a custom block I programmed. It’s a grinder used for grinding down things like wheat into flour. The model’s obviously not made yet but I’m definitely going to do it at some point.
Currently fixing my modpack :( I tried to make it into a git repo and it broke and now I have to do it all again. Thankfully I can just copy over the code but it’s still really annoying. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime enjoy a picture of an older 3d model of mine.
Alright fixed it. Thankfully the mods running again and I even got the alpha-1.1 version up on modrinth for approval. I’ll keep you updated once its live.
Hi guys, here’s my devlog for today. So down below you can see a few new items, some of which I havent textured yet (shame on me). (from left to right) A bowl of rice, yeast, fermented yeast, dough (which you can bake into bread) and sushi with cod and salmon. On the left you can also see that I experimented a bit with block entities and I think i will turn this conept into some sort of display plate that would also be used for crafting dishes in the future. Anyways hope you liked my little devlog for today, see you for the next one :)
Didn’t have time for much so I just added two new items: chicken legs and onigiris. The latter already has a crafting recipe. For the chicken leg I still have to figure out how I want it to be obtainable.
I mentioned it in an earlier devlog and now here they are: the plates! They can be placed down to display you’re crafted dishes (and other items). The texture is still to be made properly.
Hi people! Didn’t have time for much today, so all I did was restucture my Item Groups a bit to have them in a logical order. So now there are Seeds, Ingredients, finished Dishes and Utensils.
So I didnt code a lot today that I can show you because it’s all still unfinished and doesnt work but I have other exciting news: My mod got approved on Modrinth so you can download it through the Modrinth Website now! Please keep in mind that I have a version from a few days back on there so it’s not perfectly up to date but it’s still a playable version (in creative, though I’m working on making it survival friendly) Here’s a screenshot of my mod’s page:
My Corn Grinder is now a Block Entity! It has an inventory now where you can input your wheat to get flour. Next I will add a custom recipe type so I can add more types of things to grind down. I was thinking about grinding corn seeds into corn flour for example so in the future I could add nachos or taco shells. I’d be open for more suggestions on what grinding recipes to add.
It’s me again! My grinder now has a custom recipe type. It can now grind sugarcane into sugar as well as wheat into flour. That’s also the reason why I decided to rename it just into grinder. I think it fits the purpose a bit better. I even managed to add a way to get my recipes to get easily generated with the fabric data gen. And I added a grilled corn cib because I wanted to. Now my focus will probably shift towards making what I have survival friendly because for now the mod only work in creative. For the different kinds of seeds I think I’ll just add them to the loot table to grass, like wheat seeds. But I’m always open for better suggestions!
On my road to making my mod survival friendly, I have now added all my seeds to the loot table of short and tall grass.It took longer than I had hoped for because I may or may not have forgotten that silk touch has no effect on grass and I may or may not have tried to implement the silk touch exception regardless.Wasn’t exactly my brightest moments once i figured it out after like 20 minutes of wasting my time.
Currently working on giving this little thing a proper function. For now it was just my earliest Block Entity experiement, but now I want to give my cooking pot an actual fuction. I want it to function similarly to Farmer’s Delight’s pot. So the crafting doesnt follow a shape, but is shapeless. I already have rewritten a lot like the custom block and block entity and I’ve written the cooking pot recipe (input). Thankfully I was able to recycle a lot of code from my grinder. The big task now is to rewrite the screen and screen handler and to make the whole thing work as a whole so I can finally craft everything I want :) Can’t wait to finish this! I’d love some suggestions on where to go on from the finished cooking pot. I’ve already thought about adding a frying pan, which would make sense in my head since you don’t cook everything in a pot.
Now that the summer holidays have finally begun where I live I can finally show you the working cooking pot. While the model (the thing on the burning furnance) defintely needs a rework I’m pretty happy with the function. The most annoying part defintely was getting the screen (the menu) to run and look correctly. I currently have the crafting recipe for cooking rice and tomato sauce implemented and I’m working on adding the vanilla soup/stews but there are still a few textures missing until I want to show you those. Anyways feel free to leave some ideas on recipes to add in the comments, see you next time :)
Here’s my devlog for toady :) So I played around a bit with my cooking pot and added the function that they only work, when they have a warm block underneath them, like the ones you can see below. What I’m working on next is probably something like a stove so you can have a nice looking block that gives off heat because all the warm blocks look a bit weird and I don’t think it would make sense to count a furnance that isn’t on as a warm block. I also made three new item models to complete them one after another. From left to right we now have the oinigiri, the salmon sushi, the cod sushi and an item model for my plate because i thought it would look better to have a 2d texture instead of the 3d model. Hope to see you in my next devlog :) and feel free to leave suggestions on what I could add to my mod.
Didn’t have time for much toady so all i did was finally create a loot table for my block entities and implemented their strength so they wouldn’t be instamine anymore. (I know the dropped cooking pot is a bit big but I’ll change that in the future.) See you next time :)
New Crop Alert! Meet the newest crop addition to Mine and Dine: The onion can now be grown. On my way to making my mod survival friendly this really helps quite a lot. The onion can, like the other seeds, be obtained through breaking grass. But to be honest texturing the growth stages of a crop will forever be the most annoying part of the process. I’ve also done some more tweaking, like adding sounds and map colors to my blocks. Plus a I added a German language pack to my mod. Here are some of my favourite (with that I mean wildest) translations: Vanilla Bean Seeds = Vanilleschotensamen Dark Chocolate covered Apple = Apfel mit Zartbitterschokoladenüberzug And the other ones sound kind of weird too, even though German is my mother tongue. Guess it really does’nt make a difference if you read the english version all the time without thinking of the translation XD Anyways have a good day and see you next time.
Hi people! This is probably the last devlog I’ll post before I leave for a week to go on vacation to London, unless I get a sudden sweep of motivation or somthing XD. Anyways I got some new stuff for you. So first you see the work of my boredom, my farm that I build. Then I finally added the stove with texture and everything so that’s done now. And to celebrate that I added the carrot soup that can be crafted in the cooking pot. And I’ve added the new garlic crop with seeds and the garlic itself of course. Not really sure yet what I’m going to do with that but better have it than not have it. Besides garlic bread is always an answer, am I right. Anyways that’s all from me for today, see you guys in a week or so :)
Hi people! I’m back from my holidays in London so I can finally continue the project. It’s been a while so I felt motivated and decided to start adding a new block entity: the pan! So far the block entity already has a screen but there are still a few things missing, like the model/texture and a proper crafting system. So far I can only implement recipes with a container like a bowl or plate (since I recycled a lot of code from my cooking pot) but that wouldnt make a lot of sense if I just wanted to get e.g. the standard minecraft cooked beef since it has no container, so yeah, I’ll have to find a way to make that work. I also added a new decoravtive block: the counter. It’s the brick with a layer of polished deepslate at the top. And I’ve found out that it not only works well as a counter but also as the top of a brisk wall. Anyways that’s all I had time for today, see you tomorrow!
Hello people! I’ve been somewhat productive today: So first of all I added a provisional model for my pan. Its that orange thing next to the cooking pot. Then I’ve also reworked the crafting logic of my pan so it supports recipes that don’t need a bowl or similar, like you can see in the second picture. I feel like for the vanilla meat items that apporach makes the most sense. And I’ve added sunflower seeds, ground sunflower seeds and sunflower oil into my game. For now you just have to believe me, because I dont have any textures made for them just yet XD. In the third screenshot you can see how sunflower seeds are ground into ground sunflower seeds. In the last picture you can see the crafting recipe for sunflower oil fron ground sunflower seeds. It’s very simplified from the way one would actually make sunflower oil but it’s still just minecraft so I think it fits. Anyways that’s everything I have for you today, see you tomorrow!
Hi People! Today I added another Block Entity: The mixer. It works similarly to the cooking pot and pan so I was able to copy a lot of that code. I just had to add the rest of the slots and remove the container slot. I’ll use the mixer as a way to make different kinds of doughs later but for now it can just make bread dough, you can bake into bread in a furnance. I’m really looking forward on making pasta dough and then expanding on that. I was kind of thinking of making a noodle press so you can make different kinds of pasta (I’m speaking spagetti, tortelini, etc.) I kind of want it to work like a stone cutter, where you put in the dough and then select one shape of noodle. But those are still thoughts for the future. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you next time :)
Hello people! I didn’t have a lot of time today since I’m currently renovating my new room :) and it takes a lot of time. Anyways I still managed to get something done today and that is working on the immersion of my mod. The cooking pot and pan now emit smoke when they are cooking. That’s all from me today and I’ll hopefully get back to you with more things :) See ya!
Okay damn I didn’t think that this would take me this long But hi people! I finally added a cutting board to my mod! It came up a while back as a suggestion for how to get my chicken legs and let me say I think it was a good suggestion. The cutting board just fits right in. It works pretty much as you may know it from farmer’s delight, where you put an item on it and then click on it with a tool in this case a knife (which I also added today but that was pretty simple) and it drops the outcome. I’m planning on adding onto that mechanic with more tools like a roling pin for example and definitely more recipes. I have to say now that it is in the game I really like it but damn was it annoying to implement. I mean it was my fault (I forgot one function so it didn’t work) but it nontheless send me down an existentiell crisis ‘cause there was no error message whatsoever. Don’t we love that XD Anyways that’s all from me for today, I’ll see you around :)
Hi people! I’ve been putting my new block entities to some good use today. (From left to right) First of all I added the bun dough. You get it by cutting bread dough on the cutting board. Then there is the bun which you obviously get by smelting bun dough in a furnance. Next up is the cookie dough. You get it by mixing the needed ingredients for a cookie in a mixer. And last is the heavy cream. I’ve added the item a little while back but only now found the time and motivation (especially the latter XD) to make the texture and give it a proper crafting recipe. You get it by mixing milk and butter in the mixer. I believe that that is roughly how heavy cream is made in real life, at least after my five minute google research. I’ve also added crafting recipes for some other things but those aren’t anything special really just in a crafting table. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you around :)
Hello People! I’ve worked a bit more on expanding the cutting board functionality. I’ve added another tool that can be used in the recipes and that’s the rolling pin (first pic, top left) It does exactly what it sounds like it flattens the ingredients, like for example with my tortilla dough (top right). You can see the process in the second picture. And because it would have felt weird to stop the production chain there, I added the function to put the raw torilla into my frying pan where it gets fired into a finished tortilla. I’m really looking forward on adding more recipes with my tortilla but for now I’m kind of missing some more ingredients, like red beans that I want to put in there. Anyways, that’s all I have time for today :( I’ll see you around :)
Hi people! I’ve been doing a lot of background work today for future stuff so sadly I don’t have too much to show you today. I still coded some more things that I can already hsow you that are worth taking the look at. On the left is the new powdered sugar that you get by grinding sugar in the grinder. It is also used to craft the next item, the pie dough in the mixer. On the cutting board oyu can then transform the dough into the pie base. This item will be used later when making different kinds of pies. What I immediately have in mind is of course the oumpkin pie that is already in vanilla minecraft but also the apple pie and the sweet berry pie. Both of these fruits are of course already in the base game so I think the addition of a pie would make sense. I’m also planning on adding more fruit so I can add more pies. Anyways that’s all from me for today, see you around :)
Hello people! You can now enjoy a nice apple pie at your farm because I have been busy. I added eight new items today to aid you on your cooking journey. First I added cinnamon sticks and powder. Right now you get cinnamon sticks from stripping jungle logs on a cutting board. I’m planning on adding actual cinnamon trees in the future but for now I figured jungle wood would be the most fitting since cinnamon is also a tropical plant. With the addtition of cinnamon I finally made it possible to craft pumpkin pie with the mechanics of my mod. That’s also why I added the middle row of items. On the left we have the pumkin slice which you can bake into the grilled pumpkin slice (middle). I’ll probably have to rework this texture in the future cause you can’t really tell the difference :P. And with that item you can then craft the unbaked pumpkin pie which, as the name suggests, can be baked into the minecraft pumpkin pie. The last three items I added are for my apple pie. First up we have apple chunks which you can then use to make the unbaked apple pie which of course can be baked into the finished apple pie. I hope you like my new additions and that’s also everything from me for today. See you around :)
Hello people! I havent posted anything in quite some time but trust me I’ve been busy. The reason why I’ve shown you so little is because there isn’t much that I could show you. I’ve added a lot of background stuff that I just had to add because I’m planning on shipping soon. One sneakpeak I can give you is this (see picture). Any idea what it is? Well I’ll tell you: It’s a cookbook. I think it’s nice for the immersion if you have a cookbook where you can find all the cooking recipes for my mod. I’ll show you more about it in the future once I’m done with it. Until then that’s all from me. Hope to see you around!
Hello people! As promised I have finished the cookbook (at least to a point where I’d say it’s complete enough) and I can now give you some sneakpeeks. Sadly I cant show you everything ‘cause I can only attach four pictures but I think I got a good selection. So the first picture you can see is the opening page of the cookbook, so just some general stuff. The second picture shows a segment of the contents list. All the pink things are links to the corresponding pages you can click on to quickly navigate through the book. And lastly you can see an extract from one of the recipes (in this case for an apple pie). I’m somewhat happy with the design but I’m especially happy with the display of the item on the corresponding page. It is defintely a pain to set up (at least the way I did it) but I think it’s well worth it. But I think that’s all from me for today. I’ll be adding the last textures and little things over the next few days so I can finally push out my first ship :) See you around!
Hi people! I’ve been busy the last couple of days and let me tell you I’m so close to shipping my first iteration of the mod. I’m so close to being done I just have a add a last few things and maybe film a few short showcases and then I’ll be ready to ship this thing. Anyways the most interesting additions that I added are a few new item (textures) and finally after weeks of them being untextured, my mixer and grinder have gotten their models. Anyways that’s all from me for today. The next time you’ll hear from me is probably with a ship so stay tuned. See you!
Hello People! Today I just wanted to share a quick video with you. It shows how you make an apple pie in my mod. I thought it would be a good showcase for some of the mechanics my mod has to offer. And if the video quality isnt so good, I’m sorry but its the only way I could upload the video on this platform :( Anyways see you around!
Hello people! I’ve been busy again. But before we dive into what I added I want to say thank you to everyone who rated my project so incredibly high. I couldn’t be happier with all the feedback you gave me. I want to address a few things though that I found which I think caused problems for some of the playtesters. I was under the assumption that the Modrinth version detection would work and therefor my mod was playable on all 1.21.X The problem is that the mod is only compatible with 1.21.1. As much as I would like to blame all of that on Modrinth I do have to admit that I could have just playtested it on the other versions. So to everyone who had problems with playing my mod I want to say a sorry and I hope that this fixes your issues. But now to what I’ve been doing the last couple of days: I’m from southern Germany and therefor I wanted to implement the most iconic dish from my region: Käsespätzle. Käsespätzle (something like cheese spaetzle in english) are like the german kind of noodles just baked with cheese. It may sound a but lame but trust me they are delicious. Now implementing them proved to be a bit more challenging than I had thought because I had no cheese whatsoever so I implemented that together with it’s aging mechanic. And furthermore spätzle are made on a special type of scraper which I also had to implement. It inserts the raw spätzle directly into the cooking pot. I’m currently also contemplating where I want to go with this mod. I’m not going to abandon it, that’s for sure but I just don’t know if i want to keep adding stuff in 1.21 or if I should migrate to the newest version of the game (that’s something that a lot of raters wanted) I’ll have to think about that a bit more but until then see you around!
Hey people! So I decided to start porting my mod to 26.2 because I hate myself or something. This creenshot really captures my current state of mind quite well, and I’m really contemplating why I decided to do this. Well, it’s the next logical step that’s why I did it but it’s till so annoying. But seriously, why does Mojang have to change their code in every update? Anyways, by the time I uploaded this devlog, I was able to port most of the items plus the model generator which roughly leaves the blocks + their entities and screens and everything, the tag datagen, the cookbook pages (I dont want to) and all the recipes. Damn that’s a lot of work why did I sign up for this. Anyways that’s all from me today, see you around!
Hi people! I have been quiet for a few days now but trust me I’ve been busy. The port to the newest Minecraft version is almost complete so be on the lookout for that. Since I last posted a devlog I updated all the items, tags and the loottable modifiers. Also I updated the playerJoinEvent that gives you a cookbook when you first join into a world. Now to the places that still need updating: The ModBlocks, but just those with a blockentity with crafting functions. Therefore ModEntites and the custom recipe types and generators are obviously still missing too. And probably the least amount of work will be updating the missing recipes in my ModRecipeProvider class (It auto generates all my recipes) I have already updated the vanilla style recipes so the ones in a crafting table or oven but my custom recipes are still missing. And of course I gotta debug all my code when all that is done. Anyways I hope I’ll finish this update at some time next week so I can finally start adding some new stuff. That being said I don’t think I’ll be able to code as much starting from Monday, because where I live school is starting again so yeah… Anyways that’s all from me today, hope to see you around!
Hi people! My CornGrinderRecipeBuilder works again! That also means that I managed to get my corn grinder as a whole at least to a state where I would assume that it runs again. So yes, I have reworked both the custom block, teh block entity and the recipe handling. And let’s just say I wouldnt exactly say that I had fun… It’s just really annoying trying to find out why i cant refer to a method in another class only to then find out that I forgot that I forgot to rename one type. To apply that to what cost me the most time, I tried to call my tick() method from my block entity in the custom block (so the crafting actually progresses) but I forgot to change the type of my blockEntityType and it referred to the wrong blockentity. It took me forever to catch that problem. Anyways only five more crafting blockentities I have to port over frustrated scream . I just hope it will be easier since i now roughly know what I’m supposed to do. I can only hope now that school starts again for me… Anyways that’s everything from me today, see you around!
Hi people! My cooking pot is now working! (Hopefully) It took me longer than I expected because I had a lot of “fun” with the codec of the recipes. But thankfully now that that’s working I can recycle a lot of code for my pan and mixer which will hopefully make that part a lot easier. The cutting board and scraper will probably be another story though. But I’m positive that I’ll be able to finish everything by the ned of the week. That’s all from me for today see you around!
Hi people! It’s looking a lot less red now, doesnt it? I’ve been able to update both the pan and the mixer to the newest version, and that leaves only the cutting board and the scraper before I’ll be able to finally run the game again (hopefully) So yeah I feel like I’m close to finally being finished with the update and then I can finally start working on actual new features. I want to add at least a little bit of actually new content before I ship again. Anyways that’s all from me for today, hope to see you around!
Hi people! I’ve been busy the last couple of days and I can now announce that I can finally run my game again in Minecraft 26.2. So the majority of the update is finished! That being said there are some to be fair kind of funny bugs that I still need to fix (and honestly right now I don’t really have a clue how but oh well I guess we’ll have to see) One example is that somehow my progress arrow in my menu does this really weird thing where it just duplicates a couple times and stretches weirdly across my screen. I mean I don’t know what I did but I’m sure there’s a way to fix that. And the other thing is that for some to me unknown reason, my display items are just red. For example on my cutting board. They’re not at all supposed to look like that and the issue is consistent across all my item renders… Yeah honestly no clue why. Also the display doesnt dissapear when you craft and item but I already had that issue with the last version and I managed to fix that so I’m sure that won’t be a big problem. There are some minor bugs that I still have to resolve, like the item models of my blocks not loading in correctly or my item displays in the cooking pot not working but I’m sure that won’t be too difficult. Anyways that’s all from me for today, I’ll see you around!
Hi people! This will probably be my last update in this challenge as I have now finally fixed the bugs that were bothering me. The item renderers work now and have their actual colors. Also the progress arrow is now only one arrow and not 100. I’ll be shipping my project now in the hopes that it will get accepted and rated as well as the last time I shipped. By the way this doesn’t mean I’m done with the mod at all, I still think it could use more updates and improvements so my development is by no means finished. It’ll just happen outside of this challenge and maybe not as frequent as it did now. Anyways that’s all from me for now, I’ll hope to see you around!
Ships:
Mine & Dine is a Minecraft mod that aims to overhaul the minecraft cooking system, because I always thought that it was a little bit shallow and lacked depth. Therefore I have set the goal for myself to transform the cooking system into something I always wanted. My mod adds five new blockentities and over 60 new items that do exactly that. (You can find a deeper explanation of the contents in my ReadMe) This mod is by far not finished but I think it’s gotten to a point where I would say it is playable and enjoyable, that’s why I decided to ship it now. What I’m especially proud of is how far my skills as a mod developer have come since I started this project. I have made a couple of smaller mods before the stardance challenge but never something quite like this. I was even able to upload it to Modrinth where the whole world can see it. (Modrinth is also the easiest way to play my mod) This step of shipping my first project really feels like I’ve achieved something. Thanks in advance to everyone who plays my mod, I hope you’ll enjoy it. If you encounter any bugs (And its not unlikely you do) please report them on my github page. Anyways that’s everything I have to say for now, see you around!
Mine & Dine is a Minecraft mod that aims to overhaul the minecraft cooking system, because I always thought that it was a little bit shallow and lacked depth. Therefore I have set the goal for myself to transform the cooking system into something I always wanted. My mod adds six new blockentities and over 70 new items that do exactly that. (You can find a deeper explanation of the contents in my ReadMe) This mod is by far not finished but I think it’s gotten to a point where I would say it is playable and enjoyable, that’s why I decided to ship it now. Especially now that I’ve successfully ported it to version 26.2. What I’m especially proud of is how far my skills as a mod developer have come since I started this project. I have made a couple of smaller mods before the stardance challenge but never something quite like this. I was even able to upload it to Modrinth where the whole world can see it. (Modrinth is also the easiest way to play my mod btw) This step of shipping my final project for this challenge really feels like I’ve achieved something. Thanks in advance to everyone who plays my mod, I hope you’ll enjoy it. If you encounter any bugs (And its not unlikely you do) please report them on my github page. Anyways that’s everything I have to say for now, see you around!...
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Searchuse 1.4.4 by @ai_zamden | Stardance
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ai_zamden
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135.0
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1486
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-07T22:47:37Z", "hours": 33.0, "multiplier": 11.36, "payout": 340, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Hey guys, this is my third ship for my turn-based strategy game Searchuse. A lot of you guys suggested to add a tutorial, so I made one, and now it’s a lot easier to figure out how to play the game! I hope you enjoy.", "repo": "https://github.com/aidenzma/Searchuse", "demo": "https://ai-zamden.itch.io/searchuse"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-17T01:35:02Z", "hours": 77.0, "multiplier": 14.75, "payout": 853, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I’ve listened to the people and have tried to make as many improvements as I could. UI has been improved Art has been pixel-adjusted Controls are specified in the README Main Menu button has been added Searchuse is now available on Linux AND Searchuse is now available on BROWSER (itch.io, the demo link) So now everyone is theoretically able to try it! A large portion of my time was spent creating a neural network for the bot (that can only be experienced in Train Bot, there’s a hardcoded bot and a neural network bot.) (The neural network bot is still very inexperienced currently.) (Admittedly, Gemini helped me a lot with setting up that portion of the game.) For specific help in downloading the zips, visit the README.", "repo": "https://github.com/aidenzma/Searchuse", "demo": "https://ai-zamden.itch.io/searchuse"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-06-25T04:03:09Z", "hours": 25.0, "multiplier": 12.05, "payout": 293, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a turn-based strategy game called Searchuse, where you search for and then use various items with different mechanics. A challenge in the process was getting all of the turn-based logic right. (For cooldowns and lasting effects, the timing can be surprisingly complicated to get down.) I’m proud that there aren’t any glaring bugs in the game right now. To play, move around using arrow keys, and press the buttons search or use. There are deeper mechanics you can learn, but the surface-level controls should be intuitive! Here’s the trailer: https://youtu.be/wL6j5aslFXA Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/NpBV6vHc7", "repo": "https://github.com/aidenzma/Searchuse", "demo": "https://ai-zamden.itch.io/searchuse"}]...
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[{"post_id": 63898, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 63898, "ts": "2026-09-07T22:44:08Z", "hours": 3.3097, "text": "I’m finished with the tutorial, so now you guys can easily learn how to play Searchuse!"}, {"post_id": 63059, "ts": "2026-09-06T17:21:51Z", "hours": 9.2094, "text": "I’m making a tutorial to teach new users how to play the game, as requested by feedback for my latest ship."}, {"post_id": 36775, "ts": "2026-07-29T01:24:16Z", "hours": 12.9503, "text": "I did a massive overhaul of the inner workings of the inventory system, changing the data tracking from only ints representing the itemIDs to structs which provide a container for data of items. I did this because I had to add individual item durability."}, {"post_id": 34389, "ts": "2026-07-25T02:19:17Z", "hours": 7.4644, "text": "After a long while, some new content is finally added to Searchuse. Introducing: Armor Piercing Rounds: Use with certain weapons to allow damage to be done as if the opponent were wearing no armor! Beretta+: An upgraded version of the Beretta, this weapon allows you to do damage the the enemy’s max health, a groundbreaking new mechanic added in this update. Fixed: Energy Orb edge bug: Now, the Energy Orb and other explosives will explode when hitting the edge of the map instead of not doing anything! Smoke vision bug: A small error in FOV rendering while in a smoked area was fixed. Factory edge bug: A visual glitch that resulted in Factory tiles peeking out from under the greyed out vision area was fixed."}, {"post_id": 29881, "ts": "2026-07-17T01:27:03Z", "hours": 1.3161, "text": "Searchuse is now available on Linux and Browser!"}, {"post_id": 29302, "ts": "2026-07-16T04:03:09Z", "hours": 7.9944, "text": "I’ve made major UI improvements to the game!"}, {"post_id": 26990, "ts": "2026-07-12T03:45:34Z", "hours": 10.4197, "text": "I’ve set up the system so that my hardcoded bot can train the neural network bot. This is gonna be fun!"}, {"post_id": 26063, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:29:06Z", "hours": 8.1575, "text": "I started building a neural network for the bot so that I can train it and it can learn. This is what the data file looks like for all of the weights and nodes."}, {"post_id": 24880, "ts": "2026-07-08T18:45:45Z", "hours": 2.7314, "text": "I coded an algorithm that allows the bot to scan the map, and the resulting data lists are represented here by colors! Red = near mountains & hills Green = near cover (caves & trees) Blue = near loot (buildings)"}, {"post_id": 24522, "ts": "2026-07-08T03:50:22Z", "hours": 15.1186, "text": "I added a world map to Searchuse!"}, {"post_id": 21711, "ts": "2026-07-03T20:06:43Z", "hours": 7.6906, "text": "I’ve upgraded the bot’s intelligence. Instead of only being aware of the enemy when they are in its immediate vision, the bot now remembers where it previously saw the enemy, keeps track of how many opportunities to move the enemy had since then, and precisely calculates all the squares the enemy could be on using a flood fill algorithm, based on how many moves the bot thinks the enemy had. (The eye icons represent what the bot thinks are the possible positions of my player based on where it last saw my player. (Sometimes the player can “escape” the eyes by having more moves than what the bot thinks the player has.) (Otherwise, if the bot is right about how many moves the player has, the player should not be able to move to a square without an eye icon.))"}, {"post_id": 20077, "ts": "2026-07-01T16:24:44Z", "hours": 23.2564, "text": "I worked on the enemy AI for my turn-based game Searchuse. The enemy can now use tools, such as invisibility potions, binoculars, radars, UAVs, and traps like landmines or C4s, and can also get airdrops."}, {"post_id": 15456, "ts": "2026-06-25T03:54:38Z", "hours": 4.6358, "text": "I added a few final features to match my turn-based strategy on Unity to its Scratch predecessor. Added: Hitmarker: When you’re hit with an unsuppressed weapon or bomb, a red arrow appears, telling you in which direction on your player’s character’s body you felt the impact. Cooldown visualiser: When you press c, a visual will show up that will show you all the items you have on cooldown and how many turns it is before you can use them next. 4 turn heavy weapons rule: In the first 4 turns, it is now impossible to find any weapon that totals a damage greater than 25 per turn. 3 weapon limit: You can only carry 3 weapons at a time. (By weapons I mean those that stay in your inventory, so something like Grenade doesn’t count.) If you find another weapon while you’re at your limit, you can choose to switch. Turns text: You can now press t to show the turns text, which is below the moves text and shows how many turns it’s been. Turn indicator: On the bottom of your screen, you’ll now find a green or blue landscape that indicates whose turn it is. (Green meaning your turn, blue meaning the enemy’s turn.)"}, {"post_id": 14868, "ts": "2026-06-24T04:17:21Z", "hours": 2.3808, "text": "Added: Message in a Floating Bottle: Like a book, it gives you a random powerup, but its rarity is lower than that of a book. However, its upside is that it is granted immediately after searching. Can only be found in water. AK-47: The world’s most iconic rifle is now in Searchuse! With 2 shots of 20 damage each, this addition provides more mid-tier weapon choices. AK-74: An upgrade of the AK-47, this gun matches the damage done by the M4A1, but it has a lesser cooldown, making it the more desirable option. Meat Stick: This item provides a solid mid-tier healing option, giving you 40 health in one bite. Spikes: This item gives you three more moves, but takes up an armor slot and provides 0 armor. (my beautiful art below)"}, {"post_id": 14567, "ts": "2026-06-23T18:50:46Z", "hours": 10.5353, "text": "I added a bunch of features, a new item, and fixed some bugs for my turn-based strategy game Searchuse. Added: Replay for when Vital Signs run out Replay for when Binoculars runs out Book: when read, gives you a random skill. These skills range from increasing moves to getting 2 searches per turn, so put on your reading glasses and pick up a book! You can also now press b to see your book inventory. Use arrow keys to navigate. Roll Chances Information: press L to open Roll Chances Information, which will tell you the chances of getting each rarity on each tile when you press search. Use arrow keys to navigate. Changed: Sound when picking up Thermal Vision Goggles Fixed: Not being able to start your turn on bot mode glitch Normalized speeds for UAV animation, texts, and movement"}, {"post_id": 11694, "ts": "2026-06-19T01:46:35Z", "hours": 7.0461, "text": "I added an airdrop to my turn-based strategy game Searchuse, which, instead of one, gives you three options to choose from when you press search."}, {"post_id": 9970, "ts": "2026-06-16T14:36:33Z", "hours": 0.32, "text": "I added a UAV to my turn-based strategy game Searchuse, which tracks down the enemy."}]...
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Title: Searchuse 1.4.4 by @ai_zamden | Stardance
Title: Searchuse 1.4.4 by @ai_zamden | Stardance
Devlogs:
I added a UAV to my turn-based strategy game Searchuse, which tracks down the enemy.
I added an airdrop to my turn-based strategy game Searchuse, which, instead of one, gives you three options to choose from when you press search.
I added a bunch of features, a new item, and fixed some bugs for my turn-based strategy game Searchuse. Added: Replay for when Vital Signs run out Replay for when Binoculars runs out Book: when read, gives you a random skill. These skills range from increasing moves to getting 2 searches per turn, so put on your reading glasses and pick up a book! You can also now press b to see your book inventory. Use arrow keys to navigate. Roll Chances Information: press L to open Roll Chances Information, which will tell you the chances of getting each rarity on each tile when you press search. Use arrow keys to navigate. Changed: Sound when picking up Thermal Vision Goggles Fixed: Not being able to start your turn on bot mode glitch Normalized speeds for UAV animation, texts, and movement
Added: Message in a Floating Bottle: Like a book, it gives you a random powerup, but its rarity is lower than that of a book. However, its upside is that it is granted immediately after searching. Can only be found in water. AK-47: The world’s most iconic rifle is now in Searchuse! With 2 shots of 20 damage each, this addition provides more mid-tier weapon choices. AK-74: An upgrade of the AK-47, this gun matches the damage done by the M4A1, but it has a lesser cooldown, making it the more desirable option. Meat Stick: This item provides a solid mid-tier healing option, giving you 40 health in one bite. Spikes: This item gives you three more moves, but takes up an armor slot and provides 0 armor. (my beautiful art below)
I added a few final features to match my turn-based strategy on Unity to its Scratch predecessor. Added: Hitmarker: When you’re hit with an unsuppressed weapon or bomb, a red arrow appears, telling you in which direction on your player’s character’s body you felt the impact. Cooldown visualiser: When you press c, a visual will show up that will show you all the items you have on cooldown and how many turns it is before you can use them next. 4 turn heavy weapons rule: In the first 4 turns, it is now impossible to find any weapon that totals a damage greater than 25 per turn. 3 weapon limit: You can only carry 3 weapons at a time. (By weapons I mean those that stay in your inventory, so something like Grenade doesn’t count.) If you find another weapon while you’re at your limit, you can choose to switch. Turns text: You can now press t to show the turns text, which is below the moves text and shows how many turns it’s been. Turn indicator: On the bottom of your screen, you’ll now find a green or blue landscape that indicates whose turn it is. (Green meaning your turn, blue meaning the enemy’s turn.)
I worked on the enemy AI for my turn-based game Searchuse. The enemy can now use tools, such as invisibility potions, binoculars, radars, UAVs, and traps like landmines or C4s, and can also get airdrops.
I’ve upgraded the bot’s intelligence. Instead of only being aware of the enemy when they are in its immediate vision, the bot now remembers where it previously saw the enemy, keeps track of how many opportunities to move the enemy had since then, and precisely calculates all the squares the enemy could be on using a flood fill algorithm, based on how many moves the bot thinks the enemy had. (The eye icons represent what the bot thinks are the possible positions of my player based on where it last saw my player. (Sometimes the player can “escape” the eyes by having more moves than what the bot thinks the player has.) (Otherwise, if the bot is right about how many moves the player has, the player should not be able to move to a square without an eye icon.))
I added a world map to Searchuse!
I coded an algorithm that allows the bot to scan the map, and the resulting data lists are represented here by colors! Red = near mountains & hills Green = near cover (caves & trees) Blue = near loot (buildings)
I started building a neural network for the bot so that I can train it and it can learn. This is what the data file looks like for all of the weights and nodes.
I’ve set up the system so that my hardcoded bot can train the neural network bot. This is gonna be fun!
I’ve made major UI improvements to the game!
Searchuse is now available on Linux and Browser!
After a long while, some new content is finally added to Searchuse. Introducing: Armor Piercing Rounds: Use with certain weapons to allow damage to be done as if the opponent were wearing no armor! Beretta+: An upgraded version of the Beretta, this weapon allows you to do damage the the enemy’s max health, a groundbreaking new mechanic added in this update. Fixed: Energy Orb edge bug: Now, the Energy Orb and other explosives will explode when hitting the edge of the map instead of not doing anything! Smoke vision bug: A small error in FOV rendering while in a smoked area was fixed. Factory edge bug: A visual glitch that resulted in Factory tiles peeking out from under the greyed out vision area was fixed.
I did a massive overhaul of the inner workings of the inventory system, changing the data tracking from only ints representing the itemIDs to structs which provide a container for data of items. I did this because I had to add individual item durability.
I’m making a tutorial to teach new users how to play the game, as requested by feedback for my latest ship.
I’m finished with the tutorial, so now you guys can easily learn how to play Searchuse!
Ships:
I made a turn-based strategy game called Searchuse, where you search for and then use various items with different mechanics. A challenge in the process was getting all of the turn-based logic right. (For cooldowns and lasting effects, the timing can be surprisingly complicated to get down.) I’m proud that there aren’t any glaring bugs in the game right now. To play, move around using arrow keys, and press the buttons search or use. There are deeper mechanics you can learn, but the surface-level controls should be intuitive! Here’s the trailer: https://youtu.be/wL6j5aslFXA Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/NpBV6vHc7
I’ve listened to the people and have tried to make as many improvements as I could. UI has been improved Art has been pixel-adjusted Controls are specified in the README Main Menu button has been added Searchuse is now available on Linux AND Searchuse is now available on BROWSER (itch.io, the demo link) So now everyone is theoretically able to try it! A large portion of my time was spent creating a neural network for the bot (that can only be experienced in Train Bot, there’s a hardcoded bot and a neural network bot.) (The neural network bot is still very inexperienced currently.) (Admittedly, Gemini helped me a lot with setting up that portion of the game.) For specific help in downloading the zips, visit the README.
Hey guys, this is my third ship for my turn-based strategy game Searchuse. A lot of you guys suggested to add a tutorial, so I made one, and now it’s a lot easier to figure out how to play the game! I hope you enjoy....
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1792846151.6578004
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1792932551.6578004
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|
2006
|
Flob (a platformer) by @potheterr | Stardance
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potheterr
|
2
|
103.68
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1489
|
[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-03T13:26:56Z", "hours": 53.0, "multiplier": 17.22, "payout": 912, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Welcome to FLOB 0.2.0.0!! This is the second of three updates I’d like to get out before the end of Stardance which will more than likely be the last update. This ship, I focused a lot on making new systems and expanding on old ones, all giving me unique challenges. I’m not the proudest of how the code turned out, but everything works for the most part so I will take it and run. I’ve also added a little tiny bit of a story that will be continued through my other projects I make in the future, which I am very excited for. Overall, this update was extremely fun to work on and I’m so happy with the way it turned out. That being said, the macOS and Linux builds of the game are UNTESTED, so if there are any huge issues find some way to let me know ASAP. Enjoy!", "repo": "https://github.com/JamesCorradinoGit/flowFreePlatformer", "demo": "https://potheterr.itch.io/flob"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-13T03:52:13Z", "hours": 50.0, "multiplier": 11.46, "payout": 577, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is a DEMO VERSION of my first published game, Flob! There are so many edge cases and bugs that I need to fix which is by far going to be the hardest part of this challenge, but I’m ready for it. Hopefully you all enjoy! (A video of the game is attached on the itch page).", "repo": "https://github.com/JamesCorradinoGit/flowFreePlatformer", "demo": "https://potheterr.itch.io/flob"}]...
|
[{"post_id": 45742, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 45742, "ts": "2026-08-12T13:04:25Z", "hours": 0.6797, "text": "Hey everyone! Just reporting that I’ve been really burnt out with the game and I think I might call it here. I’ll probably return to it in future but as of right now I think it’s in a solid enough state. Thank you all!"}, {"post_id": 39756, "ts": "2026-08-02T22:33:00Z", "hours": 6.1347, "text": "Hello everyone! I’ve been much more focused on music and sounds over the last 2-3 days and I’m confident that there’s enough new content for a new ship. As for future content, I think 2 more worlds will be enough to round out the game. See y’all whenever I ship the update!"}, {"post_id": 37981, "ts": "2026-07-31T02:25:03Z", "hours": 8.7875, "text": "Hello everyone! Over the last two days, I’ve been working on new levels and many more features. My current issue is that I have a major logic issue with the moving platforms that I’m going to try to spend tomorrow fixing. See y’all soon!"}, {"post_id": 36561, "ts": "2026-07-28T19:13:31Z", "hours": 8.85, "text": "Hello everyone! Over the last couple of days I’ve been implementing some pretty cool light related stuff. I’ve also recoded many of the button systems and interactions with them because my coding of the systems originally were not my proudest work. (Pretty exciting stuff) In other news: I would like to reiterate that none of my work on this project or its related stuff (devlogs, READMEs, etc.) has been assisted with AI. I do not believe that the technology is fit for a majority of creative spaces and the day I use generative AI on one of my projects is long past the day I die. Until next time!"}, {"post_id": 34925, "ts": "2026-07-26T01:12:23Z", "hours": 4.9117, "text": "Hello again everyone! Over the last couple of days, I’ve been focusing on finishing up world 1 levels and doing lots and lots of general polish. However, now I am at an impasse. I need your help! If you’ve been following the project or are just passing by, please give your answer! Should I ship the new update as is and continue to ship small updates, or should I add another world or two and have a huge major ship? See y’all around!"}, {"post_id": 33861, "ts": "2026-07-24T03:51:47Z", "hours": 8.0322, "text": "Hello everyone! Lots more work has been done and I’m very very happy with the way things have been going, especially with reworking the tutorial text / instructions (which were mainly done in an hour on original release). Check out the video below for some tutorial revamp goodies. In other news: Flob is officially a super star project!!! This was so unexpected and I am so very honored to receive the super star award! There are so many other phenomenal projects that I personally believe deserve it way more than I do, but despite that I am so eternally grateful that I’ve made something people enjoy and are looking forward to full release of. See y’all again soon!"}, {"post_id": 32036, "ts": "2026-07-20T22:19:45Z", "hours": 8.0317, "text": "Hello everyone! I wasn’t expecting another devlog so soon, but here we are! I’ve had an obnoxious amount of free time so instead of doing real important stuff I’m going back and updating some UI to make it not look as “rushed”. Hopefully after I’m done with the slog that is user interface, I can return to gameplay!"}, {"post_id": 30683, "ts": "2026-07-18T13:47:51Z", "hours": 8.2372, "text": "It has been a long, long week for me over at Flob Inc. The 13th is when I got my wisdom teeth removed, so I got lots of time to reflect on my project so far. Speaking of which, Thank you everyone for the feedback after demo ship #1! It was so awesome seeing lots of good stuff to keep in mind for future updates along with my future projects. For now, here’s a glance at one of the new levels! See y’all soon!"}, {"post_id": 27498, "ts": "2026-07-13T03:38:28Z", "hours": 3.0597, "text": "Everything is complete…"}, {"post_id": 26171, "ts": "2026-07-10T20:21:24Z", "hours": 5.6414, "text": "For the last three or so days, I’ve been in audio burnout hell which reminds me that I am not cut out to be a sound engineer. That being said, the demo now has (mostly all) sound effects and I just need to make 2 more music tracks! After the release of the demo, I’ll most likely get the help of someone who knows what their doing, but for right now I say it passes. Expect a ship soon!"}, {"post_id": 24226, "ts": "2026-07-07T17:26:34Z", "hours": 6.4161, "text": "Ever since I almost ruined my project twice, I’ve started to work on lots and lots of polishing for my game! I’ll show off more whenever I have more finished, but for now take a look at this pseudo-screensaver I made (which is surprisingly performant) See y’all soon!"}, {"post_id": 21836, "ts": "2026-07-03T23:37:48Z", "hours": 0.6083, "text": "Logging again to make sure I’m not fully messing everything up. Had to rollback everything AGAIN because I am a stupid silly human being (my day is going phenomenally)"}, {"post_id": 21732, "ts": "2026-07-03T20:30:02Z", "hours": 3.9531, "text": "Today I almost ruined my entire project!! I accidentally deleted something that I thought was a leftover placeholder but it turns out it was the lynchpin holding my entire project together (which is funny because I only use it in one place pictured below) but all has been saved thanks to version control! Logging my time now just in case this breaks the godot plugin :P"}, {"post_id": 19579, "ts": "2026-06-30T22:28:47Z", "hours": 6.3931, "text": "Finally a devlog where I have interesting things to share! Over the last three or four days, I’ve highkey lowkey been doing way too much work with UI. Here is a cursory look at what I’ve done so far. A lot of the project is still unfinished (such as the options button doing nothing right now), but I’m happy I set up this baseline for myself. Almost everything when it comes to level selection, creation, and potential future additions are completely modular which means my life will be significantly easier as I wrap up this DEMO of the game. I will also be going back and edit my past devlogs to better represent what I’ve actually been up to rather than some terse statements!! See you soon!"}, {"post_id": 15905, "ts": "2026-06-25T21:00:53Z", "hours": 8.8308, "text": "It’s been more than a week…….. I loveee ui so so much…… For real though, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the UI of the game and how the general menu feel is. Everything shown is a prototype and is destined to change."}, {"post_id": 10035, "ts": "2026-06-16T16:25:49Z", "hours": 3.5228, "text": "There’s been no actual devlog updates for a week because I’ve been making the main menu music for the game! Yes, I know it is very early in the process to be worrying about the sound of the game, but I needed a break from coding and building so as to not get burnt out; however, now that the music is done I will get back to the coding magic!!"}, {"post_id": 5723, "ts": "2026-06-09T16:55:10Z", "hours": 4.7789, "text": "Over the last week, I feel as though I’ve figured out the main systems to get them in a position good enough to start real level design. The circle on the left is the way the PLAYER NODE completes their half of the whole level, with the other half being the puzzle solving with grids. This current first level contains no grids as it is a way to warm the player up to the movement of the game, but the rest of the game will almost always contain a grid puzzle that needs to be completed."}, {"post_id": 2294, "ts": "2026-06-04T18:16:27Z", "hours": 1.0494, "text": "Core update!! Core update!! Grids can be completed now! The grid system now has lots of customizability as there is the potential of custom grid edges (they’re all currently walls, but the possibilities are nearly endless) along with the interior of grid spaces, which are currently being used to spawn the line nodes and receivers which the player can interact with."}, {"post_id": 2101, "ts": "2026-06-04T13:04:51Z", "hours": 1.1253, "text": "Hello again again!! I’ve slightly updated the player movement so it is not as static as the default Godot player movement defaults. The movement still needs an immense amount of polish as I want to add variable jump heights, a proper state machine, and lots and lots of customizability in terms of how the player functions. Now that I have a working prototype of movement, I will focus on level creation and finishing up grid systems."}, {"post_id": 1196, "ts": "2026-06-03T01:37:36Z", "hours": 1.3769, "text": "I have returned with amazing news of modularity. A majority of actual grid work is done! This current rendition of the grids are fully modular in that you can adjust the X size and Y size to form a rectangular grid. Time for not default player control!"}, {"post_id": 984, "ts": "2026-06-02T19:22:12Z", "hours": 1.8433, "text": "Hello again! Good news, grid snapping works!! This means that one of the fundamental halves of the game is now fairly operational minus a few edge cases (that I am aware of). Next step is immediate grid fixes and the ability to actually detect a solved grid."}, {"post_id": 574, "ts": "2026-06-02T02:09:06Z", "hours": 1.7192, "text": "First one of these! Game progress is going fairly well (granted I basically just started outside of a line system I had made a week prior) as I just started making many of the core systems not be held together with duct tape and spaghetti."}]...
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Title: Flob (a platformer) by @potheterr | Stardan Title: Flob (a platformer) by @potheterr | Stardance
Devlogs:
First one of these! Game progress is going fairly well (granted I basically just started outside of a line system I had made a week prior) as I just started making many of the core systems not be held together with duct tape and spaghetti.
Hello again! Good news, grid snapping works!! This means that one of the fundamental halves of the game is now fairly operational minus a few edge cases (that I am aware of). Next step is immediate grid fixes and the ability to actually detect a solved grid.
I have returned with amazing news of modularity. A majority of actual grid work is done! This current rendition of the grids are fully modular in that you can adjust the X size and Y size to form a rectangular grid. Time for not default player control!
Hello again again!! I’ve slightly updated the player movement so it is not as static as the default Godot player movement defaults. The movement still needs an immense amount of polish as I want to add variable jump heights, a proper state machine, and lots and lots of customizability in terms of how the player functions. Now that I have a working prototype of movement, I will focus on level creation and finishing up grid systems.
Core update!! Core update!! Grids can be completed now! The grid system now has lots of customizability as there is the potential of custom grid edges (they’re all currently walls, but the possibilities are nearly endless) along with the interior of grid spaces, which are currently being used to spawn the line nodes and receivers which the player can interact with.
Over the last week, I feel as though I’ve figured out the main systems to get them in a position good enough to start real level design. The circle on the left is the way the PLAYER NODE completes their half of the whole level, with the other half being the puzzle solving with grids. This current first level contains no grids as it is a way to warm the player up to the movement of the game, but the rest of the game will almost always contain a grid puzzle that needs to be completed.
There’s been no actual devlog updates for a week because I’ve been making the main menu music for the game! Yes, I know it is very early in the process to be worrying about the sound of the game, but I needed a break from coding and building so as to not get burnt out; however, now that the music is done I will get back to the coding magic!!
It’s been more than a week…….. I loveee ui so so much…… For real though, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the UI of the game and how the general menu feel is. Everything shown is a prototype and is destined to change.
Finally a devlog where I have interesting things to share! Over the last three or four days, I’ve highkey lowkey been doing way too much work with UI. Here is a cursory look at what I’ve done so far. A lot of the project is still unfinished (such as the options button doing nothing right now), but I’m happy I set up this baseline for myself. Almost everything when it comes to level selection, creation, and potential future additions are completely modular which means my life will be significantly easier as I wrap up this DEMO of the game. I will also be going back and edit my past devlogs to better represent what I’ve actually been up to rather than some terse statements!! See you soon!
Today I almost ruined my entire project!! I accidentally deleted something that I thought was a leftover placeholder but it turns out it was the lynchpin holding my entire project together (which is funny because I only use it in one place pictured below) but all has been saved thanks to version control! Logging my time now just in case this breaks the godot plugin :P
Logging again to make sure I’m not fully messing everything up. Had to rollback everything AGAIN because I am a stupid silly human being (my day is going phenomenally)
Ever since I almost ruined my project twice, I’ve started to work on lots and lots of polishing for my game! I’ll show off more whenever I have more finished, but for now take a look at this pseudo-screensaver I made (which is surprisingly performant) See y’all soon!
For the last three or so days, I’ve been in audio burnout hell which reminds me that I am not cut out to be a sound engineer. That being said, the demo now has (mostly all) sound effects and I just need to make 2 more music tracks! After the release of the demo, I’ll most likely get the help of someone who knows what their doing, but for right now I say it passes. Expect a ship soon!
Everything is complete…
It has been a long, long week for me over at Flob Inc. The 13th is when I got my wisdom teeth removed, so I got lots of time to reflect on my project so far. Speaking of which, Thank you everyone for the feedback after demo ship #1! It was so awesome seeing lots of good stuff to keep in mind for future updates along with my future projects. For now, here’s a glance at one of the new levels! See y’all soon!
Hello everyone! I wasn’t expecting another devlog so soon, but here we are! I’ve had an obnoxious amount of free time so instead of doing real important stuff I’m going back and updating some UI to make it not look as “rushed”. Hopefully after I’m done with the slog that is user interface, I can return to gameplay!
Hello everyone! Lots more work has been done and I’m very very happy with the way things have been going, especially with reworking the tutorial text / instructions (which were mainly done in an hour on original release). Check out the video below for some tutorial revamp goodies. In other news: Flob is officially a super star project!!! This was so unexpected and I am so very honored to receive the super star award! There are so many other phenomenal projects that I personally believe deserve it way more than I do, but despite that I am so eternally grateful that I’ve made something people enjoy and are looking forward to full release of. See y’all again soon!
Hello again everyone! Over the last couple of days, I’ve been focusing on finishing up world 1 levels and doing lots and lots of general polish. However, now I am at an impasse. I need your help! If you’ve been following the project or are just passing by, please give your answer! Should I ship the new update as is and continue to ship small updates, or should I add another world or two and have a huge major ship? See y’all around!
Hello everyone! Over the last couple of days I’ve been implementing some pretty cool light related stuff. I’ve also recoded many of the button systems and interactions with them because my coding of the systems originally were not my proudest work. (Pretty exciting stuff) In other news: I would like to reiterate that none of my work on this project or its related stuff (devlogs, READMEs, etc.) has been assisted with AI. I do not believe that the technology is fit for a majority of creative spaces and the day I use generative AI on one of my projects is long past the day I die. Until next time!
Hello everyone! Over the last two days, I’ve been working on new levels and many more features. My current issue is that I have a major logic issue with the moving platforms that I’m going to try to spend tomorrow fixing. See y’all soon!
Hello everyone! I’ve been much more focused on music and sounds over the last 2-3 days and I’m confident that there’s enough new content for a new ship. As for future content, I think 2 more worlds will be enough to round out the game. See y’all whenever I ship the update!
Hey everyone! Just reporting that I’ve been really burnt out with the game and I think I might call it here. I’ll probably return to it in future but as of right now I think it’s in a solid enough state. Thank you all!
Ships:
This is a DEMO VERSION of my first published game, Flob! There are so many edge cases and bugs that I need to fix which is by far going to be the hardest part of this challenge, but I’m ready for it. Hopefully you all enjoy! (A video of the game is attached on the itch page).
Welcome to FLOB 0.2.0.0!! This is the second of three updates I’d like to get out before the end of Stardance which will more than likely be the last update. This ship, I focused a lot on making new systems and expanding on old ones, all giving me unique challenges. I’m not the proudest of how the code turned out, but everything works for the most part so I will take it and run. I’ve also added a little tiny bit of a story that will be continued through my other projects I make in the future, which I am very excited for. Overall, this update was extremely fun to work on and I’m so happy with the way it turned out. That being said, the macOS and Linux builds of the game are UNTESTED, so if there are any huge issues find some way to let me know ASAP. Enjoy!...
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1792846138.795995
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1792932538.795995
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18394
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myMusic by @cluelessfr | Stardance
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cluelessfr
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3
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105.0
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1498
|
[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-01T04:09:47Z", "hours": 49.0, "multiplier": 12.73, "payout": 608, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made myMusic, a Windows/Linux app that allows you to download your favorite songs. It works by searching YouTube/YouTube music for videos of your song. Then, using yt-dlp, it is able to download your song as an mp3 file. Finally it adds all of the metadata, allowing you to properly listen to your music offline. This is ship #3 of my project, so let me explain all of the changes since the last ship: First I finally added support for playlist and album downloads. Now instead of putting in each separate track individually you can combine it into a playlist and download that all together. For this I also had to update the GUI in order to fit all of the song information together. Second I improved the song searching and reliability. I made things consistent with how YouTube expects them (ASCII, Unicode characters, etc.). I also combine YouTube Music and YouTube candidates, so you get the best of both worlds. The app also tries multiple candidates before declaring that track a fail. Third I introduced explicit-version matching. Before, you would sometimes get the clean version of an explicit song. To fix this I switched to ytmusicapi, which allows me to compare matches to determine which one fits the criteria the best. The API also allows me to see whether or not the song is clean, which makes matching easier. Fourth (and probably the biggest update) I was able to add a Spicetify extension with the app. Because of this you are now able to download your favorite songs directly from the Spotify windows app. It reuses Spotify’s native download button rows, which make it easy to download your songs. It also preserves native behavior if you are already on Spotify Premium. It also shows notifications about the status of your download. This is only available on Windows. Fifth in order to make the Spotify integration work, the app now opens up a FastAPI/Uvicorn server bound to 127.0.0.1:18492. I chose a far away port in order for it not to affect any other local host processes. Sixth I also added background behavior for the app. This keeps the app open in the background without it being open on the gui (you will still be able to see it in your system tray). This allows the Spotify integration to run seamlessly without interfering with your every day work. Seventh I greatly improved the in app updater speed. Before it would greatly lag your computer because the chunk sizes were so small and it had to do a lot of writes to your disk. Now I increased the chunk size, and updated the packaging configurations to further boost the download speed and app size. These were all the main updates I did to my app, hope you like it!", "repo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic", "demo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic/releases/tag/v2.0.1"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-06T17:31:14Z", "hours": 34.0, "multiplier": 18.59, "payout": 611, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made myMusic, a Windows desktop app that takes a Spotify track link, previews the song details, finds a matching audio result, downloads it, converts it to MP3, and saves it with basic metadata tags. This is Ship #2 of my project. There have been a quite a few changes since my last ship, so let me list them all: First I added a folder-picking dialog. This allows the user to change the directory their songs are downloaded to, instead of being forced to always download to the “Downloads” directory. The app also saves the last chosen directory, so even if you close and reopen the app the directory is still saved. I then bundled Deno into the app, which helps yt-dlp solve JS challenges. Then I added the Spotify oEmbed metadata as fallback metadata if the SpotifyScraper python package fails. I also added YouTube as a partner with YouTube Music to get the best results from both platforms. I then a ranking system for the songs. The program adds and removes points from the top 6 matches from both platforms based on a few criteria, then it tries downloading from highest to least ranked. Then I also started embedding cover art. The app now takes in the cover art link, streams it, then writes it to the audio file. Next I added in-app update checking. The app can search the github repo for the latest version, checks to see if it is newer, then can automatically download and installer it. I also polished up the UI so that the controls and labels are more organized. Finally, I added Linux x64 and Linux ARM64 support. This has the same behavior as the Windows app, but the dependencies are now installed natively on that platform, which makes the app run more reliably on Linux. The current latest version at the time of this ship is v1.3.0.", "repo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic", "demo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic/releases/tag/v2.0.1"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-06-18T06:15:48Z", "hours": 22.0, "multiplier": 13.37, "payout": 279, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made myMusic, a Windows desktop app that takes a Spotify track link, previews the song details, finds a matching audio result, downloads it, converts it to MP3, and saves it with basic metadata tags. The hardest part was turning it from a local Python project into something other people can actually run: bundling FFmpeg, building the Windows executable, creating an installer, and writing clear install/testing instructions. These were all new steps that I wasn’t familiar with before, so I had to heavily research them and get familiar with them before shipping. I am proud that I was able to get it working as a real, bundled Windows desktop app, instead of a small project that runs only on my computer. To test it, use the Try Project link, download the v1.0.1 Windows installer, install it, open myMusic, paste a Spotify track link, click Preview Song Details, then click Download. The finished MP3 should appear in your Downloads folder. Windows may show SmartScreen because the app is unsigned; the release notes explain how to continue.", "repo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic", "demo": "https://github.com/cluelessfr/myMusic/releases/tag/v2.0.1"}]...
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[{"post_id": 38621, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 38621, "ts": "2026-08-01T03:30:24Z", "hours": 2.9203, "text": "Devlog 39: I was finally able to get the Linux guards in place, and also packaged the new builds and released them to GitHub has a new version. The guards were mostly simple, as they were just a few checks that asked what operating system the user was on. And depending on that it decided whether or not to install the Spicetify extensions."}, {"post_id": 38528, "ts": "2026-07-31T23:36:25Z", "hours": 7.4581, "text": "Devlog 38: I worked on functions that helped install the Spicetify extension into the Spicetify configuration. I had to ensure Spicetify was installer, had to find its path, had to find its extensions path, then finally copy over the extension. I also added system tray behavior and multiple instance detection for the app, so that now when you close the app it doesn’t close but instead goes to the system tray. This allows the Spotify integration to work even if the app itself isn’t visible. The multiple instance detection ensures the app runs properly, and ensures that the app doesn’t try to use the same http port twice, resulting in errors. This did take a while but now all I have to do is create guards for Linux, so that the Spotify integration only works on Windows and doesn’t create unexpected errors on Linux."}, {"post_id": 37449, "ts": "2026-07-30T06:15:53Z", "hours": 4.1092, "text": "Devlog 37: I am very close to shipping now. I added the Spotify status/progress update messages, so now you can see when the tracks have finished downloading. I also fixed three (kinda major) bugs. First of all there was an error when searching for the songs on YouTube/YouTube Music. Basically what happened was that the title didn’t follow the same ASCII conventions that was used by YouTube. Because of this the app would reject good title matches even though they were the same. This produced quite a few errors, especially when trying to download songs with apostrophes. The second error I fixed was the some songs would automatically have the clean version downloaded. To fix this I switched to the ytmusicapi python package. This package also returned whether the song was explicit or not. Because of this I was able to check whether or not the song was intended to be that way, and if not I could prevent that match from being downloaded. I did have to edit a few functions to accept the new format, but in the end everything worked. Third I fixed a simple error that messed up the searching. This time it wasn’t really a bug, but instead an edge case that I missed. I was catching keywords like “feat.” and “featuring”, but I didn’t catch words like “From (and tv show, etc.)”. Because of this some matches were getting left out. I fixed this by adding another regex pattern that removes this as well."}, {"post_id": 37238, "ts": "2026-07-29T19:53:38Z", "hours": 2.6647, "text": "Devlog 36: I am almost done with the first phase of the integration. When the download button is clicked inside of Spotify, Spicetify intercepts it and now posts a request to the open web server. Then the python script gets notified of that request, decodes it, then automatically starts downloading the song/playlist/album. The only thing is that the myMusic app has to be open while doing this, but I will remove that requirement in the future (not now). The next step would be to add status reports to Spotify so that the user knows what the status of their download is."}, {"post_id": 36598, "ts": "2026-07-28T20:17:16Z", "hours": 2.8025, "text": "Devlog 35: The app now creates its own server on a very distant and far port so that your other local host stuff doesn’t get affected. I did this with uvicorn and threading, so that creating the port doesn’t make the app freeze. With this functionality the app can get the requests made inside Spotify and automatically download them. The next step is to get the app to report the statuses of the download jobs (queued, downloading, completed, failed, etc.). Then I would actually have to connect both parts, let Spotify send messages and the app receive the message."}, {"post_id": 35435, "ts": "2026-07-26T20:46:18Z", "hours": 4.8314, "text": "Devlog 34: I have been working on creating a queue for the requests. This ensures that the user can download multiple songs at once without having to wait for the previous ones to be finished. So far I have been able to create a request id for each request. The app can update the attributes of each request, such as its status, and error message. On top of this once a request is completed the app also automatically removes that request."}, {"post_id": 31912, "ts": "2026-07-20T18:12:07Z", "hours": 3.5339, "text": "Devlog 33: The app is now able to understand and automatically download any received links. Now the problem is that Spotify isn’t able to send any normal requests to via the computer. Because of this I need to find a way for Spotify to send and get data. I know that Spotify (using Spicetify) can send and get http requests. Because of that I am planning to use FastAPI and a local http server to be able to send and get data so the app can automatically download tracks. I will ensure to keep the server in a high index to ensure it doesn’t get in the way of any other local servers."}, {"post_id": 29252, "ts": "2026-07-16T01:35:08Z", "hours": 6.2167, "text": "Devlog 32: (sorry for the late post) I have been working on a really cool feature for the app. Basically what I am trying to do is integrate the myMusic pipeline into the windows Spotify app itself. When you right click a playlist or album, there will be a menu that pops up. Usually for normal Spotify users (not on premium) there will be a greyed out download button. What I am trying to do is two things: add a download button for tracks (because there isn’t one right now), and make the playlist/album button actually work. Right now what I have accomplished is adding a new button for the track and making the playlist/album button clickable. I was able to do this by using Spicetify and its framework. Because I already have it installed on my computer I am using it to test everything out but later I will bundle it with my app. What I did was build a custom Spicetify extension (I had to learn JavaScript) that creates a new button. I was able to make the original playlist/album button work because it was only “aria-disabled”, not actually disabled. This means that it was only disabled at the UI level, but Spotify still recorded clicks. By applying some UI changes I was able to make the button look enabled and still record clicks. My next step is to actually hook this up to the Python script. I think this is a really cool feature."}, {"post_id": 28364, "ts": "2026-07-14T16:05:28Z", "hours": 2.7422, "text": "Devlog 31: This devlog was mainly focused on the efficiency and speed of updating the app. Before the data would come in really small packets, meaning the cpu would have to write to the drive about 130,000 times in total (I know 😭). I adjusted this so it now comes in larger packets so the cpu doesn’t have to do more work. I also adjusted the compression and a few other Inno Setup settings (number of threads, etc.) to make the app more efficient in general. Another issue that I found is that once the app updated (specifically in Windows, idk about other platforms) the settings app would still show the older version for some time. This was an issue with the timing, so I had to adjust some of the delays to get it to work properly. Overall I think this is a pretty good update."}, {"post_id": 27877, "ts": "2026-07-13T19:39:38Z", "hours": 6.6931, "text": "Devlog 30: I FINALLY implemented playlist and album support. At first I thought it would be simple, just looping though each song in the playlist/album. Oh was I wrong. First I had to add two more methods that looped though each song, one for playlists and one for albums. There had to be two different ones because each returned metadata differently. Then I had to kind of change the format of the whole thing, because I had to store all of the songs in a list, but currently I was only returning dictionaries from all of my methods. After getting all of that sorted out I had to actually fix the GUI/downloading part. I had to update the downloading method to handle playlist/album links, then I had to properly handle all of the status message for each song (“Ready”, “Downloading”, “Failed”). Finally I had to work on fixing the bugs I had introduced and handling the edge cases. After all of that I FINALLY had playlist and album support. One thing that was sorta tough was handling the status for each track individually. Before I was just looping through the entire list and setting all of the statuses to the same thing, but I was able to create a new method and change each song status as it was being downloaded, not for every song as a whole."}, {"post_id": 25666, "ts": "2026-07-10T02:30:59Z", "hours": 5.3094, "text": "Devlog 29: This is kind of a messy devlog, so I’ll lay it out as best as I can. First, I update the UI in preparation for playlist/album support. Before it was three static text fields that could only display one song at a time. Now I replaced it with a scrollable frame, with the ability to add more sections inside the frame for more songs. This frame also has the ability to display metadata. I also introduced a status message that shows different messages and colors depending on the status. While I was doing that (and I am not done with it), I decided to stop in the middle and fix another bug. This bug (that was reported by other people as well as my testing) prevented good matches from ranked properly. This was a problem with how I compared the titles in my ranker. To fix this I added two new functions, one that normalizes the candidate title, and another that normalizes the actual Spotify song name (mainly to exclude features and get just the song name). To do this I messed around a lot with regex patterns, so I learned a lot. Now I have to go back and continue working on the new UI for playlists and albums."}, {"post_id": 23538, "ts": "2026-07-06T15:46:31Z", "hours": 3.8236, "text": "Devlog 28: Based on feedback from my first ship, I have decided to introduce Linux support. I thought it would be easy, but it turned out to be a little harder than I thought. The first thing I had to do was rewrite some of the Path code that saves the users download directory. This is because Linux and Windows have different file systems, and I had to account for both. Then came the hard part, Packaging. For ARM, I decided to do this on my Raspberry Pi, where I downloaded the project files from git, downloaded the OS specific FFMPEG and Deno, then repackaged the app as a .tar.gz. I decided to do it this way because this is sort of simply an experimental release. For x64 I decided to use GitHub Actions, which allowed me to download the dependencies and compile without having to spin up a new Virtual Machine. I also decided to keep this as a .tar.gz. Later, once I get more feedback about the Linux versions, I am planning to release a more universal app package (.flatpak). I also had to change the update checkers, because each OS version has to check its own corresponding file. In the end this was a very unique experience and I learned a lot of things about packaging apps on Linux."}, {"post_id": 21260, "ts": "2026-07-03T03:02:23Z", "hours": 5.4692, "text": "Devlog 27: This is a pretty major update. The myMusic can now automatically download and install updates, without the user having to go and download the github repository. Before, the user would manually have to go and download the installer from github, and set it up like a completely new install. Now, the app itself has a “Check for Updates” button. This button checks the github for the latest version, and if there is a newer version available it gives the user an option to download and install that. If they change their mind during the download, there is a cancel option as well. This works by first getting the github version (latest), then seeing if the current app version matches that. If it does, the app is up to date. If not, then the app can fetch the executable using the github API and automatically download the latest installer. On top of this some inno setup tools allow the app to close the app, install the new version, and reopen the app by itself. The only caveat is that this only works starting from v1.2.0. This means that if you have an older version you will have to manually download v1.2.0 in order to start getting automatic app updates."}, {"post_id": 20302, "ts": "2026-07-01T21:16:28Z", "hours": 1.2353, "text": "Devlog 26: Added a function to help with auto-downloading new updates. I haven’t hooked it up to the UI yet, but that is my next step. The function takes in the name of the installer and the link to download it. It first downloads the installer to a temp file, then once everything is good it saves it to a real executable."}, {"post_id": 19419, "ts": "2026-06-30T18:55:12Z", "hours": 1.0339, "text": "Devlog 25: This update was about implementing the update checker from the last devlog. Now there is an in-app button that allows you to check for new updates. The implementation was similar to all the other buttons and didn’t take too long because I already had the function ready. The next step is to allow the app to actually download and install the update, instead of just pointing out it is available."}, {"post_id": 19007, "ts": "2026-06-30T05:16:32Z", "hours": 1.6642, "text": "Devlog 24: I have started adding implementations that checks for the latest version of the app from github. It uses the github API endpoint for my specific project, then reads the json to get any version information. Using that we can compare the current version to the latest version on the github to see if there are any updates available. Currently I have only created the function and am yet to implement this feature into the actual app/GUI."}, {"post_id": 18082, "ts": "2026-06-29T02:24:36Z", "hours": 1.4658, "text": "Devlog 23: Today I added the feature that embeds cover art into the mp3 files. To do this I had to first use the requests library in Python to get the image itself. Instead of downloading the image I kept it in memory using the ‘io’ library. This made the metadata tagging safer and faster. Finally the app uses mutagen to embed the cover art into the mp3 file. I used a try and except loop, which ensures that even if the cover art adding fails the mp3 file still gets returned, just without the art."}, {"post_id": 17306, "ts": "2026-06-28T01:07:06Z", "hours": 1.4167, "text": "Devlog 22 This update was about further increasing the matching strength. Before the program would automatically download the highest ranked candidate, even if it was very low. Now the app downloads the highest ranked candidate only if its ranked above a certain thresh hold. If there are no qualifying matches then the app simply returns a no matches found error. This wasn’t that complicated, but I had to modify a few functions so that the score was returned properly and in a usable format."}, {"post_id": 16647, "ts": "2026-06-27T02:18:17Z", "hours": 2.3261, "text": "Devlog 21: Now added real YouTube (YT) to the match finding instead of just YouTube Music (YTM). Before the songs were found only on YTM, but I realist that normal YT has a larger list of songs, so I decided to add that to the algorithm as well. Now, the program takes 3 songs from YTM and 3 songs from YT, and uses the ranking function I created before to sort them from best to worst. Then the program starts by trying to download the best match. If it can’t, it goes through the list until if finds one it can download. If none of them download, then it sends an error message. One thing with this step was that I tried not to repeat big chunks of code, as a lot of this was similar to the original YTM downloading method."}, {"post_id": 16559, "ts": "2026-06-26T22:37:04Z", "hours": 1.9589, "text": "Devlog 20: Added the Spotify OEmbed fallback. Now even if the SpotifyScraper python package fails we have a fallback to get as much metadata as we can. This wasn’t that hard, as I already had the file from a previous time. The hard part was accounting for all the different cases, such as the title being missing or an empty string. I had to account for all of those while integrating the new file."}, {"post_id": 15864, "ts": "2026-06-25T19:50:13Z", "hours": 0.3722, "text": "Devlog 19: Implemented the ranking feature from the last devlog. Now, the best candidates are ranked in order from best to worst, and that is the order in which they are downloaded."}, {"post_id": 15836, "ts": "2026-06-25T19:07:36Z", "hours": 0.9022, "text": "Devlog 18: I implemented a way to start scoring the candidates returned by YT-DLP. This ensures that even if the first candidate returned is not the best, the program can automatically filter out the bad ones using key words and ensure the best candidate is always selected. I have only coded this function for now, and I have to wire it in to the real app soon."}, {"post_id": 15337, "ts": "2026-06-24T22:21:13Z", "hours": 3.4889, "text": "Devlog 17: Did some major code cleanups. No new features, but made the code more efficient. Also reorganized some files. The hard part was keeping the functionality the same while trying to make the code non-repetitive and more efficient. I also tried to fix any warnings that were present in the code that were caught by the IDE."}, {"post_id": 13864, "ts": "2026-06-22T18:38:18Z", "hours": 1.5628, "text": "Devlog 16: Simple update, but I added a new error message to account for a yt-dlp botting error. Now, when YouTube sends an error saying that the request was blocked due to botting being suspected, it sends a properly formatted error message instead of the raw yt-dlp text. I retested everything to ensure the previous functionality of the app remained the same."}, {"post_id": 13481, "ts": "2026-06-22T02:29:05Z", "hours": 3.7828, "text": "Devlog 15: Improved song selection algorithm, so it selects the next best track if the first selection is invalid. Before if the first track selected by YT-DLP didn’t work/was invalid, then the whole program would fail. Now it moves on to the next if the first one doesn’t work. I also update the progress messages, so it shows which match it is trying."}, {"post_id": 11619, "ts": "2026-06-18T22:25:28Z", "hours": 3.6753, "text": "Devlog 14: I have implemented two new features. First I implemented a feature that allows users to switch the directory where songs get downloaded. This took some time, but I was able to get it in the end. It works by creating a new button which opens a folder picking dialogue. The path that the user seclects inside this dialogue then gets saved to a local json file. Everytime the user changes the path it gets saved to the json, which allows the program to always open up the last directory selected by the user. I had to implement some checks to ensure that the program would work even if the json file was missing or corrupted. The second feature is more of an update. The static “Downloading” progress message is now updated with real time info on what the program is doing. The next step would be adding a dynamic progress bar."}, {"post_id": 11117, "ts": "2026-06-18T05:51:42Z", "hours": 1.4456, "text": "Devlog 13: I added an installer .exe file, added screenshots to the readme, and added a new release on GitHub. Configuring the installer was a little hard, as I was new to this process and didn’t know where to start. I used Codex to help me figure out that I could use a program called Inno. This handled the installer file, uninstall, as well as configuring it with Windows. Codex guided me through how to set that up, and eventually I got everything working. Finally I created a new version on Git and pushed everything."}, {"post_id": 10999, "ts": "2026-06-18T00:51:48Z", "hours": 1.1539, "text": "Devlog 12: I compiled the app into a .exe, updated the readme, and pushed the first version to git. I ran into some issues when compiling the app. Specifically after the initial compiling YT-DLP couldn’t see the location of FFMPEG. Because of this I had to update the “get_app_root.py” file so it accounted for the file changes when compiling."}, {"post_id": 10925, "ts": "2026-06-17T22:01:48Z", "hours": 1.1078, "text": "Devlog 11: I added a preview button to the GUI so that users could see the song details and confirm they were right before downloading the song. also prepared for packaging this file into an executable (.exe)."}, {"post_id": 10860, "ts": "2026-06-17T20:15:14Z", "hours": 1.8986, "text": "Devlog 10: Added app.py and introduced a GUI window using Custom Tkinter. Now when users run app.py they see a new desktop window open up, see a text box and a download button. Once they paste in a Spotify link they see status messages like “Downloading”. At the end they also see the downloaded path. On top of this if there are any errors during the download (like fetching metadata), this also displays as a status message. This took a little bit because I get to get familiar with Custom Tkinter, add another function that gets called by the button, and add some safeguards/quality of life updates. The main safeguard was disabling the download button while the song was downloading, which ensured the user didn’t spam processes. The quality of life update was that the download path now wraps the text to multiple lines if the path is very long."}, {"post_id": 10426, "ts": "2026-06-17T04:14:00Z", "hours": 0.4461, "text": "Devlog 09 Simple update, but it now uses Mutagen to add track name, artists, and album name to the downloaded files."}, {"post_id": 10333, "ts": "2026-06-17T00:33:23Z", "hours": 1.6983, "text": "Devlog 08 Introduced FFMPEG to the project to be able to convert downloads from .webm to .mp3 files. Also change the song title to be the title of the song. Introduced a file check to ensure file names are valid and accepted by Windows."}, {"post_id": 10283, "ts": "2026-06-16T22:29:59Z", "hours": 1.0183, "text": "Devlog 07 The program now automatically uses YT-DLP to download the best match found. This works by using YT-DLP’s build in “Download” method. I pass in the number 1 match found by YT-DLP (built in the last devlog), and it downloads it to the users default “Downloads” folder. This is a major step in the project, and I am almost ready to ship the first version."}, {"post_id": 10156, "ts": "2026-06-16T19:30:33Z", "hours": 2.4497, "text": "Devlog 06 Major Update: Now added YT-DLP to the project. Now whenever you put in a valid link you get more than just the metadata. You also get the top 5 best matches from YouTube Music. This took a while because I had to learn to properly call and use the YT-DLP package in python. I created 3 helper functions. The first created the search query using the metadata, the second returned the search results, and the last one formatted and returned the results. I created one last function as a wrapper, such that when I passed in the metadata it returned the YouTube Music search results. When calling yt_dlp.YoutubeDL(), I got a type error when passing the parameters. This was because the package expected its own datatype, while I was simply passing a dictionary. I was able to fix this by setting the type to “Any” when passing in the argument. I also changed main.py to include the YouTube search results. Now, whenever you pass in a Spotify link you get the song metadata as well as well as the top 5 best matches from YouTube Music."}, {"post_id": 9712, "ts": "2026-06-16T04:05:09Z", "hours": 0.4872, "text": "Devlog 05 This is a pretty small update, all I did was add a small test file to be able to consistently check for errors and functionality."}, {"post_id": 9667, "ts": "2026-06-16T02:27:43Z", "hours": 3.6628, "text": "Devlog 04 This was a big change in the metadata retrieving/handling. Last devlog I explained how the new restrictions on the Spotify API made it difficult to fetch the metadata, so I had to use the public oEmbed API. This didn’t give much information and was hard to work with. After researching some more I found a python package that does the metadata fetching for me, “SpotifyScraper”. this package takes in a spotify url (which the user will be providing), and can get information like song names, artists, duration, etc. This was very useful for me when coding the metadata functions. On top of this it supports playlist and album inputs as well, which is great for future updates. I spent this time rewriting the metadata retrieving functions and cleaning everything up. I removed a few redundant functions and introduced proper error messages."}, {"post_id": 9279, "ts": "2026-06-15T16:04:31Z", "hours": 2.2303, "text": "Devlog 03 After getting the link cleaner to work, I wanted to use the Spotify API to get the metadata of the song. The problem with this is that Spotify introduced heavy limitations on its API earlier this year. Because of this I had to fallback to the Spotify oEmbed, which gives only provides the song name. I am still researching for more options."}, {"post_id": 9003, "ts": "2026-06-15T00:31:15Z", "hours": 3.3114, "text": "Devlog 02 This took a while, but I was able to make the program that strips the input down to only the Spotify link. This ensures that (for the most part) that only the Spotify link gets used, and not any other whitespace/extra characters that might have appeared. It took a while because I was researching and learning how to use the ‘re’ library in Python, and it took some trial and error/debugging to get the logic to work. How this works; The user inputs into the text field First the type of track gets identified (single track, playlist, album) Then it uses the ‘re’ library to detect the pattern of Spotify URLs and URIs. This ensures that the Spotify track is actually valid. It then uses the ‘.group()’ function to capture the matching section out of the input Finally the functions are checked to ensure everything is valid, then the type of track and song url are returned."}, {"post_id": 8718, "ts": "2026-06-14T14:15:06Z", "hours": 0.7378, "text": "Devlog 01 This is the initial commit for the myMusic project. I created the file system locally, then opened the project inside IntelliJ Idea. I kept things simple and only introduced a README for now. I ran into a few problems when pushing to GitHub. Mainly, the .gitignore was being placed inside a .idea folder (I think because I was using IntelliJ). Because of this I had to go back into the IDE and move the .gitignore into the main branch and not into a subfolder."}]...
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Title: myMusic by @cluelessfr | Stardance
Devlogs Title: myMusic by @cluelessfr | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog 01 This is the initial commit for the myMusic project. I created the file system locally, then opened the project inside IntelliJ Idea. I kept things simple and only introduced a README for now. I ran into a few problems when pushing to GitHub. Mainly, the .gitignore was being placed inside a .idea folder (I think because I was using IntelliJ). Because of this I had to go back into the IDE and move the .gitignore into the main branch and not into a subfolder.
Devlog 02 This took a while, but I was able to make the program that strips the input down to only the Spotify link. This ensures that (for the most part) that only the Spotify link gets used, and not any other whitespace/extra characters that might have appeared. It took a while because I was researching and learning how to use the ‘re’ library in Python, and it took some trial and error/debugging to get the logic to work. How this works; The user inputs into the text field First the type of track gets identified (single track, playlist, album) Then it uses the ‘re’ library to detect the pattern of Spotify URLs and URIs. This ensures that the Spotify track is actually valid. It then uses the ‘.group()’ function to capture the matching section out of the input Finally the functions are checked to ensure everything is valid, then the type of track and song url are returned.
Devlog 03 After getting the link cleaner to work, I wanted to use the Spotify API to get the metadata of the song. The problem with this is that Spotify introduced heavy limitations on its API earlier this year. Because of this I had to fallback to the Spotify oEmbed, which gives only provides the song name. I am still researching for more options.
Devlog 04 This was a big change in the metadata retrieving/handling. Last devlog I explained how the new restrictions on the Spotify API made it difficult to fetch the metadata, so I had to use the public oEmbed API. This didn’t give much information and was hard to work with. After researching some more I found a python package that does the metadata fetching for me, “SpotifyScraper”. this package takes in a spotify url (which the user will be providing), and can get information like song names, artists, duration, etc. This was very useful for me when coding the metadata functions. On top of this it supports playlist and album inputs as well, which is great for future updates. I spent this time rewriting the metadata retrieving functions and cleaning everything up. I removed a few redundant functions and introduced proper error messages.
Devlog 05 This is a pretty small update, all I did was add a small test file to be able to consistently check for errors and functionality.
Devlog 06 Major Update: Now added YT-DLP to the project. Now whenever you put in a valid link you get more than just the metadata. You also get the top 5 best matches from YouTube Music. This took a while because I had to learn to properly call and use the YT-DLP package in python. I created 3 helper functions. The first created the search query using the metadata, the second returned the search results, and the last one formatted and returned the results. I created one last function as a wrapper, such that when I passed in the metadata it returned the YouTube Music search results. When calling yt_dlp.YoutubeDL(), I got a type error when passing the parameters. This was because the package expected its own datatype, while I was simply passing a dictionary. I was able to fix this by setting the type to “Any” when passing in the argument. I also changed main.py to include the YouTube search results. Now, whenever you pass in a Spotify link you get the song metadata as well as well as the top 5 best matches from YouTube Music.
Devlog 07 The program now automatically uses YT-DLP to download the best match found. This works by using YT-DLP’s build in “Download” method. I pass in the number 1 match found by YT-DLP (built in the last devlog), and it downloads it to the users default “Downloads” folder. This is a major step in the project, and I am almost ready to ship the first version.
Devlog 08 Introduced FFMPEG to the project to be able to convert downloads from .webm to .mp3 files. Also change the song title to be the title of the song. Introduced a file check to ensure file names are valid and accepted by Windows.
Devlog 09 Simple update, but it now uses Mutagen to add track name, artists, and album name to the downloaded files.
Devlog 10: Added app.py and introduced a GUI window using Custom Tkinter. Now when users run app.py they see a new desktop window open up, see a text box and a download button. Once they paste in a Spotify link they see status messages like “Downloading”. At the end they also see the downloaded path. On top of this if there are any errors during the download (like fetching metadata), this also displays as a status message. This took a little bit because I get to get familiar with Custom Tkinter, add another function that gets called by the button, and add some safeguards/quality of life updates. The main safeguard was disabling the download button while the song was downloading, which ensured the user didn’t spam processes. The quality of life update was that the download path now wraps the text to multiple lines if the path is very long.
Devlog 11: I added a preview button to the GUI so that users could see the song details and confirm they were right before downloading the song. also prepared for packaging this file into an executable (.exe).
Devlog 12: I compiled the app into a .exe, updated the readme, and pushed the first version to git. I ran into some issues when compiling the app. Specifically after the initial compiling YT-DLP couldn’t see the location of FFMPEG. Because of this I had to update the “get_app_root.py” file so it accounted for the file changes when compiling.
Devlog 13: I added an installer .exe file, added screenshots to the readme, and added a new release on GitHub. Configuring the installer was a little hard, as I was new to this process and didn’t know where to start. I used Codex to help me figure out that I could use a program called Inno. This handled the installer file, uninstall, as well as configuring it with Windows. Codex guided me through how to set that up, and eventually I got everything working. Finally I created a new version on Git and pushed everything.
Devlog 14: I have implemented two new features. First I implemented a feature that allows users to switch the directory where songs get downloaded. This took some time, but I was able to get it in the end. It works by creating a new button which opens a folder picking dialogue. The path that the user seclects inside this dialogue then gets saved to a local json file. Everytime the user changes the path it gets saved to the json, which allows the program to always open up the last directory selected by the user. I had to implement some checks to ensure that the program would work even if the json file was missing or corrupted. The second feature is more of an update. The static “Downloading” progress message is now updated with real time info on what the program is doing. The next step would be adding a dynamic progress bar.
Devlog 15: Improved song selection algorithm, so it selects the next best track if the first selection is invalid. Before if the first track selected by YT-DLP didn’t work/was invalid, then the whole program would fail. Now it moves on to the next if the first one doesn’t work. I also update the progress messages, so it shows which match it is trying.
Devlog 16: Simple update, but I added a new error message to account for a yt-dlp botting error. Now, when YouTube sends an error saying that the request was blocked due to botting being suspected, it sends a properly formatted error message instead of the raw yt-dlp text. I retested everything to ensure the previous functionality of the app remained the same.
Devlog 17: Did some major code cleanups. No new features, but made the code more efficient. Also reorganized some files. The hard part was keeping the functionality the same while trying to make the code non-repetitive and more efficient. I also tried to fix any warnings that were present in the code that were caught by the IDE.
Devlog 18: I implemented a way to start scoring the candidates returned by YT-DLP. This ensures that even if the first candidate returned is not the best, the program can automatically filter out the bad ones using key words and ensure the best candidate is always selected. I have only coded this function for now, and I have to wire it in to the real app soon.
Devlog 19: Implemented the ranking feature from the last devlog. Now, the best candidates are ranked in order from best to worst, and that is the order in which they are downloaded.
Devlog 20: Added the Spotify OEmbed fallback. Now even if the SpotifyScraper python package fails we have a fallback to get as much metadata as we can. This wasn’t that hard, as I already had the file from a previous time. The hard part was accounting for all the different cases, such as the title being missing or an empty string. I had to account for all of those while integrating the new file.
Devlog 21: Now added real YouTube (YT) to the match finding instead of just YouTube Music (YTM). Before the songs were found only on YTM, but I realist that normal YT has a larger list of songs, so I decided to add that to the algorithm as well. Now, the program takes 3 songs from YTM and 3 songs from YT, and uses the ranking function I created before to sort them from best to worst. Then the program starts by trying to download the best match. If it can’t, it goes through the list until if finds one it can download. If none of them download, then it sends an error message. One thing with this step was that I tried not to repeat big chunks of code, as a lot of this was similar to the original YTM downloading method.
Devlog 22 This update was about further increasing the matching strength. Before the program would automatically download the highest ranked candidate, even if it was very low. Now the app downloads the highest ranked candidate only if its ranked above a certain thresh hold. If there are no qualifying matches then the app simply returns a no matches found error. This wasn’t that complicated, but I had to modify a few functions so that the score was returned properly and in a usable format.
Devlog 23: Today I added the feature that embeds cover art into the mp3 files. To do this I had to first use the requests library in Python to get the image itself. Instead of downloading the image I kept it in memory using the ‘io’ library. This made the metadata tagging safer and faster. Finally the app uses mutagen to embed the cover art into the mp3 file. I used a try and except loop, which ensures that even if the cover art adding fails the mp3 file still gets returned, just without the art.
Devlog 24: I have started adding implementations that checks for the latest version of the app from github. It uses the github API endpoint for my specific project, then reads the json to get any version information. Using that we can compare the current version to the latest version on the github to see if there are any updates available. Currently I have only created the function and am yet to implement this feature into the actual app/GUI.
Devlog 25: This update was about implementing the update checker from the last devlog. Now there is an in-app button that allows you to check for new updates. The implementation was similar to all the other buttons and didn’t take too long because I already had the function ready. The next step is to allow the app to actually download and install the update, instead of just pointing out it is available.
Devlog 26: Added a function to help with auto-downloading new updates. I haven’t hooked it up to the UI yet, but that is my next step. The function takes in the name of the installer and the link to download it. It first downloads the installer to a temp file, then once everything is good it saves it to a real executable.
Devlog 27: This is a pretty major update. The myMusic can now automatically download and install updates, without the user having to go and download the github repository. Before, the user would manually have to go and download the installer from github, and set it up like a completely new install. Now, the app itself has a “Check for Updates” button. This button checks the github for the latest version, and if there is a newer version available it gives the user an option to download and install that. If they change their mind during the download, there is a cancel option as well. This works by first getting the github version (latest), then seeing if the current app version matches that. If it does, the app is up to date. If not, then the app can fetch the executable using the github API and automatically download the latest installer. On top of this some inno setup tools allow the app to close the app, install the new version, and reopen the app by itself. The only caveat is that this only works starting from v1.2.0. This means that if you have an older version you will have to manually download v1.2.0 in order to start getting automatic app updates.
Devlog 28: Based on feedback from my first ship, I have decided to introduce Linux support. I thought it would be easy, but it turned out to be a little harder than I thought. The first thing I had to do was rewrite some of the Path code that saves the users download directory. This is because Linux and Windows have different file systems, and I had to account for both. Then came the hard part, Packaging. For ARM, I decided to do this on my Raspberry Pi, where I downloaded the project files from git, downloaded the OS specific FFMPEG and Deno, then repackaged the app as a .tar.gz. I decided to do it this way because this is sort of simply an experimental release. For x64 I decided to use GitHub Actions, which allowed me to download the dependencies and compile without having to spin up a new Virtual Machine. I also decided to keep this as a .tar.gz. Later, once I get more feedback about the Linux versions, I am planning to release a more universal app package (.flatpak). I also had to change the update checkers, because each OS version has to check its own corresponding file. In the end this was a very unique experience and I learned a lot of things about packaging apps on Linux.
Devlog 29: This is kind of a messy devlog, so I’ll lay it out as best as I can. First, I update the UI in preparation for playlist/album support. Before it was three static text fields that could only display one song at a time. Now I replaced it with a scrollable frame, with the ability to add more sections inside the frame for more songs. This frame also has the ability to display metadata. I also introduced a status message that shows different messages and colors depending on the status. While I was doing that (and I am not done with it), I decided to stop in the middle and fix another bug. This bug (that was reported by other people as well as my testing) prevented good matches from ranked properly. This was a problem with how I compared the titles in my ranker. To fix this I added two new functions, one that normalizes the candidate title, and another that normalizes the actual Spotify song name (mainly to exclude features and get just the song name). To do this I messed around a lot with regex patterns, so I learned a lot. Now I have to go back and continue working on the new UI for playlists and albums.
Devlog 30: I FINALLY implemented playlist and album support. At first I thought it would be simple, just looping though each song in the playlist/album. Oh was I wrong. First I had to add two more methods that looped though each song, one for playlists and one for albums. There had to be two different ones because each returned metadata differently. Then I had to kind of change the format of the whole thing, because I had to store all of the songs in a list, but currently I was only returning dictionaries from all of my methods. After getting all of that sorted out I had to actually fix the GUI/downloading part. I had to update the downloading method to handle playlist/album links, then I had to properly handle all of the status message for each song (“Ready”, “Downloading”, “Failed”). Finally I had to work on fixing the bugs I had introduced and handling the edge cases. After all of that I FINALLY had playlist and album support. One thing that was sorta tough was handling the status for each track individually. Before I was just looping through the entire list and setting all of the statuses to the same thing, but I was able to create a new method and change each song status as it was being downloaded, not for every song as a whole.
Devlog 31: This devlog was mainly focused on the efficiency and speed of updating the app. Before the data would come in really small packets, meaning the cpu would have to write to the drive about 130,000 times in total (I know 😭). I adjusted this so it now comes in larger packets so the cpu doesn’t have to do more work. I also adjusted the compression and a few other Inno Setup settings (number of threads, etc.) to make the app more efficient in general. Another issue that I found is that once the app updated (specifically in Windows, idk about other platforms) the settings app would still show the older version for some time. This was an issue with the timing, so I had to adjust some of the delays to get it to work properly. Overall I think this is a pretty good update.
Devlog 32: (sorry for the late post) I have been working on a really cool feature for the app. Basically what I am trying to do is integrate the myMusic pipeline into the windows Spotify app itself. When you right click a playlist or album, there will be a menu that pops up. Usually for normal Spotify users (not on premium) there will be a greyed out download button. What I am trying to do is two things: add a download button for tracks (because there isn’t one right now), and make the playlist/album button actually work. Right now what I have accomplished is adding a new button for the track and making the playlist/album button clickable. I was able to do this by using Spicetify and its framework. Because I already have it installed on my computer I am using it to test everything out but later I will bundle it with my app. What I did was build a custom Spicetify extension (I had to learn JavaScript) that creates a new button. I was able to make the original playlist/album button work because it was only “aria-disabled”, not actually disabled. This means that it was only disabled at the UI level, but Spotify still recorded clicks. By applying some UI changes I was able to make the button look enabled and still record clicks. My next step is to actually hook this up to the Python script. I think this is a really cool feature.
Devlog 33: The app is now able to understand and automatically download any received links. Now the problem is that Spotify isn’t able to send any normal requests to via the computer. Because of this I need to find a way for Spotify to send and get data. I know that Spotify (using Spicetify) can send and get http requests. Because of that I am planning to use FastAPI and a local http server to be able to send and get data so the app can automatically download tracks. I will ensure to keep the server in a high index to ensure it doesn’t get in the way of any other local servers.
Devlog 34: I have been working on creating a queue for the requests. This ensures that the user can download multiple songs at once without having to wait for the previous ones to be finished. So far I have been able to create a request id for each request. The app can update the attributes of each request, such as its status, and error message. On top of this once a request is completed the app also automatically removes that request.
Devlog 35: The app now creates its own server on a very distant and far port so that your other local host stuff doesn’t get affected. I did this with uvicorn and threading, so that creating the port doesn’t make the app freeze. With this functionality the app can get the requests made inside Spotify and automatically download them. The next step is to get the app to report the statuses of the download jobs (queued, downloading, completed, failed, etc.). Then I would actually have to connect both parts, let Spotify send messages and the app receive the message.
Devlog 36: I am almost done with the first phase of the integration. When the download button is clicked inside of Spotify, Spicetify intercepts it and now posts a request to the open web server. Then the python script gets notified of that request, decodes it, then automatically starts downloading the song/playlist/album. The only thing is that the myMusic app has to be open while doing this, but I will remove that requirement in the future (not now). The next step would be to add status reports to Spotify so that the user knows what the status of their download is.
Devlog 37: I am very close to shipping now. I added the Spotify status/progress update messages, so now you can see when the tracks have finished downloading. I also fixed three (kinda major) bugs. First of all there was an error when searching for the songs on YouTube/YouTube Music. Basically what happened was that the title didn’t follow the same ASCII conventions that was used by YouTube. Because of this the app would reject good title matches even though they were the same. This produced quite a few errors, especially when trying to download songs with apostrophes. The second error I fixed was the some songs would automatically have the clean version downloaded. To fix this I switched to the ytmusicapi python package. This package also returned whether the song was explicit or not. Because of this I was able to check whether or not the song was intended to be that way, and if not I could prevent that match from being downloaded. I did have to edit a few functions to accept the new format, but in the end everything worked. Third I fixed a simple error that messed up the searching. This time it wasn’t really a bug, but instead an edge case that I missed. I was catching keywords like “feat.” and “featuring”, but I didn’t catch words like “From (and tv show, etc.)”. Because of this some matches were getting left out. I fixed this by adding another regex pattern that removes this as well.
Devlog 38: I worked on functions that helped install the Spicetify extension into the Spicetify configuration. I had to ensure Spicetify was installer, had to find its path, had to find its extensions path, then finally copy over the extension. I also added system tray behavior and multiple instance detection for the app, so that now when you close the app it doesn’t close but instead goes to the system tray. This allows the Spotify integration to work even if the app itself isn’t visible. The multiple instance detection ensures the app runs properly, and ensures that the app doesn’t try to use the same http port twice, resulting in errors. This did take a while but now all I have to do is create guards for Linux, so that the Spotify integration only works on Windows and doesn’t create unexpected errors on Linux.
Devlog 39: I was finally able to get the Linux guards in place, and also packaged the new builds and released them to GitHub has a new version. The guards were mostly simple, as they were just a few checks that asked what operating system the user was on. And depending on that it decided whether or not to install the Spicetify extensions.
Ships:
I made myMusic, a Windows desktop app that takes a Spotify track link, previews the song details, finds a matching audio result, downloads it, converts it to MP3, and saves it with basic metadata tags. The hardest part was turning it from a local Python project into something other people can actually run: bundling FFmpeg, building the Windows executable, creating an installer, and writing clear install/testing instructions. These were all new steps that I wasn’t familiar with before, so I had to heavily research them and get familiar with them before shipping. I am proud that I was able to get it working as a real, bundled Windows desktop app, instead of a small project that runs only on my computer. To test it, use the Try Project link, download the v1.0.1 Windows installer, install it, open myMusic, paste a Spotify track link, click Preview Song Details, then click Download. The finished MP3 should appear in your Downloads folder. Windows may show SmartScreen because the app is unsigned; the release notes explain how to continue.
I made myMusic, a Windows desktop app that takes a Spotify track link, previews the song details, finds a matching audio result, downloads it, converts it to MP3, and saves it with basic metadata tags. This is Ship #2 of my project. There have been a quite a few changes since my last ship, so let me list them all: First I added a folder-picking dialog. This allows the user to change the directory their songs are downloaded to, instead of being forced to always download to the “Downloads” directory. The app also saves the last chosen directory, so even if you close and reopen the app the directory is still saved. I then bundled Deno into the app, which helps yt-dlp solve JS challenges. Then I added the Spotify oEmbed metadata as fallback metadata if the SpotifyScraper python package fails. I also added YouTube as a partner with YouTube Music to get the best results from both platforms. I then a ranking system for the songs. The program adds and removes points from the top 6 matches from both platforms based on a few criteria, then it tries downloading from highest to least ranked. Then I also started embedding cover art. The app now takes in the cover art link, streams it, then writes it to the audio file. Next I added in-app update checking. The app can search the github repo for the latest version, checks to see if it is newer, then can automatically download and installer it. I also polished up the UI so that the controls and labels are more organized. Finally, I added Linux x64 and Linux ARM64 support. This has the same behavior as the Windows app, but the dependencies are now installed natively on that platform, which makes the app run more reliably on Linux. The current latest version at the time of this ship is v1.3.0.
I made myMusic, a Windows/Linux app that allows you to download your favorite songs. It works by searching YouTube/YouTube music for videos of your song. Then, using yt-dlp, it is able to download your song as an mp3 file. Finally it adds all of the metadata, allowing you to properly listen to your music offline. This is ship #3 of my project, so let me explain all of the changes since the last ship: First I finally added support for playlist and album downloads. Now instead of putting in each separate track individually you can combine it into a playlist and download that all together. For this I also had to update the GUI in order to fit all of the song information together. Second I improved the song searching and reliability. I made things consistent with how YouTube expects them (ASCII, Unicode characters, etc.). I also combine YouTube Music and YouTube candidates, so you get the best of both worlds. The app also tries multiple candidates before declaring that track a fail. Third I introduced explicit-version matching. Before, you would sometimes get the clean version of an explicit song. To fix this I switched to ytmusicapi, which allows me to compare matches to determine which one fits the criteria the best. The API also allows me to see whether or not the song is clean, which makes matching easier. Fourth (and probably the biggest update) I was able to add a Spicetify extension with the app. Because of this you are now able to download your favorite songs directly from the Spotify windows app. It reuses Spotify’s native download button rows, which make it easy to download your songs. It also preserves native behavior if you are already on Spotify Premium. It also shows notifications about the status of your download. This is only available on Windows. Fifth in order to make the Spotify integration work, the app now opens up a FastAPI/Uvicorn server bound to 127.0.0.1:18492. I chose a far away port in order for it not to affect any other local host processes. Sixth I also added background behavior for the app. This keeps the app open in the background without it being open on the gui (you will still be able to see it in your system tray). This allows the Spotify integration to run seamlessly without interfering with your every day work. Seventh I greatly improved the in app updater speed. Before it would greatly lag your computer because the chunk sizes were so small and it had to do a lot of writes to your disk. Now I increased the chunk size, and updated the packaging configurations to further boost the download speed and app size. These were all the main updates I did to my app, hope you like it!...
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-06T04:44:27Z", "hours": 100.0, "multiplier": 16.43, "payout": 1502, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Q: What did I make? - A: As you can see, learning IELTS nowaday is becoming much more expensive, making it harder for youngster, whose need that certification the most for their study career, to afford it. So I have made IELTS Only, the completely free IELTS learning & practicing platform that can help people to study IELTS easily. Q: What was challenging? - A: There were a lot of challenges that I faced when doing this project, such as coding, fixing bugs. But the hardest thing is the imitation of real IELTS interface, I need to research a lot on it. Q: What am I proud of? - A: I proud of myself because I have done something good for the social and learn a lot of value lesson. Q: What should people know so they can test my project? - A: You just simply click on the “Try project” button below, it will direct you to my website (It kinda lag… im dont have much money to buy a web hosting sr…)", "repo": "https://github.com/nploc1209/IELTSOnly", "demo": "https://ieltsonly.imluke.hackclub.app"}]...
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[{"post_id": 58876, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 58876, "ts": "2026-08-31T13:30:20Z", "hours": 7.4714, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 1.1.0 - Writing Updates Hi y’all, long time no see! So today, I have made a real writing interface, I tried to copy exactly what IELTS writing interface have,…"}, {"post_id": 41727, "ts": "2026-08-06T03:43:36Z", "hours": 1.5814, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 1.0.0 - Reading & Grammar release! For a long long long long longggggg time, I have finished the first two skill, which is Reading and Grammar, get ready for the first ship to the world"}, {"post_id": 40281, "ts": "2026-08-03T18:20:21Z", "hours": 5.2558, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.15.2 - Writing Update 0.15.1: I built the real Writing interface, it is easy because I just change some of element in real Reading interface which I struggle for a long time 0.15.2: I also built the writing creation page. It also easy compared to reading and grammar as you can see in the second picture."}, {"post_id": 38706, "ts": "2026-08-01T07:40:18Z", "hours": 8.8911, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.14.3 - Grammar Lesson Update So I’ve spent 8 hours making three major updates: 0.14.0: I upgraded the grammar interface from version 0.12.0 so now it becoming more clean and easy to interact with. 0.14.1: I built the grammar dashboard with widget as you can see in the third picture. It quite easy because it the same as reading dashboard so it don’t take much time. 0.14.2: I built the grammar question creation, this is the hardest one because i face a lot of error while doing it. And make database to save the work. 0.14.3: Fixing some minor bugs of grammar."}, {"post_id": 37662, "ts": "2026-07-30T15:36:19Z", "hours": 8.4631, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.13.0 - Optimization Update Recently, I have optimized the website by some of the useful trick I learned on Instagram like instead of showing the loading spin, we can use skeleton loading to make user think it will be more faster to load,…"}, {"post_id": 35219, "ts": "2026-07-26T14:41:44Z", "hours": 11.4536, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.12.0 - Grammar Practice Interface Update After hours and hours, Reading section still in progress but i kinda bored. So I have changed to build Grammar Interface instead. I really like the interface of Duolingo so I tried to build almost as same as its interface (don’t worry I will not copy 100%). It still in progress and I hope to finish it soon!"}, {"post_id": 33078, "ts": "2026-07-22T17:38:07Z", "hours": 12.9244, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.11.0 - Error Page Update Today I made the Error page so when ever someone run into an error, I can use the trace code to trace the error and easy for me to fix the web. (Jury will be the main website’s mascot too)"}, {"post_id": 30768, "ts": "2026-07-18T17:11:06Z", "hours": 14.0036, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.10.0 - Infrastructure Update This update is mostly happening behind the scenes, but it is a big one 🔧 IELTS Only’s infrastructure has been rebuilt to make the platform more stable, faster, and easier to scale. It still in progress, I will update soon! P/S: It took me like 1 hour to draw the painting below! Like if you love it ♥️"}, {"post_id": 29657, "ts": "2026-07-16T18:39:17Z", "hours": 4.1644, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.9.0 - Reading Dashboard Update The Reading dashboard just got a fresh new look ✨ Tests are now easier to browse with clearer passage filters, useful details at a glance, and quick filtering by progress, source, or question type. I also added custom pixel-art covers to give each passage a bit more personality. A few small details are still being polished, but the dashboard is now cleaner, faster, and much more fun to use."}, {"post_id": 29020, "ts": "2026-07-15T17:49:32Z", "hours": 7.8081, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.8.0 - Complete Real IELTS Interface Update Pheww, It took me quite a long time to copy the real IELTS Interface and made it work!"}, {"post_id": 28321, "ts": "2026-07-14T14:33:17Z", "hours": 4.5064, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.7.16 - The Editor Update I change from Quill into Tiptap for more features and more easy to use! Love it because I can easily modify text like Word/Google Docs instead of using Markdown which is quite hard for low-tech people P/S: Do you think ⭐️ STARDANCE should have an update like me:)?"}, {"post_id": 27179, "ts": "2026-07-12T14:42:06Z", "hours": 2.4275, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.7.15 - IELTS Reading Test Creation Portal Update I build the preview, so teacher/creater can be easily see what is going on!"}, {"post_id": 26757, "ts": "2026-07-11T18:44:29Z", "hours": 4.8289, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.7.14 - IELTS Reading Test Creation Portal Update This is the hardest part so far, I’m very struggling with this because I need to think what to design to make it simple, so for the low-tech people, they can still easily use it. 0.7.0: Changed the Single and Multiple Choice selection buttons from blue to IELTS Only red. 0.7.1: Added dropdown answer selection directly beside each heading in Matching Headings questions. 0.7.2: Made dropdown answer limits and important instructions bold and easier to notice. 0.7.3: Redesigned Sentence Completion with one flexible text editor instead of separate sentence inputs. 0.7.4: Added automatic blank detection using [] placeholders inside completion-question content. 0.7.5: Limited the answer fields to exactly match the number of [] blanks detected in the text. 0.7.6: Applied the same flexible text-and-placeholder system to Summary, Note, and other completion question types. 0.7.7: Removed unnecessary content containers from question types that do not require 0.7.8: formatted passage content. 0.7.9: Started designing an Excel-like editor for creating custom Table Completion layouts. 0.7.10: Started designing a visual flowchart builder for Flow-chart Completion questions. 0.7.11: Started designing a simple paint-style canvas for Diagram Labelling and Completion questions. 0.7.12: Reviewed the entire Reading Test Creation Portal to improve consistency, clarity, spacing, and usability. 0.7.13: Simplified labels, controls, and workflows so first-time and low-tech users can create questions more easily. 0.7.14: Reduced repetitive inputs and automated as many complicated setup steps as possible."}, {"post_id": 26452, "ts": "2026-07-11T08:06:31Z", "hours": 3.0911, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.6.3 - Real IELTS Reading Interface Update - 0.6.0: Build the exact interface of IELTS Reading test I researched on Google but cannot found any real IETLS Reading interface. Luckily, on YouTube, IDP has posted the instruction for doing Reading in computer-based system which including the real IELTS Reading interface in the video. So I build side-by-side with that. - 0.6.1: I made the hamburger icon work! Now user can change the theme or text size like official IELTS test. - 0.6.2: I made a small change in the lower board, user can watch time and adjust the volume that best fit to the user (I know Reading does not contain any sound but anyway in the actual IELTS it also included it) - 0.6.3: I researched on Google and found that IELTS does not allow to find (Crtl/Command + F) so I make the system listen to that key to prevent it perform find. Copy-paste still works!"}, {"post_id": 25827, "ts": "2026-07-10T09:32:36Z", "hours": 1.1781, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.5.0 - Reading Section Update I made the filter so user can easy to filter what lesson they want to do!"}, {"post_id": 25786, "ts": "2026-07-10T07:35:52Z", "hours": 3.4886, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.4.1 - Setting Updates 0.4.0: Personal Information Update I build the pages for user to change their information. Moreover, they can also delete their account. The system will delete all the data belong to the UUID of the user to erase all their data. 0.4.1: Statistic Update: I make the activity grid! The idea to make it from Codeforces, it really motivated to see the activity grid full of colors. And also and activity history so user can see what they have done."}, {"post_id": 25408, "ts": "2026-07-09T17:46:31Z", "hours": 3.1411, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.3.0 - Authentication Update The logic is very straightforward: The user enters their email. If that email already exists in the database, they will be asked to enter their password. The system then checks the password and logs them in. If the email does not exist yet, the user will be asked to enter their name and create a password. After that, they will be logged in. This is my idea for combining login and registration into one simple flow. I use Supabase to store the user database, ensuring security and transparency."}, {"post_id": 25188, "ts": "2026-07-09T08:09:06Z", "hours": 1.9067, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.2.0 - Dashboard Update I tried my best to make it as simple as possible. How I have these lovely people art when my drawing is bad! The solution is that I sketched it and then using Nano Banana Pro to enhance my drawing."}, {"post_id": 24545, "ts": "2026-07-08T05:20:36Z", "hours": 0.6847, "text": "IELTS Only - Version 0.1.0 - Brand Kit Update"}]...
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Title: IELTS Only - Learning and Practice Platform Title: IELTS Only - Learning and Practice Platform by @ImLuke | Stardance
Devlogs:
IELTS Only - Version 0.1.0 - Brand Kit Update
IELTS Only - Version 0.2.0 - Dashboard Update I tried my best to make it as simple as possible. How I have these lovely people art when my drawing is bad! The solution is that I sketched it and then using Nano Banana Pro to enhance my drawing.
IELTS Only - Version 0.3.0 - Authentication Update The logic is very straightforward: The user enters their email. If that email already exists in the database, they will be asked to enter their password. The system then checks the password and logs them in. If the email does not exist yet, the user will be asked to enter their name and create a password. After that, they will be logged in. This is my idea for combining login and registration into one simple flow. I use Supabase to store the user database, ensuring security and transparency.
IELTS Only - Version 0.4.1 - Setting Updates 0.4.0: Personal Information Update I build the pages for user to change their information. Moreover, they can also delete their account. The system will delete all the data belong to the UUID of the user to erase all their data. 0.4.1: Statistic Update: I make the activity grid! The idea to make it from Codeforces, it really motivated to see the activity grid full of colors. And also and activity history so user can see what they have done.
IELTS Only - Version 0.5.0 - Reading Section Update I made the filter so user can easy to filter what lesson they want to do!
IELTS Only - Version 0.6.3 - Real IELTS Reading Interface Update - 0.6.0: Build the exact interface of IELTS Reading test I researched on Google but cannot found any real IETLS Reading interface. Luckily, on YouTube, IDP has posted the instruction for doing Reading in computer-based system which including the real IELTS Reading interface in the video. So I build side-by-side with that. - 0.6.1: I made the hamburger icon work! Now user can change the theme or text size like official IELTS test. - 0.6.2: I made a small change in the lower board, user can watch time and adjust the volume that best fit to the user (I know Reading does not contain any sound but anyway in the actual IELTS it also included it) - 0.6.3: I researched on Google and found that IELTS does not allow to find (Crtl/Command + F) so I make the system listen to that key to prevent it perform find. Copy-paste still works!
IELTS Only - Version 0.7.14 - IELTS Reading Test Creation Portal Update This is the hardest part so far, I’m very struggling with this because I need to think what to design to make it simple, so for the low-tech people, they can still easily use it. 0.7.0: Changed the Single and Multiple Choice selection buttons from blue to IELTS Only red. 0.7.1: Added dropdown answer selection directly beside each heading in Matching Headings questions. 0.7.2: Made dropdown answer limits and important instructions bold and easier to notice. 0.7.3: Redesigned Sentence Completion with one flexible text editor instead of separate sentence inputs. 0.7.4: Added automatic blank detection using [] placeholders inside completion-question content. 0.7.5: Limited the answer fields to exactly match the number of [] blanks detected in the text. 0.7.6: Applied the same flexible text-and-placeholder system to Summary, Note, and other completion question types. 0.7.7: Removed unnecessary content containers from question types that do not require 0.7.8: formatted passage content. 0.7.9: Started designing an Excel-like editor for creating custom Table Completion layouts. 0.7.10: Started designing a visual flowchart builder for Flow-chart Completion questions. 0.7.11: Started designing a simple paint-style canvas for Diagram Labelling and Completion questions. 0.7.12: Reviewed the entire Reading Test Creation Portal to improve consistency, clarity, spacing, and usability. 0.7.13: Simplified labels, controls, and workflows so first-time and low-tech users can create questions more easily. 0.7.14: Reduced repetitive inputs and automated as many complicated setup steps as possible.
IELTS Only - Version 0.7.15 - IELTS Reading Test Creation Portal Update I build the preview, so teacher/creater can be easily see what is going on!
IELTS Only - Version 0.7.16 - The Editor Update I change from Quill into Tiptap for more features and more easy to use! Love it because I can easily modify text like Word/Google Docs instead of using Markdown which is quite hard for low-tech people P/S: Do you think ⭐️ STARDANCE should have an update like me:)?
IELTS Only - Version 0.8.0 - Complete Real IELTS Interface Update Pheww, It took me quite a long time to copy the real IELTS Interface and made it work!
IELTS Only - Version 0.9.0 - Reading Dashboard Update The Reading dashboard just got a fresh new look ✨ Tests are now easier to browse with clearer passage filters, useful details at a glance, and quick filtering by progress, source, or question type. I also added custom pixel-art covers to give each passage a bit more personality. A few small details are still being polished, but the dashboard is now cleaner, faster, and much more fun to use.
IELTS Only - Version 0.10.0 - Infrastructure Update This update is mostly happening behind the scenes, but it is a big one 🔧 IELTS Only’s infrastructure has been rebuilt to make the platform more stable, faster, and easier to scale. It still in progress, I will update soon! P/S: It took me like 1 hour to draw the painting below! Like if you love it ♥️
IELTS Only - Version 0.11.0 - Error Page Update Today I made the Error page so when ever someone run into an error, I can use the trace code to trace the error and easy for me to fix the web. (Jury will be the main website’s mascot too)
IELTS Only - Version 0.12.0 - Grammar Practice Interface Update After hours and hours, Reading section still in progress but i kinda bored. So I have changed to build Grammar Interface instead. I really like the interface of Duolingo so I tried to build almost as same as its interface (don’t worry I will not copy 100%). It still in progress and I hope to finish it soon!
IELTS Only - Version 0.13.0 - Optimization Update Recently, I have optimized the website by some of the useful trick I learned on Instagram like instead of showing the loading spin, we can use skeleton loading to make user think it will be more faster to load,…
IELTS Only - Version 0.14.3 - Grammar Lesson Update So I’ve spent 8 hours making three major updates: 0.14.0: I upgraded the grammar interface from version 0.12.0 so now it becoming more clean and easy to interact with. 0.14.1: I built the grammar dashboard with widget as you can see in the third picture. It quite easy because it the same as reading dashboard so it don’t take much time. 0.14.2: I built the grammar question creation, this is the hardest one because i face a lot of error while doing it. And make database to save the work. 0.14.3: Fixing some minor bugs of grammar.
IELTS Only - Version 0.15.2 - Writing Update 0.15.1: I built the real Writing interface, it is easy because I just change some of element in real Reading interface which I struggle for a long time 0.15.2: I also built the writing creation page. It also easy compared to reading and grammar as you can see in the second picture.
IELTS Only - Version 1.0.0 - Reading & Grammar release! For a long long long long longggggg time, I have finished the first two skill, which is Reading and Grammar, get ready for the first ship to the world
IELTS Only - Version 1.1.0 - Writing Updates Hi y’all, long time no see! So today, I have made a real writing interface, I tried to copy exactly what IELTS writing interface have,…
Ships:
Q: What did I make? - A: As you can see, learning IELTS nowaday is becoming much more expensive, making it harder for youngster, whose need that certification the most for their study career, to afford it. So I have made IELTS Only, the completely free IELTS learning & practicing platform that can help people to study IELTS easily. Q: What was challenging? - A: There were a lot of challenges that I faced when doing this project, such as coding, fixing bugs. But the hardest thing is the imitation of real IELTS interface, I need to research a lot on it. Q: What am I proud of? - A: I proud of myself because I have done something good for the social and learn a lot of value lesson. Q: What should people know so they can test my project? - A: You just simply click on the “Try project” button below, it will direct you to my website (It kinda lag… im dont have much money to buy a web hosting sr…)...
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Chess Now! by @AngelCMHxD | Stardance
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AngelCMHxD
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140.11
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1509
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-30T15:00:21Z", "hours": 137.0, "multiplier": 18.82, "payout": 1509, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is Chess Now! A real-time chess API with challenges handling, matches, friends, and much more! The idea is for anyone to be able to make a custom client, bot or integration with the platform, thus it’s as open as it can possibly be while trying to also stay secure. One of the biggest parts of the proyect was doing that many clients, especially the TUI client. While I learned Vue doing the TUI client, I found it’s behaviour kinda… unintuitive in some way I can’t really explain. Though at the end I felt that Vue is better than React by a mile (now I only have to try out Svelte) I am proud of how well structured the API is, and while I’m sure it can be improved, the bases feel pretty solid. I’m also proud of how much I learned doing this. I mean, I tried a lot of things I’ve been meaning to try for some time already: Vue, Better Auth, Drizzle ORM, actually deploying a Next.js app, React mail + Resend, Elysia, and Fumadocs. And probably something else I already forgot about hehe Would I do something different if I started right now? Probably, but mostly just to try out even more things, which is the main reason why I do most of my projects. If you want to try out the project, you should probably just check the instance hosted at https://chessnow.angelcmh.com/ , create an account and play against a bot. You should also check out the docs, or the npm package over at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chess-now/api if you are interested. Thanks for reading till the end, have a great day! ;P", "repo": "https://github.com/AngelCMHxD/chess-now", "demo": "https://chessnow.angelcmh.com/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 62578, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 62578, "ts": "2026-09-06T01:20:34Z", "hours": 3.1125, "text": "aaaa, so… long time no see! also, super star!!! So, I’ve began doing some things that I’ve meant to do before, but completely forgot as I got quite busy… lol I fixed an error which made the TUI not work on Linux, it works now! It was an issue as I was building on NixOS, and the linker path was on my /nix/store folder instead of the usual /lib one. that means it also broke for me after an update lol You can now configure challenges! This needed to be implemented on all clients, hence why it took a little while lol Select whether you want to start with white, black or random. The opponent will be able to see which color you selected before accepting the challenge though! :P Also, meet unrankeds! You can now also mark a match as unranked so it doesn’t affect your ELO ratings at all . Take into account that there is decay though! so if you don’t play ranked for a while, your next match ELO diffs might be a little bit different Fun fact: The starting color option has been available on the API for a while already, even documented. so, if you did API calls directly, you could have selected a starting color and the opponent would not have been able to notice! as none of the clients showed it. except for the Discord bot… I think… or if you requested the match through the API too ;D"}, {"post_id": 37641, "ts": "2026-07-30T14:59:49Z", "hours": 0.8269, "text": "Hewo! This devlog was unexpected. I prepared a small video/trailer so I had something to upload when shipping the project, and when I tried to upload it I realized that you can only upload images when shipping a project :/ So here is that video as it won’t go to waste. I tried my best, hope my voice doesn’t sound awkward, I’m not a native speaker Also, check out the shipped project! As I probably shipped it right after this devlog"}, {"post_id": 37305, "ts": "2026-07-29T22:23:23Z", "hours": 3.36, "text": "Well, I set up the domain + reverse proxy and all kind of problems arose. I changed the package so you only need to instantiate the class without any arguments to use the default server over at https://chessnow.angelcmh.com though you can still pass an optional baseUrl in case you selfhost your own instance at first nothing worked, but then i noticed that I had a port conflict on my VPS with two things trying to use the same port lol i also tried to improve SEO on the main page as much as I could, though im not an expert on that. i also added an official bots section so you can challenge some bots without having to look at any docs to find them shipping in some minutes!"}, {"post_id": 36858, "ts": "2026-07-29T05:39:21Z", "hours": 6.6392, "text": "Hewo! Last devlog till ship here (i think) I didn’t think I’d add anything else, but you can now forfeit matches or ask the opponent for a draw! They just seemed like something that should exist on the shipped project… Each player can request only one draw per match, so you think before you do it. why did i do it like that? well, asking for a draw pauses the whole match, an neither player can do any moves until the draw request is answered. in order to prevent one of the users spamming draws, i simply limited to only one per match. also, ending the match in a draw doesn’t mean that your ELO isn’t affected, it is affected. depending on the elo of your opponent, you’ll lose/earn elo on a draw, just as you’d do on a stalemate. I also added a piece promotion selector. i forgot i made it so it always chose the queen by default, but in some matches that might not be wanted, so now you get a popup to select the piece you want to promote to well, i don’t really know if i’m missing any other things, as that was all that was i had on my TODO list, so i guess i’ll start setting up the prod environment below is a video showing the forfeit and draw flows, along with the promotion popup. don’t worry about the first match being a valid checkmate but the match continued being active, i already fixed that bug but it didn’t apply to already affected matches :P i also sped up (is that the correct way to say it?) and cutted out some parts of the video to prevent it from being 6 minutes of me playing the match lol"}, {"post_id": 34658, "ts": "2026-07-25T15:44:56Z", "hours": 9.5286, "text": "Well, that took way longer than expected. The docs are way more polished now! All endpoints have example responses so you know exactly what each one will return, along with a small description. HTTP endpoints that trigger a WebSocket event for any user (like friend requests, challenges, match moves, etc), mention it on their descriptions. I also added some headers to the PGN strings, as they were previously filled with “?“s. This mostly took this long due to a LOT of issues with the account deletion process, but it works perfectly now. When you delete your account, your user is replaced in all the matches you’ve played to @deleted_user . This is to keep the match data available even after any user deletes it. After that, your account is deleted from the DB. Due to how the DB is configured with cascade deletes, that will delete all other rows that reference the user (friendships, friend requests, pending challenges, etc.) except for matches, as they no longer reference the user that is being deleted. I’m am quite close to the ship, which I’m kinda nervous about. I want the project to be in the best state and as polished as possible, without any bugs (well, any known bugs lol). Which is mostly the reason this project as a whole has taken soo long :/ Below is a small video showing the docs with the example data. At the end is the delete account flow, which have lot’s of confirmations as it currently doesn’t send an email. I’m thinking it probably should send one lol See you in the next (and probably last) devlog! (I fixed my OBS settings, the video should look a bit better than the previous ones :P)"}, {"post_id": 33878, "ts": "2026-07-24T04:38:40Z", "hours": 5.6958, "text": "ELO system! let’s go!! At the end, I did add an ELO system. Well, it’s not really ELO, it’s Glicko . I used the glicko2-lite library, which is stateless unlike other glicko implementations I found. I wanted a stateless one because I’m saving the data on the DB anyways, so making it stateful would only make it use more resources (primarly RAM). You start with a rating of 1500. After every match your rating will go up/down depending on whether you win or lose. How much you win or lose depends on how many matches you have played (the first one are worth a bit more to get you to the optimal points), and depending on the rating of your oponent. If you win against someone with a bigger rating than yours, you’ll gain way more points than if you win agains someone around your rating or less. I also added a settings page so you can change your name and username, along with a page to change your password. Below is a small video showing how the ELO Glicko system works: What remains is just to also add the name/username change for bots and improve the docs. I also made a Stockfish bot which you can try to play against. (Keyword: try , because it’s probably almost impossible)"}, {"post_id": 33281, "ts": "2026-07-23T02:11:49Z", "hours": 2.855, "text": "User page done! You can now see all of the matches and friends of other people, along with a small list of stats. I’m thinking about implementing the ELO system. While I previously said that I wouldn’t be able to moderate people artificially inflating it (by selfbotting), having it without a leaderboard wouldn’t really make it that enticing to abuse. And personally, if there isn’t a leaderboard, I don’t think moderating it would be that important, what would the user gain more than having a bigger number on their profile? Still thinking about it though I’m not sure about adding custom profile pictures or really any other user generated content. It would be nice to have, but it also involves moderation in order to prevent anything inappropriate from being uploaded (i mean, we all know how the internet works :/) Below is a small video showing the user page, along with the bot auto accepting any new friend requests :P"}, {"post_id": 32786, "ts": "2026-07-22T05:22:14Z", "hours": 6.9678, "text": "Well, the web client is done!! I used react-chessboard and it’s a pretty good library. I didn’t add click-to-move pieces as it makes the logic a LOT more complex, so I didn’t want to do it for now I also used the API package from before, so we can use the websocket connection and listen for any changes. I also added it onto the matches page so any updates on the boards are reflected in real-time (which would probably look amazing if you have multiple automated matches running lol), and any new matches are added to the list without needing to refresh the page. I also want to add it onto the friends page, so it also updates in real-time I had to change the icons on the discord bot as I realized they were Chess.com’s icons, and they aren’t free to use, so I removed them and replaced them with a pack named Caliente , which look amazing. It’s the same one I use on the web client I think I should add a popup once the match is over as the current result feels quite plain. I also gotta add another page where you can spectate the match of other people, as the current one has too many logic already I prefer to duplicate it and remove the need of handling input and what not. I also haven’t added a profiles page yet, so that’s still on the TODO list hahah Below is a small video of me playing a match against a bot. Two disclaimers: I used AI to fix some issues I had with the CSS on the page, though it didn’t change anything other than fix some class names, and the whole logic was made by me. I played horribly against the bot, as the difficulty is set quite low lol Additional disclaimer: Ignore the -55s duration on one of the matches, it was an old bug but I’ve gotten lazy and haven’t fixed the match on the DB yet .-."}, {"post_id": 32426, "ts": "2026-07-21T16:34:43Z", "hours": 0.685, "text": "The TUI is 100% done! (I think…) There is no longer any mock data and it works with the actual API. You can send and receive challenges and friend requests, and you can see/play your running matches. I think that, for the account management, I’ll remove email signups and only allow social OAuth2 (currently Google and Discord). As with email/password signups I need to handle email verification and password reset, and while Resend (what I use right now) is REALLY good and it’s free tier is great (3000 mails a month, 100 daily), if someone tries to spam the endpoints, it’s gonna eat up the limit. Though I might just put a rate limiter in place, and with Cloudflare Turnstile I already combat at least some botting, still thinking about it… I’ll probably start with the web client for now, which might be the last thing to do Below is a little video showing the TUI in action, while playing a match: (I took quite a bit of time thinking about the move I should make till I remembered I was just recording a test video lol)"}, {"post_id": 32210, "ts": "2026-07-21T07:10:56Z", "hours": 0.5875, "text": "And… This devlog is just to show the web dashboard, which I have forgotten to do a devlog for it all this time, which is why the logged time is so low lol I used the Next.js framework to build the web dashboard (well, the whole dashboard + welcome page and just the whole web thing). I also used the shadcn/ui components library, as I’m not that good making frontend stuff, so that helped a lot. The dashboard layout is actually a template you can find on the shadcn site, I love the huge amount of things they have I didn’t know what else to put as a welcome to the dashboard, so I left a little welcome message as seen at the beginning of the video And I also forgot to show (mostly because there wasn’t any) the notifications button, where you can find any incoming challenges and friend requests. The whole bot creation process works, at the end it gives you a token that you can use as if it were a user auth token, but you have all the scopes by default, so you can do anything you want with the account What remains to do on this web part is to be able to see the profile of other users, along with their recent matches. And also a web client so you can play without downloading the TUI client or needing to use the discord bot"}, {"post_id": 32193, "ts": "2026-07-21T06:11:10Z", "hours": 5.3728, "text": "Edit: I realized right after posting this devlog: 100 hours! This has taken me more time than what I expected and gone quite big at this point hahah Welp, the bots are done, and now I’ve tested the Discord integration. I made the bots using the js-chess-engine package. Why that instead of something like stockfish? it simply was way easier to do as it’s a full js/ts engine lol Though, that doesn’t mean that the stockfish engine wouldn’t be posible to integrate! as anyone can create bots, that also means that anyone could create a stockfish bot if they wanted to. In case you don’t know what Stockfish is: It’s a really powerful and popular chess engine written in C++. Also, while writing this devlog, I found this package , which could be used to make a stockfish bot really easily. Though the ELO of the stockfish bot is really high, so I don’t really regret choosing js-chess-engine as a simpler engine means people can at least win against it lol Here is a small video showing a match running on the discord bot. There are some small coordinates on the image so writing the SAN/LAN notation is easier, though it’s quire hard to see them on the video due to compression. While it has support for everything (friend requests, send challenges, accept challenges, etc), I kinda forgot to record the rest :P"}, {"post_id": 31519, "ts": "2026-07-20T00:11:39Z", "hours": 9.0231, "text": "Well, making the TUI has gone quite well. While I initially thought that Vue seemed weird for doing TUIs, it’s actually not that bad. No wonder Ink is so popular. (Though I’m liking Vue more than I like React, and Ink felt kinda clunky at times when I first tried it) If you want to do TUIs with TypeScript/JavaScript, I’d recommend you give Vue TermUI a try. It also supports the Vue Router, so it’s easy to make a lot of pages and then navigate through them. The data show in the video is just mock data. So it still doesn’t use the actual API, though progress have gone quite well without many hiccups. The send friend request button, and the accept/reject challenge buttons do use the actual API, but they just throw an error because it tries to accept/reject a challenge that doesn’t actually exist, as it’s just mock data. The app doesn’t crash on error though, it displays the error message right below the button, that way the user can see what went wrong without having the whole app crash or any other unexpected behavior. What remains now is making some bots, that way I can make the whole “Playing a game” page, as having mock data for the WHOLE game state is not very… easy? I mean, I’ll have to do some bots anyway, so why not do them now instead of creating some weird mock functions hahah I also think that the icons on the authorization page feel weird. I dont know if maybe they are too big or if I should just change them to other ones. I also have to change the card after approval or denial instead of just showing the toast at the bottom, as it doesnt give feedback to the user Below is a small video of the TUI in action: (Disclaimer: Some AI was used, primarily to create the mock data so I could focus on the TUI itself)"}, {"post_id": 30506, "ts": "2026-07-18T04:16:32Z", "hours": 8.6408, "text": "Welp, designing how to do the TUI was kinda… complex. I mostly know JS/TS, so I wanted to use that. And that made everything way more complex, as there aren’t so many options as you might have with something like how good Bubble Tea is on Go. So these were the options I considered: Ink : Which didn’t have mouse support and uses React, which I’ve felt kinda clunky while doing the webpage, so I wanted try something else. Rezi : Which, at first, was AMAZING. But it had some bugs where focus didn’t work at all and I couldn’t interact with the TUI, or just started getting weird. OpenTUI : tbf, I didn’t test it out that much, couldn’t really understand it’s TS bindings So what I ended up going with? Something not listed above: I ended up going with Vue TermUI ( for now ). Why? Well, I’ve wanted to try out Vue for some time now, and it uses OpenTUI under the hood, so it’s backend is probably pretty stable, or so I think, i don’t really know. It does handles mouse input and focus management, making it quite easy to use. Will I stay with Vue TermUI? I don’t really know yet. I’m just beginning to try it out, and I’m curious to see how it ends up. Especially because Vue for TUI sounds pretty weird lol I actually really liked Rezi and you should check it out, as the issues I had were probably because I was doing something wrong hahah"}, {"post_id": 24535, "ts": "2026-07-08T04:57:03Z", "hours": 62.6878, "text": "Welp, I’ve been working for quite a while and this is quite a long devlog. If this seems interesting to you, leave a comment with suggestions! Maybe I could do some of them depending on their difficulty I now have a pretty good API structure. It has normal HTTP endpoints and also a subscription system using WebSockets so you can get event-based messages, all of it working already. I also did a JS/TS package so it’s easier to implement it on your proyects. (Still not published to npm) I currently have the following systems working: Account, Friends, Challenges, Matches, Bot management and Device auth (the thing where the app can show you an 8 character code to login). I also did a scopes system, that way you can know exactly what data the app will have access to and what actions it’d be able to do on your behalf I made the backend using Elysia , while the whole storage is a PostgreSQL database that I interface with using Drizzle . The doc pages were done using Fumadocs , I love the way they look :D A secondary DB, using Redis (or Redis-compatible DB) is also optional, quite useful as some thing like board movements might be done by players quite fast on low timers (like 1 min) and should be replied to as fast as possible to prevent the DB write speeds and reply time from counting against a player’s timer or affecting the match playability, though I still haven’t implemented timers lol If the secondary Redis DB isn’t setup, then that data will be stored on RAM in order to keep it fast. Things like match status is kept there until the match ends, that means if the API server restarts, the matches that are currently being played are restarted too. I thought this isn’t as bad of a tradeoff in order to have a fast API reply, especially because you can solve it by setting up the Redis DB, and then you can restart the API server without worry, as the data is stored on the Redis server. While the whole API is done, the account dashboard still requires some work to do, and I’m planning to do some integrations to make it easy to test, like a Discord bot (which is already done), a TUI, or maybe a web interface, though frontend interactivity isn’t something I’m really good at, and still haven’t gotten used to doing things “the React way” :P I also added some bot management endpoints. That way someone can create a bot account under their user and be able to create any “bot opponent” to play against, something that I also want to do so anyone trying out the API or implementations can test it without requiring another available opponent Don’t know if I should make an ELO/Leaderboard system, as those could be easily cheated and can’t really moderate them, and doing skill based match making wouldn’t work with a small user base."}, {"post_id": 7750, "ts": "2026-06-12T22:58:59Z", "hours": 14.0508, "text": "This is Chess Now! An open-source (soon!) API to control chess games. The idea is for anyone to be able to create and integrate their apps and be able to control the games from there. This also means that you could be playing on App1 while your opponent can be playing on App2, as the server-side is shared between them. I’ve added the whole auth flow and database integration. Better Auth really helped a lot in this regard, the docs were awesome. I used some templates for the hero and login/signup flow as I don’t have almost any experience with frontend development (and a side-goal for me is to not use AI for codegen while making this project), though I’ve been learning a LOT about frontend doing this. I’ll begin planning the whole API structure, I still don’t know where to begin hahah"}]...
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Title: Chess Now! by @AngelCMHxD | Stardance
Devl Title: Chess Now! by @AngelCMHxD | Stardance
Devlogs:
This is Chess Now! An open-source (soon!) API to control chess games. The idea is for anyone to be able to create and integrate their apps and be able to control the games from there. This also means that you could be playing on App1 while your opponent can be playing on App2, as the server-side is shared between them. I’ve added the whole auth flow and database integration. Better Auth really helped a lot in this regard, the docs were awesome. I used some templates for the hero and login/signup flow as I don’t have almost any experience with frontend development (and a side-goal for me is to not use AI for codegen while making this project), though I’ve been learning a LOT about frontend doing this. I’ll begin planning the whole API structure, I still don’t know where to begin hahah
Welp, I’ve been working for quite a while and this is quite a long devlog. If this seems interesting to you, leave a comment with suggestions! Maybe I could do some of them depending on their difficulty I now have a pretty good API structure. It has normal HTTP endpoints and also a subscription system using WebSockets so you can get event-based messages, all of it working already. I also did a JS/TS package so it’s easier to implement it on your proyects. (Still not published to npm) I currently have the following systems working: Account, Friends, Challenges, Matches, Bot management and Device auth (the thing where the app can show you an 8 character code to login). I also did a scopes system, that way you can know exactly what data the app will have access to and what actions it’d be able to do on your behalf I made the backend using Elysia , while the whole storage is a PostgreSQL database that I interface with using Drizzle . The doc pages were done using Fumadocs , I love the way they look :D A secondary DB, using Redis (or Redis-compatible DB) is also optional, quite useful as some thing like board movements might be done by players quite fast on low timers (like 1 min) and should be replied to as fast as possible to prevent the DB write speeds and reply time from counting against a player’s timer or affecting the match playability, though I still haven’t implemented timers lol If the secondary Redis DB isn’t setup, then that data will be stored on RAM in order to keep it fast. Things like match status is kept there until the match ends, that means if the API server restarts, the matches that are currently being played are restarted too. I thought this isn’t as bad of a tradeoff in order to have a fast API reply, especially because you can solve it by setting up the Redis DB, and then you can restart the API server without worry, as the data is stored on the Redis server. While the whole API is done, the account dashboard still requires some work to do, and I’m planning to do some integrations to make it easy to test, like a Discord bot (which is already done), a TUI, or maybe a web interface, though frontend interactivity isn’t something I’m really good at, and still haven’t gotten used to doing things “the React way” :P I also added some bot management endpoints. That way someone can create a bot account under their user and be able to create any “bot opponent” to play against, something that I also want to do so anyone trying out the API or implementations can test it without requiring another available opponent Don’t know if I should make an ELO/Leaderboard system, as those could be easily cheated and can’t really moderate them, and doing skill based match making wouldn’t work with a small user base.
Welp, designing how to do the TUI was kinda… complex. I mostly know JS/TS, so I wanted to use that. And that made everything way more complex, as there aren’t so many options as you might have with something like how good Bubble Tea is on Go. So these were the options I considered: Ink : Which didn’t have mouse support and uses React, which I’ve felt kinda clunky while doing the webpage, so I wanted try something else. Rezi : Which, at first, was AMAZING. But it had some bugs where focus didn’t work at all and I couldn’t interact with the TUI, or just started getting weird. OpenTUI : tbf, I didn’t test it out that much, couldn’t really understand it’s TS bindings So what I ended up going with? Something not listed above: I ended up going with Vue TermUI ( for now ). Why? Well, I’ve wanted to try out Vue for some time now, and it uses OpenTUI under the hood, so it’s backend is probably pretty stable, or so I think, i don’t really know. It does handles mouse input and focus management, making it quite easy to use. Will I stay with Vue TermUI? I don’t really know yet. I’m just beginning to try it out, and I’m curious to see how it ends up. Especially because Vue for TUI sounds pretty weird lol I actually really liked Rezi and you should check it out, as the issues I had were probably because I was doing something wrong hahah
Well, making the TUI has gone quite well. While I initially thought that Vue seemed weird for doing TUIs, it’s actually not that bad. No wonder Ink is so popular. (Though I’m liking Vue more than I like React, and Ink felt kinda clunky at times when I first tried it) If you want to do TUIs with TypeScript/JavaScript, I’d recommend you give Vue TermUI a try. It also supports the Vue Router, so it’s easy to make a lot of pages and then navigate through them. The data show in the video is just mock data. So it still doesn’t use the actual API, though progress have gone quite well without many hiccups. The send friend request button, and the accept/reject challenge buttons do use the actual API, but they just throw an error because it tries to accept/reject a challenge that doesn’t actually exist, as it’s just mock data. The app doesn’t crash on error though, it displays the error message right below the button, that way the user can see what went wrong without having the whole app crash or any other unexpected behavior. What remains now is making some bots, that way I can make the whole “Playing a game” page, as having mock data for the WHOLE game state is not very… easy? I mean, I’ll have to do some bots anyway, so why not do them now instead of creating some weird mock functions hahah I also think that the icons on the authorization page feel weird. I dont know if maybe they are too big or if I should just change them to other ones. I also have to change the card after approval or denial instead of just showing the toast at the bottom, as it doesnt give feedback to the user Below is a small video of the TUI in action: (Disclaimer: Some AI was used, primarily to create the mock data so I could focus on the TUI itself)
Edit: I realized right after posting this devlog: 100 hours! This has taken me more time than what I expected and gone quite big at this point hahah Welp, the bots are done, and now I’ve tested the Discord integration. I made the bots using the js-chess-engine package. Why that instead of something like stockfish? it simply was way easier to do as it’s a full js/ts engine lol Though, that doesn’t mean that the stockfish engine wouldn’t be posible to integrate! as anyone can create bots, that also means that anyone could create a stockfish bot if they wanted to. In case you don’t know what Stockfish is: It’s a really powerful and popular chess engine written in C++. Also, while writing this devlog, I found this package , which could be used to make a stockfish bot really easily. Though the ELO of the stockfish bot is really high, so I don’t really regret choosing js-chess-engine as a simpler engine means people can at least win against it lol Here is a small video showing a match running on the discord bot. There are some small coordinates on the image so writing the SAN/LAN notation is easier, though it’s quire hard to see them on the video due to compression. While it has support for everything (friend requests, send challenges, accept challenges, etc), I kinda forgot to record the rest :P
And… This devlog is just to show the web dashboard, which I have forgotten to do a devlog for it all this time, which is why the logged time is so low lol I used the Next.js framework to build the web dashboard (well, the whole dashboard + welcome page and just the whole web thing). I also used the shadcn/ui components library, as I’m not that good making frontend stuff, so that helped a lot. The dashboard layout is actually a template you can find on the shadcn site, I love the huge amount of things they have I didn’t know what else to put as a welcome to the dashboard, so I left a little welcome message as seen at the beginning of the video And I also forgot to show (mostly because there wasn’t any) the notifications button, where you can find any incoming challenges and friend requests. The whole bot creation process works, at the end it gives you a token that you can use as if it were a user auth token, but you have all the scopes by default, so you can do anything you want with the account What remains to do on this web part is to be able to see the profile of other users, along with their recent matches. And also a web client so you can play without downloading the TUI client or needing to use the discord bot
The TUI is 100% done! (I think…) There is no longer any mock data and it works with the actual API. You can send and receive challenges and friend requests, and you can see/play your running matches. I think that, for the account management, I’ll remove email signups and only allow social OAuth2 (currently Google and Discord). As with email/password signups I need to handle email verification and password reset, and while Resend (what I use right now) is REALLY good and it’s free tier is great (3000 mails a month, 100 daily), if someone tries to spam the endpoints, it’s gonna eat up the limit. Though I might just put a rate limiter in place, and with Cloudflare Turnstile I already combat at least some botting, still thinking about it… I’ll probably start with the web client for now, which might be the last thing to do Below is a little video showing the TUI in action, while playing a match: (I took quite a bit of time thinking about the move I should make till I remembered I was just recording a test video lol)
Well, the web client is done!! I used react-chessboard and it’s a pretty good library. I didn’t add click-to-move pieces as it makes the logic a LOT more complex, so I didn’t want to do it for now I also used the API package from before, so we can use the websocket connection and listen for any changes. I also added it onto the matches page so any updates on the boards are reflected in real-time (which would probably look amazing if you have multiple automated matches running lol), and any new matches are added to the list without needing to refresh the page. I also want to add it onto the friends page, so it also updates in real-time I had to change the icons on the discord bot as I realized they were Chess.com’s icons, and they aren’t free to use, so I removed them and replaced them with a pack named Caliente , which look amazing. It’s the same one I use on the web client I think I should add a popup once the match is over as the current result feels quite plain. I also gotta add another page where you can spectate the match of other people, as the current one has too many logic already I prefer to duplicate it and remove the need of handling input and what not. I also haven’t added a profiles page yet, so that’s still on the TODO list hahah Below is a small video of me playing a match against a bot. Two disclaimers: I used AI to fix some issues I had with the CSS on the page, though it didn’t change anything other than fix some class names, and the whole logic was made by me. I played horribly against the bot, as the difficulty is set quite low lol Additional disclaimer: Ignore the -55s duration on one of the matches, it was an old bug but I’ve gotten lazy and haven’t fixed the match on the DB yet .-.
User page done! You can now see all of the matches and friends of other people, along with a small list of stats. I’m thinking about implementing the ELO system. While I previously said that I wouldn’t be able to moderate people artificially inflating it (by selfbotting), having it without a leaderboard wouldn’t really make it that enticing to abuse. And personally, if there isn’t a leaderboard, I don’t think moderating it would be that important, what would the user gain more than having a bigger number on their profile? Still thinking about it though I’m not sure about adding custom profile pictures or really any other user generated content. It would be nice to have, but it also involves moderation in order to prevent anything inappropriate from being uploaded (i mean, we all know how the internet works :/) Below is a small video showing the user page, along with the bot auto accepting any new friend requests :P
ELO system! let’s go!! At the end, I did add an ELO system. Well, it’s not really ELO, it’s Glicko . I used the glicko2-lite library, which is stateless unlike other glicko implementations I found. I wanted a stateless one because I’m saving the data on the DB anyways, so making it stateful would only make it use more resources (primarly RAM). You start with a rating of 1500. After every match your rating will go up/down depending on whether you win or lose. How much you win or lose depends on how many matches you have played (the first one are worth a bit more to get you to the optimal points), and depending on the rating of your oponent. If you win against someone with a bigger rating than yours, you’ll gain way more points than if you win agains someone around your rating or less. I also added a settings page so you can change your name and username, along with a page to change your password. Below is a small video showing how the ELO Glicko system works: What remains is just to also add the name/username change for bots and improve the docs. I also made a Stockfish bot which you can try to play against. (Keyword: try , because it’s probably almost impossible)
Well, that took way longer than expected. The docs are way more polished now! All endpoints have example responses so you know exactly what each one will return, along with a small description. HTTP endpoints that trigger a WebSocket event for any user (like friend requests, challenges, match moves, etc), mention it on their descriptions. I also added some headers to the PGN strings, as they were previously filled with “?“s. This mostly took this long due to a LOT of issues with the account deletion process, but it works perfectly now. When you delete your account, your user is replaced in all the matches you’ve played to @deleted_user . This is to keep the match data available even after any user deletes it. After that, your account is deleted from the DB. Due to how the DB is configured with cascade deletes, that will delete all other rows that reference the user (friendships, friend requests, pending challenges, etc.) except for matches, as they no longer reference the user that is being deleted. I’m am quite close to the ship, which I’m kinda nervous about. I want the project to be in the best state and as polished as possible, without any bugs (well, any known bugs lol). Which is mostly the reason this project as a whole has taken soo long :/ Below is a small video showing the docs with the example data. At the end is the delete account flow, which have lot’s of confirmations as it currently doesn’t send an email. I’m thinking it probably should send one lol See you in the next (and probably last) devlog! (I fixed my OBS settings, the video should look a bit better than the previous ones :P)
Hewo! Last devlog till ship here (i think) I didn’t think I’d add anything else, but you can now forfeit matches or ask the opponent for a draw! They just seemed like something that should exist on the shipped project… Each player can request only one draw per match, so you think before you do it. why did i do it like that? well, asking for a draw pauses the whole match, an neither player can do any moves until the draw request is answered. in order to prevent one of the users spamming draws, i simply limited to only one per match. also, ending the match in a draw doesn’t mean that your ELO isn’t affected, it is affected. depending on the elo of your opponent, you’ll lose/earn elo on a draw, just as you’d do on a stalemate. I also added a piece promotion selector. i forgot i made it so it always chose the queen by default, but in some matches that might not be wanted, so now you get a popup to select the piece you want to promote to well, i don’t really know if i’m missing any other things, as that was all that was i had on my TODO list, so i guess i’ll start setting up the prod environment below is a video showing the forfeit and draw flows, along with the promotion popup. don’t worry about the first match being a valid checkmate but the match continued being active, i already fixed that bug but it didn’t apply to already affected matches :P i also sped up (is that the correct way to say it?) and cutted out some parts of the video to prevent it from being 6 minutes of me playing the match lol
Well, I set up the domain + reverse proxy and all kind of problems arose. I changed the package so you only need to instantiate the class without any arguments to use the default server over at https://chessnow.angelcmh.com though you can still pass an optional baseUrl in case you selfhost your own instance at first nothing worked, but then i noticed that I had a port conflict on my VPS with two things trying to use the same port lol i also tried to improve SEO on the main page as much as I could, though im not an expert on that. i also added an official bots section so you can challenge some bots without having to look at any docs to find them shipping in some minutes!
Hewo! This devlog was unexpected. I prepared a small video/trailer so I had something to upload when shipping the project, and when I tried to upload it I realized that you can only upload images when shipping a project :/ So here is that video as it won’t go to waste. I tried my best, hope my voice doesn’t sound awkward, I’m not a native speaker Also, check out the shipped project! As I probably shipped it right after this devlog
aaaa, so… long time no see! also, super star!!! So, I’ve began doing some things that I’ve meant to do before, but completely forgot as I got quite busy… lol I fixed an error which made the TUI not work on Linux, it works now! It was an issue as I was building on NixOS, and the linker path was on my /nix/store folder instead of the usual /lib one. that means it also broke for me after an update lol You can now configure challenges! This needed to be implemented on all clients, hence why it took a little while lol Select whether you want to start with white, black or random. The opponent will be able to see which color you selected before accepting the challenge though! :P Also, meet unrankeds! You can now also mark a match as unranked so it doesn’t affect your ELO ratings at all . Take into account that there is decay though! so if you don’t play ranked for a while, your next match ELO diffs might be a little bit different Fun fact: The starting color option has been available on the API for a while already, even documented. so, if you did API calls directly, you could have selected a starting color and the opponent would not have been able to notice! as none of the clients showed it. except for the Discord bot… I think… or if you requested the match through the API too ;D
Ships:
This is Chess Now! A real-time chess API with challenges handling, matches, friends, and much more! The idea is for anyone to be able to make a custom client, bot or integration with the platform, thus it’s as open as it can possibly be while trying to also stay secure. One of the biggest parts of the proyect was doing that many clients, especially the TUI client. While I learned Vue doing the TUI client, I found it’s behaviour kinda… unintuitive in some way I can’t really explain. Though at the end I felt that Vue is better than React by a mile (now I only have to try out Svelte) I am proud of how well structured the API is, and while I’m sure it can be improved, the bases feel pretty solid. I’m also proud of how much I learned doing this. I mean, I tried a lot of things I’ve been meaning to try for some time already: Vue, Better Auth, Drizzle ORM, actually deploying a Next.js app, React mail + Resend, Elysia, and Fumadocs. And probably something else I already forgot about hehe Would I do something different if I started right now? Probably, but mostly just to try out even more things, which is the main reason why I do most of my projects. If you want to try out the project, you should probably just check the instance hosted at https://chessnow.angelcmh.com/ , create an account and play against a bot. You should also check out the docs, or the npm package over at https://www.npmjs.com/package/@chess-now/api if you are interested. Thanks for reading till the end, have a great day! ;P...
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1792835668.0999582
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1792922068.0999582
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9316
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OMNI-Chess by @thestarviper | Stardance
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thestarviper
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2
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102.0
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1511
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-02T01:14:49Z", "hours": 63.0, "multiplier": 17.79, "payout": 873, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a chess engine in raylib with puzzle functionality and a movelog with a nature theme. Migrating from pygame to raylib was a big challenge that took me a while to fix all the kinks. idk the leaves are hoverable for a cool fidget thing and have fun!", "repo": "https://github.com/TheStarViper/chess-eng", "demo": "https://thestarviper.itch.io/chess-engine"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-06-15T03:47:41Z", "hours": 39.0, "multiplier": 16.63, "payout": 638, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a chess game where you locally 1v1 someone with a move log to see move history and all the special rules/draw conditions like 50 move rule, 3 fold, insufficient material, castling, enpessent. It was challenging doing the historical move rendering because you have to keep track of all the previous board positions and the checks and square highlights Im proud of the move log because its cool yall should know that it’s low res cuz it’s not that efficient and uses pygame and am working on a re-release utilizing raylib for more proformance", "repo": "https://github.com/TheStarViper/chess-eng", "demo": "https://thestarviper.itch.io/chess-engine"}]...
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[{"post_id": 20435, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 20435, "ts": "2026-07-02T00:59:11Z", "hours": 4.7919, "text": "UPDATE #13 This is the last update before i ship So basically this was just the last update for this project cuz i decided i would start work on a different project, the changes i made this update are just to get ready to ship and complete the project: removed fps counter removed openings and play menu removed variants from selection as they arent polished enough removed misc debug features audio bug fixed on button hovers audio bug fixed on puzzle win"}, {"post_id": 17944, "ts": "2026-06-28T22:04:11Z", "hours": 17.1667, "text": "UPDATE #12 added features added variants support added giveaway chess added duckchess (kinda) added the start of a play screen, still working on it not much yet added easing functions to some visuals so they appear instead of popping in fixed bugs/cleanup (like 50% of this devlog) split code back into multiple files fixed that puzzle code was directly in frame update loop tons of crash fixes todo with variants and puzzles animation broke on variants draw legal moves didn’t work on custom pieces future ideas clock bots particle system effects screen shake randomize leaves menu transitions i was mainly struggling to fix crash bugs this devlog as there were multiple that i had to fix, most notably there was a crash bug when swapping between the game and puzzle menus, and loading a new ruleset for variants. My current plan now is to finish the create game screen, then work on fixing the last duckchess bugs, programming a bot then variants + polish. I may ship again if i get a chance before i finish this though. Screenshot here shots duckchess in action but I made the duck sprite using AI just so we’re clear about that because i am bad at art."}, {"post_id": 15352, "ts": "2026-06-24T23:25:28Z", "hours": 9.0172, "text": "Update #11 Added Features added puzzle side menu added puzzle streak counter skip retry hint puzzle buttons sucess rate puzzle counter sound effect for hovering button puzzles are basically done Fixed Bugs 3 fold occured in puzzle mode if you made the same wrong move 3 times same thing with 50 move rule as 3 fold puzzle would start with you instead of the computer swaps turn on failed move animations didn’t work in puzzles fixed you can select the opponent’s pieces in the puzzle during animation if you hit a frameperfect from the animation finishing on the puzzle screen and switch to the game screen it moves the piece in the game screen if there was a piece on the starting tile same bug with next puzzle button leaves sfx looped infinitely Smart Bool I added a new datatype to make my life easier called a smartbool, this is basically a boolean with a third state called NewTrue which is only true for the first cycle the boolean is updated to true. This boolean is useful for when you want to play a sound effect on hover but if you use a traditional boolean it will play every frame. you can use it like a normal boolean too like smartbool = true; or if (smartbool){} . But this new datatype makes the code easier to understand for me. struct smartbool { enum State { False, NewTrue, True }; State state = False; void operator=(bool value) {this->set(value);} operator bool() const {return state != False; } bool is_new_true() const { return state == NewTrue; } void set(bool value) { if (value) { if (state == False) state = NewTrue; } else { state = False; } } void update() { if (state == NewTrue) { state = True; } } }; Future Ideas clock bots variants more moving graphics/sfx randomize leaves on borders menu transitions (maybe) finish polishing puzzles (pretty much done)"}, {"post_id": 13961, "ts": "2026-06-22T22:21:46Z", "hours": 16.5194, "text": "UPDATE #10 added features/changes added a sidebar added a settings page with the ability to toggle 50 move counter,3 fold counter,board markings with more settings to come like high contrast and animation speed added a makefile to compile code to test instead of running a bunch of commands back to back added puzzles to the puzzle tab pulls random puzzle out of a csv things before next ship more sfx click and drag to move piece sfx plays infinitely on hovers randomize leaves placements menu transitions polish puzzles page and get rid of bugs general ideas theme switcher animation speed control move clock In this update i messed up my codebase so massively bad trying to refactor the code so alot of my time was fixing the nuke i dropped into my codebase. uhhh one of the big bugs i had to squash before this that took eternity was playing sound effects would just crash the game. It turned out the reason was i didnt add the compile flag to my makefile causing the audio mixer to crash the game. After that i added sound effects back in and then started to work on puzzles. for puzzles i took the lichess puzzle database of 6m puzzles and condensed it down to 100k for file space. I pull a random row from this file to create the puzzle and it kinda works but its still in progress."}, {"post_id": 11768, "ts": "2026-06-19T04:42:16Z", "hours": 7.4614, "text": "UPDATE #9 I presented my changes in the stardance slack and was able to get some new ideas like adding a theme switcher. I added the leaves cuz i thought it would add to the theme and then after seeing the leaves, they looked very interactable so i made them interactable. idk thats about it changes/added features leaves on outside of board leaves enlarge on hover for fidgeting i guess idk its fun tho made move log more narrow to fit a sidebar on the left added a 3 fold repetition warning that appears after 2x repetition (make togglable) added a background i got from itchio made hover dots enlarge on hover again fixed animation issues changed board markers to inside the board like originally in python updated itchio page things before next ship add sound effects back click and drag to move piece add sidebar"}, {"post_id": 10951, "ts": "2026-06-17T23:23:52Z", "hours": 7.9317, "text": "UPDATE #8 This version is not live yet as there are a few bugs that need fixing still as the port from python introduced alot. Some things i liked about porting from python to c++ is that i was able to fine tune things more and use namespaces which i like. ENUMs are also a feature i like. changes/added features Updated graphics to use pieces from itchio 50 move rule counter under game log (i plan to make it togglable) says whos turn it is to play in top right ontop of the highlighting changed entire game to pixelart because i found some assets on itchio that i thought looked really nice things needed for next ship going to add a sidebar on the left side instead of the right side add sound effects back add a background click and drag to move piece animation issues fold repetition counter under move log make itchio page look better next devlog should be when i update the itchio page and other stuff also i spent closer to 15-16 hours on this cuz it includes the last devlog"}, {"post_id": 9054, "ts": "2026-06-15T03:36:13Z", "hours": 8.3464, "text": "UPDATE #7 i wanna have the time logged for shipping but basically all i did was change some file formats for web assembly and turned down the resolution so that it would automatically scale so that it’s playable. I’m currently in the process of converting the game from pygame to c++ raylib since i know c++ already and c++ is better for WASM thats about ittttttttt live ver: https://thestarviper.itch.io/chess-engine"}, {"post_id": 7870, "ts": "2026-06-13T03:53:24Z", "hours": 8.3592, "text": "UPDATE #6 fixed bugs: all game end conditions were broken move log scrollbar didn’t appear on pawn promotion move log didnt use proper notation canceling pawn promotion didnt undo move log canceling pawn promotion capture didnt undo capture when going back in move log, if there was a check the square didnt light red couldn’t change piece to move after selecting a piece added features/changes: promotion menu is inline column added sfx better sprites for pieces draw and resign buttons now use icons move log text now uses the Audiowide regular fond massive code restructure things needed for shipping: optimization, didn’t optimize since last devlog maybe learn WHAT DA HAIL bitboards are to optimize yk click and drag to move piece pieces flicker for a frame when transitioning from animation to static on the board"}, {"post_id": 6680, "ts": "2026-06-11T05:52:38Z", "hours": 3.0944, "text": "UPDATE #5 fixed bugs: checkmate didnt work (again) when king is in check the square didnt light red move log overflowed when filling up so i added a scroll feature added features/changes: promotion gui is now like chess.com and vertical move log is striped and alternates colors for each row board markings for the rows and columns things needed before shipping: optimization, still runs at like 45fps on itch.io sound effects maybe change fonts cuz im using default ugly ones draw/resign icons instead of text click and drag to move piece better sprites for pieces (BUG) can’t move a different piece after selecting one (BUG) draw conditions are broken (BUG) sidebar buttons are broken even though they dont do anything (BUG) when looking back in the move log when the king is in check the square stays red"}, {"post_id": 6058, "ts": "2026-06-10T05:41:11Z", "hours": 5.0128, "text": "UPDATE #4 I fixed preformance :D heres how: i drew the move log table 3x per frame instead of once so i made it do it once now was calculating if someone was in checkmate every frame which was checking if anyone had legal moves every single frame, changed it to check for checkmate on clicks which is every time someone made a move some of the stuff we were rendering were static background elements that never changed and they were being drawn every frame. So instead we render them once at the start and cache it so that we don’t render static elements so many times. (i accidentally changed the opacity of the background and dont feel like retaking the screenshot and accidentally moved the sidebar) FPS my machine 30-40 -> 200+ FPS itch.io 10 -> 45 we still have a ways to go to get a fully smooth experience but 10 to 45 fps from the demo link is much much more playable and i thought i would get a devlog out. next update ill continue to optimize and polish to get ready to ship!"}, {"post_id": 5727, "ts": "2026-06-09T17:02:19Z", "hours": 3.425, "text": "UPDATE #3 things added in this update: added a subtle background added a sidebar added “Game Log” text moved board and bar to the right a bit added a GitHub readme rounded corners of chess board and other stuff Issues: I started to notice the rendering of my chess pieces moving were slightly lagging, after doing a performance test of my code using python’s profile tool i noticed that my logic for getting legal moves was called 160k+ times and my pieces were rendered 50k+ times. This made my chess engine run at 30-50 fps so i will have to fix the performance issues soon. Next update will prolly be addressing these issues and adding more UI changes"}, {"post_id": 5349, "ts": "2026-06-09T02:49:21Z", "hours": 2.9911, "text": "UPDATE #2 things added in this update: created an itch.io page to demo the game by compiled the PYgame with pygbag added a move log with the ability to look back in time legal move dots now enlarge on hover i plan on actually making the itch.io page look good and actually add a readme to my github repo that looks good but i plan on doing that later. next update i think will be gui changes then after that i will work on QOL changes then feature additions like variants Fully functional game though and i did work on my laptop without wakatime so sad it wasnt tracked :c"}, {"post_id": 4605, "ts": "2026-06-07T23:34:09Z", "hours": 7.4347, "text": "UPDATE #1 I have created using pygame a chess engine complete with all of the rules of chess and is fully playable for local 1v1 with the features: on piece hover, piece tilts a bit piece moves to next square instead of teleporting checkmate resign and draw buttons stalemate 3 fold repetition 50 move rule en pessant castling captured pieces are shown on the side that captured them captured piece zone is aligned to board pawn promotion FUTURE IDEAS: SFX Better GUI on loss/draw screens Better GUI for promotion Main menu variants (atomic,duckchess,giveaway chess, Horde, etc) time control bots (pinging chess.com api idk how to code a chess bot from scratch) color change of boards better graphics for pieces move log when hovering on dot of the move you want to make the dot becomes bigge pull and drag pieces around board to make moves like chess.com"}]...
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Title: OMNI-Chess by @thestarviper | Stardance
De Title: OMNI-Chess by @thestarviper | Stardance
Devlogs:
UPDATE #1 I have created using pygame a chess engine complete with all of the rules of chess and is fully playable for local 1v1 with the features: on piece hover, piece tilts a bit piece moves to next square instead of teleporting checkmate resign and draw buttons stalemate 3 fold repetition 50 move rule en pessant castling captured pieces are shown on the side that captured them captured piece zone is aligned to board pawn promotion FUTURE IDEAS: SFX Better GUI on loss/draw screens Better GUI for promotion Main menu variants (atomic,duckchess,giveaway chess, Horde, etc) time control bots (pinging chess.com api idk how to code a chess bot from scratch) color change of boards better graphics for pieces move log when hovering on dot of the move you want to make the dot becomes bigge pull and drag pieces around board to make moves like chess.com
UPDATE #2 things added in this update: created an itch.io page to demo the game by compiled the PYgame with pygbag added a move log with the ability to look back in time legal move dots now enlarge on hover i plan on actually making the itch.io page look good and actually add a readme to my github repo that looks good but i plan on doing that later. next update i think will be gui changes then after that i will work on QOL changes then feature additions like variants Fully functional game though and i did work on my laptop without wakatime so sad it wasnt tracked :c
UPDATE #3 things added in this update: added a subtle background added a sidebar added “Game Log” text moved board and bar to the right a bit added a GitHub readme rounded corners of chess board and other stuff Issues: I started to notice the rendering of my chess pieces moving were slightly lagging, after doing a performance test of my code using python’s profile tool i noticed that my logic for getting legal moves was called 160k+ times and my pieces were rendered 50k+ times. This made my chess engine run at 30-50 fps so i will have to fix the performance issues soon. Next update will prolly be addressing these issues and adding more UI changes
UPDATE #4 I fixed preformance :D heres how: i drew the move log table 3x per frame instead of once so i made it do it once now was calculating if someone was in checkmate every frame which was checking if anyone had legal moves every single frame, changed it to check for checkmate on clicks which is every time someone made a move some of the stuff we were rendering were static background elements that never changed and they were being drawn every frame. So instead we render them once at the start and cache it so that we don’t render static elements so many times. (i accidentally changed the opacity of the background and dont feel like retaking the screenshot and accidentally moved the sidebar) FPS my machine 30-40 -> 200+ FPS itch.io 10 -> 45 we still have a ways to go to get a fully smooth experience but 10 to 45 fps from the demo link is much much more playable and i thought i would get a devlog out. next update ill continue to optimize and polish to get ready to ship!
UPDATE #5 fixed bugs: checkmate didnt work (again) when king is in check the square didnt light red move log overflowed when filling up so i added a scroll feature added features/changes: promotion gui is now like chess.com and vertical move log is striped and alternates colors for each row board markings for the rows and columns things needed before shipping: optimization, still runs at like 45fps on itch.io sound effects maybe change fonts cuz im using default ugly ones draw/resign icons instead of text click and drag to move piece better sprites for pieces (BUG) can’t move a different piece after selecting one (BUG) draw conditions are broken (BUG) sidebar buttons are broken even though they dont do anything (BUG) when looking back in the move log when the king is in check the square stays red
UPDATE #6 fixed bugs: all game end conditions were broken move log scrollbar didn’t appear on pawn promotion move log didnt use proper notation canceling pawn promotion didnt undo move log canceling pawn promotion capture didnt undo capture when going back in move log, if there was a check the square didnt light red couldn’t change piece to move after selecting a piece added features/changes: promotion menu is inline column added sfx better sprites for pieces draw and resign buttons now use icons move log text now uses the Audiowide regular fond massive code restructure things needed for shipping: optimization, didn’t optimize since last devlog maybe learn WHAT DA HAIL bitboards are to optimize yk click and drag to move piece pieces flicker for a frame when transitioning from animation to static on the board
UPDATE #7 i wanna have the time logged for shipping but basically all i did was change some file formats for web assembly and turned down the resolution so that it would automatically scale so that it’s playable. I’m currently in the process of converting the game from pygame to c++ raylib since i know c++ already and c++ is better for WASM thats about ittttttttt live ver: https://thestarviper.itch.io/chess-engine
UPDATE #8 This version is not live yet as there are a few bugs that need fixing still as the port from python introduced alot. Some things i liked about porting from python to c++ is that i was able to fine tune things more and use namespaces which i like. ENUMs are also a feature i like. changes/added features Updated graphics to use pieces from itchio 50 move rule counter under game log (i plan to make it togglable) says whos turn it is to play in top right ontop of the highlighting changed entire game to pixelart because i found some assets on itchio that i thought looked really nice things needed for next ship going to add a sidebar on the left side instead of the right side add sound effects back add a background click and drag to move piece animation issues fold repetition counter under move log make itchio page look better next devlog should be when i update the itchio page and other stuff also i spent closer to 15-16 hours on this cuz it includes the last devlog
UPDATE #9 I presented my changes in the stardance slack and was able to get some new ideas like adding a theme switcher. I added the leaves cuz i thought it would add to the theme and then after seeing the leaves, they looked very interactable so i made them interactable. idk thats about it changes/added features leaves on outside of board leaves enlarge on hover for fidgeting i guess idk its fun tho made move log more narrow to fit a sidebar on the left added a 3 fold repetition warning that appears after 2x repetition (make togglable) added a background i got from itchio made hover dots enlarge on hover again fixed animation issues changed board markers to inside the board like originally in python updated itchio page things before next ship add sound effects back click and drag to move piece add sidebar
UPDATE #10 added features/changes added a sidebar added a settings page with the ability to toggle 50 move counter,3 fold counter,board markings with more settings to come like high contrast and animation speed added a makefile to compile code to test instead of running a bunch of commands back to back added puzzles to the puzzle tab pulls random puzzle out of a csv things before next ship more sfx click and drag to move piece sfx plays infinitely on hovers randomize leaves placements menu transitions polish puzzles page and get rid of bugs general ideas theme switcher animation speed control move clock In this update i messed up my codebase so massively bad trying to refactor the code so alot of my time was fixing the nuke i dropped into my codebase. uhhh one of the big bugs i had to squash before this that took eternity was playing sound effects would just crash the game. It turned out the reason was i didnt add the compile flag to my makefile causing the audio mixer to crash the game. After that i added sound effects back in and then started to work on puzzles. for puzzles i took the lichess puzzle database of 6m puzzles and condensed it down to 100k for file space. I pull a random row from this file to create the puzzle and it kinda works but its still in progress.
Update #11 Added Features added puzzle side menu added puzzle streak counter skip retry hint puzzle buttons sucess rate puzzle counter sound effect for hovering button puzzles are basically done Fixed Bugs 3 fold occured in puzzle mode if you made the same wrong move 3 times same thing with 50 move rule as 3 fold puzzle would start with you instead of the computer swaps turn on failed move animations didn’t work in puzzles fixed you can select the opponent’s pieces in the puzzle during animation if you hit a frameperfect from the animation finishing on the puzzle screen and switch to the game screen it moves the piece in the game screen if there was a piece on the starting tile same bug with next puzzle button leaves sfx looped infinitely Smart Bool I added a new datatype to make my life easier called a smartbool, this is basically a boolean with a third state called NewTrue which is only true for the first cycle the boolean is updated to true. This boolean is useful for when you want to play a sound effect on hover but if you use a traditional boolean it will play every frame. you can use it like a normal boolean too like smartbool = true; or if (smartbool){} . But this new datatype makes the code easier to understand for me. struct smartbool { enum State { False, NewTrue, True }; State state = False; void operator=(bool value) {this->set(value);} operator bool() const {return state != False; } bool is_new_true() const { return state == NewTrue; } void set(bool value) { if (value) { if (state == False) state = NewTrue; } else { state = False; } } void update() { if (state == NewTrue) { state = True; } } }; Future Ideas clock bots variants more moving graphics/sfx randomize leaves on borders menu transitions (maybe) finish polishing puzzles (pretty much done)
UPDATE #12 added features added variants support added giveaway chess added duckchess (kinda) added the start of a play screen, still working on it not much yet added easing functions to some visuals so they appear instead of popping in fixed bugs/cleanup (like 50% of this devlog) split code back into multiple files fixed that puzzle code was directly in frame update loop tons of crash fixes todo with variants and puzzles animation broke on variants draw legal moves didn’t work on custom pieces future ideas clock bots particle system effects screen shake randomize leaves menu transitions i was mainly struggling to fix crash bugs this devlog as there were multiple that i had to fix, most notably there was a crash bug when swapping between the game and puzzle menus, and loading a new ruleset for variants. My current plan now is to finish the create game screen, then work on fixing the last duckchess bugs, programming a bot then variants + polish. I may ship again if i get a chance before i finish this though. Screenshot here shots duckchess in action but I made the duck sprite using AI just so we’re clear about that because i am bad at art.
UPDATE #13 This is the last update before i ship So basically this was just the last update for this project cuz i decided i would start work on a different project, the changes i made this update are just to get ready to ship and complete the project: removed fps counter removed openings and play menu removed variants from selection as they arent polished enough removed misc debug features audio bug fixed on button hovers audio bug fixed on puzzle win
Ships:
I made a chess game where you locally 1v1 someone with a move log to see move history and all the special rules/draw conditions like 50 move rule, 3 fold, insufficient material, castling, enpessent. It was challenging doing the historical move rendering because you have to keep track of all the previous board positions and the checks and square highlights Im proud of the move log because its cool yall should know that it’s low res cuz it’s not that efficient and uses pygame and am working on a re-release utilizing raylib for more proformance
I made a chess engine in raylib with puzzle functionality and a movelog with a nature theme. Migrating from pygame to raylib was a big challenge that took me a while to fix all the kinks. idk the leaves are hoverable for a cool fidget thing and have fun!...
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Iris by @Hamna | Stardance
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Hamna
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1
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144.68
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1521
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-18T22:02:27Z", "hours": 131.0, "multiplier": 13.36, "payout": 1521, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is my booking website for wellness (my family hotel). There’s a public site, online checkout, a Reception console and a Management console The most difficult part to stop double bookings btw the website and the front desk,I fixed this by making a hold time of 10 mints on suites I’m really so proud of this project as this was something I was planning to make for my family and it turned out to so amazing and I got to learn so much about security (P.S , This is my last project on Hackclub , I really had the cool experience here, This platform really motivated me to make this project)", "repo": "https://github.com/lilithCode/Iris_ChatBot", "demo": "https://iris-chat-bot-lac.vercel.app/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 76064, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 76064, "ts": "2026-10-02T07:21:18Z", "hours": 6.8922, "text": "Changed the UI a bit"}, {"post_id": 73916, "ts": "2026-09-26T09:52:32Z", "hours": 2.9411, "text": "There were some UI erros in the git pages file i made, so this is the last final verison for this project for the demo link: hope you’ll like this : )"}, {"post_id": 71239, "ts": "2026-09-20T14:41:31Z", "hours": 3.8447, "text": "Fixed it today! I replaced ChatInterface in the Space with a gr.Interface that takes the history as a JSON input, so the conversation actually reaches the model now. I also added a history count to the logs so I can see it arriving with every message. This fixes Amadeus too, since they share the same Space. Iris finally remembers what we’re talking about, and that feels like the right place to call this project complete"}, {"post_id": 70295, "ts": "2026-09-18T21:53:46Z", "hours": 4.7014, "text": "Spent today debugging the memory problem. The frontend was sending the chat history and the router was clearly using it, but the model was answering like every message was the first one. I asked “what did I just ask?” and got a totally random reply. Then I checked the Space’s API info and found the problem: Gradio 6’s ChatInterface hides the history from the API, so it was silently throwing the whole conversation away"}, {"post_id": 69607, "ts": "2026-09-17T12:20:33Z", "hours": 5.0708, "text": "Tested the new pipeline today. I asked “who won the last cricket world cup?” and it searched, found the facts and answered “Australia” correctly. Iris knowing current events feels like a huge upgrade. But while chatting normally I noticed something weird: it kept saying “Hai haii” to everything and had no idea what we’d been talking about"}, {"post_id": 69182, "ts": "2026-09-16T15:25:12Z", "hours": 4.86, "text": "Big backend day. I made Iris use the exact same backend as my other project, Amadeus: the same Hugging Face ZeroGPU Space, plus a RAG pipeline. Now a small router model on Hack Club AI rewrites the question, decides whether it needs a web search, and remembers facts about the user. If it needs current info, it searches the web with Exa and passes verified facts to the model. The UI stayed exactly the same"}, {"post_id": 67350, "ts": "2026-09-13T13:00:04Z", "hours": 8.9375, "text": "Tried Modal as another hosting option today, to compare it with ZeroGPU. I switched the route to call a Modal endpoint with an API key. It worked, but managing two setups for two projects (Iris and Amadeus) was getting messy, and I started thinking about putting both on the same backend"}, {"post_id": 66168, "ts": "2026-09-11T20:25:17Z", "hours": 11.0492, "text": "Came back to Iris after a while because responses were way too slow on free CPU hosting. Today I moved the model to Hugging Face ZeroGPU, so it actually runs on a GPU now. I rewrote the backend route to call the Space through the Gradio API, with retries and fallback messages in case something fail"}, {"post_id": 65771, "ts": "2026-09-11T04:17:48Z", "hours": 6.2706, "text": "Final UI touches today. I polished the About modal, updated the project links and rewrote the README with the whole training pipeline. Then I deployed it on Vercel. Iris is officially live and I shared the link with everyone"}, {"post_id": 65244, "ts": "2026-09-10T07:34:11Z", "hours": 8.7197, "text": "Today I connected the frontend to the real Hugging Face backend instead of the placeholder. Seeing Iris reply on my own website, in Senpai’s style, felt unreal. Responses were slow, but it was talking, and I spent way too long just chatting with it"}, {"post_id": 64336, "ts": "2026-09-08T17:12:01Z", "hours": 3.4358, "text": "I replaced the old playlist with songs that match the vibe better and made new covers for each track. Some of the song links broke right after, so I fixed those, and one mp3 was way too big, so I compressed it. Small stuff, but the radio station panel feels complete now"}, {"post_id": 64109, "ts": "2026-09-08T09:37:59Z", "hours": 4.6706, "text": "I didn’t like how the UI looked yesterday, so today I redesigned almost all of it. I went with a soft lavender pastel theme that feels more like Iris, removed the cyber cursor and added a cute Senpai avatar that pops up with little messages. I also made the whole thing responsive so it works on phones too"}, {"post_id": 63712, "ts": "2026-09-07T17:27:59Z", "hours": 9.7992, "text": "Started the frontend today with Next.js and Tailwind. I built the main layout: a chat panel in the middle, a music player on the left, and a side panel on the right. I also added a loading screen and little send/receive sound effects, because a chatbot without sounds feels lifeless. Pushed the first commit with the UI, routing and model connection all together"}, {"post_id": 62439, "ts": "2026-09-05T19:40:06Z", "hours": 11.1208, "text": "Training ran for 1000 steps today and I watched the loss drop from about 2.5 to 0.3. When I tested it, it replied with “Kk” and an eye roll emoji, and that’s literally how Senpai texts. I sent screenshots to my friends and they were all shocked. That was the best moment of the project so far"}, {"post_id": 61489, "ts": "2026-09-04T13:05:44Z", "hours": 22.205, "text": "Set up my Kaggle notebook today with Unsloth and Llama-3 8B as the base model. Most of the day went into fighting configs and memory errors on the T4 x2 GPUs. After a lot of trial and error I settled on a 2048 sequence length and a 5e-5 learning rate. It finally started training without crashing, and I almost cried"}, {"post_id": 59161, "ts": "2026-08-31T19:49:02Z", "hours": 12.4886, "text": "Today I turned the cleaned chats into proper training data. Senpai sends five short messages in a row instead of one long one, so I grouped consecutive messages together to keep that natural texting flow. I ended up with 12,613 dialogue samples. Seeing that number made it feel like a real project for the first time"}, {"post_id": 56717, "ts": "2026-08-28T16:11:34Z", "hours": 7.4811, "text": "Spent the whole day cleaning the WhatsApp export. It was around 81,000 lines of pure chaos: timestamps, “media omitted”, deleted messages, random links. I wrote a script to strip all the junk out and kept only the actual conversations. My eyes hurt, but the data finally looks usable"}, {"post_id": 54957, "ts": "2026-08-26T12:02:23Z", "hours": 9.8514, "text": "Today I finally started something I’d been thinking about for a while. Every AI chatbot I’ve used feels so polite and robotic, like it has zero aura. So I decided to make one that talks like a real person, specifically my friend “Senpai”. I exported our WhatsApp chats and just stared at them for a bit, wondering what I’d gotten myself into"}]...
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Title: Iris by @Hamna | Stardance
Devlogs:
Today Title: Iris by @Hamna | Stardance
Devlogs:
Today I finally started something I’d been thinking about for a while. Every AI chatbot I’ve used feels so polite and robotic, like it has zero aura. So I decided to make one that talks like a real person, specifically my friend “Senpai”. I exported our WhatsApp chats and just stared at them for a bit, wondering what I’d gotten myself into
Spent the whole day cleaning the WhatsApp export. It was around 81,000 lines of pure chaos: timestamps, “media omitted”, deleted messages, random links. I wrote a script to strip all the junk out and kept only the actual conversations. My eyes hurt, but the data finally looks usable
Today I turned the cleaned chats into proper training data. Senpai sends five short messages in a row instead of one long one, so I grouped consecutive messages together to keep that natural texting flow. I ended up with 12,613 dialogue samples. Seeing that number made it feel like a real project for the first time
Set up my Kaggle notebook today with Unsloth and Llama-3 8B as the base model. Most of the day went into fighting configs and memory errors on the T4 x2 GPUs. After a lot of trial and error I settled on a 2048 sequence length and a 5e-5 learning rate. It finally started training without crashing, and I almost cried
Training ran for 1000 steps today and I watched the loss drop from about 2.5 to 0.3. When I tested it, it replied with “Kk” and an eye roll emoji, and that’s literally how Senpai texts. I sent screenshots to my friends and they were all shocked. That was the best moment of the project so far
Started the frontend today with Next.js and Tailwind. I built the main layout: a chat panel in the middle, a music player on the left, and a side panel on the right. I also added a loading screen and little send/receive sound effects, because a chatbot without sounds feels lifeless. Pushed the first commit with the UI, routing and model connection all together
I didn’t like how the UI looked yesterday, so today I redesigned almost all of it. I went with a soft lavender pastel theme that feels more like Iris, removed the cyber cursor and added a cute Senpai avatar that pops up with little messages. I also made the whole thing responsive so it works on phones too
I replaced the old playlist with songs that match the vibe better and made new covers for each track. Some of the song links broke right after, so I fixed those, and one mp3 was way too big, so I compressed it. Small stuff, but the radio station panel feels complete now
Today I connected the frontend to the real Hugging Face backend instead of the placeholder. Seeing Iris reply on my own website, in Senpai’s style, felt unreal. Responses were slow, but it was talking, and I spent way too long just chatting with it
Final UI touches today. I polished the About modal, updated the project links and rewrote the README with the whole training pipeline. Then I deployed it on Vercel. Iris is officially live and I shared the link with everyone
Came back to Iris after a while because responses were way too slow on free CPU hosting. Today I moved the model to Hugging Face ZeroGPU, so it actually runs on a GPU now. I rewrote the backend route to call the Space through the Gradio API, with retries and fallback messages in case something fail
Tried Modal as another hosting option today, to compare it with ZeroGPU. I switched the route to call a Modal endpoint with an API key. It worked, but managing two setups for two projects (Iris and Amadeus) was getting messy, and I started thinking about putting both on the same backend
Big backend day. I made Iris use the exact same backend as my other project, Amadeus: the same Hugging Face ZeroGPU Space, plus a RAG pipeline. Now a small router model on Hack Club AI rewrites the question, decides whether it needs a web search, and remembers facts about the user. If it needs current info, it searches the web with Exa and passes verified facts to the model. The UI stayed exactly the same
Tested the new pipeline today. I asked “who won the last cricket world cup?” and it searched, found the facts and answered “Australia” correctly. Iris knowing current events feels like a huge upgrade. But while chatting normally I noticed something weird: it kept saying “Hai haii” to everything and had no idea what we’d been talking about
Spent today debugging the memory problem. The frontend was sending the chat history and the router was clearly using it, but the model was answering like every message was the first one. I asked “what did I just ask?” and got a totally random reply. Then I checked the Space’s API info and found the problem: Gradio 6’s ChatInterface hides the history from the API, so it was silently throwing the whole conversation away
Fixed it today! I replaced ChatInterface in the Space with a gr.Interface that takes the history as a JSON input, so the conversation actually reaches the model now. I also added a history count to the logs so I can see it arriving with every message. This fixes Amadeus too, since they share the same Space. Iris finally remembers what we’re talking about, and that feels like the right place to call this project complete
There were some UI erros in the git pages file i made, so this is the last final verison for this project for the demo link: hope you’ll like this : )
Changed the UI a bit
Ships:
This is my booking website for wellness (my family hotel). There’s a public site, online checkout, a Reception console and a Management console The most difficult part to stop double bookings btw the website and the front desk,I fixed this by making a hold time of 10 mints on suites I’m really so proud of this project as this was something I was planning to make for my family and it turned out to so amazing and I got to learn so much about security (P.S , This is my last project on Hackclub , I really had the cool experience here, This platform really motivated me to make this project)...
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1792856876.8815353
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1792943276.8815353
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2910
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3d game engine by @rajaryan1492007 | Stardance
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rajaryan1492007
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3
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110.5
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1561
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-13T19:17:52Z", "hours": 14.0, "multiplier": 16.69, "payout": 232, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "i just finally done all thing like stable etc . and search of all libs etc so can really work making really good engine i add milestone etc . u can still test project tho but it will just artitacture doc change and some sync bug fix . other then that i add milestone so i can work on that now but i 19 now today so my hackclub will get end so i just ship to info that . devlog is end but i will continue to work on this engine bcuz it been like year since i st working on it already so anyway . and anything u wanna know u can check my project issues and roadmap", "repo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN", "demo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/releases/tag/test"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-08-26T21:35:30Z", "hours": 71.0, "multiplier": 14.89, "payout": 1056, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "-> I built the Unhuman Engine (UHE) a high-performance, custom 3D game engine written entirely from scratch in C++. It features a custom Vulkan rendering pipeline, Jolt Physics integration, and a 3D spatial audio system using miniaudio. Alongside the engine, I built a fully playable “Aim Lab” style 3D shooter game to showcase its capabilities, complete with skeletal animations, recoil mechanics, and a robust entity component system (ECS). -> Building a Vulkan renderer from the ground up is notoriously difficult due to how explicit the API is. Getting the Vulkan swapchains, descriptors, and framebuffers perfectly synchronized was a massive hurdle. Beyond rendering, building the virtual file system (VFS) to correctly resolve asset paths across different platforms (Linux native and Windows via Wine) required a lot of trial and error, as did managing multithreaded memory cleanup for the audio subsystem to prevent Because of the custom Vulkan architecture and strict C++ optimizations, the game hits 900+ FPS in release builds, even on integrated graphics! the custom pixel-perfect 3D entity picking system we built using Vulkan framebuffers (instead of relying on standard physics raycasting). Finally, the engine architecture is scalable enough that it’s not just for games—it’s designed to handle heavy robotics and autonomous vehicle simulations in the engine . -> The engine supports both Linux and Windows to play the game, just run the UHEGAME executable inside the bin folder. Important: Make sure the assets folder (which contains the 3D models and audio files) is sitting right next to the executable in the same directory, otherwise the game will fall back to a safe mode. Controls: Use your mouse to aim, Left Click to shoot the targets, and press ‘R’ to reload the animated 3D pistol also i write it too big bcuz last time many people said they don’t understand what i did . about running it u can run it in windows and linux both see window build and linux build there to work able excutable file one is uhegame.exe and uhe_editor.exe one is game and other is editor https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/releases/tag/alpha i will improve the game as time goes i just st with vulkan and other if u have any problem u can ask here https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/issues if still don’t understand don’t rate down read or search or just read devlog and understand instead of low rating thankyou :)", "repo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN", "demo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/releases/tag/test"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-06-09T19:02:56Z", "hours": 21.0, "multiplier": 14.37, "payout": 273, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This project has been a daily labor of love for over a year. Over the last 4 to 5 months, I completely rewrote the entire rendering backend, moving away from a legacy OpenGL state machine to an explicit Vulkan pipeline. Along the way, I completely redesigned the Rendering Hardware Interface (RHI) to align with modern graphics architectures. Welcome to UNHUMAN! You are completely free to clone and compile this engine, but please read this first: ->The 50/50 Rule: This is a custom, explicitly defined Vulkan engine currently tailored to a Ryzen/Vega Windows environment. Because Vulkan does not hide driver-level differences (NVIDIA vs. AMD vs. Intel), there is roughly a 50/50 chance it will compile flawlessly or completely explode on your specific GPU setup. ->The Easy Way Out: If you attempt to build the project and hit Vulkan validation errors, device-lost crashes, or strict compilation failures, please do not waste your time trying to debug my RHI! * Visual Verification: If the build fails on your hardware, simply watch the YouTube Walkthrough Video linked below. It contains the full visual proof of the engine running, rendering, and functioning on the native development machine. link -> https://youtu.be/CHDIU61auYo", "repo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN", "demo": "https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/releases/tag/test"}]...
|
[{"post_id": 70209, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 70209, "ts": "2026-09-18T18:21:31Z", "hours": 4.5, "text": "reading source code of o3de and make my engine barrier better"}, {"post_id": 67555, "ts": "2026-09-13T18:10:01Z", "hours": 1.8844, "text": "just make milestone bar for realase"}, {"post_id": 66844, "ts": "2026-09-12T19:21:25Z", "hours": 2.6544, "text": "make better job system"}, {"post_id": 62020, "ts": "2026-09-05T07:13:01Z", "hours": 4.5067, "text": "add multithreading and better sync"}, {"post_id": 59175, "ts": "2026-08-31T20:15:59Z", "hours": 4.8814, "text": "added text rendering"}, {"post_id": 54512, "ts": "2026-08-25T15:19:38Z", "hours": 2.1939, "text": "added audio and animation"}, {"post_id": 52892, "ts": "2026-08-23T08:38:37Z", "hours": 1.9892, "text": "St making game in my game engine"}, {"post_id": 51531, "ts": "2026-08-21T09:17:58Z", "hours": 3.6897, "text": "added a ci/cd test For engine with lavapipe"}, {"post_id": 45963, "ts": "2026-08-12T19:45:40Z", "hours": 8.6658, "text": "Add descriptor Set fallback and Contribution guidelines"}, {"post_id": 39452, "ts": "2026-08-02T12:29:11Z", "hours": 8.3283, "text": "implemented many fallback feature no less crash add fallback of dynamic_rendering other are pending"}, {"post_id": 30001, "ts": "2026-07-17T07:25:22Z", "hours": 9.0811, "text": "all setup done just have to write fallback now :)"}, {"post_id": 25765, "ts": "2026-07-10T06:41:34Z", "hours": 3.7094, "text": "implementing old renderpass and Framebuffer and other thing to run old hardware"}, {"post_id": 23311, "ts": "2026-07-06T05:53:37Z", "hours": 3.5711, "text": "add more file more function just fallback for Vulkan Engine so it can run in more device"}, {"post_id": 22767, "ts": "2026-07-05T10:54:14Z", "hours": 3.7322, "text": "add support for extension check in Vulkan"}, {"post_id": 21133, "ts": "2026-07-02T22:43:28Z", "hours": 0.9317, "text": "so from now not developing any feature in Game engine for some weeks and Adding fallback to 1.1 to 1.4 vulkan bcuz lot of problem andriod don’t support 1.3 mostly and many gpu like intel have bug in bindless so just adding other to fallback bcuz other are also not good nvidia and amd also have some problem add buildbot that will test like github don’t support gpu to test most probably i will test in software cpu and build system so user can compile and run thing without having any problem so at last only problem left is gpu vendor specific that i will cover through blender o3de engine that how engine can run in most gpus i give better doc or reference next time to show it but it very hard and take month to search so that it"}, {"post_id": 20716, "ts": "2026-07-02T11:47:34Z", "hours": 1.1572, "text": "while working on my engine i take refernce from blender also contributed in blender one issues even got merged other are pending"}, {"post_id": 17338, "ts": "2026-06-28T02:42:07Z", "hours": 7.2022, "text": "jolt physics implementation in vulkan engine and some other bug fix"}, {"post_id": 11434, "ts": "2026-06-18T18:19:47Z", "hours": 1.8758, "text": "PBR light implementation done in my engine"}, {"post_id": 11050, "ts": "2026-06-18T02:35:35Z", "hours": 1.8658, "text": "reimplemented tracy profiler for my engine and working in PBR"}, {"post_id": 10211, "ts": "2026-06-16T20:38:31Z", "hours": 2.0136, "text": "one of the hardest bug to solve i did it now there no texture overlap"}, {"post_id": 9830, "ts": "2026-06-16T08:46:40Z", "hours": 4.2797, "text": "linux and window both support for vulkan engine tested in wine"}, {"post_id": 8004, "ts": "2026-06-13T11:03:28Z", "hours": 6.6514, "text": "model loading done in my engine"}, {"post_id": 5794, "ts": "2026-06-09T18:32:13Z", "hours": 0.28, "text": "update everything now moving toward 3d work and cleanup"}, {"post_id": 5693, "ts": "2026-06-09T16:07:36Z", "hours": 1.7525, "text": "finally port complete in vulkan with RHI and Linux support"}, {"post_id": 5390, "ts": "2026-06-09T04:27:45Z", "hours": 10.2675, "text": "finally rhi and wrapper test is done in vulkan"}, {"post_id": 3458, "ts": "2026-06-06T12:22:17Z", "hours": 8.22, "text": "almost write backend vulkan may i can see something in screen next week after 3 month 😵💫"}, {"post_id": 1715, "ts": "2026-06-03T21:36:09Z", "hours": 0.5761, "text": "rewriting my game engine backend in vulkan and adding support for linux"}]...
|
Title: 3d game engine by @rajaryan1492007 | Starda Title: 3d game engine by @rajaryan1492007 | Stardance
Devlogs:
rewriting my game engine backend in vulkan and adding support for linux
almost write backend vulkan may i can see something in screen next week after 3 month 😵💫
finally rhi and wrapper test is done in vulkan
finally port complete in vulkan with RHI and Linux support
update everything now moving toward 3d work and cleanup
model loading done in my engine
linux and window both support for vulkan engine tested in wine
one of the hardest bug to solve i did it now there no texture overlap
reimplemented tracy profiler for my engine and working in PBR
PBR light implementation done in my engine
jolt physics implementation in vulkan engine and some other bug fix
while working on my engine i take refernce from blender also contributed in blender one issues even got merged other are pending
so from now not developing any feature in Game engine for some weeks and Adding fallback to 1.1 to 1.4 vulkan bcuz lot of problem andriod don’t support 1.3 mostly and many gpu like intel have bug in bindless so just adding other to fallback bcuz other are also not good nvidia and amd also have some problem add buildbot that will test like github don’t support gpu to test most probably i will test in software cpu and build system so user can compile and run thing without having any problem so at last only problem left is gpu vendor specific that i will cover through blender o3de engine that how engine can run in most gpus i give better doc or reference next time to show it but it very hard and take month to search so that it
add support for extension check in Vulkan
add more file more function just fallback for Vulkan Engine so it can run in more device
implementing old renderpass and Framebuffer and other thing to run old hardware
all setup done just have to write fallback now :)
implemented many fallback feature no less crash add fallback of dynamic_rendering other are pending
Add descriptor Set fallback and Contribution guidelines
added a ci/cd test For engine with lavapipe
St making game in my game engine
added audio and animation
added text rendering
add multithreading and better sync
make better job system
just make milestone bar for realase
reading source code of o3de and make my engine barrier better
Ships:
This project has been a daily labor of love for over a year. Over the last 4 to 5 months, I completely rewrote the entire rendering backend, moving away from a legacy OpenGL state machine to an explicit Vulkan pipeline. Along the way, I completely redesigned the Rendering Hardware Interface (RHI) to align with modern graphics architectures. Welcome to UNHUMAN! You are completely free to clone and compile this engine, but please read this first: ->The 50/50 Rule: This is a custom, explicitly defined Vulkan engine currently tailored to a Ryzen/Vega Windows environment. Because Vulkan does not hide driver-level differences (NVIDIA vs. AMD vs. Intel), there is roughly a 50/50 chance it will compile flawlessly or completely explode on your specific GPU setup. ->The Easy Way Out: If you attempt to build the project and hit Vulkan validation errors, device-lost crashes, or strict compilation failures, please do not waste your time trying to debug my RHI! * Visual Verification: If the build fails on your hardware, simply watch the YouTube Walkthrough Video linked below. It contains the full visual proof of the engine running, rendering, and functioning on the native development machine. link -> https://youtu.be/CHDIU61auYo
-> I built the Unhuman Engine (UHE) a high-performance, custom 3D game engine written entirely from scratch in C++. It features a custom Vulkan rendering pipeline, Jolt Physics integration, and a 3D spatial audio system using miniaudio. Alongside the engine, I built a fully playable “Aim Lab” style 3D shooter game to showcase its capabilities, complete with skeletal animations, recoil mechanics, and a robust entity component system (ECS). -> Building a Vulkan renderer from the ground up is notoriously difficult due to how explicit the API is. Getting the Vulkan swapchains, descriptors, and framebuffers perfectly synchronized was a massive hurdle. Beyond rendering, building the virtual file system (VFS) to correctly resolve asset paths across different platforms (Linux native and Windows via Wine) required a lot of trial and error, as did managing multithreaded memory cleanup for the audio subsystem to prevent Because of the custom Vulkan architecture and strict C++ optimizations, the game hits 900+ FPS in release builds, even on integrated graphics! the custom pixel-perfect 3D entity picking system we built using Vulkan framebuffers (instead of relying on standard physics raycasting). Finally, the engine architecture is scalable enough that it’s not just for games—it’s designed to handle heavy robotics and autonomous vehicle simulations in the engine . -> The engine supports both Linux and Windows to play the game, just run the UHEGAME executable inside the bin folder. Important: Make sure the assets folder (which contains the 3D models and audio files) is sitting right next to the executable in the same directory, otherwise the game will fall back to a safe mode. Controls: Use your mouse to aim, Left Click to shoot the targets, and press ‘R’ to reload the animated 3D pistol also i write it too big bcuz last time many people said they don’t understand what i did . about running it u can run it in windows and linux both see window build and linux build there to work able excutable file one is uhegame.exe and uhe_editor.exe one is game and other is editor https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/releases/tag/alpha i will improve the game as time goes i just st with vulkan and other if u have any problem u can ask here https://github.com/rajaryan2007/UNHUMAN/issues if still don’t understand don’t rate down read or search or just read devlog and understand instead of low rating thankyou :)
i just finally done all thing like stable etc . and search of all libs etc so can really work making really good engine i add milestone etc . u can still test project tho but it will just artitacture doc change and some sync bug fix . other then that i add milestone so i can work on that now but i 19 now today so my hackclub will get end so i just ship to info that . devlog is end but i will continue to work on this engine bcuz it been like year since i st working on it already so anyway . and anything u wanna know u can check my project issues and roadmap...
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1792835790.571338
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1792922190.571338
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30862
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Psync by @jacobjuneau | Stardance
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jacobjuneau
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1
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93.0
|
1577
|
[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-11T22:18:47Z", "hours": 93.0, "multiplier": 16.94, "payout": 1577, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Note: Very untested, only try with projects you have backups of! Psync was designed to solve the problem of my laptop having limited storage and my with to be able to use my nas semi-transparently without the use of automountd or fuse both of which I have tried and deployed in other scenarios and neither of which are resiliant to not being able to contact the NFS server when on different networks. So i made Psync which uses encryption which make me feel secure enough to open it up to the internet instead of unauthenticated NFS.", "repo": "https://github.com/jacobjuneau6/Psync", "demo": "https://crates.io/crates/pwr-cli"}]...
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[{"post_id": 26707, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 26707, "ts": "2026-07-11T17:33:03Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add bash tab completion script for pwr CLI commands Provide a bash completion function for all pwr subcommands and their flags. The completion script maps each subcommand to its valid arguments: init completes –server-host, –server-port, –psk, and –local-root; archive, restore, and ensure complete directory paths; status and list offer –recursive/-r; log provides –errors/-e and –project; shell completes bash, zsh, fish, and –init. The completion is installed via ‘source <(pwr completions bash)’ in .bashrc."}, {"post_id": 26622, "ts": "2026-07-11T15:31:34Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Document required parentheses around impl Trait syntax in handler signatures The Rust 2024 edition requires explicit parentheses around compound trait bounds in function argument position. Without them, ‘&mut impl Read + Write’ is ambiguous: it could parse as ‘(&mut impl Read) + Write’ (a mutable reference to a type implementing Read, with an additional Write bound) or ‘&mut (impl Read + Write)’ (a mutable reference to a type implementing both). The compiler requires the latter to be written with parentheses. Add a module-level doc comment explaining this so future maintainers do not attempt to remove the parentheses."}, {"post_id": 26556, "ts": "2026-07-11T13:30:09Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add end-to-end integration tests for full client-server lifecycle Implement two end-to-end tests using paired in-memory byte streams (Pipe struct implementing Read+Write via Arc<Mutex<Vec») that simulate a complete client-server interaction without network dependencies. test_full_client_server_archive_restore_cycle creates a multi-file project directory, generates age encryption keys and a PSK, runs the archive pipeline to produce an encrypted blob, then spawns two threads for client and server communicating through paired pipes. The client performs the full protocol sequence: Handshake with HMAC-SHA256 proof, ArchiveRequest with project metadata, chunked data transfer with 1 MiB chunks and zero-length EOF marker, and ArchiveComplete with SHA-256 hash. The server thread receives the Handshake, verifies the client proof, responds with its own server proof for mutual authentication, reads the ArchiveRequest, receives all chunks via the 4-byte length-prefixed streaming protocol, and acknowledges ArchiveComplete. After both threads join, assertions verify the server received the exact encrypted blob, decryption succeeds, and the local project metadata transitions correctly through local → archived → placeholder states with .project.toml file survival. test_end_to_end_hash_verification_prevents_corruption validates that tampering with a single byte of the encrypted archive produces a different SHA-256 hash, ensuring integrity violations are detectable before extraction."}, {"post_id": 26393, "ts": "2026-07-11T04:56:13Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add operation progress overlay to TUI and wire pwr tui subcommand in CLI Implement an OperationOverlay screen for the ratatui-based TUI that renders a centered modal dialog with a progress gauge, transfer statistics, and a cancel prompt during archive and restore operations. The overlay displays the operation name and project name in the title bar, a cyan progress gauge driven by the bytes_done/bytes_total ratio, a statistics line showing human-readable byte counts with percentage, and a status line that changes between ‘Press Esc to cancel’ during transfer, ‘Transfer complete’ on success, and red error text on failure. The format_size helper converts byte counts to GB/MB/KB/B with one decimal place. The handle_input method maps Escape to cancellation and Enter to dismissal after completion. Wire the pwr tui subcommand into the CLI behind the tui feature flag. The Commands enum gains a Tui variant gated by #[cfg(feature = “tui”)], the dispatch match arm calls cmd_tui(), and the tui module is conditionally compiled. Building without –features tui produces a CLI-only binary; building with the flag includes the ratatui and crossterm dependencies and the tui module, enabling pwr tui to launch the interactive interface."}, {"post_id": 26352, "ts": "2026-07-11T02:54:46Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Annotate session state structs with allow(dead_code) for future use The ArchiveSession and RestoreSession structs in the handler state machine contain fields (session_id, file_count, compression, bytes_received, bytes_sent) that are stored for future use in resume-after-interruption logic and detailed transfer statistics. Currently they are only written during state transitions but not yet read back. Add #[allow(dead_code)] annotations to suppress compiler warnings while keeping the fields available for the planned transfer progress tracking and interrupted archive resume features."}, {"post_id": 26283, "ts": "2026-07-11T00:05:32Z", "hours": 2.0333, "text": "Fix warning: remove unused variable and clean up imports Remove the unused config variable clone from the listener accept loop where it was captured by the thread closure but never referenced. Remove the unused PrivateKeyDer import from rustls pki_types. Prefix the catch-all match variable with underscore to suppress the unused variable warning in the dispatch function. Keep the required parentheses around impl Trait syntax in argument position as required by Rust 2024 edition for disambiguation. Add MIT LICENSE file."}, {"post_id": 26236, "ts": "2026-07-10T22:03:06Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add systemd service unit and deployment guides for server and client Create a hardened systemd service unit for pwr-server with security directives including NoNewPrivileges, PrivateTmp, ProtectSystem=strict, ProtectHome=yes, and read-only access to config and certificate paths with read-write access only to the project storage directory. The service runs as the pwr system user, restarts on failure with a 5-second delay, and logs to journald. Resource limits cap file descriptors at 4096 and memory at 512 MB. Add docs/server-setup.md covering the complete Debian 12 deployment workflow: installing build dependencies, compiling with cargo, initializing the server to generate TLS certificates and PSK, creating the storage directory with correct ownership, installing and enabling the systemd service, verifying the listener with ss, configuring firewall rules for nftables and iptables, and troubleshooting common issues. Add docs/client-setup.md covering the Arch Linux client workflow: building the binary, running pwr init with server host and PSK, setting up shell integration for bash, zsh, and fish, performing the first archive and restore, launching the TUI, and troubleshooting configuration and authentication errors. Include a full configuration file reference."}, {"post_id": 26145, "ts": "2026-07-10T19:28:04Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Fix client integration tests and add retry-aware connect test Repair the client integration test suite after the retry logic and library target additions. The connect_to_nonexistent_server test now uses a match statement instead of unwrap_err to work with the ClientResult type. The connect_timeout_is_respected test is marked #[ignore] because OS-level TCP timeout behavior varies across platforms, making sub-second timeout assertions unreliable in CI environments. Unused imports (TcpListener, Duration) are removed from the test file."}, {"post_id": 26055, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:19:39Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add progress bar integration to CLI with empty-archive edge case handling also add 0-byte transfer file size."}, {"post_id": 25987, "ts": "2026-07-10T15:17:01Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Add progress callback support to client archive and restore methods Extend archive_project and restore_project with optional progress callbacks that report bytes transferred against total size. The existing methods become thin wrappers calling the new archive_project_with_progress and restore_project_with_progress variants with None for backward compatibility. During archive, the callback fires after each 1 MiB chunk is written to the TCP stream, reporting cumulative bytes sent. During restore, the callback fires after each received chunk is appended to the buffer, reporting cumulative bytes received. The callback signature is fn(u64, u64) where the first argument is current progress and the second is the total, suitable for driving indicatif progress bars or TUI progress displays without coupling the client module to any specific UI library."}, {"post_id": 25938, "ts": "2026-07-10T13:15:41Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Add exponential backoff retry logic to PwrClient connection Implement connect_with_retry in PwrClient that wraps the existing connection logic with up to 3 retry attempts using exponential backoff starting at 1 second and doubling to 2 and 4 seconds. The existing connect method is renamed to connect_once and made private, with the public connect method now calling it in a retry loop. Transient network failures such as TCP connection refused or TLS handshake timeouts are retried, while authentication failures are not (they propagate immediately since retrying with the same credentials would produce the same result). Each retry attempt is logged at WARN level with the error and delay, and a successful retry is logged at INFO level. The connect_timeout_secs from the client config is applied to each individual TCP connection attempt within the retry loop."}, {"post_id": 25722, "ts": "2026-07-10T04:53:07Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement TLS transport with custom certificate verifier and fingerprint pinning Replace the TLS-not-yet-implemented stub in the PwrClient with a working rustls-based TLS 1.3 connection layer. The connect_tls function builds a ClientConfig using the dangerous API with a custom certificate verifier (CertVerifier) that accepts self-signed server certificates — necessary because pwr-server generates its own ECDSA P-256 certificate during init rather than obtaining one from a public CA. Authentication is provided by the PSK handshake running over the encrypted channel, so the TLS layer provides confidentiality while the application layer handles mutual authentication. The verifier supports optional SHA-256 certificate fingerprint pinning. When a server_fingerprint is present in the client config, the verifier computes the SHA-256 hash of the server’s end-entity certificate and compares it against the pinned value, rejecting the connection on mismatch. When no fingerprint is configured, the verifier accepts any certificate but logs the observed fingerprint for the user to pin later, enabling a trust-on-first-use workflow. Signature verification in the verifier accepts all TLS 1.2 and 1.3 signatures without checking against a root CA. This is intentional: the security model relies on PSK-based mutual authentication at the application layer combined with certificate pinning for defense-in-depth, rather than on the Web PKI trust infrastructure which would reject self-signed certificates. The supported_verify_schemes list advertises ECDSA and RSA schemes to maximize compatibility."}, {"post_id": 25674, "ts": "2026-07-10T02:47:59Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Add server address display to status command output Extend the status command to print the configured server host and port after the project count summary, giving users a quick reminder of which NAS their projects are archived to."}, {"post_id": 25619, "ts": "2026-07-10T00:28:40Z", "hours": 2.0333, "text": "Fix server handler and listener warnings: remove unnecessary parentheses and unused imports Clean up compilation warnings in the pwr-server crate. In handler.rs, the send_server_msg function signature used unnecessary parentheses around impl Write which triggered the unused_parens lint. In listener.rs, the PrivateKeyDer import was unused since the key is loaded via rustls_pemfile::private_key which returns a generic PrivateKeyDer type that does not need to be explicitly imported."}, {"post_id": 25572, "ts": "2026-07-09T22:06:58Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Clean up unused imports and fix compilation warnings in client TLS module Remove unused Arc import from the top-level client scope (it is only needed inside the connect_tls function where it is imported locally). Replace TrustAnchor with the correct ServerName import from rustls::pki_types. Remove the unnecessary mut qualifier from the ClientConnection binding in connect_tls."}, {"post_id": 25494, "ts": "2026-07-09T20:05:53Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add –tls flag to all network commands, –limit to log, –auto-install to shell init Extend the CLI with connection and usability flags across all subcommands. Every command that contacts the server (archive, restore, ensure, status, list) now accepts a –tls flag that is passed through to PwrClient::connect, controlling whether the connection uses TLS with certificate pinning or plaintext for local testing. The log command gains a –limit flag defaulting to 50 entries, with a summary line showing how many entries were truncated. The shell init command supports –auto-install which opens the shell rc file in append mode and writes the eval line directly, providing a one-command setup experience. Function signatures throughout main.rs are updated to thread the new boolean parameter. The ensure command passes tls=false through to its internal restore call since ensure is triggered from the shell wrapper where TLS may not be configured. The list command delegates to cmd_status with tls=false for local-only directory scanning."}, {"post_id": 25418, "ts": "2026-07-09T18:04:28Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Wire progress bars and retry logic into CLI archive and restore commands Integrate the progress reporting module and retry logic into the two main CLI workflows. The archive command now creates a progress bar before the packaging pipeline and passes it to create_archive_with_progress via a ProgressFn callback that maps ArchiveStage values to status messages and fractional bar position. A second progress bar tracks the upload phase. Both bars are finished and cleared on completion. The restore command similarly uses a download progress bar keyed to the stored project size and an extraction progress bar sized to the received encrypted blob. Connection attempts now use with_retry wrapping PwrClient::connect with 3 retries and a 1-second base delay, retrying only on transient network errors as classified by is_retryable_error. This provides resilience against momentary server unavailability without masking fatal errors like authentication failures."}, {"post_id": 25343, "ts": "2026-07-09T16:03:49Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add client integration test suite with handshake, streaming, retry, and progress tests Create 14 integration tests in pwr-cli/tests/client_integration.rs covering the client-side protocol layer. Handshake tests verify that ClientMessage frames encode with correct magic bytes, version, and type discriminants, and that decode_client_message recovers the original Handshake struct with client_id and nonce intact. Archive flow tests exercise ArchiveRequest and ArchiveComplete serialization round-trips with all fields including UUID, name, total_size, file_count, compression, and hash. Restore flow tests verify RestoreRequest encoding and decoding. Server response parsing tests validate that HandshakeAck, Error, and StatusResponse messages are correctly deserialized from framed payloads, including success flags, error codes, and project info vectors with UUID and file_count fields. Chunk streaming tests cover five size boundaries from zero bytes (EOF detection) through 1 MiB, plus standalone EOF marker encoding. Retry logic tests verify is_retryable_error correctly classifies connection failures, timeouts, and broken pipes as transient while treating authentication and not-found errors as fatal. with_retry is tested for immediate success, maximum retry exhaustion (initial + 3 retries = 4 calls), and early termination on non-retryable errors after 1 call. A progress stage test confirms all five ArchiveStage variants are distinct."}, {"post_id": 25289, "ts": "2026-07-09T14:02:25Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Add progress reporting module with indicatif integration and stage callbacks Introduce a progress module in the pwr CLI crate that provides two display modes for long-running operations. The archive_progress_bar and restore_progress_bar functions create indicatif ProgressBar instances with styled templates showing a spinner, progress bar, byte counter, and ETA. The update_archive_progress function maps ArchiveStage enum values to human-readable status messages displayed in the bar. For non-interactive terminals or quiet mode, print_stage emits a simple line to stderr for each stage transition during archive or extract operations. This provides visibility into long-running operations without requiring a TTY."}, {"post_id": 25182, "ts": "2026-07-09T07:46:17Z", "hours": 2.0333, "text": "Implement TLS connector with certificate pinning and retry logic for the client Add a complete TLS connection path to PwrClient, replacing the previous stub that returned a not-yet-implemented error. The connect_tls function builds a rustls ClientConfig with webpki root certificates for standard PKI validation. When a server_fingerprint is set in the client config, a custom FingerprintVerifier replaces the default verifier. This verifier computes the SHA-256 hash of the server’s end-entity certificate DER bytes and compares it against the pinned hex fingerprint, implementing trust-on-first-use style certificate pinning without requiring a private CA. The verifier supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3 signature schemes including RSA and ECDSA P-256. The PwrClient struct gains server_addr, psk, and pinned_fingerprint fields, enabling a reconnect method that re-establishes a TCP connection to the same server and re-runs the PSK handshake without reloading the config file. The connect method now branches on use_tls, routing to either the TLS path with certificate validation or the plaintext path for local testing. Add retry logic via the with_retry helper, a generic function that wraps any fallible operation with exponential backoff. The caller provides a retryable-error predicate; is_retryable_error recognizes connection refused, timeout, connection closed, connection reset, broken pipe, and unexpected EOF as transient errors worth retrying. The base delay doubles each attempt, with a configurable maximum number of retries."}, {"post_id": 25150, "ts": "2026-07-09T05:35:05Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add server integration test suite and library target for external testing Create 17 integration tests in pwr-server/tests/server_integration.rs covering the full server subsystem. Storage CRUD tests (6) verify project creation with duplicate rejection, removal, archive read/write round-trips through the storage layer, persistence across re-opens via registry JSON, and size limit enforcement rejecting archives exceeding the configured max_project_size_gb. PSK handshake tests (3) validate the full mutual authentication flow with correct proof verification and wrong-PSK rejection. Frame-level integration tests (3) exercise the complete serialization pipeline: Handshake framing round-trip with client_id and nonce preservation, ArchiveRequest framing with all fields intact, and server message decode direction checking. File chunk streaming tests (2) simulate the chunk protocol by encoding 250 KB of cyclical data across 4 KB chunks with 4-byte length prefixes and EOF markers, reassembling on the receiver side and verifying content equality. An empty archive test confirms that a standalone EOF marker produces zero bytes of received data. Rate limiter tests (3) verify the 6th attempt is blocked after 5 allowed, success resets the window, and different IPs are tracked independently. A full archive-restore simulation test writes 500 KB of data through the storage layer, reads it back, and verifies byte-exact restoration plus metadata persistence. A cleanup test confirms that removing a project after a failed archive deletes both the archive file and registry entry. To support external integration tests, a library target (lib.rs) is added to pwr-server, re-exporting all modules as public while the binary target (main.rs) retains its own private module declarations."}, {"post_id": 25104, "ts": "2026-07-09T02:58:05Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add file chunk streaming to archive and restore handlers Implement the raw chunk streaming protocol in both directions on the server side. After accepting an ArchiveRequest, the handler enters a chunk receive loop (handle_archive_chunks) that reads 4-byte big-endian length prefixes followed by that many bytes of data, appending each chunk to the project’s archive file on disk via append-mode file I/O. A zero-length chunk signals EOF. The total bytes received is logged for monitoring. On the restore side, handle_restore_chunks reads the complete archive file from disk through the storage layer, then streams it back to the client in 1 MiB chunks with the same 4-byte length-prefixed format, followed by a zero-length EOF marker and a flush. This mirrors the client’s restore_project method which reads chunks in the same format. The dispatch function now chains the chunk streaming phase after the initial request acceptance: ArchiveRequest dispatch calls handle_archive_start followed by handle_archive_chunks, and RestoreRequest calls handle_restore_start followed by handle_restore_chunks. The ArchiveComplete and RestoreComplete messages are received as framed messages after the chunk phase completes, handled by the existing finish functions."}, {"post_id": 24986, "ts": "2026-07-08T21:34:40Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add IP-based authentication rate limiter and integrate into handshake handler Implement a per-IP rate limiter in the server’s auth module that tracks failed authentication attempts within a sliding 60-second window. Each IP is allowed up to 5 failed handshake attempts before being banned for 300 seconds. The RateLimiter maintains an in-memory HashMap<IpAddr, RateLimitEntry> with periodic cleanup of expired entries to prevent unbounded memory growth. The check_attempt method atomically increments the attempt counter, resets the window if it has expired, checks whether the IP is currently banned, and returns false if the attempt should be rejected. record_success resets the counter and clears any ban on successful authentication, allowing legitimate clients that temporarily misconfigured their PSK to recover. The rate limiter is shared across all connections via Arc<Mutex<» and passed through HandlerContext. The handshake handler calls check_attempt before validating the PSK proof, ensuring brute-force attempts are blocked before any cryptographic work is performed. If the rate limit is exceeded, a HandshakeAck with a descriptive error is sent and the connection is closed. On successful authentication, record_success is called to clear the counter. Four unit tests verify that the first five attempts are allowed, the sixth is blocked, record_success resets the counter, and different IPs are tracked independently."}, {"post_id": 24904, "ts": "2026-07-08T19:20:56Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement server main entry point with clap CLI and fix listener/handler compilation Add a complete main.rs for pwr-server with three clap subcommands. The init subcommand detects or accepts a hostname, delegates to cert::init_server for TLS certificate generation, PSK creation, and config file writing, then prints the start command. The start subcommand locates the config file via the standard search path, loads and validates the ServerConfig, logs the bind address and storage path via tracing, and calls listener::run to begin accepting connections (blocks until shutdown). The status subcommand loads the config and prints a summary of all settings plus a connectivity check by attempting a brief TCP connection to the configured port, reporting whether the server appears to be running. Logging is configured via tracing-subscriber with an env-filter defaulting to pwr_server=info, controllable via the RUST_LOG environment variable. The –foreground flag on the start subcommand is accepted but daemonization is not yet implemented. Fix two compilation errors discovered during integration. The listener’s TLS setup incorrectly pattern-matched rustls::StreamOwned::new as if it returned a Result; it returns the stream directly in rustls 0.23. The handler’s handle_archive_finish had a borrow conflict where the session reference from the Archiving state match arm prevented reassigning *state; the fix extracts project_uuid and project_name into local variables before the state transition."}, {"post_id": 24827, "ts": "2026-07-08T17:13:43Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add comprehensive crypto integration test suite with 26 tests Introduce crypto_integration.rs exercising the full security subsystem across four categories. PSK tests (8) verify 256-bit key generation across ten iterations, hex round-trip preservation including case insensitivity, rejection of odd-length and wrong-length hex strings, deterministic client proof computation, the complete mutual authentication flow with distinct client and server proofs, and PSK binding where different keys produce different proofs. Age encryption tests (6) cover small, empty, and 1 MB large payload round-trips, ephemeral key non-determinism (same plaintext produces different ciphertext but both decrypt correctly), wrong identity rejection, and corrupted ciphertext detection via single-byte flipping mid-payload. HKDF tests (4) verify 256-bit output length, deterministic derivation for same PSK and UUID, cross-project key uniqueness for different UUIDs, and a known-UUID stability test confirming the derived key is neither all-zeros nor all-PSK-bytes. Integrity tests (3) confirm streaming hasher equivalence with oneshot hashing across 5 MB of 64 KB chunks, empty file hashing matching the well-known empty SHA-256 digest, and proper I/O error propagation for nonexistent files. Archive round-trip tests (3) create a multi-file project with README, two Rust sources, a design doc, and Cargo.toml, run through create_archive → extract_archive, verify all file contents match exactly and .project.toml is excluded. Hash verification rejection confirms wrong hashes prevent extraction. A progress callback test records all stage transitions during archive creation and verifies the final progress fraction reaches 1.0."}, {"post_id": 24701, "ts": "2026-07-08T13:51:58Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add progress callback support to archive and extract pipelines Introduce progress reporting to the archive packaging and extraction functions through an optional callback parameter. The ProgressFn type is a boxed closure receiving an ArchiveStage enum and a fractional progress value from 0.0 to 1.0. Eight stages cover the full lifecycle: Scanning, Tarring, Compressing, Encrypting, Hashing, Decrypting, Decompressing, and Extracting. The original create_archive and extract_archive signatures are preserved as convenience wrappers that call the new create_archive_with_progress and extract_archive_with_progress variants with None for the callback, maintaining backward compatibility for callers that do not need progress reporting. Progress granularity is coarse but meaningful: the archive pipeline reports six transitions (Scanning at 0.0, Tarring at 0.1, Compressing at 0.3, Encrypting at 0.5, Hashing at 0.9 and 1.0). The extract pipeline reports eight transitions (Hashing at 0.0 and 0.2, Decrypting at 0.3 and 0.5, Decompressing at 0.6, Extracting at 0.7 and 1.0). Future refinements could report per-file progress during the tar stage by tracking bytes written against the pre-computed directory size."}, {"post_id": 24514, "ts": "2026-07-08T03:32:17Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add HKDF-SHA256 per-project key derivation from master PSK Implement derive_project_key in the crypto module using ring’s HKDF implementation with SHA-256. The function takes the 256-bit master PSK as the HKDF salt and the project UUID bytes as the info parameter, producing a deterministic 256-bit per-project key. This design means per-project encryption keys are never stored on disk — they are re-derived from the master PSK and project UUID on each archive or restore operation. If the PSK is rotated, all existing projects become inaccessible, which is documented as a deliberate security property rather than a bug. The HKDF-Extract step uses the PSK as the salt with an empty initial key material, producing a pseudorandom key. HKDF-Expand then derives 32 bytes of output key material bound to the project UUID via the info parameter, preventing cross-project key reuse even if an attacker learns one project’s derived key. Four tests verify deterministic derivation, UUID binding, PSK binding, and correct 256-bit output length."}, {"post_id": 24448, "ts": "2026-07-08T00:35:04Z", "hours": 1.9667, "text": "Implement complete integrity verification module with streaming hasher Replace the stub hash_file function with a full implementation that reads files in 64 KiB chunks through std::io::copy into a SHA-256 hasher, avoiding memory pressure for arbitrarily large inputs. Add hash_bytes_raw for callers that need the 32-byte binary digest rather than a hex string. hash_reader accepts any io::Read source, enabling hash computation on network streams or in-memory buffers without materializing intermediate files. Introduce StreamingHasher for incremental hash computation across multiple update calls. This is designed for chunked network reception where the full data is never in memory at once: the receiver calls update on each chunk as it arrives, then finalize or finalize_raw to obtain the digest. The struct wraps sha2::Sha256 and implements Default. Verification helpers verify_hash and verify_file_hash compare computed hashes against expected hex strings, returning bool rather than Result for use in assert-style checks. The crypto module’s sha256_hex and sha256_file functions are updated to delegate to the integrity module, making it the single canonical location for SHA-256 operations. Ten tests cover known-answer vectors for the empty string and ‘hello world’, raw hash byte length, file hashing including a 10 MB large-file path to exercise chunked I/O, hash verification for both match and mismatch cases, file verification, streaming hasher correctness against a known answer, streaming-vs-oneshot equivalence across four chunks, and hash_reader with an in-memory source."}, {"post_id": 24339, "ts": "2026-07-07T20:58:46Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add comprehensive protocol integration test suite Introduce 20 integration tests in pwr-core/tests/protocol_integration.rs that exercise the full protocol layer without network dependencies, operating entirely on in-memory frame buffers and byte streams. Frame encode/decode round-trips validate that ArchiveRequest, RestoreRequest, and Handshake messages survive serialization through the full pipeline: typed ClientMessage enum to JSON payload to framed bytes with magic and length prefix through decode_frame back to typed enum with correct field values. FrameDecoder buffering tests cover two edge cases: byte-by-byte arrival where the decoder correctly reports None for incomplete frames across dozens of individual push_bytes calls until the full frame is available, and multi-frame reads where two concatenated frames in a single buffer are decoded sequentially without leftover bytes. Error injection tests verify that bad magic bytes produce errors, truncated frame headers (fewer than 10 bytes) return None rather than errors, payloads exceeding the 16 MiB limit are rejected, unsupported protocol versions are detected, and unknown message type bytes trigger framing errors. File chunk streaming tests cover exact 1 MiB chunks, zero-length data (which is indistinguishable from the EOF marker by design since empty chunks serve no purpose), EOF detection, and reassembly of 500 KB of cyclical data across 4 KB chunks with content verification. Serialization coverage iterates over all five ClientMessage variants and all seven ServerMessage variants, verifying each round-trips through JSON and preserves its message_type discriminant. Boundary tests handle empty ProjectInfo lists, near-max-size payloads with u64::MAX size_bytes and u32::MAX file_count, and direction-mismatch rejection where decode_client_message and decode_server_message refuse payloads from the wrong direction."}, {"post_id": 24259, "ts": "2026-07-07T18:26:22Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Refactor client to use typed ClientMessage/ServerMessage enums and protocol builders Replace raw struct construction and manual frame encoding in the archive, restore, and status methods with protocol builder functions and typed message enums. archive_project now calls protocol::build_archive_request and protocol::build_archive_complete. restore_project uses protocol::build_restore_request. The send_client_msg and recv_server_msg helpers replace the generic send_frame and recv_frame functions, providing type-safe serialization for ClientMessage enums and typed deserialization via protocol::decode_server_message for ServerMessage responses. The handshake function is updated to construct the Handshake message as a ClientMessage::Handshake variant and match the response as a ServerMessage::HandshakeAck variant, with error handling for ServerMessage::Error responses. Response parsing in all methods uses match on ServerMessage variants instead of serde_json::from_slice with unwrapped payloads, catching unexpected message types at the call site rather than failing silently with deserialization errors. The import list is reduced from a wildcard protocol::* to explicit imports for ClientMessage, Handshake, ProjectInfo, ServerMessage, and the protocol module itself for builder function access."}, {"post_id": 24168, "ts": "2026-07-07T15:49:02Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Refactor server handler to use ClientMessage/ServerMessage enums and protocol builders Rewrite the connection handler’s dispatch function to decode raw frame payloads through protocol::decode_client_message, which returns a typed ClientMessage enum. The match statement now patterns on the enum variant directly rather than matching MessageType discriminants and manually deserializing individual structs. This eliminates redundant deserialization code and catches direction mismatches at the protocol boundary. All server response construction now uses the protocol builder functions: build_handshake_ack_success, build_handshake_ack_failed, build_archive_accept, build_restore_accept, build_status_response, and build_error. The send_server_msg helper takes a ServerMessage enum, calls message_type() for the frame header discriminant, and serializes through encode_frame. This replaces scattered struct literal construction and manual frame encoding with a single call site. The handler functions (handle_handshake, handle_archive_start, handle_archive_finish, handle_restore_start, handle_status) are unchanged in logic but now operate on the inner payload structs extracted by the dispatch layer. Storage locking uses scoped blocks with read().unwrap() and write().unwrap() guards that drop before the next operation. Unused imports are cleaned up, including the removal of the deprecated ring::constant_time import."}, {"post_id": 24104, "ts": "2026-07-07T13:45:46Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add typed builder functions for all protocol message flows Introduce convenience constructors in the protocol module that build ClientMessage and ServerMessage enums from their constituent fields, eliminating the need for callers to construct nested struct literals. For the archive flow, build_archive_request accepts a UUID, name, size, file count, and compression flag, while build_archive_complete and build_archive_failed produce the terminal ArchiveComplete variants. For the restore flow, build_restore_request wraps a project UUID, build_restore_accept bundles session metadata with size and hash, build_restore_complete signals success, and build_restore_failed attaches an error string. Handshake builders handle both success and failure Ack messages with the server nonce, proof, and optional reason. Additional helpers cover ArchiveAccept, StatusResponse, and generic Error messages. These builders centralize protocol message construction so handler and client code does not repeat struct literals and reduces the surface area for missing required fields."}, {"post_id": 23954, "ts": "2026-07-07T05:15:09Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add ClientMessage and ServerMessage sum types with typed deserialization dispatch Introduce two unified enums to the protocol module that wrap all message variants for type-safe routing in the connection handler state machine. ClientMessage covers the five messages the client can send (Handshake, ArchiveRequest, ArchiveComplete, RestoreRequest, StatusRequest) and ServerMessage covers the six server responses (HandshakeAck, ArchiveAccept, RestoreAccept, RestoreComplete, StatusResponse, Error). Each variant delegates serialization to the inner struct via serde’s internally-tagged enum representation using a ‘type’ discriminator field. The message_type method on each enum maps variants to their MessageType discriminant byte, enabling the frame encoder to write the correct header without the caller tracking the mapping manually. Two deserialization functions, decode_client_message and decode_server_message, take a raw payload and a MessageType discriminant and return the typed enum. They validate that the discriminant matches the expected direction, rejecting client message types when a server message is expected and vice versa, catching protocol-level dispatch bugs at the decoding layer rather than deeper in handler logic. The MessageType enum is relocated from the frame module to the protocol module since it is a protocol concern, resolving a circular import between the two modules. Frame encoding continues to reference MessageType for the frame header type byte. The from_byte constructor maps all 13 assigned discriminants with explicit match arms for stability. Eight new tests cover ClientMessage and ServerMessage JSON round-trips, direction-mismatch rejection in decode_client_message and decode_server_message, and message_type discriminant mapping for both enums, adding to the existing serialization and discriminant tests."}, {"post_id": 23872, "ts": "2026-07-07T02:13:05Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add comprehensive README with architecture overview, security model, and setup guides Document the complete pwr project covering the three-crate architecture, security model with its three layers (TLS transport, PSK authentication, and age at-rest encryption), quick-start guides for both Debian 12 server and Arch Linux client, the .project.toml file format specification, complete command reference table, configuration file reference for both client and server TOML files, and build-from-source instructions with feature flags for the optional TUI."}, {"post_id": 23820, "ts": "2026-07-06T23:56:22Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add TLS certificate generation and server initialization utility Implement a certificate generation module in pwr-server that produces self-signed ECDSA P-256 certificates for TLS 1.3 via the rcgen crate. generate_certificate accepts a common name (typically the server hostname), creates certificate parameters with a distinguished name, generates a P-256 keypair, self-signs the certificate with a 365-day validity, and returns the PEM-encoded certificate, PEM-encoded private key, and a SHA-256 hex fingerprint of the certificate for client-side pinning. save_certificate writes the certificate and key to the configured paths with appropriate permissions: the certificate file is world-readable while the private key is restricted to owner-only (mode 0o600 on Unix). Parent directories are created automatically. The init_server function ties everything together for first-time setup. It generates the TLS certificate and key, saves them to /etc/pwr/, generates a random 256-bit PSK via ring’s CSPRNG, creates a ServerConfig with the PSK and certificate paths, and saves the config to /etc/pwr/server.toml. The PSK hex string and certificate fingerprint are printed to stdout with instructions for copying the PSK to the client config. This gives administrators a single command to bootstrap a new pwr-server instance with all security material generated fresh and properly permissioned."}, {"post_id": 23698, "ts": "2026-07-06T20:10:17Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Add ratatui-based TUI with project browser, creator, and log viewer screens Implement a terminal UI for interactive project management using ratatui 0.28 with the crossterm backend. The application shell provides a tabbed interface with three screens accessible via number keys (1-3) or Tab cycling. A status bar at the bottom displays global keybindings. The Project List screen renders a scrollable table of tracked projects discovered by scanning the local root directory for .project.toml files. Each row displays a color-coded status indicator (green for local, yellow for archived), project name, human-readable size, and last-sync date. Vim-style j/k and arrow key navigation is supported. Pressing r refreshes the list from disk. The screen is empty with an appropriate message when no projects are configured. The Project Creator screen provides a two-field form for interactively creating .project.toml files. The name field is pre-filled from the current directory name. Tab and Shift+Tab cycle focus between name and local path fields. Typing appends characters, backspace deletes. Ctrl+S validates that the path exists and is a directory, that the name is non-empty, then writes the .project.toml via the core library’s atomic write function. Status messages appear on success or validation failure. The Log Viewer screen reads the local JSONL transaction log and displays entries in a scrollable table with timestamp, operation type, project name, data size, and color-coded status (green OK, red FAILED, yellow in-progress). Supports refresh with r and j/k navigation. The TUI is enabled behind the tui Cargo feature flag which gates the ratatui and crossterm dependencies."}, {"post_id": 23620, "ts": "2026-07-06T18:02:51Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement full CLI command suite with shell integration and client networking"}, {"post_id": 23512, "ts": "2026-07-06T15:10:42Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement archive packaging pipeline and client networking module Add the archive packaging pipeline to pwr-core. The create_archive function builds an encrypted project archive through a four-stage streaming pipeline. First, the project directory is walked recursively and added to a tar archive via the tar crate, excluding .project.toml metadata files. Second, the tar stream is gzip-compressed using flate2 at default compression level and written to a temporary file to bound memory usage independent of project size. Third, the compressed tarball is read back and encrypted using the age X25519 public key from the project’s metadata, producing an opaque encrypted blob the server cannot read. Fourth, the SHA-256 hash of the encrypted blob is computed for integrity verification after transfer. Symlinks are preserved in the archive. The reverse pipeline, extract_archive, first verifies the SHA-256 hash against the expected value, then age-decrypts, gunzips, and untars into the target directory. Two tests verify create-extract round-trip fidelity (README.md, src/main.rs, and Cargo.toml are restored with correct content) and that hash mismatch prevents extraction. Add the protocol client module to the pwr binary. PwrClient manages a connection to pwr-server with TCP socket setup, configurable timeouts, PSK handshake authentication with mutual server proof verification, and framed message send/receive via the core frame module. The archive_project method sends an ArchiveRequest, receives acceptance, streams archive data in 1 MiB chunks with 4-byte length prefixes and a zero-length EOF marker, and sends ArchiveComplete with the SHA-256 hash. The restore_project method requests a project by UUID, receives a RestoreAccept with size metadata, streams chunks back from the server, and returns the complete encrypted blob. get_status queries the server for project listings with optional UUID filtering. The handshake helper generates a 32-byte CSPRNG nonce, computes the HMAC-SHA256 client proof, sends the Handshake message, verifies the server’s HandshakeAck success flag, and performs mutual authentication by validating the server proof against the expected value using constant-time comparison."}, {"post_id": 23258, "ts": "2026-07-06T03:13:55Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement pwr-server storage backend, connection handler, and TLS listener Add the three core server modules that together form the NAS-side daemon. The storage module (storage.rs) manages an on-disk project registry as a JSON index file mapping UUIDs to StoredProject entries containing name, size, file count, encryption flag, and timestamps. The registry is persisted atomically using a write-to-temp-then-rename pattern. Per-project directories under the configured storage base path hold data.enc (the encrypted archive blob) and meta.toml (per-project metadata). Methods provide CRUD operations on the registry, streaming archive read/write through buffered I/O, storage limit enforcement against the configured max_project_size_gb, and filesystem directory management. Five tests verify create-and-list, duplicate rejection, remove, archive write-read round-trip, and registry persistence across re-opens. The handler module (handler.rs) implements a per-connection state machine with five states: AwaitingHandshake, Authenticated, Archiving, Restoring, and Closed. The dispatch function routes decoded frames by state and message type. The handshake handler validates the client’s HMAC-SHA256 proof in constant time using ring::constant_time::verify_slices_are_equal, then generates a server nonce and server proof for mutual authentication. Archive start creates a project entry after checking the storage limit, archive finish updates the final size or rolls back on failure. Restore start looks up the project and verifies the archive file exists. Status queries support both single-UUID lookup and full listing. Storage is shared across connections via Arc<RwLock> with per-operation read or write locking. The listener module (listener.rs) loads PEM-encoded TLS certificates via rustls-pemfile, builds a rustls ServerConfig with TLS 1.3 and the application-level protocol negotiation tag “pwr/1”, binds a std::net TcpListener, and spawns each accepted connection on a dedicated OS thread with a rustls::StreamOwned wrapping the TCP stream for TLS encryption."}, {"post_id": 23204, "ts": "2026-07-06T00:55:44Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement cryptographic layer with PSK authentication, age encryption, and SHA-256 integrity Add the complete cryptographic subsystem to pwr-core, providing three layers of security for the protocol. The pre-shared key authentication layer uses HMAC-SHA256 to compute challenge-response proofs. The client proves knowledge of the PSK by sending HMAC(client_nonce || “pwr-auth-v1”, PSK). The server responds with HMAC(client_nonce || server_nonce || “pwr-auth-v1”, PSK), enabling mutual authentication. Both nonces are 32-byte CSPRNG values generated per-connection using ring’s SystemRandom. The PSK itself is a 256-bit random key stored as a hex string in both config files. Helper functions handle hex encoding and decoding. At-rest encryption uses age with X25519 key pairs. generate_age_identity creates a fresh keypair, stores the secret identity at ~/.config/pwr/identity with 0o600 permissions, and returns the Bech32 public key for inclusion in .project.toml. The age_encrypt function takes a public key string and plaintext, producing an age-format encrypted blob using the one-shot Encryptor API. age_decrypt reverses this with an identity, returning the original plaintext. Both functions propagate structured errors for wrong keys, corrupted data, and unsupported formats. Integrity verification uses SHA-256 via the sha2 crate. sha256_hex hashes an in-memory buffer. sha256_file streams through a file in 64 KiB chunks to support large projects without memory pressure. Ten tests verify PSK randomness and hex round-trips, deterministic proof computation (same inputs produce same outputs), mutual proof divergence (client and server proofs differ), age encrypt-decrypt round-trips for both empty and non-empty payloads, wrong-identity rejection, known-answer SHA-256 vectors, and file hashing against the same known answer."}, {"post_id": 23125, "ts": "2026-07-05T21:58:39Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement wire protocol message types and frame encoding layer Define the complete set of protocol messages shared between client and server in pwr-core. The MessageType enum assigns stable 1-byte discriminants to each message variant for routing in the frame header. Handshake messages carry 32-byte client and server nonces with HMAC-SHA256 proofs for mutual PSK authentication, plus a server version string and optional error reason for debugging failed handshakes. Archive flow messages coordinate project uploads: ArchiveRequest announces the project UUID, name, total size, file count, and compression flag; ArchiveAccept returns a session UUID for correlating subsequent chunks; ArchiveComplete reports the final SHA-256 hash and transfer size. Restore flow mirrors this with RestoreRequest, RestoreAccept (carrying size and hash so the client can pre-allocate), and RestoreComplete. File streaming uses FileHeader (relative path, size, Unix mode bits) sent before raw chunk data and FileEnd (SHA-256 checksum) sent after. Query messages provide StatusRequest with optional project UUID filter and StatusResponse with a ProjectInfo vector carrying UUID, name, size, file count, and timestamps. The frame module implements a 10-byte header format: 4 magic bytes (0x50575246, ASCII “PWRF”), 4-byte big-endian payload length, 1-byte protocol version, and 1-byte message type. Payloads are JSON-encoded for debuggability. encode_frame serializes and wraps a message; decode_frame validates magic, version, and length bounds, returning None when more data is needed. FrameDecoder maintains an internal buffer for incremental socket reads. File chunks use a separate 4-byte length-prefixed streaming format with a zero-length EOF marker, keeping large file data out of the JSON framing layer. Thirteen tests cover message type discriminants, serialization round-trips for ArchiveRequest and ProjectInfo, handshake nonce sizes, frame encode-decode with magic verification, partial-read buffering in FrameDecoder, oversized frame rejection, bad magic rejection, file chunk encode-decode, and EOF marker detection."}, {"post_id": 23041, "ts": "2026-07-05T19:34:43Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement project file I/O with atomic writes, placeholder detection, and directory utilities Add the complete project file management layer in pwr-core. The .project.toml file is the stable identity marker that persists on local disk regardless of whether project content is present (Local state) or stored on the server (Archived state). read_project_file returns Option, returning None when no .project.toml exists so callers can distinguish untracked directories from tracked projects. write_project_file uses an atomic write-through pattern: contents are serialized to a .tmp sibling file first, then renamed over the target, preventing readers from observing a partially written metadata file. remove_project_file deletes the marker without touching directory contents. State detection predicates cover all cases needed by the CLI and shell wrapper. is_archived_placeholder confirms that a directory contains only a .project.toml whose state field is Archived — the signal that triggers automatic restore in the ensure command. is_local_project checks for the opposite state. is_tracked simply tests file existence without parsing. Directory utilities support the archive and restore workflows. dir_size computes total bytes excluding the metadata file itself, with symlinks counted by their target path length rather than followed. file_count tallies regular files recursively for transfer progress estimation. remove_dir_contents_except_project strips a directory down to its .project.toml placeholder after a successful archive. Eleven tests cover round-trip I/O, atomic write behavior, placeholder and local state detection, tracking predicate, exact byte counting, file enumeration, directory stripping, and recursive discovery."}, {"post_id": 22950, "ts": "2026-07-05T16:44:00Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Implement server-side configuration management with validation and storage layout Add the ServerConfig struct to the pwr-server crate, controlling all aspects of the daemon’s operation. The configuration specifies the TCP bind address and port (defaulting to 0.0.0.0:9742), the filesystem root for project storage (defaulting to /srv/pwr/projects), paths to the TLS certificate and private key files, the hex-encoded 256-bit pre-shared authentication token that clients must present during the handshake, and operational limits including maximum concurrent connections (default 32), maximum project size in gigabytes (default 500), and an idle timeout for authenticated connections (default 300 seconds). Validation is performed at load time: the port must be non-zero, the auth token must be non-empty, and both max_project_size_gb and max_connections must be positive. The validate method returns a plain String error so the caller can present it directly to the user without depending on the shared pwr-core error types, keeping the server crate’s dependency surface minimal during early development. A config file search strategy checks four locations in order: an explicit –config CLI path, the current working directory (for development), the XDG config directory under ~/.config/pwr/, and the system-wide /etc/pwr/server.toml. Helper methods compute derived paths: project_dir returns the per-UUID storage subdirectory, registry_path returns the JSON index file location, and bind_addr formats the socket address for TcpListener::bind. Seven tests cover default validation, empty-token rejection, zero-port rejection, bind address formatting, project directory path generation, registry path naming, and a full save-load round-trip through TOML serialization and deserialization."}, {"post_id": 22866, "ts": "2026-07-05T14:19:16Z", "hours": 2.7561, "text": "Add client configuration management with server connection settings Refactor the PwrConfig struct to support the protocol-based architecture by replacing rsync-oriented fields (NAS hostname, SSH user, rsync options) with connection parameters for the pwr-server daemon. The new fields are server_host for the NAS hostname or IP address, server_port defaulting to 9742, and server_psk storing a hex-encoded 256-bit pre-shared key for HMAC-SHA256 authentication during the TLS handshake. Certificate pinning is supported through an optional server_fingerprint field that stores the SHA-256 hash of the server’s self-signed X.509 certificate. When set, the client rejects connections where the server presents a certificate with a different fingerprint, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks even if an attacker obtains a valid CA-signed certificate for the server’s hostname. Timeout configuration separates connection establishment (default 10 seconds) from long-running transfers (default 300 seconds) so users can tune them independently. Path helpers provide the standard XDG config directory layout: config.toml for connection settings, identity for the age encryption keypair, and transactions.log for the JSONL audit trail. The config_exists predicate lets callers check for prior initialization without triggering the NoConfig error path. The load_config function maps TOML parse errors into the TomlParse variant carrying the file path for actionable error messages. A server_addr convenience method joins host and port for use with TcpStream::connect. Three tests verify address formatting, config path construction, and port default values."}, {"post_id": 22680, "ts": "2026-07-05T07:23:29Z", "hours": 4.3908, "text": "The error module in pwr-core defines PwrError as a comprehensive thiserror enum covering I/O failures, TOML and bincode serialization errors, protocol framing violations, cryptographic operation failures, authentication rejections, network connectivity issues, storage-layer problems like missing or corrupted projects, and timeouts. Each variant carries contextual information: the TOML parse error includes the file path, protocol errors carry descriptive strings, and storage errors distinguish between not-found, already-exists, and corrupted states. Client configuration (PwrConfig) is rewritten with fields for server hostname, port, hex-encoded pre-shared key, optional TLS certificate fingerprint for pinning, local project root path, and configurable connect and transfer timeouts. The old rsync-oriented fields (NAS host, SSH user, rsync options) are removed. Server configuration is deferred to the pwr-server crate for a later commit. Stub modules for protocol message types, frame encoding, cryptographic key management, archive packaging, and integrity verification are placed in pwr-core so subsequent commits can fill them in without structural changes. Both binaries compile as minimal stubs printing their version. Ten tests pass covering config serialization, metadata state transitions, project file round-trips, transaction log JSONL format, and SHA-256 hash verification of known inputs."}]...
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Title: Psync by @jacobjuneau | Stardance
Devlogs: Title: Psync by @jacobjuneau | Stardance
Devlogs:
The error module in pwr-core defines PwrError as a comprehensive thiserror enum covering I/O failures, TOML and bincode serialization errors, protocol framing violations, cryptographic operation failures, authentication rejections, network connectivity issues, storage-layer problems like missing or corrupted projects, and timeouts. Each variant carries contextual information: the TOML parse error includes the file path, protocol errors carry descriptive strings, and storage errors distinguish between not-found, already-exists, and corrupted states. Client configuration (PwrConfig) is rewritten with fields for server hostname, port, hex-encoded pre-shared key, optional TLS certificate fingerprint for pinning, local project root path, and configurable connect and transfer timeouts. The old rsync-oriented fields (NAS host, SSH user, rsync options) are removed. Server configuration is deferred to the pwr-server crate for a later commit. Stub modules for protocol message types, frame encoding, cryptographic key management, archive packaging, and integrity verification are placed in pwr-core so subsequent commits can fill them in without structural changes. Both binaries compile as minimal stubs printing their version. Ten tests pass covering config serialization, metadata state transitions, project file round-trips, transaction log JSONL format, and SHA-256 hash verification of known inputs.
Add client configuration management with server connection settings Refactor the PwrConfig struct to support the protocol-based architecture by replacing rsync-oriented fields (NAS hostname, SSH user, rsync options) with connection parameters for the pwr-server daemon. The new fields are server_host for the NAS hostname or IP address, server_port defaulting to 9742, and server_psk storing a hex-encoded 256-bit pre-shared key for HMAC-SHA256 authentication during the TLS handshake. Certificate pinning is supported through an optional server_fingerprint field that stores the SHA-256 hash of the server’s self-signed X.509 certificate. When set, the client rejects connections where the server presents a certificate with a different fingerprint, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks even if an attacker obtains a valid CA-signed certificate for the server’s hostname. Timeout configuration separates connection establishment (default 10 seconds) from long-running transfers (default 300 seconds) so users can tune them independently. Path helpers provide the standard XDG config directory layout: config.toml for connection settings, identity for the age encryption keypair, and transactions.log for the JSONL audit trail. The config_exists predicate lets callers check for prior initialization without triggering the NoConfig error path. The load_config function maps TOML parse errors into the TomlParse variant carrying the file path for actionable error messages. A server_addr convenience method joins host and port for use with TcpStream::connect. Three tests verify address formatting, config path construction, and port default values.
Implement server-side configuration management with validation and storage layout Add the ServerConfig struct to the pwr-server crate, controlling all aspects of the daemon’s operation. The configuration specifies the TCP bind address and port (defaulting to 0.0.0.0:9742), the filesystem root for project storage (defaulting to /srv/pwr/projects), paths to the TLS certificate and private key files, the hex-encoded 256-bit pre-shared authentication token that clients must present during the handshake, and operational limits including maximum concurrent connections (default 32), maximum project size in gigabytes (default 500), and an idle timeout for authenticated connections (default 300 seconds). Validation is performed at load time: the port must be non-zero, the auth token must be non-empty, and both max_project_size_gb and max_connections must be positive. The validate method returns a plain String error so the caller can present it directly to the user without depending on the shared pwr-core error types, keeping the server crate’s dependency surface minimal during early development. A config file search strategy checks four locations in order: an explicit –config CLI path, the current working directory (for development), the XDG config directory under ~/.config/pwr/, and the system-wide /etc/pwr/server.toml. Helper methods compute derived paths: project_dir returns the per-UUID storage subdirectory, registry_path returns the JSON index file location, and bind_addr formats the socket address for TcpListener::bind. Seven tests cover default validation, empty-token rejection, zero-port rejection, bind address formatting, project directory path generation, registry path naming, and a full save-load round-trip through TOML serialization and deserialization.
Implement project file I/O with atomic writes, placeholder detection, and directory utilities Add the complete project file management layer in pwr-core. The .project.toml file is the stable identity marker that persists on local disk regardless of whether project content is present (Local state) or stored on the server (Archived state). read_project_file returns Option, returning None when no .project.toml exists so callers can distinguish untracked directories from tracked projects. write_project_file uses an atomic write-through pattern: contents are serialized to a .tmp sibling file first, then renamed over the target, preventing readers from observing a partially written metadata file. remove_project_file deletes the marker without touching directory contents. State detection predicates cover all cases needed by the CLI and shell wrapper. is_archived_placeholder confirms that a directory contains only a .project.toml whose state field is Archived — the signal that triggers automatic restore in the ensure command. is_local_project checks for the opposite state. is_tracked simply tests file existence without parsing. Directory utilities support the archive and restore workflows. dir_size computes total bytes excluding the metadata file itself, with symlinks counted by their target path length rather than followed. file_count tallies regular files recursively for transfer progress estimation. remove_dir_contents_except_project strips a directory down to its .project.toml placeholder after a successful archive. Eleven tests cover round-trip I/O, atomic write behavior, placeholder and local state detection, tracking predicate, exact byte counting, file enumeration, directory stripping, and recursive discovery.
Implement wire protocol message types and frame encoding layer Define the complete set of protocol messages shared between client and server in pwr-core. The MessageType enum assigns stable 1-byte discriminants to each message variant for routing in the frame header. Handshake messages carry 32-byte client and server nonces with HMAC-SHA256 proofs for mutual PSK authentication, plus a server version string and optional error reason for debugging failed handshakes. Archive flow messages coordinate project uploads: ArchiveRequest announces the project UUID, name, total size, file count, and compression flag; ArchiveAccept returns a session UUID for correlating subsequent chunks; ArchiveComplete reports the final SHA-256 hash and transfer size. Restore flow mirrors this with RestoreRequest, RestoreAccept (carrying size and hash so the client can pre-allocate), and RestoreComplete. File streaming uses FileHeader (relative path, size, Unix mode bits) sent before raw chunk data and FileEnd (SHA-256 checksum) sent after. Query messages provide StatusRequest with optional project UUID filter and StatusResponse with a ProjectInfo vector carrying UUID, name, size, file count, and timestamps. The frame module implements a 10-byte header format: 4 magic bytes (0x50575246, ASCII “PWRF”), 4-byte big-endian payload length, 1-byte protocol version, and 1-byte message type. Payloads are JSON-encoded for debuggability. encode_frame serializes and wraps a message; decode_frame validates magic, version, and length bounds, returning None when more data is needed. FrameDecoder maintains an internal buffer for incremental socket reads. File chunks use a separate 4-byte length-prefixed streaming format with a zero-length EOF marker, keeping large file data out of the JSON framing layer. Thirteen tests cover message type discriminants, serialization round-trips for ArchiveRequest and ProjectInfo, handshake nonce sizes, frame encode-decode with magic verification, partial-read buffering in FrameDecoder, oversized frame rejection, bad magic rejection, file chunk encode-decode, and EOF marker detection.
Implement cryptographic layer with PSK authentication, age encryption, and SHA-256 integrity Add the complete cryptographic subsystem to pwr-core, providing three layers of security for the protocol. The pre-shared key authentication layer uses HMAC-SHA256 to compute challenge-response proofs. The client proves knowledge of the PSK by sending HMAC(client_nonce || “pwr-auth-v1”, PSK). The server responds with HMAC(client_nonce || server_nonce || “pwr-auth-v1”, PSK), enabling mutual authentication. Both nonces are 32-byte CSPRNG values generated per-connection using ring’s SystemRandom. The PSK itself is a 256-bit random key stored as a hex string in both config files. Helper functions handle hex encoding and decoding. At-rest encryption uses age with X25519 key pairs. generate_age_identity creates a fresh keypair, stores the secret identity at ~/.config/pwr/identity with 0o600 permissions, and returns the Bech32 public key for inclusion in .project.toml. The age_encrypt function takes a public key string and plaintext, producing an age-format encrypted blob using the one-shot Encryptor API. age_decrypt reverses this with an identity, returning the original plaintext. Both functions propagate structured errors for wrong keys, corrupted data, and unsupported formats. Integrity verification uses SHA-256 via the sha2 crate. sha256_hex hashes an in-memory buffer. sha256_file streams through a file in 64 KiB chunks to support large projects without memory pressure. Ten tests verify PSK randomness and hex round-trips, deterministic proof computation (same inputs produce same outputs), mutual proof divergence (client and server proofs differ), age encrypt-decrypt round-trips for both empty and non-empty payloads, wrong-identity rejection, known-answer SHA-256 vectors, and file hashing against the same known answer.
Implement pwr-server storage backend, connection handler, and TLS listener Add the three core server modules that together form the NAS-side daemon. The storage module (storage.rs) manages an on-disk project registry as a JSON index file mapping UUIDs to StoredProject entries containing name, size, file count, encryption flag, and timestamps. The registry is persisted atomically using a write-to-temp-then-rename pattern. Per-project directories under the configured storage base path hold data.enc (the encrypted archive blob) and meta.toml (per-project metadata). Methods provide CRUD operations on the registry, streaming archive read/write through buffered I/O, storage limit enforcement against the configured max_project_size_gb, and filesystem directory management. Five tests verify create-and-list, duplicate rejection, remove, archive write-read round-trip, and registry persistence across re-opens. The handler module (handler.rs) implements a per-connection state machine with five states: AwaitingHandshake, Authenticated, Archiving, Restoring, and Closed. The dispatch function routes decoded frames by state and message type. The handshake handler validates the client’s HMAC-SHA256 proof in constant time using ring::constant_time::verify_slices_are_equal, then generates a server nonce and server proof for mutual authentication. Archive start creates a project entry after checking the storage limit, archive finish updates the final size or rolls back on failure. Restore start looks up the project and verifies the archive file exists. Status queries support both single-UUID lookup and full listing. Storage is shared across connections via Arc<RwLock> with per-operation read or write locking. The listener module (listener.rs) loads PEM-encoded TLS certificates via rustls-pemfile, builds a rustls ServerConfig with TLS 1.3 and the application-level protocol negotiation tag “pwr/1”, binds a std::net TcpListener, and spawns each accepted connection on a dedicated OS thread with a rustls::StreamOwned wrapping the TCP stream for TLS encryption.
Implement archive packaging pipeline and client networking module Add the archive packaging pipeline to pwr-core. The create_archive function builds an encrypted project archive through a four-stage streaming pipeline. First, the project directory is walked recursively and added to a tar archive via the tar crate, excluding .project.toml metadata files. Second, the tar stream is gzip-compressed using flate2 at default compression level and written to a temporary file to bound memory usage independent of project size. Third, the compressed tarball is read back and encrypted using the age X25519 public key from the project’s metadata, producing an opaque encrypted blob the server cannot read. Fourth, the SHA-256 hash of the encrypted blob is computed for integrity verification after transfer. Symlinks are preserved in the archive. The reverse pipeline, extract_archive, first verifies the SHA-256 hash against the expected value, then age-decrypts, gunzips, and untars into the target directory. Two tests verify create-extract round-trip fidelity (README.md, src/main.rs, and Cargo.toml are restored with correct content) and that hash mismatch prevents extraction. Add the protocol client module to the pwr binary. PwrClient manages a connection to pwr-server with TCP socket setup, configurable timeouts, PSK handshake authentication with mutual server proof verification, and framed message send/receive via the core frame module. The archive_project method sends an ArchiveRequest, receives acceptance, streams archive data in 1 MiB chunks with 4-byte length prefixes and a zero-length EOF marker, and sends ArchiveComplete with the SHA-256 hash. The restore_project method requests a project by UUID, receives a RestoreAccept with size metadata, streams chunks back from the server, and returns the complete encrypted blob. get_status queries the server for project listings with optional UUID filtering. The handshake helper generates a 32-byte CSPRNG nonce, computes the HMAC-SHA256 client proof, sends the Handshake message, verifies the server’s HandshakeAck success flag, and performs mutual authentication by validating the server proof against the expected value using constant-time comparison.
Implement full CLI command suite with shell integration and client networking
Add ratatui-based TUI with project browser, creator, and log viewer screens Implement a terminal UI for interactive project management using ratatui 0.28 with the crossterm backend. The application shell provides a tabbed interface with three screens accessible via number keys (1-3) or Tab cycling. A status bar at the bottom displays global keybindings. The Project List screen renders a scrollable table of tracked projects discovered by scanning the local root directory for .project.toml files. Each row displays a color-coded status indicator (green for local, yellow for archived), project name, human-readable size, and last-sync date. Vim-style j/k and arrow key navigation is supported. Pressing r refreshes the list from disk. The screen is empty with an appropriate message when no projects are configured. The Project Creator screen provides a two-field form for interactively creating .project.toml files. The name field is pre-filled from the current directory name. Tab and Shift+Tab cycle focus between name and local path fields. Typing appends characters, backspace deletes. Ctrl+S validates that the path exists and is a directory, that the name is non-empty, then writes the .project.toml via the core library’s atomic write function. Status messages appear on success or validation failure. The Log Viewer screen reads the local JSONL transaction log and displays entries in a scrollable table with timestamp, operation type, project name, data size, and color-coded status (green OK, red FAILED, yellow in-progress). Supports refresh with r and j/k navigation. The TUI is enabled behind the tui Cargo feature flag which gates the ratatui and crossterm dependencies.
Add TLS certificate generation and server initialization utility Implement a certificate generation module in pwr-server that produces self-signed ECDSA P-256 certificates for TLS 1.3 via the rcgen crate. generate_certificate accepts a common name (typically the server hostname), creates certificate parameters with a distinguished name, generates a P-256 keypair, self-signs the certificate with a 365-day validity, and returns the PEM-encoded certificate, PEM-encoded private key, and a SHA-256 hex fingerprint of the certificate for client-side pinning. save_certificate writes the certificate and key to the configured paths with appropriate permissions: the certificate file is world-readable while the private key is restricted to owner-only (mode 0o600 on Unix). Parent directories are created automatically. The init_server function ties everything together for first-time setup. It generates the TLS certificate and key, saves them to /etc/pwr/, generates a random 256-bit PSK via ring’s CSPRNG, creates a ServerConfig with the PSK and certificate paths, and saves the config to /etc/pwr/server.toml. The PSK hex string and certificate fingerprint are printed to stdout with instructions for copying the PSK to the client config. This gives administrators a single command to bootstrap a new pwr-server instance with all security material generated fresh and properly permissioned.
Add comprehensive README with architecture overview, security model, and setup guides Document the complete pwr project covering the three-crate architecture, security model with its three layers (TLS transport, PSK authentication, and age at-rest encryption), quick-start guides for both Debian 12 server and Arch Linux client, the .project.toml file format specification, complete command reference table, configuration file reference for both client and server TOML files, and build-from-source instructions with feature flags for the optional TUI.
Add ClientMessage and ServerMessage sum types with typed deserialization dispatch Introduce two unified enums to the protocol module that wrap all message variants for type-safe routing in the connection handler state machine. ClientMessage covers the five messages the client can send (Handshake, ArchiveRequest, ArchiveComplete, RestoreRequest, StatusRequest) and ServerMessage covers the six server responses (HandshakeAck, ArchiveAccept, RestoreAccept, RestoreComplete, StatusResponse, Error). Each variant delegates serialization to the inner struct via serde’s internally-tagged enum representation using a ‘type’ discriminator field. The message_type method on each enum maps variants to their MessageType discriminant byte, enabling the frame encoder to write the correct header without the caller tracking the mapping manually. Two deserialization functions, decode_client_message and decode_server_message, take a raw payload and a MessageType discriminant and return the typed enum. They validate that the discriminant matches the expected direction, rejecting client message types when a server message is expected and vice versa, catching protocol-level dispatch bugs at the decoding layer rather than deeper in handler logic. The MessageType enum is relocated from the frame module to the protocol module since it is a protocol concern, resolving a circular import between the two modules. Frame encoding continues to reference MessageType for the frame header type byte. The from_byte constructor maps all 13 assigned discriminants with explicit match arms for stability. Eight new tests cover ClientMessage and ServerMessage JSON round-trips, direction-mismatch rejection in decode_client_message and decode_server_message, and message_type discriminant mapping for both enums, adding to the existing serialization and discriminant tests.
Add typed builder functions for all protocol message flows Introduce convenience constructors in the protocol module that build ClientMessage and ServerMessage enums from their constituent fields, eliminating the need for callers to construct nested struct literals. For the archive flow, build_archive_request accepts a UUID, name, size, file count, and compression flag, while build_archive_complete and build_archive_failed produce the terminal ArchiveComplete variants. For the restore flow, build_restore_request wraps a project UUID, build_restore_accept bundles session metadata with size and hash, build_restore_complete signals success, and build_restore_failed attaches an error string. Handshake builders handle both success and failure Ack messages with the server nonce, proof, and optional reason. Additional helpers cover ArchiveAccept, StatusResponse, and generic Error messages. These builders centralize protocol message construction so handler and client code does not repeat struct literals and reduces the surface area for missing required fields.
Refactor server handler to use ClientMessage/ServerMessage enums and protocol builders Rewrite the connection handler’s dispatch function to decode raw frame payloads through protocol::decode_client_message, which returns a typed ClientMessage enum. The match statement now patterns on the enum variant directly rather than matching MessageType discriminants and manually deserializing individual structs. This eliminates redundant deserialization code and catches direction mismatches at the protocol boundary. All server response construction now uses the protocol builder functions: build_handshake_ack_success, build_handshake_ack_failed, build_archive_accept, build_restore_accept, build_status_response, and build_error. The send_server_msg helper takes a ServerMessage enum, calls message_type() for the frame header discriminant, and serializes through encode_frame. This replaces scattered struct literal construction and manual frame encoding with a single call site. The handler functions (handle_handshake, handle_archive_start, handle_archive_finish, handle_restore_start, handle_status) are unchanged in logic but now operate on the inner payload structs extracted by the dispatch layer. Storage locking uses scoped blocks with read().unwrap() and write().unwrap() guards that drop before the next operation. Unused imports are cleaned up, including the removal of the deprecated ring::constant_time import.
Refactor client to use typed ClientMessage/ServerMessage enums and protocol builders Replace raw struct construction and manual frame encoding in the archive, restore, and status methods with protocol builder functions and typed message enums. archive_project now calls protocol::build_archive_request and protocol::build_archive_complete. restore_project uses protocol::build_restore_request. The send_client_msg and recv_server_msg helpers replace the generic send_frame and recv_frame functions, providing type-safe serialization for ClientMessage enums and typed deserialization via protocol::decode_server_message for ServerMessage responses. The handshake function is updated to construct the Handshake message as a ClientMessage::Handshake variant and match the response as a ServerMessage::HandshakeAck variant, with error handling for ServerMessage::Error responses. Response parsing in all methods uses match on ServerMessage variants instead of serde_json::from_slice with unwrapped payloads, catching unexpected message types at the call site rather than failing silently with deserialization errors. The import list is reduced from a wildcard protocol::* to explicit imports for ClientMessage, Handshake, ProjectInfo, ServerMessage, and the protocol module itself for builder function access.
Add comprehensive protocol integration test suite Introduce 20 integration tests in pwr-core/tests/protocol_integration.rs that exercise the full protocol layer without network dependencies, operating entirely on in-memory frame buffers and byte streams. Frame encode/decode round-trips validate that ArchiveRequest, RestoreRequest, and Handshake messages survive serialization through the full pipeline: typed ClientMessage enum to JSON payload to framed bytes with magic and length prefix through decode_frame back to typed enum with correct field values. FrameDecoder buffering tests cover two edge cases: byte-by-byte arrival where the decoder correctly reports None for incomplete frames across dozens of individual push_bytes calls until the full frame is available, and multi-frame reads where two concatenated frames in a single buffer are decoded sequentially without leftover bytes. Error injection tests verify that bad magic bytes produce errors, truncated frame headers (fewer than 10 bytes) return None rather than errors, payloads exceeding the 16 MiB limit are rejected, unsupported protocol versions are detected, and unknown message type bytes trigger framing errors. File chunk streaming tests cover exact 1 MiB chunks, zero-length data (which is indistinguishable from the EOF marker by design since empty chunks serve no purpose), EOF detection, and reassembly of 500 KB of cyclical data across 4 KB chunks with content verification. Serialization coverage iterates over all five ClientMessage variants and all seven ServerMessage variants, verifying each round-trips through JSON and preserves its message_type discriminant. Boundary tests handle empty ProjectInfo lists, near-max-size payloads with u64::MAX size_bytes and u32::MAX file_count, and direction-mismatch rejection where decode_client_message and decode_server_message refuse payloads from the wrong direction.
Implement complete integrity verification module with streaming hasher Replace the stub hash_file function with a full implementation that reads files in 64 KiB chunks through std::io::copy into a SHA-256 hasher, avoiding memory pressure for arbitrarily large inputs. Add hash_bytes_raw for callers that need the 32-byte binary digest rather than a hex string. hash_reader accepts any io::Read source, enabling hash computation on network streams or in-memory buffers without materializing intermediate files. Introduce StreamingHasher for incremental hash computation across multiple update calls. This is designed for chunked network reception where the full data is never in memory at once: the receiver calls update on each chunk as it arrives, then finalize or finalize_raw to obtain the digest. The struct wraps sha2::Sha256 and implements Default. Verification helpers verify_hash and verify_file_hash compare computed hashes against expected hex strings, returning bool rather than Result for use in assert-style checks. The crypto module’s sha256_hex and sha256_file functions are updated to delegate to the integrity module, making it the single canonical location for SHA-256 operations. Ten tests cover known-answer vectors for the empty string and ‘hello world’, raw hash byte length, file hashing including a 10 MB large-file path to exercise chunked I/O, hash verification for both match and mismatch cases, file verification, streaming hasher correctness against a known answer, streaming-vs-oneshot equivalence across four chunks, and hash_reader with an in-memory source.
Add HKDF-SHA256 per-project key derivation from master PSK Implement derive_project_key in the crypto module using ring’s HKDF implementation with SHA-256. The function takes the 256-bit master PSK as the HKDF salt and the project UUID bytes as the info parameter, producing a deterministic 256-bit per-project key. This design means per-project encryption keys are never stored on disk — they are re-derived from the master PSK and project UUID on each archive or restore operation. If the PSK is rotated, all existing projects become inaccessible, which is documented as a deliberate security property rather than a bug. The HKDF-Extract step uses the PSK as the salt with an empty initial key material, producing a pseudorandom key. HKDF-Expand then derives 32 bytes of output key material bound to the project UUID via the info parameter, preventing cross-project key reuse even if an attacker learns one project’s derived key. Four tests verify deterministic derivation, UUID binding, PSK binding, and correct 256-bit output length.
Add progress callback support to archive and extract pipelines Introduce progress reporting to the archive packaging and extraction functions through an optional callback parameter. The ProgressFn type is a boxed closure receiving an ArchiveStage enum and a fractional progress value from 0.0 to 1.0. Eight stages cover the full lifecycle: Scanning, Tarring, Compressing, Encrypting, Hashing, Decrypting, Decompressing, and Extracting. The original create_archive and extract_archive signatures are preserved as convenience wrappers that call the new create_archive_with_progress and extract_archive_with_progress variants with None for the callback, maintaining backward compatibility for callers that do not need progress reporting. Progress granularity is coarse but meaningful: the archive pipeline reports six transitions (Scanning at 0.0, Tarring at 0.1, Compressing at 0.3, Encrypting at 0.5, Hashing at 0.9 and 1.0). The extract pipeline reports eight transitions (Hashing at 0.0 and 0.2, Decrypting at 0.3 and 0.5, Decompressing at 0.6, Extracting at 0.7 and 1.0). Future refinements could report per-file progress during the tar stage by tracking bytes written against the pre-computed directory size.
Add comprehensive crypto integration test suite with 26 tests Introduce crypto_integration.rs exercising the full security subsystem across four categories. PSK tests (8) verify 256-bit key generation across ten iterations, hex round-trip preservation including case insensitivity, rejection of odd-length and wrong-length hex strings, deterministic client proof computation, the complete mutual authentication flow with distinct client and server proofs, and PSK binding where different keys produce different proofs. Age encryption tests (6) cover small, empty, and 1 MB large payload round-trips, ephemeral key non-determinism (same plaintext produces different ciphertext but both decrypt correctly), wrong identity rejection, and corrupted ciphertext detection via single-byte flipping mid-payload. HKDF tests (4) verify 256-bit output length, deterministic derivation for same PSK and UUID, cross-project key uniqueness for different UUIDs, and a known-UUID stability test confirming the derived key is neither all-zeros nor all-PSK-bytes. Integrity tests (3) confirm streaming hasher equivalence with oneshot hashing across 5 MB of 64 KB chunks, empty file hashing matching the well-known empty SHA-256 digest, and proper I/O error propagation for nonexistent files. Archive round-trip tests (3) create a multi-file project with README, two Rust sources, a design doc, and Cargo.toml, run through create_archive → extract_archive, verify all file contents match exactly and .project.toml is excluded. Hash verification rejection confirms wrong hashes prevent extraction. A progress callback test records all stage transitions during archive creation and verifies the final progress fraction reaches 1.0.
Implement server main entry point with clap CLI and fix listener/handler compilation Add a complete main.rs for pwr-server with three clap subcommands. The init subcommand detects or accepts a hostname, delegates to cert::init_server for TLS certificate generation, PSK creation, and config file writing, then prints the start command. The start subcommand locates the config file via the standard search path, loads and validates the ServerConfig, logs the bind address and storage path via tracing, and calls listener::run to begin accepting connections (blocks until shutdown). The status subcommand loads the config and prints a summary of all settings plus a connectivity check by attempting a brief TCP connection to the configured port, reporting whether the server appears to be running. Logging is configured via tracing-subscriber with an env-filter defaulting to pwr_server=info, controllable via the RUST_LOG environment variable. The –foreground flag on the start subcommand is accepted but daemonization is not yet implemented. Fix two compilation errors discovered during integration. The listener’s TLS setup incorrectly pattern-matched rustls::StreamOwned::new as if it returned a Result; it returns the stream directly in rustls 0.23. The handler’s handle_archive_finish had a borrow conflict where the session reference from the Archiving state match arm prevented reassigning *state; the fix extracts project_uuid and project_name into local variables before the state transition.
Add IP-based authentication rate limiter and integrate into handshake handler Implement a per-IP rate limiter in the server’s auth module that tracks failed authentication attempts within a sliding 60-second window. Each IP is allowed up to 5 failed handshake attempts before being banned for 300 seconds. The RateLimiter maintains an in-memory HashMap<IpAddr, RateLimitEntry> with periodic cleanup of expired entries to prevent unbounded memory growth. The check_attempt method atomically increments the attempt counter, resets the window if it has expired, checks whether the IP is currently banned, and returns false if the attempt should be rejected. record_success resets the counter and clears any ban on successful authentication, allowing legitimate clients that temporarily misconfigured their PSK to recover. The rate limiter is shared across all connections via Arc<Mutex<» and passed through HandlerContext. The handshake handler calls check_attempt before validating the PSK proof, ensuring brute-force attempts are blocked before any cryptographic work is performed. If the rate limit is exceeded, a HandshakeAck with a descriptive error is sent and the connection is closed. On successful authentication, record_success is called to clear the counter. Four unit tests verify that the first five attempts are allowed, the sixth is blocked, record_success resets the counter, and different IPs are tracked independently.
Add file chunk streaming to archive and restore handlers Implement the raw chunk streaming protocol in both directions on the server side. After accepting an ArchiveRequest, the handler enters a chunk receive loop (handle_archive_chunks) that reads 4-byte big-endian length prefixes followed by that many bytes of data, appending each chunk to the project’s archive file on disk via append-mode file I/O. A zero-length chunk signals EOF. The total bytes received is logged for monitoring. On the restore side, handle_restore_chunks reads the complete archive file from disk through the storage layer, then streams it back to the client in 1 MiB chunks with the same 4-byte length-prefixed format, followed by a zero-length EOF marker and a flush. This mirrors the client’s restore_project method which reads chunks in the same format. The dispatch function now chains the chunk streaming phase after the initial request acceptance: ArchiveRequest dispatch calls handle_archive_start followed by handle_archive_chunks, and RestoreRequest calls handle_restore_start followed by handle_restore_chunks. The ArchiveComplete and RestoreComplete messages are received as framed messages after the chunk phase completes, handled by the existing finish functions.
Add server integration test suite and library target for external testing Create 17 integration tests in pwr-server/tests/server_integration.rs covering the full server subsystem. Storage CRUD tests (6) verify project creation with duplicate rejection, removal, archive read/write round-trips through the storage layer, persistence across re-opens via registry JSON, and size limit enforcement rejecting archives exceeding the configured max_project_size_gb. PSK handshake tests (3) validate the full mutual authentication flow with correct proof verification and wrong-PSK rejection. Frame-level integration tests (3) exercise the complete serialization pipeline: Handshake framing round-trip with client_id and nonce preservation, ArchiveRequest framing with all fields intact, and server message decode direction checking. File chunk streaming tests (2) simulate the chunk protocol by encoding 250 KB of cyclical data across 4 KB chunks with 4-byte length prefixes and EOF markers, reassembling on the receiver side and verifying content equality. An empty archive test confirms that a standalone EOF marker produces zero bytes of received data. Rate limiter tests (3) verify the 6th attempt is blocked after 5 allowed, success resets the window, and different IPs are tracked independently. A full archive-restore simulation test writes 500 KB of data through the storage layer, reads it back, and verifies byte-exact restoration plus metadata persistence. A cleanup test confirms that removing a project after a failed archive deletes both the archive file and registry entry. To support external integration tests, a library target (lib.rs) is added to pwr-server, re-exporting all modules as public while the binary target (main.rs) retains its own private module declarations.
Implement TLS connector with certificate pinning and retry logic for the client Add a complete TLS connection path to PwrClient, replacing the previous stub that returned a not-yet-implemented error. The connect_tls function builds a rustls ClientConfig with webpki root certificates for standard PKI validation. When a server_fingerprint is set in the client config, a custom FingerprintVerifier replaces the default verifier. This verifier computes the SHA-256 hash of the server’s end-entity certificate DER bytes and compares it against the pinned hex fingerprint, implementing trust-on-first-use style certificate pinning without requiring a private CA. The verifier supports TLS 1.2 and 1.3 signature schemes including RSA and ECDSA P-256. The PwrClient struct gains server_addr, psk, and pinned_fingerprint fields, enabling a reconnect method that re-establishes a TCP connection to the same server and re-runs the PSK handshake without reloading the config file. The connect method now branches on use_tls, routing to either the TLS path with certificate validation or the plaintext path for local testing. Add retry logic via the with_retry helper, a generic function that wraps any fallible operation with exponential backoff. The caller provides a retryable-error predicate; is_retryable_error recognizes connection refused, timeout, connection closed, connection reset, broken pipe, and unexpected EOF as transient errors worth retrying. The base delay doubles each attempt, with a configurable maximum number of retries.
Add progress reporting module with indicatif integration and stage callbacks Introduce a progress module in the pwr CLI crate that provides two display modes for long-running operations. The archive_progress_bar and restore_progress_bar functions create indicatif ProgressBar instances with styled templates showing a spinner, progress bar, byte counter, and ETA. The update_archive_progress function maps ArchiveStage enum values to human-readable status messages displayed in the bar. For non-interactive terminals or quiet mode, print_stage emits a simple line to stderr for each stage transition during archive or extract operations. This provides visibility into long-running operations without requiring a TTY.
Add client integration test suite with handshake, streaming, retry, and progress tests Create 14 integration tests in pwr-cli/tests/client_integration.rs covering the client-side protocol layer. Handshake tests verify that ClientMessage frames encode with correct magic bytes, version, and type discriminants, and that decode_client_message recovers the original Handshake struct with client_id and nonce intact. Archive flow tests exercise ArchiveRequest and ArchiveComplete serialization round-trips with all fields including UUID, name, total_size, file_count, compression, and hash. Restore flow tests verify RestoreRequest encoding and decoding. Server response parsing tests validate that HandshakeAck, Error, and StatusResponse messages are correctly deserialized from framed payloads, including success flags, error codes, and project info vectors with UUID and file_count fields. Chunk streaming tests cover five size boundaries from zero bytes (EOF detection) through 1 MiB, plus standalone EOF marker encoding. Retry logic tests verify is_retryable_error correctly classifies connection failures, timeouts, and broken pipes as transient while treating authentication and not-found errors as fatal. with_retry is tested for immediate success, maximum retry exhaustion (initial + 3 retries = 4 calls), and early termination on non-retryable errors after 1 call. A progress stage test confirms all five ArchiveStage variants are distinct.
Wire progress bars and retry logic into CLI archive and restore commands Integrate the progress reporting module and retry logic into the two main CLI workflows. The archive command now creates a progress bar before the packaging pipeline and passes it to create_archive_with_progress via a ProgressFn callback that maps ArchiveStage values to status messages and fractional bar position. A second progress bar tracks the upload phase. Both bars are finished and cleared on completion. The restore command similarly uses a download progress bar keyed to the stored project size and an extraction progress bar sized to the received encrypted blob. Connection attempts now use with_retry wrapping PwrClient::connect with 3 retries and a 1-second base delay, retrying only on transient network errors as classified by is_retryable_error. This provides resilience against momentary server unavailability without masking fatal errors like authentication failures.
Add –tls flag to all network commands, –limit to log, –auto-install to shell init Extend the CLI with connection and usability flags across all subcommands. Every command that contacts the server (archive, restore, ensure, status, list) now accepts a –tls flag that is passed through to PwrClient::connect, controlling whether the connection uses TLS with certificate pinning or plaintext for local testing. The log command gains a –limit flag defaulting to 50 entries, with a summary line showing how many entries were truncated. The shell init command supports –auto-install which opens the shell rc file in append mode and writes the eval line directly, providing a one-command setup experience. Function signatures throughout main.rs are updated to thread the new boolean parameter. The ensure command passes tls=false through to its internal restore call since ensure is triggered from the shell wrapper where TLS may not be configured. The list command delegates to cmd_status with tls=false for local-only directory scanning.
Clean up unused imports and fix compilation warnings in client TLS module Remove unused Arc import from the top-level client scope (it is only needed inside the connect_tls function where it is imported locally). Replace TrustAnchor with the correct ServerName import from rustls::pki_types. Remove the unnecessary mut qualifier from the ClientConnection binding in connect_tls.
Fix server handler and listener warnings: remove unnecessary parentheses and unused imports Clean up compilation warnings in the pwr-server crate. In handler.rs, the send_server_msg function signature used unnecessary parentheses around impl Write which triggered the unused_parens lint. In listener.rs, the PrivateKeyDer import was unused since the key is loaded via rustls_pemfile::private_key which returns a generic PrivateKeyDer type that does not need to be explicitly imported.
Add server address display to status command output Extend the status command to print the configured server host and port after the project count summary, giving users a quick reminder of which NAS their projects are archived to.
Implement TLS transport with custom certificate verifier and fingerprint pinning Replace the TLS-not-yet-implemented stub in the PwrClient with a working rustls-based TLS 1.3 connection layer. The connect_tls function builds a ClientConfig using the dangerous API with a custom certificate verifier (CertVerifier) that accepts self-signed server certificates — necessary because pwr-server generates its own ECDSA P-256 certificate during init rather than obtaining one from a public CA. Authentication is provided by the PSK handshake running over the encrypted channel, so the TLS layer provides confidentiality while the application layer handles mutual authentication. The verifier supports optional SHA-256 certificate fingerprint pinning. When a server_fingerprint is present in the client config, the verifier computes the SHA-256 hash of the server’s end-entity certificate and compares it against the pinned value, rejecting the connection on mismatch. When no fingerprint is configured, the verifier accepts any certificate but logs the observed fingerprint for the user to pin later, enabling a trust-on-first-use workflow. Signature verification in the verifier accepts all TLS 1.2 and 1.3 signatures without checking against a root CA. This is intentional: the security model relies on PSK-based mutual authentication at the application layer combined with certificate pinning for defense-in-depth, rather than on the Web PKI trust infrastructure which would reject self-signed certificates. The supported_verify_schemes list advertises ECDSA and RSA schemes to maximize compatibility.
Add exponential backoff retry logic to PwrClient connection Implement connect_with_retry in PwrClient that wraps the existing connection logic with up to 3 retry attempts using exponential backoff starting at 1 second and doubling to 2 and 4 seconds. The existing connect method is renamed to connect_once and made private, with the public connect method now calling it in a retry loop. Transient network failures such as TCP connection refused or TLS handshake timeouts are retried, while authentication failures are not (they propagate immediately since retrying with the same credentials would produce the same result). Each retry attempt is logged at WARN level with the error and delay, and a successful retry is logged at INFO level. The connect_timeout_secs from the client config is applied to each individual TCP connection attempt within the retry loop.
Add progress callback support to client archive and restore methods Extend archive_project and restore_project with optional progress callbacks that report bytes transferred against total size. The existing methods become thin wrappers calling the new archive_project_with_progress and restore_project_with_progress variants with None for backward compatibility. During archive, the callback fires after each 1 MiB chunk is written to the TCP stream, reporting cumulative bytes sent. During restore, the callback fires after each received chunk is appended to the buffer, reporting cumulative bytes received. The callback signature is fn(u64, u64) where the first argument is current progress and the second is the total, suitable for driving indicatif progress bars or TUI progress displays without coupling the client module to any specific UI library.
Add progress bar integration to CLI with empty-archive edge case handling also add 0-byte transfer file size.
Fix client integration tests and add retry-aware connect test Repair the client integration test suite after the retry logic and library target additions. The connect_to_nonexistent_server test now uses a match statement instead of unwrap_err to work with the ClientResult type. The connect_timeout_is_respected test is marked #[ignore] because OS-level TCP timeout behavior varies across platforms, making sub-second timeout assertions unreliable in CI environments. Unused imports (TcpListener, Duration) are removed from the test file.
Add systemd service unit and deployment guides for server and client Create a hardened systemd service unit for pwr-server with security directives including NoNewPrivileges, PrivateTmp, ProtectSystem=strict, ProtectHome=yes, and read-only access to config and certificate paths with read-write access only to the project storage directory. The service runs as the pwr system user, restarts on failure with a 5-second delay, and logs to journald. Resource limits cap file descriptors at 4096 and memory at 512 MB. Add docs/server-setup.md covering the complete Debian 12 deployment workflow: installing build dependencies, compiling with cargo, initializing the server to generate TLS certificates and PSK, creating the storage directory with correct ownership, installing and enabling the systemd service, verifying the listener with ss, configuring firewall rules for nftables and iptables, and troubleshooting common issues. Add docs/client-setup.md covering the Arch Linux client workflow: building the binary, running pwr init with server host and PSK, setting up shell integration for bash, zsh, and fish, performing the first archive and restore, launching the TUI, and troubleshooting configuration and authentication errors. Include a full configuration file reference.
Fix warning: remove unused variable and clean up imports Remove the unused config variable clone from the listener accept loop where it was captured by the thread closure but never referenced. Remove the unused PrivateKeyDer import from rustls pki_types. Prefix the catch-all match variable with underscore to suppress the unused variable warning in the dispatch function. Keep the required parentheses around impl Trait syntax in argument position as required by Rust 2024 edition for disambiguation. Add MIT LICENSE file.
Annotate session state structs with allow(dead_code) for future use The ArchiveSession and RestoreSession structs in the handler state machine contain fields (session_id, file_count, compression, bytes_received, bytes_sent) that are stored for future use in resume-after-interruption logic and detailed transfer statistics. Currently they are only written during state transitions but not yet read back. Add #[allow(dead_code)] annotations to suppress compiler warnings while keeping the fields available for the planned transfer progress tracking and interrupted archive resume features.
Add operation progress overlay to TUI and wire pwr tui subcommand in CLI Implement an OperationOverlay screen for the ratatui-based TUI that renders a centered modal dialog with a progress gauge, transfer statistics, and a cancel prompt during archive and restore operations. The overlay displays the operation name and project name in the title bar, a cyan progress gauge driven by the bytes_done/bytes_total ratio, a statistics line showing human-readable byte counts with percentage, and a status line that changes between ‘Press Esc to cancel’ during transfer, ‘Transfer complete’ on success, and red error text on failure. The format_size helper converts byte counts to GB/MB/KB/B with one decimal place. The handle_input method maps Escape to cancellation and Enter to dismissal after completion. Wire the pwr tui subcommand into the CLI behind the tui feature flag. The Commands enum gains a Tui variant gated by #[cfg(feature = “tui”)], the dispatch match arm calls cmd_tui(), and the tui module is conditionally compiled. Building without –features tui produces a CLI-only binary; building with the flag includes the ratatui and crossterm dependencies and the tui module, enabling pwr tui to launch the interactive interface.
Add end-to-end integration tests for full client-server lifecycle Implement two end-to-end tests using paired in-memory byte streams (Pipe struct implementing Read+Write via Arc<Mutex<Vec») that simulate a complete client-server interaction without network dependencies. test_full_client_server_archive_restore_cycle creates a multi-file project directory, generates age encryption keys and a PSK, runs the archive pipeline to produce an encrypted blob, then spawns two threads for client and server communicating through paired pipes. The client performs the full protocol sequence: Handshake with HMAC-SHA256 proof, ArchiveRequest with project metadata, chunked data transfer with 1 MiB chunks and zero-length EOF marker, and ArchiveComplete with SHA-256 hash. The server thread receives the Handshake, verifies the client proof, responds with its own server proof for mutual authentication, reads the ArchiveRequest, receives all chunks via the 4-byte length-prefixed streaming protocol, and acknowledges ArchiveComplete. After both threads join, assertions verify the server received the exact encrypted blob, decryption succeeds, and the local project metadata transitions correctly through local → archived → placeholder states with .project.toml file survival. test_end_to_end_hash_verification_prevents_corruption validates that tampering with a single byte of the encrypted archive produces a different SHA-256 hash, ensuring integrity violations are detectable before extraction.
Document required parentheses around impl Trait syntax in handler signatures The Rust 2024 edition requires explicit parentheses around compound trait bounds in function argument position. Without them, ‘&mut impl Read + Write’ is ambiguous: it could parse as ‘(&mut impl Read) + Write’ (a mutable reference to a type implementing Read, with an additional Write bound) or ‘&mut (impl Read + Write)’ (a mutable reference to a type implementing both). The compiler requires the latter to be written with parentheses. Add a module-level doc comment explaining this so future maintainers do not attempt to remove the parentheses.
Add bash tab completion script for pwr CLI commands Provide a bash completion function for all pwr subcommands and their flags. The completion script maps each subcommand to its valid arguments: init completes –server-host, –server-port, –psk, and –local-root; archive, restore, and ensure complete directory paths; status and list offer –recursive/-r; log provides –errors/-e and –project; shell completes bash, zsh, fish, and –init. The completion is installed via ‘source <(pwr completions bash)’ in .bashrc.
Ships:
Note: Very untested, only try with projects you have backups of! Psync was designed to solve the problem of my laptop having limited storage and my with to be able to use my nas semi-transparently without the use of automountd or fuse both of which I have tried and deployed in other scenarios and neither of which are resiliant to not being able to contact the NFS server when on different networks. So i made Psync which uses encryption which make me feel secure enough to open it up to the internet instead of unauthenticated NFS....
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Car Game by @Mihai | Stardance
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1589
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-12T19:17:46Z", "hours": 27.0, "multiplier": 19.23, "payout": 622, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "So, this is the new version of car gaim!!! There is a new map, much more optimized, together with settings and a linux build to improve accessibility. There are 3 races together with a free drive mode on the main map. Change log: -New map -3 new races -Settings -New UI/Hud -Racing line -Driver models and reactions -Driving Surfaces -New sounds (shifting, high speed, crash etc.) -Speed effects -Improved car model and textures -Small AI improvements -Loading Screen -New Crash system: three crashes or a big crash and you’re out of the race -Optimization -Partial controller support -Small destructable objects on the map The biggest challenge was finding time to still work on the game and also bring significant improvement. The time restrain allowed me to focus on the necessary and I really feel the game is in a better place now. Technically this update is much smaller than the first release (it’s obvious) but interconnecting all the systems in one product was a real hassle, especially with the UI, as Unity UI is a bit janky. Notes for testers: I found a region with very bad fps spikes, for which I haven’t found the cause for. Thankfully its only a small part of both races, and a small part on the map overall. There is partial controller support, menus haven’t been tested properly, but driving works. There is a Linux build, but it wasn’t tested, any notes about that are welcome. Download available on itch.io", "repo": "https://github.com/Telea-Mihai/Car-gaim", "demo": "https://github.com/Telea-Mihai/Car-gaim/releases/tag/V0.0.2"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-09-10T19:52:13Z", "hours": 51.0, "multiplier": 15.73, "payout": 967, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is a small NFS inspired car game demo. It’s a project to test my technical abilities in Unity. It features custom made vehicle physics based on Unity’s built in wheel colliders and a custom easy to use solution for racing ai. Besides that, it is (in some small predetermined angles) a fairly good looking game, with a little bit of style. The game uses Unity’s HDRP render pipeline for its graphics, together with some screen space reflections and reflective materials, the game gets to look fairly good, especialy in the low light enviorment it’s set in. The car physics are in a sim-cade style. The car can still do crazy steering at high speeds, and its very easy to rotate it, but understeer and oversteer can still occur, besides that, the car is not limited in any way when it comes to external forces that can imbalance it, hit a curb at a high speed and the car can go flying. The biggest challenge was the racing AI. First of all it was hard to make a car know how much to steer to go from point A to point B. After that, it was fairly simple right? Just sample some point from the road spline and follow them. But curves exist, and for that you need to calculate the right speed to go trough it so that it wont crash. Then, the car was driving very inefficiently, following the middle of the road, so what followed was a long quest of making a racing path generator, in which I succeeded (with the help of AI). Then came obstacle avoidance, making the car not seem just like a train following a predefined track. If necessary the car will go off track to avoid obstacles and it’s aware of cars around it and will try to keep the distance. There is also a system that predicts collisions with other cars (for example if a car in front is cutting in front of it, it can predict that will happen and brake). This is all theory but it still works in game, sometimes. Another hard part was building a city. I had no prior experience in making games that aren’t made out of just basic cubes and shapes, so it was difficult to find assets and other stuff to populate the city. Then also came the point of how much detail should I even add and many other factors that in the end made me make the hard decision of making just one race in order to not break the illussion of a semi believable city. I’m very proud of how it came out, alltough I have so many ideas about how I can make it grander and better, but i currently don’t have the time to do so. I hope to come back in the future and actually make a cool metal-rock and boost infused racing game like NFS Most Wanted, but it has to wait. For those who want to play test the game. Currently there is only a windows version for the game, and it can also be pretty demanding in terms of GPU (Basically, I think it needs a dedicated GPU, I have a rtx 3050 4gb laptop GPU and it runs fine). There is a simpler driving demo scene which is just white terrain with some roads, that maybe will fair better with lower end hardware.", "repo": "https://github.com/Telea-Mihai/Car-gaim", "demo": "https://github.com/Telea-Mihai/Car-gaim/releases/tag/V0.0.2"}]...
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[{"post_id": 79112, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 79112, "ts": "2026-10-12T18:32:02Z", "hours": 5.6664, "text": "This has been a big push to finish the new version of the game. Together with a linux build the new version brings a new map, new UI, racing line, settings menu, AI-improvements, optimization, driver models, 3 new races, a loading screen, and a start race “screen”. Specific for this devlog, the settings menu, with three graphical presets, a loading screen and a start race screen. Two new races. Small map additions (some houses and parked cars, and physical objects incld cones and barriers that you can hit). Bug fixes across the board. A big challenge for this was the data transition between scenes and settings saving. And I used player prefs to save settings, and some simple static objects to transfer info between scenes. Overall what I have here is a nice base to start building a campaign."}, {"post_id": 78111, "ts": "2026-10-09T16:17:50Z", "hours": 1.0669, "text": "I made a line that shows you where to go, so you don’t need to guess anymore. It uses the baked racing path the AI uses, and passes the points to a line renderer. It also scales with speed, higher speed => line extends further, in order to help you see upcoming corners easier."}, {"post_id": 77336, "ts": "2026-10-06T16:21:09Z", "hours": 3.9394, "text": "So, there have been a few changes. There are now drivers, the cars are no longer driven by ghosts. There are procedural animations for steering using IK (it’s really not that complicated. They also look ahead and where they drive (INCREDIBLE!!!!). Besides that they also react to crashes, eating the steering wheel, cus there ain’t no airbag (poor lads). I’ve reworked the crash system, not visually but technically. You are now allowed to have 3 small crashes, they still trigger the slow motion, but they don’t end your race. Crash many more times than that, your race ends. This way you are still penalised for bad driving. There is still a one hit “lethal impact”, but that basically means going top speed into a tree to trigger. Another small addition are some more sounds, to make the driving feel even better: -Gear shifter sounds -Handbrake pull/release sounds Just a small bit of polish. Besides that there were small bug fixes, nothing notable."}, {"post_id": 76466, "ts": "2026-10-03T16:42:33Z", "hours": 2.4925, "text": "I’ve been working on a new surface system! Now I can add surfaces with different sounds and effects when sliding. I also added “rolling sounds” that play when just driving over at adequate speed. I’ve added a dirt surface, for obvious reasons. It also has something called rolling resistance. You will observe the fact that when driving over dirt with one side of the car still on the road, the car will steer towards the dirt, because of the higher resistance, and also will have as a consequence a lower top speed, also acting as a penalty for driving offroad. Besides that I also added ambient sounds, like a wind and leaves thing so that you can tell when standing still that you are in a forest :))) Last thing is I made the crashing better, no longer will any impact “crash” you but the sounds are also better, with separate sounds for high and low impact speeds. Basically a lot of polish for the game, the driving feels better, I feel like, because of it, and it also incentivises you to stay on the road, alltough the trees already kinda did that."}, {"post_id": 76168, "ts": "2026-10-02T15:41:06Z", "hours": 2.1219, "text": "I’ve been working on the HUD for the game. Really simple, but it was missing. It features a lap counter, lap timer, best lap, lap delta, position. The speed/rpm/gear cluster is the same as before."}, {"post_id": 74116, "ts": "2026-09-26T18:26:41Z", "hours": 2.6064, "text": "Speed. Speed is very important when it comes to racing, right? Well yes, but in a video game, where you sit down on a chair, static, in a room, the sensation of speed is even more important. That’s why these few hours i’ve been working on making the game feel fast . Changes have been made to the way the camera moves behind the car and in how it tracks it. Besides that, there has been a little sound work. At high speeds sounds become muffled and a wind noise can be heard. There is also the post processing i’ve been talking about in the other devlogs. Besides that, i’ve started reworking the UI, and the first element was the gauge cluster. I’ve decided to have the text physically live in the world, it reacts to the car, lagging behind or moving from side to side slightly. It also gets blurred at high speeds, because from a certain point it doesn’t matter if you’re going 150 or 200 kph, since that road barrier is still approaching you at a lethal speed, so you should probably just brake. I LOVE the way the driving turned out, and I sometimes sit for too long just driving around, so I can’t wait to get this game back to you guyz. Peace."}, {"post_id": 72697, "ts": "2026-09-23T15:05:15Z", "hours": 2.4817, "text": "The map is doneeeeeeee!!!! It’s as varied as I could make it, but you can see the different regions, and I like that. Besides that I’ve made the first race layout, and the AI just works (wowowowwow!!!!). Another cool thing I’ve added is wind, as a sound, when you go really really fast. On high speed, as I said in a previous devlog, a tunnel vision effect forms. Now, the sounds will deafen as if the ears are getting plugged, the only thing you hear clearly being the sound of the wind passing by your car. It has a really cool implementation, using a curve and some inverse lerp to sample, this way the effect is not linear and at low speed no big changes happen. Anyway, down here i’ll add some screenshots with the map, love to hear your feedback!"}, {"post_id": 70530, "ts": "2026-09-19T10:10:04Z", "hours": 2.7044, "text": "I’ve been working on the dry-ish mountain region. I’ve also added grass to the map, as you can see. For the moment I have some lighting issues in the mountain region because of the rock models, and some settings, so the dry grass there is black, but other than that it looks great and it really helps fill the map with life. Other than map work, I took some time to work on the speed feeling. In the second and third photo is how the game looks at a speed of >120km/h. The edges get deformed, pulled back, and a vignette help sell the tunnel vision illusion. Besides that, its screen shake and FOV work. Between the third and last picture you can clearly see the difference between the two states."}, {"post_id": 69662, "ts": "2026-09-17T15:00:25Z", "hours": 1.1333, "text": "I’ve put in another hour on the map. I’ve decided to split the map in multiple regions for visual variety. There is the dense forest in the first photo, followed by a low vegetation, high altitude mountain region (began working, second and third photo). Planned is also a plains-like region, a lake and i’ll see if I can fit a small town somewhere. The roads are curved and never go straight for too long, and compared to the city map, some of the chicanes here make sense. I am still thinking about how I could still have the night city here in the next demo. Maybe i’ll restore the map itself, or i’m thinking of just adding a docks area for free driving."}, {"post_id": 69151, "ts": "2026-09-16T14:16:13Z", "hours": 1.1, "text": "I’ve been messing around with assets, lighting and visual effects. I kinda like this a bit more than the city night. So for the next demo, this will be the theme. I’ve also deleted the city scene, since it was just bad in terms of performance and other stuff. Basically, my hope is that, using a forest, will help me conceal a lot more, and repetition of trees and other assets wont be as visible as in a city, thus i’ll be able to finish it faster without losing visual fidelity. Also all the assets have LOD’s for optimization!"}, {"post_id": 68725, "ts": "2026-09-15T17:01:11Z", "hours": 1.6053, "text": "So, after all the positive feedback I couldn’t just leave the project to rot. Soo, in my free time I will try to work some more on this game. So I made a little list with what to add: I will be leaving the night city behind, it’s hard to optimize. Instead I will be making a forest/mountain scene, which I think will be cool to race in. I also decided to experiment some more with the visual effects available to me, so I added flares to light sources, for now a bit excessive, but oh well. I also upped the collision particles, more smoke, sparks and debris => looks better cuz it hides the bad crash physics (maybe ???) After I am done with the forest scene, and I will make a couple races, what will follow is another ship, and then I will work on traffic followed (if finished) by another ship."}, {"post_id": 65510, "ts": "2026-09-10T18:18:48Z", "hours": 3.2097, "text": "BUILD READY!!! This is the last devlog before the ship. Alltough the game isnt in the state I would like it to be, school started and i’m in my terminal grade, so it’s a tough year ahead, so I have to shelve this project. The race is playable, its difficult in a way but its also fun. I also added a second level which is just an open map with a field and hills for you to test the driving physics and also as a lower graphical alternative to the city race. In the final hours of development I added all the basic necessary menus and fixed some bugs that I catched while testing. See you in the ship!"}, {"post_id": 64889, "ts": "2026-09-09T16:28:26Z", "hours": 3.6897, "text": "I’ve reworked a few sections of the track and tweaked the racing AI. They can now almost always finish the race unless the player does some tomfoolery. Besides that I fixed a ugly visual bug where the terrain would poke trough the road when the camera was closed to the ground. Next, I remade the speedometer, RPM indicator and Gear indicator as you can see in the screenshots. The final thing that I added is a detection of “large” crashes, alltough is inconsistent, I dont currently have ideas how to fix it right now. For now when it detects a crash it enables slowmotion for a fraction of a second just for some oomph. All that remains for me to do is UI: -Race start countdown -Race finish info -Pause Menu -Main menu And a Game Over screen for when you crash. After these additions I will ship the game, as school started and I will have to shelve it, and I dont want to miss out on the sweet stardust it can offer!"}, {"post_id": 63721, "ts": "2026-09-07T17:33:37Z", "hours": 2.8544, "text": "Soo, I made the car more believable. It has working brake lights (WOOW), and new engine sounds that make it sound more powerful, but also added something extra spice, like exhaust backfire, that is programically made, with a multitude of firecracker sounds that I then processed. Besides that I also added a turbo blow off sound. They use the simulated rpm to decide their pitch and intensity, while also considering the throttle difference and position. Last thing (visible in the last seconds of the last video), I improved the crash physics with detachable parts and deformable chassis."}, {"post_id": 62131, "ts": "2026-09-05T11:51:23Z", "hours": 2.7356, "text": "The map is done! I added some bariers with a simple shader, but I might change them soon, as I dont like the way they look. I also added a new car for the race. I’ve also done some optimzing, enabled mesh batching, and after i’m 100% done with the map I will also bake the lighting for even better performance. I’ve decided to leave out traffic for now, as its’ pretty difficult to implement and I don’t have the time, since school is starting. As a small to do list for the ship: -Main menu with settings -Start sequence -Race Timer -Ending Cutscene -Model credit list -Sounds -Maybe some music"}, {"post_id": 55154, "ts": "2026-08-26T17:03:03Z", "hours": 3.3333, "text": "I have been working on the map ever since the last devlog. There isn’t much to say as there is to show. The scene has gotten laggy with lag spikes that seem random, so I will have to investigate and see how to optimize the game."}, {"post_id": 53725, "ts": "2026-08-24T12:09:21Z", "hours": 3.5356, "text": "Alright, i’ve been busy collecting assets and making materials and collections in order to start work on the map, which I did, I started with the dock area, since I dont yet have many house models, and well, I think it’s looking pretty cool, ngl. Next up I’ll go around the track in order to detail the section most. I am using the darkness and distance as a tool to be lazy, but also optimize. No point in detailing a part the player wont see. Also in my toolset is the fact the player will be moving fast and concentrating on the road, so it won’t be necessary for me to detail every inch of the map, instead focusing on intersections and areas the player will be slow enough to notice such details."}, {"post_id": 52464, "ts": "2026-08-22T16:17:32Z", "hours": 2.1669, "text": "The really fun part has begun! Im stylizing the game. Yeah, I decided to skip traffic for now and instead get busy making my environment. First I started by making a cool night sky and lighting, i turned on some settings, and I am pretty afraid that this game wont run decent at all when Im done, but ill do optimizing later, im sure it will be fine. Im still in search of models, as modelling everything by myself is out of the scope of this little project. But it’s gonna be pretty cool looking, i believe."}, {"post_id": 51776, "ts": "2026-08-21T16:47:51Z", "hours": 1.4, "text": "Ok, i’ve worked around a bit, and decided that for the first ship I want to release ONE very good feeling race. So I wont complicate myself with tuning and other systems, it will be one car, one race. So the atmosphere will be very important. I already have the layout of the race done, it’s supposed to go trough the docks > coast > downtown > highway and then the race ends. Also I believe making this small but very polished game will lend me more experience than something that will be overly complex, as many of my game projects end up. I will start with the terrain an polishing the track to make it more interesting in terms of driving and then i’ll get started on the terrain and dock area"}, {"post_id": 51639, "ts": "2026-08-21T12:50:14Z", "hours": 5.0786, "text": "The racing AI is done. I also made a small race manager which takes the cars, aligns them in a grid and then starts a countdown. It also keeps trak of the position and lap-times, but there is no UI for that yet. I also started working on the Map for the demo, i’m still debating how big the demo will be, but probably it’ll be a few races. After I have a small map layout, i’ll get started on the traffic AI, and move on from there. Im still trying to get the hang of this road tool I am using, and also getting the road dimensions right, but we’ll see."}, {"post_id": 49190, "ts": "2026-08-17T20:37:34Z", "hours": 3.1403, "text": "I’m very happy with the racing AI, while it’s not perfect and cannot avoid everything, like a wall in the middle of the road, I dont think that will be the case like ever. It can avoid other cars, either static or not and it uses a basic prediction to determine if it’s on a collision course with another car and act accordingly. Also, for the path, as you could see from the beggining of the video, the path was already backed based on the road. The car then only decides when to brake and steer based on that path. Next up i’ll make a demo race with multiple racers and position marking and stuff and then get started on the map."}, {"post_id": 47417, "ts": "2026-08-15T10:44:33Z", "hours": 5.6383, "text": "Alrighty, I decided to actually use my brain and came to the conclusion to instead bake the racing paths, instead of just having them create one at runtime. I made a small unity tool, I just place the checkpoints, click bake and a racing spline gets generated. If you look real close, you can see that the line follows an outside-inside-outside path for steering. Now that I have this, I will work on the racer Ai itself. First I will make it follow the track with optimal speed and then teach it to avoid obstacles, other cars and then even overtake."}, {"post_id": 45697, "ts": "2026-08-12T11:00:48Z", "hours": 3.2739, "text": "Okk, I feel like i’m getting close. As you can see, the car now tries to build a racing line, this is all in real time. While its still not perfect, I feel like I am getting close. There are still some bugs related to the pathing on the road that I will have to fix, but overall its very good. The system works by identifying an apex. The geometrical apex is considered in this case the point which has the biggest angle difference compared to its neighbours. Now, after it identifies the apex, it grabs all points leading to the apex, and shifts them to the outside, before starting to shift them to the inside towards the apex, all using a sine wave based lerp in order to get a nice arc. While this system is good, I feel like the driver script that is responsible with making the car follow the points is kind of goofed, so i’ll look into that."}, {"post_id": 45184, "ts": "2026-08-11T14:37:35Z", "hours": 6.5986, "text": "Racing ai, thats all I’ve been doing. It works fine-ish, i feel like Im close but it still overshoots, but I have some ideas on how to fix it."}, {"post_id": 3583, "ts": "2026-06-06T16:13:53Z", "hours": 4.5958, "text": "I have been working on making racing ai for the game. As a small intro, i have worked on this project before, and what I got is a working car controller, and dialed in physics to something I like how it feels. The ai represented a difficult problem. If I want this to be open world, and for there to be police chases, I needed the NPC car to be able to go offroad, so basically, of a set path. There would be the option to make a hand tailored map and even for the offroad sections to be counted as roads, but that would be hard for one developer to do and test, so I opted for this. When the car is not on a road network, it fallbacks to the built in navmesh system in unity. It then uses it to calculate a path as a list of point and then drives between them. On the road, we just need to sample points from the spline of the road and then drive between them. The hard part was this driving part :D While it might seem simple, just point the car to the next point, and then have it move forwards, there is much more nuance to this. First, the NPC car should behave just like the player car, it should have the same turn angle, and thus I must now convert a simple direction into a steering angle. Another difficult part is when racing. I can’t just have it accelerate always, the car must brake when a sharp corner is coming up, and for really tight one, maybe even drift. So how do you do that? Well, i dont know yet, this past 4 hours I have been working on the same script and same section trying to figure that out. I really hope that next devlog I can come with a solution, but i cant promise anything. My plan is to calculate the curve of the upcoming curve, and then somehow spit out a good speed for that, but there are a lot of factors to account for, like the grip of the car and actual speed, distance to corner etc."}]...
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Title: Car Game by @Mihai | Stardance
Devlogs:
I Title: Car Game by @Mihai | Stardance
Devlogs:
I have been working on making racing ai for the game. As a small intro, i have worked on this project before, and what I got is a working car controller, and dialed in physics to something I like how it feels. The ai represented a difficult problem. If I want this to be open world, and for there to be police chases, I needed the NPC car to be able to go offroad, so basically, of a set path. There would be the option to make a hand tailored map and even for the offroad sections to be counted as roads, but that would be hard for one developer to do and test, so I opted for this. When the car is not on a road network, it fallbacks to the built in navmesh system in unity. It then uses it to calculate a path as a list of point and then drives between them. On the road, we just need to sample points from the spline of the road and then drive between them. The hard part was this driving part :D While it might seem simple, just point the car to the next point, and then have it move forwards, there is much more nuance to this. First, the NPC car should behave just like the player car, it should have the same turn angle, and thus I must now convert a simple direction into a steering angle. Another difficult part is when racing. I can’t just have it accelerate always, the car must brake when a sharp corner is coming up, and for really tight one, maybe even drift. So how do you do that? Well, i dont know yet, this past 4 hours I have been working on the same script and same section trying to figure that out. I really hope that next devlog I can come with a solution, but i cant promise anything. My plan is to calculate the curve of the upcoming curve, and then somehow spit out a good speed for that, but there are a lot of factors to account for, like the grip of the car and actual speed, distance to corner etc.
Racing ai, thats all I’ve been doing. It works fine-ish, i feel like Im close but it still overshoots, but I have some ideas on how to fix it.
Okk, I feel like i’m getting close. As you can see, the car now tries to build a racing line, this is all in real time. While its still not perfect, I feel like I am getting close. There are still some bugs related to the pathing on the road that I will have to fix, but overall its very good. The system works by identifying an apex. The geometrical apex is considered in this case the point which has the biggest angle difference compared to its neighbours. Now, after it identifies the apex, it grabs all points leading to the apex, and shifts them to the outside, before starting to shift them to the inside towards the apex, all using a sine wave based lerp in order to get a nice arc. While this system is good, I feel like the driver script that is responsible with making the car follow the points is kind of goofed, so i’ll look into that.
Alrighty, I decided to actually use my brain and came to the conclusion to instead bake the racing paths, instead of just having them create one at runtime. I made a small unity tool, I just place the checkpoints, click bake and a racing spline gets generated. If you look real close, you can see that the line follows an outside-inside-outside path for steering. Now that I have this, I will work on the racer Ai itself. First I will make it follow the track with optimal speed and then teach it to avoid obstacles, other cars and then even overtake.
I’m very happy with the racing AI, while it’s not perfect and cannot avoid everything, like a wall in the middle of the road, I dont think that will be the case like ever. It can avoid other cars, either static or not and it uses a basic prediction to determine if it’s on a collision course with another car and act accordingly. Also, for the path, as you could see from the beggining of the video, the path was already backed based on the road. The car then only decides when to brake and steer based on that path. Next up i’ll make a demo race with multiple racers and position marking and stuff and then get started on the map.
The racing AI is done. I also made a small race manager which takes the cars, aligns them in a grid and then starts a countdown. It also keeps trak of the position and lap-times, but there is no UI for that yet. I also started working on the Map for the demo, i’m still debating how big the demo will be, but probably it’ll be a few races. After I have a small map layout, i’ll get started on the traffic AI, and move on from there. Im still trying to get the hang of this road tool I am using, and also getting the road dimensions right, but we’ll see.
Ok, i’ve worked around a bit, and decided that for the first ship I want to release ONE very good feeling race. So I wont complicate myself with tuning and other systems, it will be one car, one race. So the atmosphere will be very important. I already have the layout of the race done, it’s supposed to go trough the docks > coast > downtown > highway and then the race ends. Also I believe making this small but very polished game will lend me more experience than something that will be overly complex, as many of my game projects end up. I will start with the terrain an polishing the track to make it more interesting in terms of driving and then i’ll get started on the terrain and dock area
The really fun part has begun! Im stylizing the game. Yeah, I decided to skip traffic for now and instead get busy making my environment. First I started by making a cool night sky and lighting, i turned on some settings, and I am pretty afraid that this game wont run decent at all when Im done, but ill do optimizing later, im sure it will be fine. Im still in search of models, as modelling everything by myself is out of the scope of this little project. But it’s gonna be pretty cool looking, i believe.
Alright, i’ve been busy collecting assets and making materials and collections in order to start work on the map, which I did, I started with the dock area, since I dont yet have many house models, and well, I think it’s looking pretty cool, ngl. Next up I’ll go around the track in order to detail the section most. I am using the darkness and distance as a tool to be lazy, but also optimize. No point in detailing a part the player wont see. Also in my toolset is the fact the player will be moving fast and concentrating on the road, so it won’t be necessary for me to detail every inch of the map, instead focusing on intersections and areas the player will be slow enough to notice such details.
I have been working on the map ever since the last devlog. There isn’t much to say as there is to show. The scene has gotten laggy with lag spikes that seem random, so I will have to investigate and see how to optimize the game.
The map is done! I added some bariers with a simple shader, but I might change them soon, as I dont like the way they look. I also added a new car for the race. I’ve also done some optimzing, enabled mesh batching, and after i’m 100% done with the map I will also bake the lighting for even better performance. I’ve decided to leave out traffic for now, as its’ pretty difficult to implement and I don’t have the time, since school is starting. As a small to do list for the ship: -Main menu with settings -Start sequence -Race Timer -Ending Cutscene -Model credit list -Sounds -Maybe some music
Soo, I made the car more believable. It has working brake lights (WOOW), and new engine sounds that make it sound more powerful, but also added something extra spice, like exhaust backfire, that is programically made, with a multitude of firecracker sounds that I then processed. Besides that I also added a turbo blow off sound. They use the simulated rpm to decide their pitch and intensity, while also considering the throttle difference and position. Last thing (visible in the last seconds of the last video), I improved the crash physics with detachable parts and deformable chassis.
I’ve reworked a few sections of the track and tweaked the racing AI. They can now almost always finish the race unless the player does some tomfoolery. Besides that I fixed a ugly visual bug where the terrain would poke trough the road when the camera was closed to the ground. Next, I remade the speedometer, RPM indicator and Gear indicator as you can see in the screenshots. The final thing that I added is a detection of “large” crashes, alltough is inconsistent, I dont currently have ideas how to fix it right now. For now when it detects a crash it enables slowmotion for a fraction of a second just for some oomph. All that remains for me to do is UI: -Race start countdown -Race finish info -Pause Menu -Main menu And a Game Over screen for when you crash. After these additions I will ship the game, as school started and I will have to shelve it, and I dont want to miss out on the sweet stardust it can offer!
BUILD READY!!! This is the last devlog before the ship. Alltough the game isnt in the state I would like it to be, school started and i’m in my terminal grade, so it’s a tough year ahead, so I have to shelve this project. The race is playable, its difficult in a way but its also fun. I also added a second level which is just an open map with a field and hills for you to test the driving physics and also as a lower graphical alternative to the city race. In the final hours of development I added all the basic necessary menus and fixed some bugs that I catched while testing. See you in the ship!
So, after all the positive feedback I couldn’t just leave the project to rot. Soo, in my free time I will try to work some more on this game. So I made a little list with what to add: I will be leaving the night city behind, it’s hard to optimize. Instead I will be making a forest/mountain scene, which I think will be cool to race in. I also decided to experiment some more with the visual effects available to me, so I added flares to light sources, for now a bit excessive, but oh well. I also upped the collision particles, more smoke, sparks and debris => looks better cuz it hides the bad crash physics (maybe ???) After I am done with the forest scene, and I will make a couple races, what will follow is another ship, and then I will work on traffic followed (if finished) by another ship.
I’ve been messing around with assets, lighting and visual effects. I kinda like this a bit more than the city night. So for the next demo, this will be the theme. I’ve also deleted the city scene, since it was just bad in terms of performance and other stuff. Basically, my hope is that, using a forest, will help me conceal a lot more, and repetition of trees and other assets wont be as visible as in a city, thus i’ll be able to finish it faster without losing visual fidelity. Also all the assets have LOD’s for optimization!
I’ve put in another hour on the map. I’ve decided to split the map in multiple regions for visual variety. There is the dense forest in the first photo, followed by a low vegetation, high altitude mountain region (began working, second and third photo). Planned is also a plains-like region, a lake and i’ll see if I can fit a small town somewhere. The roads are curved and never go straight for too long, and compared to the city map, some of the chicanes here make sense. I am still thinking about how I could still have the night city here in the next demo. Maybe i’ll restore the map itself, or i’m thinking of just adding a docks area for free driving.
I’ve been working on the dry-ish mountain region. I’ve also added grass to the map, as you can see. For the moment I have some lighting issues in the mountain region because of the rock models, and some settings, so the dry grass there is black, but other than that it looks great and it really helps fill the map with life. Other than map work, I took some time to work on the speed feeling. In the second and third photo is how the game looks at a speed of >120km/h. The edges get deformed, pulled back, and a vignette help sell the tunnel vision illusion. Besides that, its screen shake and FOV work. Between the third and last picture you can clearly see the difference between the two states.
The map is doneeeeeeee!!!! It’s as varied as I could make it, but you can see the different regions, and I like that. Besides that I’ve made the first race layout, and the AI just works (wowowowwow!!!!). Another cool thing I’ve added is wind, as a sound, when you go really really fast. On high speed, as I said in a previous devlog, a tunnel vision effect forms. Now, the sounds will deafen as if the ears are getting plugged, the only thing you hear clearly being the sound of the wind passing by your car. It has a really cool implementation, using a curve and some inverse lerp to sample, this way the effect is not linear and at low speed no big changes happen. Anyway, down here i’ll add some screenshots with the map, love to hear your feedback!
Speed. Speed is very important when it comes to racing, right? Well yes, but in a video game, where you sit down on a chair, static, in a room, the sensation of speed is even more important. That’s why these few hours i’ve been working on making the game feel fast . Changes have been made to the way the camera moves behind the car and in how it tracks it. Besides that, there has been a little sound work. At high speeds sounds become muffled and a wind noise can be heard. There is also the post processing i’ve been talking about in the other devlogs. Besides that, i’ve started reworking the UI, and the first element was the gauge cluster. I’ve decided to have the text physically live in the world, it reacts to the car, lagging behind or moving from side to side slightly. It also gets blurred at high speeds, because from a certain point it doesn’t matter if you’re going 150 or 200 kph, since that road barrier is still approaching you at a lethal speed, so you should probably just brake. I LOVE the way the driving turned out, and I sometimes sit for too long just driving around, so I can’t wait to get this game back to you guyz. Peace.
I’ve been working on the HUD for the game. Really simple, but it was missing. It features a lap counter, lap timer, best lap, lap delta, position. The speed/rpm/gear cluster is the same as before.
I’ve been working on a new surface system! Now I can add surfaces with different sounds and effects when sliding. I also added “rolling sounds” that play when just driving over at adequate speed. I’ve added a dirt surface, for obvious reasons. It also has something called rolling resistance. You will observe the fact that when driving over dirt with one side of the car still on the road, the car will steer towards the dirt, because of the higher resistance, and also will have as a consequence a lower top speed, also acting as a penalty for driving offroad. Besides that I also added ambient sounds, like a wind and leaves thing so that you can tell when standing still that you are in a forest :))) Last thing is I made the crashing better, no longer will any impact “crash” you but the sounds are also better, with separate sounds for high and low impact speeds. Basically a lot of polish for the game, the driving feels better, I feel like, because of it, and it also incentivises you to stay on the road, alltough the trees already kinda did that.
So, there have been a few changes. There are now drivers, the cars are no longer driven by ghosts. There are procedural animations for steering using IK (it’s really not that complicated. They also look ahead and where they drive (INCREDIBLE!!!!). Besides that they also react to crashes, eating the steering wheel, cus there ain’t no airbag (poor lads). I’ve reworked the crash system, not visually but technically. You are now allowed to have 3 small crashes, they still trigger the slow motion, but they don’t end your race. Crash many more times than that, your race ends. This way you are still penalised for bad driving. There is still a one hit “lethal impact”, but that basically means going top speed into a tree to trigger. Another small addition are some more sounds, to make the driving feel even better: -Gear shifter sounds -Handbrake pull/release sounds Just a small bit of polish. Besides that there were small bug fixes, nothing notable.
I made a line that shows you where to go, so you don’t need to guess anymore. It uses the baked racing path the AI uses, and passes the points to a line renderer. It also scales with speed, higher speed => line extends further, in order to help you see upcoming corners easier.
This has been a big push to finish the new version of the game. Together with a linux build the new version brings a new map, new UI, racing line, settings menu, AI-improvements, optimization, driver models, 3 new races, a loading screen, and a start race “screen”. Specific for this devlog, the settings menu, with three graphical presets, a loading screen and a start race screen. Two new races. Small map additions (some houses and parked cars, and physical objects incld cones and barriers that you can hit). Bug fixes across the board. A big challenge for this was the data transition between scenes and settings saving. And I used player prefs to save settings, and some simple static objects to transfer info between scenes. Overall what I have here is a nice base to start building a campaign.
Ships:
This is a small NFS inspired car game demo. It’s a project to test my technical abilities in Unity. It features custom made vehicle physics based on Unity’s built in wheel colliders and a custom easy to use solution for racing ai. Besides that, it is (in some small predetermined angles) a fairly good looking game, with a little bit of style. The game uses Unity’s HDRP render pipeline for its graphics, together with some screen space reflections and reflective materials, the game gets to look fairly good, especialy in the low light enviorment it’s set in. The car physics are in a sim-cade style. The car can still do crazy steering at high speeds, and its very easy to rotate it, but understeer and oversteer can still occur, besides that, the car is not limited in any way when it comes to external forces that can imbalance it, hit a curb at a high speed and the car can go flying. The biggest challenge was the racing AI. First of all it was hard to make a car know how much to steer to go from point A to point B. After that, it was fairly simple right? Just sample some point from the road spline and follow them. But curves exist, and for that you need to calculate the right speed to go trough it so that it wont crash. Then, the car was driving very inefficiently, following the middle of the road, so what followed was a long quest of making a racing path generator, in which I succeeded (with the help of AI). Then came obstacle avoidance, making the car not seem just like a train following a predefined track. If necessary the car will go off track to avoid obstacles and it’s aware of cars around it and will try to keep the distance. There is also a system that predicts collisions with other cars (for example if a car in front is cutting in front of it, it can predict that will happen and brake). This is all theory but it still works in game, sometimes. Another hard part was building a city. I had no prior experience in making games that aren’t made out of just basic cubes and shapes, so it was difficult to find assets and other stuff to populate the city. Then also came the point of how much detail should I even add and many other factors that in the end made me make the hard decision of making just one race in order to not break the illussion of a semi believable city. I’m very proud of how it came out, alltough I have so many ideas about how I can make it grander and better, but i currently don’t have the time to do so. I hope to come back in the future and actually make a cool metal-rock and boost infused racing game like NFS Most Wanted, but it has to wait. For those who want to play test the game. Currently there is only a windows version for the game, and it can also be pretty demanding in terms of GPU (Basically, I think it needs a dedicated GPU, I have a rtx 3050 4gb laptop GPU and it runs fine). There is a simpler driving demo scene which is just white terrain with some roads, that maybe will fair better with lower end hardware.
So, this is the new version of car gaim!!! There is a new map, much more optimized, together with settings and a linux build to improve accessibility. There are 3 races together with a free drive mode on the main map. Change log: -New map -3 new races -Settings -New UI/Hud -Racing line -Driver models and reactions -Driving Surfaces -New sounds (shifting, high speed, crash etc.) -Speed effects -Improved car model and textures -Small AI improvements -Loading Screen -New Crash system: three crashes or a big crash and you’re out of the race -Optimization -Partial controller support -Small destructable objects on the map The biggest challenge was finding time to still work on the game and also bring significant improvement. The time restrain allowed me to focus on the necessary and I really feel the game is in a better place now. Technically this update is much smaller than the first release (it’s obvious) but interconnecting all the systems in one product was a real hassle, especially with the UI, as Unity UI is a bit janky. Notes for testers: I found a region with very bad fps spikes, for which I haven’t found the cause for. Thankfully its only a small part of both races, and a small part on the map overall. There is partial controller support, menus haven’t been tested properly, but driving works. There is a Linux build, but it wasn’t tested, any notes about that are welcome. Download available on itch.io...
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Cirqmon by @itsdecodeaditya | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-20T21:50:13Z", "hours": 85.0, "multiplier": 19.19, "payout": 1594, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Cirqmon is a quantum computing circuit builder on web and It’s idea was like when I used to go on tools like IBM’s or other quantum circuit simulators they used to feel like so dry and academic, So I thought why don’t I make one that’s colorful, looks like game because I guess learning deep tech should not mean that you lose colors. Earlier I thought I would just build UI layer on top of Qiskit via Python API, then I thought what will I learn and from a quite a long time I wanted to build something that involves maths and physics so i thought I should build whole thing by myself. The whole thing was Actually a bit challenging on understanding how Q spheres or Tensors or how bitwise calculations work, aligning it will a Good UI theme, So I just learned and build. sometimes I thought How will i finish or how will I map that understanding into code But I guess AI as a Teacher helped me a lot. For Others to try it you should know about Quantum Gates, read the Readme once and I guess you will understand the project.", "repo": "https://github.com/decodeaditya/cirqmon/", "demo": "https://cirqmon.vercel.app/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 71464, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 71464, "ts": "2026-09-20T21:31:02Z", "hours": 2.8469, "text": "Cirqmon Devlog #12 So I guess it’s final Devlog. Here firstly I updated Readme with new UI based snapshots. Made custom Alert box so it matches the theme instead of browser native alert box. Fixed bug in which earlier the gates were being added in circuit without checking if that Block is being used by other gate and its corresponding qubits. I hope if I don’t get a new problem to fix I will ship it;"}, {"post_id": 71194, "ts": "2026-09-20T12:52:50Z", "hours": 8.1419, "text": "Cirqmon Devlog #11 So Guys, I have finally finalized the Cirqmon Playground UI. I replaced the old glassmorphism theme with a rougher, more irregular visual style. Earlier I got feedback that, the old layout felt cluttered because the quantum gates were spread far apart and Due to Space Background and glassmorphism, it looked like Vibe coded. I have now grouped all the gates together in one place to make the interface cleaner and easier to navigate. Here Is what I changed: Removed the Home button. Clicking the Cirqmon logo now takes gets back to the home page. Updated Playground icons with Animal GIFs to give it more lively and engaging appearance. As mentioned above, reduced the use of glassmorphism to due to flickering issues and implemented like hand drawn solid color based UI. Attaching a video Snapshot so you can see changes made. also, The README is the only major task left. Once that’s finished, I’ll be ready to ship the project!"}, {"post_id": 66582, "ts": "2026-09-12T12:50:46Z", "hours": 8.0617, "text": "Cirqmon Devlog #10 Every time I think My project is ready to ship I find something missing and then it gets delayed. After I finished the blog on Deutsch Jozsa algorithm the project worked, as it needed only Single and Double qubit gate. When I started writing about Grover’s algorithm I realized the need of Three Qubit gate too as it needed CCZ gate to flip the phase to achieve 111 State. So I had to fix that. Here is what I did: Firstly as I told earlier I added the 3 Qubit gate feature, the underlying simulator code is working as old Inflating the Matrix approach, I only had to make it work for 3 Qubit gates. Secondly once I was on huddle where we were discussing about Boba bash, I presented the project to people and some said like ’it looks like too stuffed or some said it looked vibe coded. So I thought its a good feedback to work on. Then I improvised the Homepage so it feels like Apple like minimal theme while maintaining game feel. I also added the Background video instead of static image. Thirdly the blog page was pending so I made blog page with similar theme as I updated along with a option to search among the medium posts. So this was what I updated in this Version and now I needs that code review and matching the theme on Playground too. Just Hope I don’t get stuck this time and wrap it up. Thanks for Reading!"}, {"post_id": 46862, "ts": "2026-08-14T12:20:36Z", "hours": 6.1919, "text": "Cirqmon #Devlog 9 This version is more of testing, I thought that I should write blogs and use examples using Cirqmon, So Written 2 blogs on Quantum computing for Beginners and Deutsch Joza algorithm. While writing it I thought I should Show them on Cirqmon Hompage too, earlier I thought I would replace blogs part in Homepage with Just a medium link of mine, but later when I read on internet that medium allows to see RSS version of Blogs so I parsed RSS to JSON and fetched Blogs related Quantum Computing. Along with it, made Qubits limits to 8 and steps to 24 and made a centralized Config file to control parameters from there. Added a Toggle so People can switch indentation of Qubit states either Big endian or Little Endian. Updated Homepage button with Pikachu Button I found while explore on UI verse, also added link to Readme guide. Now After writing Blogs I am getting surge of confidence inside that I understood Quantum Computing more Better. One of topics I am curious about is Cybersecurity and one of Algorithm that challenges classical Approaches like RSA is Shor’s Algorithm so next I am going to explore it, Also along with all these, I have updated Some images in readme too and going to Push updates, so do Share Feedbacks."}, {"post_id": 43067, "ts": "2026-08-08T04:03:36Z", "hours": 3.9364, "text": "Cirqmon #Devlog 8 Actually I was telling my friend about project, and I realized that the Project should have better readme that tells about features, Examples, and Tour. Also added HSL wheel in Q sphere so People can Use it as a reference. Initially its faded, you hover it and it gets Visible. Also the Latest version is now Live with multi qubit gates."}, {"post_id": 41965, "ts": "2026-08-06T14:25:38Z", "hours": 8.0969, "text": "Cirqmon Devlog #7 So, I am posting this Devlog after interval of Almost 20 days since last Posted. Why delay? During this time I learnt a Lot about Quantum computing. Infact, I was planning to ship the Project with Single qubit gates only, but after I joined Qiskit Global Summer School, then I realised that main game in Quantum computing is about entanglement, that comes with multi Qubit gates like CX, CZ, SWAP etc. The Media attached is Demo is of a GHZ circuit is made by combination of H gate and CNOT gates. Basically a GHZ state is larger version of Bell state. For N qubits, only two possible states shows Up with equal probability i.e 1/root2 (000…n + 111…n). So here is What I made Changes and How : 1) 2 Qubit Gates Implementation - So Earlier Version was for Only 1 Qubit Gates, and it used Tensor product. Where it used to tensor Each step and then Multiply each step to StateVector in successive manner. But for 2 Qubit gates, tensor method gets problematic because multi qubit gates need to have dependence on other qubits too, meanwhile tensor assumes every gate on that step is independent and it builds large matrix. This loses dependence and relation as demanded by multi qubit gates. So then I got to know of approach called Embedding or Inflation where we first create Temporary matrix of 2^n rows and 2^n Columns with each entry initially as 0, then we start looping through columns of that Matrix (which represent possibility, like iteration for 0 is actually 00 in binary) and then, matching it with rows and columns in Gate matrix, after that we force the bit in Temporary Matrix’s respective column and row to align with what Gate’s matrix bit has? Either 0 or 1. Finally we get Result of application in that Temporary matrix which we multiply with StateVector later on. That’s how This Inflation Approach works. 2) Applied Phase angle Indicator Now, Quantum State’s node’s color in Q sphere shows its phase Angle, which can be from PI to -PI, calculated using formula tan2a(y,x) , then we constraint it from 0 to 2PI, later convert to degrees, then feeding that value as HUE value in HSL colour format keeping lightness as 50% and Saturation 100% and then it corresponds to Phase Angle with color that degree, like 0deg is red, 90deg is green etc. So this was Major Changes I did along with some Style changes and Minor error fixing that appeared during changing the Simulator’s Approach. And to be very Honest at when I started to Write code for 2 qubit Gates, I earlier thought I would Do something that I dont have to change Simulator, but those were still just making me cry. So finally I gone to AI to learn and for almost 2 days new experiments were going out of head and that way almost I wasted Hours and then to experiment more and Stop Tracking Hackatime since I knew It would track more hours for Experiments too, So I coded in Cursor (Without Any AI, Just as Other Editor) Untracked. At the End it worked :) Now Finally Majority part is Done, after few More Edits, Will Ship it soon!"}, {"post_id": 28525, "ts": "2026-07-14T20:44:03Z", "hours": 7.3483, "text": "Devlog #6 :) So Hey People, I am feeling Immensely satisfied that Q Sphere feature is Mostly done. Also the GateWiki part is also done that tells You about Gate you Clicked on Gates Tray, again to tell you can drag gates into Circuit to build and Tap to know about it . May be I also link blogs on that Later. Now about Q Sphere Part Okay , Now let me share about Making of Q Sphere Part , So earlier I was not able to visualize it, but somehow I got to Know about Spherical Coordinates which is dependent on: theta : angle of Line from Z Axis phi : angle of Line from x Axis But clicked finally after frustration of not understanding it earlier. Then I gone to Google searching to see 3d visuals and AI to understand how we calculate those angles: So - Based on hamming weights (Means how many 1s in that State, Suppose in |01> has 1 1s and 011 have 2 1s ) and total qubits which help us find theta and divide sphere into sort of rings for similar nodes/lines of same hamming weights in same ring. Then we find how we calculate phi based on total active states in each ring and slicing ring into same proportion. I don’t know why but that was a finally a kick for me :) Finally since you will plot lines and nodes on spherical surface you have to convert theta and phi to coordinates [x, y, z] which you do using polar coordinates . Then after plotting them, a major part of Q sphere is made. now as you can see on 2nd screenshot left side the Sphere shows nodes for respective State. more chances of being 0 is on upper half and more 1 chance on bottom half. Structured the folders Also I worked on code Structure to keep all algos separated: To parse stateVectors Parse the frontend data to json circuit instructions Making all q sphere data from stateVectors parsing Code to export in Qiskit. more such functions too.. So yeah that was work I did, little more things is needed to build, after that project is done. Adding some multi qubit gates is next important thing now. I would be pushing on Github this Version and Vercel too now. Go check it out. Namaste!!!"}, {"post_id": 27203, "ts": "2026-07-12T15:29:23Z", "hours": 8.8928, "text": "Devlog #5 :) To be very honest I forget that its 8 hours 47 minutes in hackatime and it didn’t posted devlog until I got a Notification on slack. Sooo Guys! In this part of work I had to decide a thing that should I add Visualization of Qubits or not and then I realized that’s the whole point of project [to let people easily visualize whats happening]. So thats why I have decided add Q sphere . Folder Structure First of all I realized that my project was using url images and project structure was actually messing up as files and folders were increasing, so I decided to first organise the chaos and downloading all internet 3d assets in project. [Screenshot -1]. Because without a better organization of project it would get intimidatingly hard for others to contribute. Big Endian vs Little Endian Now second part is making the Result page of Qubit execution match that 3d glassmorphism design and white browsing through IBM composer (Tool for making Circuits) I got to observe that states were actually reverse in order. Suppose you applied hadamard gate to first qubit in 2 qubit system so instead of showing Probabilities of states as |00> = 50% , |01> = 0 , |10> = 50% , |11> = 0 , it reversed for 01 and 10. So after reading on internet about this I got to know that both ways are right and just differs because order you calcuate tensors: G1 * G2 * G3.. gives you Big Endian Version which considers least qubit as important Vice versa in case of Little Endian as IBM uses. So I implemented both in project. Earlier I thought I broke a physics Law [haha.] Making Q Sphere Its for Q sphere [2nd screenshot], that’s what help you understand statevector, because we can’t imagine more than 3D, so IBM come with this method. Basically I have used react 3 fiber that helps us write Three.js in react easily, using JSX instead of js manually, and it shows 3 lines in space which represent each state in vector: Bigger the node on top, bigger its probability . Color tells phase angle from origin. More 0 probability the vector will be pointing on upper hemisphere’s top and similarly more 1 will point on bottom of lower hemisphere. I am still processing [x,y,z] coordinates of line. Q sphere now shows random plots, I have to parse state vector to correct representation, will tell you about it in next devlog after I have learnt and implemented this. Screen Restrictions Forth is more of usability, side by side you can see either, code and graph or sphere and graph , so understand better. Also I added a screen restrictor for small screens since running this project on phone won’t be possible because design clutterness (forget to add screenshot, but you can check live). So hope you liked this version, I know it’s too much of quantum but yeah like others I am also trying to understand better. At Last, don’t forget to check attachments and share your feedbacks. Also I think I would be pushing on github now before developing futher. Namaste!!!"}, {"post_id": 26000, "ts": "2026-07-10T15:38:00Z", "hours": 5.5644, "text": "Devlog #4 This Part was all about making Navigation work between pages and since last time I got some feedbacks that Home and Playground VIbe Don’t match so made Playground more 3d. Here are Changes - Using react router, Made Navigation between Home and Playground and Vice versa. Used 3d Resources like Background images, Button images to make it look 3d Videogame. Added button animations like some changes images, some spins. Improved qubit adjust box. Added tooltip component so people know what buttons does what, since buttons are image based. So, I have tried to make project look 3d Glassmorphism and minimal too. check out video attached to see progress till now ."}, {"post_id": 25463, "ts": "2026-07-09T19:03:49Z", "hours": 7.8494, "text": "#Devlog 3 Made Homepage for Cirqmon because I wanted to Put Medium blogs and Tool at one place so this will act as Entry door easily. Experimented with designs, fonts and images to make it feel like 3d Cartoon themed. Following things made - At first “what is does” Hero Section telling people that its a Colorful way to play and learn to make Quantum Circuits. Actually in hero section I have experimented with 3d images animations but it looked distracting UI so Removed it. but Kept H and Y gates to give a idea of Builder. Blogs Section is where it will fetch Quantum related Blogs from Medium (will write soon). Don’t forget to notice that Astronaut. Data is dummy. the Boxes use Backdrop transparent design to match with 3d design. Last is for People who would like to give feedbacks. Buttons are Demo for now. Basically UI for Homepage is Done. Now in next Version WIll use router for Navigation. ALso TBH Gemini really Helped me with Box Shadow button effects which I adjusted according to project Later. Do give Feedbacks please :)"}, {"post_id": 23711, "ts": "2026-07-06T20:20:51Z", "hours": 6.1475, "text": "Its Devlog 2 and in midway didn’t knew That I will be able to go further in project but somehow Curosity pushed it. So I have basically in this Version I made following new Things - Added fundamental Single Qubit Gates and the Moment someone drag Gates into Circuit and it get Translated into circuit Instructions JSON which tracks for which gate is applied at target and step; The moment you click on Playcircuit button it Calculates the probability of Each possible Qubit state and corresponding qiskit code; Basically this part of calculating the Circuit I had options either to use Qiskit directly via Python, Use react pre-written Scripts in react or Reinvent the Wheel by making my own Simulator which might not be as Efficient as Already made ones. So to see how strong my kidneys are I chose 3rd one. But you won’t believe I got answers to all My questions whether Why more qubits means exponential computation time, or tensors and many other things which I will write in blogs in some time. So basically it was about initializing a State vector and then running step by step tensor product of gates applied and then when I got a single wire as a result of all gates in each step, then multiply the state vector with Matrix which contains 2^N rows and columns (n is number of qubits) which finally gives you the amplitudes of each state. FInally you format them to Show. Now it still need better design and More code organization after which I will push new Version; till then You are welcome for Questions and Suggestions. Note - This version handle single qubits till now."}, {"post_id": 17512, "ts": "2026-06-28T10:11:41Z", "hours": 11.5036, "text": "Quite a While I started to learn about quantum Computing and observed that its still gives too research vibes for a beginner to overwhelm and leave it. This is Cirqmon which I am making so Building Quantum circuits become some fun without dumping every information and expecting everyone to be a Researcher. Started with making on React, giving it Cartoon or Animated vibe, earlier I thought to make it Doremon themed but later found that it would give copyright issues. For now features added- 1 ) You can Drag and Drog Quantum gates from Tray into Circuit Canvas. 2 ) Music and Background Manage buttons. 3 ) I have tried to play with Vector and Cartoon Images in Transition. 4 ) Adjust Qubits and Nodes/Steps from Drawer earlier I thought to Use Slider but used Buttons later to Avoid touch screen inconsistencies. While making the Drag and Drop canvas Features, found that using HTML Drag and drop API sometimes break on Safari and other browers and it was still making codebase look complicated for others or even me in future to Contribute. So I used @dnd kit for drag and drop feature. Also I kept a Limit on Qubits and Nodes to Keep Execution Easier and test. Majorly a Structure is Done,"}]...
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Title: Cirqmon by @itsdecodeaditya | Stardance
De Title: Cirqmon by @itsdecodeaditya | Stardance
Devlogs:
Quite a While I started to learn about quantum Computing and observed that its still gives too research vibes for a beginner to overwhelm and leave it. This is Cirqmon which I am making so Building Quantum circuits become some fun without dumping every information and expecting everyone to be a Researcher. Started with making on React, giving it Cartoon or Animated vibe, earlier I thought to make it Doremon themed but later found that it would give copyright issues. For now features added- 1 ) You can Drag and Drog Quantum gates from Tray into Circuit Canvas. 2 ) Music and Background Manage buttons. 3 ) I have tried to play with Vector and Cartoon Images in Transition. 4 ) Adjust Qubits and Nodes/Steps from Drawer earlier I thought to Use Slider but used Buttons later to Avoid touch screen inconsistencies. While making the Drag and Drop canvas Features, found that using HTML Drag and drop API sometimes break on Safari and other browers and it was still making codebase look complicated for others or even me in future to Contribute. So I used @dnd kit for drag and drop feature. Also I kept a Limit on Qubits and Nodes to Keep Execution Easier and test. Majorly a Structure is Done,
Its Devlog 2 and in midway didn’t knew That I will be able to go further in project but somehow Curosity pushed it. So I have basically in this Version I made following new Things - Added fundamental Single Qubit Gates and the Moment someone drag Gates into Circuit and it get Translated into circuit Instructions JSON which tracks for which gate is applied at target and step; The moment you click on Playcircuit button it Calculates the probability of Each possible Qubit state and corresponding qiskit code; Basically this part of calculating the Circuit I had options either to use Qiskit directly via Python, Use react pre-written Scripts in react or Reinvent the Wheel by making my own Simulator which might not be as Efficient as Already made ones. So to see how strong my kidneys are I chose 3rd one. But you won’t believe I got answers to all My questions whether Why more qubits means exponential computation time, or tensors and many other things which I will write in blogs in some time. So basically it was about initializing a State vector and then running step by step tensor product of gates applied and then when I got a single wire as a result of all gates in each step, then multiply the state vector with Matrix which contains 2^N rows and columns (n is number of qubits) which finally gives you the amplitudes of each state. FInally you format them to Show. Now it still need better design and More code organization after which I will push new Version; till then You are welcome for Questions and Suggestions. Note - This version handle single qubits till now.
#Devlog 3 Made Homepage for Cirqmon because I wanted to Put Medium blogs and Tool at one place so this will act as Entry door easily. Experimented with designs, fonts and images to make it feel like 3d Cartoon themed. Following things made - At first “what is does” Hero Section telling people that its a Colorful way to play and learn to make Quantum Circuits. Actually in hero section I have experimented with 3d images animations but it looked distracting UI so Removed it. but Kept H and Y gates to give a idea of Builder. Blogs Section is where it will fetch Quantum related Blogs from Medium (will write soon). Don’t forget to notice that Astronaut. Data is dummy. the Boxes use Backdrop transparent design to match with 3d design. Last is for People who would like to give feedbacks. Buttons are Demo for now. Basically UI for Homepage is Done. Now in next Version WIll use router for Navigation. ALso TBH Gemini really Helped me with Box Shadow button effects which I adjusted according to project Later. Do give Feedbacks please :)
Devlog #4 This Part was all about making Navigation work between pages and since last time I got some feedbacks that Home and Playground VIbe Don’t match so made Playground more 3d. Here are Changes - Using react router, Made Navigation between Home and Playground and Vice versa. Used 3d Resources like Background images, Button images to make it look 3d Videogame. Added button animations like some changes images, some spins. Improved qubit adjust box. Added tooltip component so people know what buttons does what, since buttons are image based. So, I have tried to make project look 3d Glassmorphism and minimal too. check out video attached to see progress till now .
Devlog #5 :) To be very honest I forget that its 8 hours 47 minutes in hackatime and it didn’t posted devlog until I got a Notification on slack. Sooo Guys! In this part of work I had to decide a thing that should I add Visualization of Qubits or not and then I realized that’s the whole point of project [to let people easily visualize whats happening]. So thats why I have decided add Q sphere . Folder Structure First of all I realized that my project was using url images and project structure was actually messing up as files and folders were increasing, so I decided to first organise the chaos and downloading all internet 3d assets in project. [Screenshot -1]. Because without a better organization of project it would get intimidatingly hard for others to contribute. Big Endian vs Little Endian Now second part is making the Result page of Qubit execution match that 3d glassmorphism design and white browsing through IBM composer (Tool for making Circuits) I got to observe that states were actually reverse in order. Suppose you applied hadamard gate to first qubit in 2 qubit system so instead of showing Probabilities of states as |00> = 50% , |01> = 0 , |10> = 50% , |11> = 0 , it reversed for 01 and 10. So after reading on internet about this I got to know that both ways are right and just differs because order you calcuate tensors: G1 * G2 * G3.. gives you Big Endian Version which considers least qubit as important Vice versa in case of Little Endian as IBM uses. So I implemented both in project. Earlier I thought I broke a physics Law [haha.] Making Q Sphere Its for Q sphere [2nd screenshot], that’s what help you understand statevector, because we can’t imagine more than 3D, so IBM come with this method. Basically I have used react 3 fiber that helps us write Three.js in react easily, using JSX instead of js manually, and it shows 3 lines in space which represent each state in vector: Bigger the node on top, bigger its probability . Color tells phase angle from origin. More 0 probability the vector will be pointing on upper hemisphere’s top and similarly more 1 will point on bottom of lower hemisphere. I am still processing [x,y,z] coordinates of line. Q sphere now shows random plots, I have to parse state vector to correct representation, will tell you about it in next devlog after I have learnt and implemented this. Screen Restrictions Forth is more of usability, side by side you can see either, code and graph or sphere and graph , so understand better. Also I added a screen restrictor for small screens since running this project on phone won’t be possible because design clutterness (forget to add screenshot, but you can check live). So hope you liked this version, I know it’s too much of quantum but yeah like others I am also trying to understand better. At Last, don’t forget to check attachments and share your feedbacks. Also I think I would be pushing on github now before developing futher. Namaste!!!
Devlog #6 :) So Hey People, I am feeling Immensely satisfied that Q Sphere feature is Mostly done. Also the GateWiki part is also done that tells You about Gate you Clicked on Gates Tray, again to tell you can drag gates into Circuit to build and Tap to know about it . May be I also link blogs on that Later. Now about Q Sphere Part Okay , Now let me share about Making of Q Sphere Part , So earlier I was not able to visualize it, but somehow I got to Know about Spherical Coordinates which is dependent on: theta : angle of Line from Z Axis phi : angle of Line from x Axis But clicked finally after frustration of not understanding it earlier. Then I gone to Google searching to see 3d visuals and AI to understand how we calculate those angles: So - Based on hamming weights (Means how many 1s in that State, Suppose in |01> has 1 1s and 011 have 2 1s ) and total qubits which help us find theta and divide sphere into sort of rings for similar nodes/lines of same hamming weights in same ring. Then we find how we calculate phi based on total active states in each ring and slicing ring into same proportion. I don’t know why but that was a finally a kick for me :) Finally since you will plot lines and nodes on spherical surface you have to convert theta and phi to coordinates [x, y, z] which you do using polar coordinates . Then after plotting them, a major part of Q sphere is made. now as you can see on 2nd screenshot left side the Sphere shows nodes for respective State. more chances of being 0 is on upper half and more 1 chance on bottom half. Structured the folders Also I worked on code Structure to keep all algos separated: To parse stateVectors Parse the frontend data to json circuit instructions Making all q sphere data from stateVectors parsing Code to export in Qiskit. more such functions too.. So yeah that was work I did, little more things is needed to build, after that project is done. Adding some multi qubit gates is next important thing now. I would be pushing on Github this Version and Vercel too now. Go check it out. Namaste!!!
Cirqmon Devlog #7 So, I am posting this Devlog after interval of Almost 20 days since last Posted. Why delay? During this time I learnt a Lot about Quantum computing. Infact, I was planning to ship the Project with Single qubit gates only, but after I joined Qiskit Global Summer School, then I realised that main game in Quantum computing is about entanglement, that comes with multi Qubit gates like CX, CZ, SWAP etc. The Media attached is Demo is of a GHZ circuit is made by combination of H gate and CNOT gates. Basically a GHZ state is larger version of Bell state. For N qubits, only two possible states shows Up with equal probability i.e 1/root2 (000…n + 111…n). So here is What I made Changes and How : 1) 2 Qubit Gates Implementation - So Earlier Version was for Only 1 Qubit Gates, and it used Tensor product. Where it used to tensor Each step and then Multiply each step to StateVector in successive manner. But for 2 Qubit gates, tensor method gets problematic because multi qubit gates need to have dependence on other qubits too, meanwhile tensor assumes every gate on that step is independent and it builds large matrix. This loses dependence and relation as demanded by multi qubit gates. So then I got to know of approach called Embedding or Inflation where we first create Temporary matrix of 2^n rows and 2^n Columns with each entry initially as 0, then we start looping through columns of that Matrix (which represent possibility, like iteration for 0 is actually 00 in binary) and then, matching it with rows and columns in Gate matrix, after that we force the bit in Temporary Matrix’s respective column and row to align with what Gate’s matrix bit has? Either 0 or 1. Finally we get Result of application in that Temporary matrix which we multiply with StateVector later on. That’s how This Inflation Approach works. 2) Applied Phase angle Indicator Now, Quantum State’s node’s color in Q sphere shows its phase Angle, which can be from PI to -PI, calculated using formula tan2a(y,x) , then we constraint it from 0 to 2PI, later convert to degrees, then feeding that value as HUE value in HSL colour format keeping lightness as 50% and Saturation 100% and then it corresponds to Phase Angle with color that degree, like 0deg is red, 90deg is green etc. So this was Major Changes I did along with some Style changes and Minor error fixing that appeared during changing the Simulator’s Approach. And to be very Honest at when I started to Write code for 2 qubit Gates, I earlier thought I would Do something that I dont have to change Simulator, but those were still just making me cry. So finally I gone to AI to learn and for almost 2 days new experiments were going out of head and that way almost I wasted Hours and then to experiment more and Stop Tracking Hackatime since I knew It would track more hours for Experiments too, So I coded in Cursor (Without Any AI, Just as Other Editor) Untracked. At the End it worked :) Now Finally Majority part is Done, after few More Edits, Will Ship it soon!
Cirqmon #Devlog 8 Actually I was telling my friend about project, and I realized that the Project should have better readme that tells about features, Examples, and Tour. Also added HSL wheel in Q sphere so People can Use it as a reference. Initially its faded, you hover it and it gets Visible. Also the Latest version is now Live with multi qubit gates.
Cirqmon #Devlog 9 This version is more of testing, I thought that I should write blogs and use examples using Cirqmon, So Written 2 blogs on Quantum computing for Beginners and Deutsch Joza algorithm. While writing it I thought I should Show them on Cirqmon Hompage too, earlier I thought I would replace blogs part in Homepage with Just a medium link of mine, but later when I read on internet that medium allows to see RSS version of Blogs so I parsed RSS to JSON and fetched Blogs related Quantum Computing. Along with it, made Qubits limits to 8 and steps to 24 and made a centralized Config file to control parameters from there. Added a Toggle so People can switch indentation of Qubit states either Big endian or Little Endian. Updated Homepage button with Pikachu Button I found while explore on UI verse, also added link to Readme guide. Now After writing Blogs I am getting surge of confidence inside that I understood Quantum Computing more Better. One of topics I am curious about is Cybersecurity and one of Algorithm that challenges classical Approaches like RSA is Shor’s Algorithm so next I am going to explore it, Also along with all these, I have updated Some images in readme too and going to Push updates, so do Share Feedbacks.
Cirqmon Devlog #10 Every time I think My project is ready to ship I find something missing and then it gets delayed. After I finished the blog on Deutsch Jozsa algorithm the project worked, as it needed only Single and Double qubit gate. When I started writing about Grover’s algorithm I realized the need of Three Qubit gate too as it needed CCZ gate to flip the phase to achieve 111 State. So I had to fix that. Here is what I did: Firstly as I told earlier I added the 3 Qubit gate feature, the underlying simulator code is working as old Inflating the Matrix approach, I only had to make it work for 3 Qubit gates. Secondly once I was on huddle where we were discussing about Boba bash, I presented the project to people and some said like ’it looks like too stuffed or some said it looked vibe coded. So I thought its a good feedback to work on. Then I improvised the Homepage so it feels like Apple like minimal theme while maintaining game feel. I also added the Background video instead of static image. Thirdly the blog page was pending so I made blog page with similar theme as I updated along with a option to search among the medium posts. So this was what I updated in this Version and now I needs that code review and matching the theme on Playground too. Just Hope I don’t get stuck this time and wrap it up. Thanks for Reading!
Cirqmon Devlog #11 So Guys, I have finally finalized the Cirqmon Playground UI. I replaced the old glassmorphism theme with a rougher, more irregular visual style. Earlier I got feedback that, the old layout felt cluttered because the quantum gates were spread far apart and Due to Space Background and glassmorphism, it looked like Vibe coded. I have now grouped all the gates together in one place to make the interface cleaner and easier to navigate. Here Is what I changed: Removed the Home button. Clicking the Cirqmon logo now takes gets back to the home page. Updated Playground icons with Animal GIFs to give it more lively and engaging appearance. As mentioned above, reduced the use of glassmorphism to due to flickering issues and implemented like hand drawn solid color based UI. Attaching a video Snapshot so you can see changes made. also, The README is the only major task left. Once that’s finished, I’ll be ready to ship the project!
Cirqmon Devlog #12 So I guess it’s final Devlog. Here firstly I updated Readme with new UI based snapshots. Made custom Alert box so it matches the theme instead of browser native alert box. Fixed bug in which earlier the gates were being added in circuit without checking if that Block is being used by other gate and its corresponding qubits. I hope if I don’t get a new problem to fix I will ship it;
Ships:
Cirqmon is a quantum computing circuit builder on web and It’s idea was like when I used to go on tools like IBM’s or other quantum circuit simulators they used to feel like so dry and academic, So I thought why don’t I make one that’s colorful, looks like game because I guess learning deep tech should not mean that you lose colors. Earlier I thought I would just build UI layer on top of Qiskit via Python API, then I thought what will I learn and from a quite a long time I wanted to build something that involves maths and physics so i thought I should build whole thing by myself. The whole thing was Actually a bit challenging on understanding how Q spheres or Tensors or how bitwise calculations work, aligning it will a Good UI theme, So I just learned and build. sometimes I thought How will i finish or how will I map that understanding into code But I guess AI as a Teacher helped me a lot. For Others to try it you should know about Quantum Gates, read the Readme once and I guess you will understand the project....
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WinDurango by @Rodrigo_Todescatto2010 | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-12T17:43:22Z", "hours": 71.0, "multiplier": 19.95, "payout": 1355, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "During the meanwhile, I’ve been working with mostly audio and support for other games.", "repo": "https://github.com/WinDurango/WinDurango", "demo": "https://github.com/WinDurango/WinDurango/actions"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-06-15T19:54:34Z", "hours": 13.0, "multiplier": 18.65, "payout": 239, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Hey there! This is WinDurango, an Xbox One translation layer (you can call it a high level emulator too if you want…) for Windows 10/11. Currently, support for games such as Forza Horizon 2, Forza Motorsport 5, Halo 5 and others is being actively worked on, while some few others like Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (older versions), Sonic Mania and LIMBO are fully playable! Note that I’m not the only developer in this project (I work on rendering/audio mostly and WinRT a few times), as @dexrn (works mostly on the GitHub/Social Media management part) and @CT5 (works mostly on the WinRT part). (screenshot from Forza Motorsport 5 with WinDurango in ForzaVista mode, showing the car interior).", "repo": "https://github.com/WinDurango/WinDurango", "demo": "https://github.com/WinDurango/WinDurango/actions"}]...
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[{"post_id": 66761, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 66761, "ts": "2026-09-12T17:28:09Z", "hours": 9.845, "text": "Quick update: Progress on audio with Forza Horizon 2! It now stutters way less. (Broken textures because I’m still debugging some stuff!)"}, {"post_id": 54171, "ts": "2026-08-25T01:05:49Z", "hours": 2.115, "text": "Great news: Thanks to RSantila, audio is now in the works for Forza and other games that use the ACP! (games that use Wwise or FMOD for example) For example, here’s Forza Horizon 2 with music in the background (there’s no audio at all without ACP processing, it’s also kinda glitchy because it’s being processed and decoded)"}, {"post_id": 47218, "ts": "2026-08-15T00:04:26Z", "hours": 7.5353, "text": "Great news: Forza Horizon 2 finally gets to the title screen!"}, {"post_id": 44010, "ts": "2026-08-09T14:38:36Z", "hours": 2.8606, "text": "Another quick update: Forza Horizon 3 now boots! (Might require DXVK!)"}, {"post_id": 39006, "ts": "2026-08-01T17:28:34Z", "hours": 5.3114, "text": "Another quick update: Peggle 2 is now playable!"}, {"post_id": 37865, "ts": "2026-07-30T20:47:12Z", "hours": 3.3136, "text": "Hey! Small update: The Crew boots!"}, {"post_id": 35493, "ts": "2026-07-26T23:25:10Z", "hours": 1.4122, "text": "Hey there! Little update: Destiny now boots!"}, {"post_id": 35456, "ts": "2026-07-26T21:43:25Z", "hours": 9.0853, "text": "Hey! Has been quite a while since the last devlog but here are some changes and news: Halo 5: Guardians is very close to booting! It still just needs some fixes with memory allocation. FIFA 15 is another game close to booting! Occultic;Nine now boots! Overall, I’m still doing some work that I will hopefully be able to share better in the next few days :)"}, {"post_id": 27986, "ts": "2026-07-13T23:06:36Z", "hours": 6.9742, "text": "Hi! I’m back with some stuff: Happy Dungeons (an console exclusive game) now boots with WinDurango! I’m working very hard at the moment on Forza Horizon 2 and Forza Motorsport 5 (which are my goals…) and I hope to have new stuff to share about them soon! And… That’s it for today, there isn’t anything else to say 😭"}, {"post_id": 24994, "ts": "2026-07-08T21:48:51Z", "hours": 9.4822, "text": "Hey there! It has been a few days since the last devlog (again) but we are still cooking some stuff! Another Minecraft: Xbox One Edition version is now playable! The version is 1.22.904.0/CU34 or earlier? Not sure about the exact CU. Another playable one is 1.18.781.0! While this one can’t be shown yet (or heard… there’s nothing!), I’m heavily working on emulating (I think we could put it like that?) the Xbox One’s ACP (Audio Co-Processor), which is used for decoding XMA (Xbox Media Audio) and processing audio in general (heavily used by FMOD and Wwise). While some games don’t depend on it specifically (such as Minecraft, LIMBO, Sonic Mania etc), the majority of the games depend on it (Unity, Unreal Engine and Cryengine use it), and if you don’t emulate it, most of the games will basically either hang at some point waiting for audio to be processed (e.g. Forza, Happy Wars, Halo 5) and won’t have audio at all. This is the part I’m focusing the most currently and I’m very stomped on it, which is also why there isn’t much progress going on, but hopefully I get some progress with it to share with y’all! That’s it for today, I really hope to have new stuff to share with everyone soon! But for now, that’s pretty much it… 😭"}, {"post_id": 19667, "ts": "2026-07-01T01:29:49Z", "hours": 12.6392, "text": "Hello there! Has been a while since my last devlog (a few days… long ago, huh?), but that does not mean there’s no progress going on, because there is! Draw Bundles are currently being worked on, which means more geometry rendering for some games! It still needs some optimization (mainly on RAM usage) and placement update still needs a few tweaks, but welp, at least we are getting some progress overall! Minecraft: Story Mode now boots! And it looks very broken I know and I’m investigating what can be done for fix that, but as far as I’ve seen, this is happening because of the game updating buffers with UpdateSubresource1 and passing what seems like (not sure if that’s actually the case!) constant offsets in pSrcBox + passing passing unaligned constants when setting a constant buffer with SetConstantBuffers1 , which was actually allowed back in D3D11.X, Xbox’s D3D11 version. Note that Minecraft: Story Mode isn’t the only game that does that, there are some games such as Forza Horizon 2 that also do so! And believe me, there are way more trickeries that were allowed and could be done back in D3D11.X… That’s it for today! I don’t have anything else to say and this is all the progress I got, I’ve been quite busy with some school exams but they will end soon (in 2 days) and hopefully I can get some more progress to share here! See ya! :)"}, {"post_id": 9024, "ts": "2026-06-15T01:43:09Z", "hours": 6.4064, "text": "Hello again! Today I’ve made some progress with 3D rendering with Placement Resources and got some 3D stuff in Forza rendering! Most of the scenario and the track won’t really render at all because I haven’t implemented Draw Bundles yet, but I plan on working on it soon! That’s it for today, hope yall like it :)"}, {"post_id": 8501, "ts": "2026-06-14T04:12:23Z", "hours": 5.2733, "text": "Hello again! Today I’ve made some progress with tiled textures/placement resources (a Xbox One’s D3D11.X exclusive feature similar to placed resources in D3D12), I’m still working on it but results are already quite satisfactory… The first screenshot shows how the texture looks now and the second one shows how it looked like before, the third one is an extra screenshot from the game title screen! (it also looked like a mess before!) See ya! :)"}, {"post_id": 7772, "ts": "2026-06-13T00:01:01Z", "hours": 1.6606, "text": "Hello World! This is WinDurango, a Xbox One Translation Layer for Windows 10/11. Today I got Forza Motorsport 6 booting. It didn’t require much thankfully but I noticed our ID3D11DeviceX vtable might be wrong for it’s D3D11.X version. Right after the Turn 10/Microsoft Studios intro (bink video), the game hangs on a black screen due to unimplemented audio things (ACP commands). More updates to come in the next days from other games as well! :)"}]...
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Title: WinDurango by @Rodrigo_Todescatto2010 | Sta Title: WinDurango by @Rodrigo_Todescatto2010 | Stardance
Devlogs:
Hello World! This is WinDurango, a Xbox One Translation Layer for Windows 10/11. Today I got Forza Motorsport 6 booting. It didn’t require much thankfully but I noticed our ID3D11DeviceX vtable might be wrong for it’s D3D11.X version. Right after the Turn 10/Microsoft Studios intro (bink video), the game hangs on a black screen due to unimplemented audio things (ACP commands). More updates to come in the next days from other games as well! :)
Hello again! Today I’ve made some progress with tiled textures/placement resources (a Xbox One’s D3D11.X exclusive feature similar to placed resources in D3D12), I’m still working on it but results are already quite satisfactory… The first screenshot shows how the texture looks now and the second one shows how it looked like before, the third one is an extra screenshot from the game title screen! (it also looked like a mess before!) See ya! :)
Hello again! Today I’ve made some progress with 3D rendering with Placement Resources and got some 3D stuff in Forza rendering! Most of the scenario and the track won’t really render at all because I haven’t implemented Draw Bundles yet, but I plan on working on it soon! That’s it for today, hope yall like it :)
Hello there! Has been a while since my last devlog (a few days… long ago, huh?), but that does not mean there’s no progress going on, because there is! Draw Bundles are currently being worked on, which means more geometry rendering for some games! It still needs some optimization (mainly on RAM usage) and placement update still needs a few tweaks, but welp, at least we are getting some progress overall! Minecraft: Story Mode now boots! And it looks very broken I know and I’m investigating what can be done for fix that, but as far as I’ve seen, this is happening because of the game updating buffers with UpdateSubresource1 and passing what seems like (not sure if that’s actually the case!) constant offsets in pSrcBox + passing passing unaligned constants when setting a constant buffer with SetConstantBuffers1 , which was actually allowed back in D3D11.X, Xbox’s D3D11 version. Note that Minecraft: Story Mode isn’t the only game that does that, there are some games such as Forza Horizon 2 that also do so! And believe me, there are way more trickeries that were allowed and could be done back in D3D11.X… That’s it for today! I don’t have anything else to say and this is all the progress I got, I’ve been quite busy with some school exams but they will end soon (in 2 days) and hopefully I can get some more progress to share here! See ya! :)
Hey there! It has been a few days since the last devlog (again) but we are still cooking some stuff! Another Minecraft: Xbox One Edition version is now playable! The version is 1.22.904.0/CU34 or earlier? Not sure about the exact CU. Another playable one is 1.18.781.0! While this one can’t be shown yet (or heard… there’s nothing!), I’m heavily working on emulating (I think we could put it like that?) the Xbox One’s ACP (Audio Co-Processor), which is used for decoding XMA (Xbox Media Audio) and processing audio in general (heavily used by FMOD and Wwise). While some games don’t depend on it specifically (such as Minecraft, LIMBO, Sonic Mania etc), the majority of the games depend on it (Unity, Unreal Engine and Cryengine use it), and if you don’t emulate it, most of the games will basically either hang at some point waiting for audio to be processed (e.g. Forza, Happy Wars, Halo 5) and won’t have audio at all. This is the part I’m focusing the most currently and I’m very stomped on it, which is also why there isn’t much progress going on, but hopefully I get some progress with it to share with y’all! That’s it for today, I really hope to have new stuff to share with everyone soon! But for now, that’s pretty much it… 😭
Hi! I’m back with some stuff: Happy Dungeons (an console exclusive game) now boots with WinDurango! I’m working very hard at the moment on Forza Horizon 2 and Forza Motorsport 5 (which are my goals…) and I hope to have new stuff to share about them soon! And… That’s it for today, there isn’t anything else to say 😭
Hey! Has been quite a while since the last devlog but here are some changes and news: Halo 5: Guardians is very close to booting! It still just needs some fixes with memory allocation. FIFA 15 is another game close to booting! Occultic;Nine now boots! Overall, I’m still doing some work that I will hopefully be able to share better in the next few days :)
Hey there! Little update: Destiny now boots!
Hey! Small update: The Crew boots!
Another quick update: Peggle 2 is now playable!
Another quick update: Forza Horizon 3 now boots! (Might require DXVK!)
Great news: Forza Horizon 2 finally gets to the title screen!
Great news: Thanks to RSantila, audio is now in the works for Forza and other games that use the ACP! (games that use Wwise or FMOD for example) For example, here’s Forza Horizon 2 with music in the background (there’s no audio at all without ACP processing, it’s also kinda glitchy because it’s being processed and decoded)
Quick update: Progress on audio with Forza Horizon 2! It now stutters way less. (Broken textures because I’m still debugging some stuff!)
Ships:
Hey there! This is WinDurango, an Xbox One translation layer (you can call it a high level emulator too if you want…) for Windows 10/11. Currently, support for games such as Forza Horizon 2, Forza Motorsport 5, Halo 5 and others is being actively worked on, while some few others like Minecraft: Xbox One Edition (older versions), Sonic Mania and LIMBO are fully playable! Note that I’m not the only developer in this project (I work on rendering/audio mostly and WinRT a few times), as @dexrn (works mostly on the GitHub/Social Media management part) and @CT5 (works mostly on the WinRT part). (screenshot from Forza Motorsport 5 with WinDurango in ForzaVista mode, showing the car interior).
During the meanwhile, I’ve been working with mostly audio and support for other games....
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Pirate Cats by @Vishy | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-15T23:16:06Z", "hours": 5.0, "multiplier": 19.74, "payout": 104, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Second Ship for Pirate Cats. In this ship there have been many changes to the games. Some changes include making instructions/tasks clearer, many visual changes, and easter eggs/new features. Many of you guys said the instructions were not clear so I spent a lot of time going through to fix it, and made it more clearer here and there. Also you guys said to put space to skip, so I added that now you can just zoom through the text (if you please). There were not any bugs but some items that were not connected allowing you to not see the bubbles, making some visual fixes like the shells was so blurry and there were some fade in’s coming in really early. Then I added some easter eggs and new dialogue for you guys to find. I hope you guys enjoy the new and improved version!", "repo": "https://github.com/justvishy12/Pirate-Cats", "demo": "https://vishyyyyyyyyy.itch.io/pirate-cats"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-08-01T23:26:58Z", "hours": 77.0, "multiplier": 19.55, "payout": 1496, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Welcome to my ship of Pirate Cats. Pirate Cats is a 2d godot interactive game using point and click and other buttons such as arrow keys and space. This was the most complex game I have ever built and I have learned so much from it. This game has taken me over a month to build and I am so proud of my self. From learning that there are other ways to create assets (like figma) to how to create save manager (saving the users progress) this was a very fun game to build. Building this game was not so easy, as it required alot of logic, and some of that was repeating so I had to keep rechecking it. Also there were some items I did not know how to use so I had to do research. As this game is only a point and click I am sure you guys will find it entertaining, as I spent a long time on making this good. After building a game so long, and finishing, I realized I want to expand on this! So this is version one where I have your guys feedback! So I can improve my game and add a hard mode where you have lives and other suggestions you guys have. This game has tested my patience as I have spent countless nights coding and building this game from scratch. I have learned so many things that I previously did not know. I didnt know a panel takes mouse input or that there were sliders, those were the easy things to conquer. But items such as creating a full on working save manager took some time to understand, or creating a full fishing minigame, with different sounds and other cool features. I am sure you guys will love what I have put into this game. It also makes me want to learn how to use figma more. From playing minigames on the ship, to steering a ship, to helping the cats escape from crabs, this game has great variety. So who is ready to help the cats (and of course a parrot) and find their treasure!", "repo": "https://github.com/justvishy12/Pirate-Cats", "demo": "https://vishyyyyyyyyy.itch.io/pirate-cats"}]...
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[{"post_id": 47246, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 47246, "ts": "2026-08-15T01:34:45Z", "hours": 1.3317, "text": "Captains Secret??? I designeed the figma cat for the captain, along with the frame, then implemented the photo/frame in godot behind the chair in the captains room. This is a relatively short devlog as it is just one added feature that I think makes the game cooler. Figma For the figma first we start off with creating the cat, it is the same as usual, I don’t use the pen tool because it is very unconsistent, anyways we start with the head then the body then add legs, one thing about figma is they dont have vertical and horizontal align just horizontal with items, they should have an option to enable a grid. Anyways for the secret I figured I would make it contrast the captain ( we are talking about the cat) the captain has textured and not very furry fur, but I made this cat have furry skin/fur, and not textured, and kind of short/tall (depending on which cat you are comparing it to). Anyways I used the Pen tool to create the frame as it is easier and faster, even though the alignment is not perfect, it is hard to see just from the human eye, Godot To input this in godot we have to get the image, so we upload it into the file system then I had to re export the chair (seperatley) so I could have it like the photo is behind the chair and the user can press the photo (only the part sticking out) then the captains text plays. This is like a secret and for you guys to find out, so good luck and go try it out!"}, {"post_id": 44656, "ts": "2026-08-10T15:53:19Z", "hours": 3.9511, "text": "Recommended Fixes Hello everyone I just recently shipped and I was really happy with the votes I got so thank you to everyone that supported me but with all the suggestions you guys gave and some of mine that I knew i had to do, I have fixed up the game. Before I get started the godot wakatime extention is broken so now I have to use lapse which makes it harder for me because I have to do the whole recording in one sitting and I cant do some work close it and continue. The video attached includes a few of the fixes and I will start using paragraphs in my writing. But without further to do lets get started. List Of Fixes With all you guys said I have made a list of fixes such as during the cooking scene it was not clear what to do after you made a plate so at the end of the training round I added a arrow so that users can try it before they are on their own. Second There is this flag in the powder monkey’s area, which is side ship view 1. When the flag raises its fine but it does some bugs when coming back down and the way I structured it was weird so I deleted all the code and had a area 2d mouse enter and exit, and I start the animation one 1 speed when they hover over it and when they let go I put it on -1 speed and play it. This makes it look like you are raising the flag and when you stop it goes down. Another thing was all the shells in that scene were blurry. I forgot what did but in figma I think the items were way to small so when scaling up t was very blurry. Also for the space star scene when the user gets it wrong the dialogue for it says that they found the island but then says they should set sail tomorrow, I had the order of items wrong so I flipped them (in the dialogue) and made it stop 1 line earlier in the code. Also after the user gets 3 constellations correct to go to the island it goes to the scene fades in and out then next scene then fades in and out and same for third scene. The problem was that it was making things visible after the fade out finished, it should have been doing it when fade in was done so when fade out was done like you were traveling. Skip text!!! I know this is a big one, so I added it, so I had a line of code that was like if event.is_action_pressed(\"ui_accept\") and !typing: So I just flipped it so that when the dialogue is playing and if they call it it makes a variable true, and in the code where it is playing the text out (its a for loop) I break the for loop and make the ammount of characters visible the ammount of characters there are. Then I also made all the text that says space to continue, to space to skip. This one I did most recently but it was with the crabs, I added a randomizer for the audio so when they shoot the cannons, I just made a randi for -0.1 - 0.1 and added it to the pitch of 1 to the audio stream player so it was random. I also made a new scene for the explosion boom like visual effect and made it fade in and out. I have also commented all the code to make it easier for you guys to understand! That is all I have done and will always be looking for more suggestions to do more work, thank you and hope yall enjoy!"}, {"post_id": 38867, "ts": "2026-08-01T13:04:48Z", "hours": 2.4856, "text": "Finishing Touches Hello everyone we have finally finished Pirate Cats. After weeks of coding, building and testing, we have finally come up with a playable version. In this version everything is finished, but there is only one mode. So as this is the last devlog for this ship let me explain what I have done this time. Bugs After game testing we found some bugs out like there was no music for the cooking puzzle, or the sponge was not visible for the sponge scene, or the button in the island was not working, or the typing settings broke down. So let me start each of the bugs and how I fixed this (all these bugs came up yesterday as I only post a devlog once a day). So first the cooking music puzzle, I forgot to play it in the code, this was a simple fix but the other ones were not. For the scrubbing scene the sponge was not visible, in the code again I forgot to set it to visible but then I found another bug from fixing one it was that I need to turn it back after the scene otherwise it will always stay like that. So I figured out you have to set the cursor to null, that way it doesn’t put a preloaded asset and just has the normal one. This next one was tricky, on the island minigame where you are digging after you finish digging, sometimes you can not press certain parts of the button (to finish the dialogue and go to the end scene) I was so confused on what to problem was, then after some time I realized it only happened because I was initiating a scene, and I thought that it was over it, so I set some of the items including the buttons z index near 1000, because there was only going to be like 100 of the items. So then I thought the button for the sand was over, but it was not and I disabled it after the treasure was found, so I was so confused, then I realized there was a panel in the scene being initiated. So then I finally thought dont panels take the mouse input? And that was when I realized that I had a random panel there stealing the mouse, so i set the mouse input on it to pass, so it can not take it. Finally the typing settings. I learned how to use sliders, but there was one thing I could not figure out, how to flip a slider, so for the text slider, it was fast (the bottom one) to slow (the top one) instead of slow to fast as a slider should be, but then when assigning the value I put a - infront of it, I thought this fixed it because when I went in the speed was on the slower side but max speed. Then I tested it, and I could not change the speed, the problem was when you do - it puts the lowest setting meaning it can not be put to the highest, so I had to put it back and I still don not know how to flip a slider, but that is for next ship. See you guys!"}, {"post_id": 37977, "ts": "2026-07-31T01:49:51Z", "hours": 4.8392, "text": "Finishing Touches (Saving Special ✨) Hello everyone, I am getting close to shipping this project and I have done the finishing touches today which is so much, and I just have to get my fellow game testers up and test the game for any bugs or anything. I know there are a few here and there, but I should have fixed them when I started, doing it now will be too much, and I will fix it in the second ship. So without further to do lets get straight into it. Loading Scenes The loading scenes are the guide scene, preference scene, and the loading part itself. So now in the preference scene there are volume sliders for the different things like sfx, audio in general and bg music. And there is also a slider for the speed on how fast the text goes by, since you can not skip it i thought \"SHould it not be useful to just have a speed, so fast and slow readers can adjust it to make it feel more like a game? So then I added a slider, all the settings are saved I think, but since this is just finishing the logic and not the testing part I will not know for a fact. Overall the ui looks great, and mainly for the save manager, I was working on connecting the variables throughout the different scenes, and when they load a game, based on where they are in the game (like progress wise) then it will put them in the corresponding scene, this was not hard but I kept on forgetting what to add until I started wroking on a different scene. Other Fixes So one major bug I had was previously when I was working on the map scene, I thought I saved the progress but I didn’t and then I committed and all my progress was gone, so I had to spend some time today fixing all the bugs there, and then some of the dialogue in that scene, I thought for some reason was inputted incorrectly, then I proceeded to re fix the whole structure adding lines to the dialogue and then I realized it was wrong and had to put it back, since changing dialogue doesnt sound like a big deal, you have to understand, I changed all the variables because of that. Anyways that was the last thing I did today but lets talk about some other progress I did today. Audio The audio for the game was all recorded today, and everything is handmade (like in the meaning that it is not taken from somewhere else) the only thing that is going to be used for the game that is not handmade, is the background music (im not a good artist, but I am a musician so I am sure I can learn how to do it) and also the fonts, the fonts used for this game look amazing, and I will use it again for all my other games. After making the audio I had to implement it everywhere such as keyboard noise for the letters typing on the screen. Or the crabs moving, or the sponge scrubbing, or the cannons firing going like \"Boom Boom\" and other stuff. Anyways that summarizes most of the things I have done today, and tomorrow I will official test the game and get ready to ship, bye guys!"}, {"post_id": 37400, "ts": "2026-07-30T02:48:14Z", "hours": 7.0306, "text": "Bugs + Fixes Hello everyone, I am getting very close to finishing Pirate Cats and will probably only work on it for a few more days (like until the 31st then ship on the first). I have big changes coming in after this ship. So today I will talk about to big progress and what I will be working on! The Game Tester So I had a game tester come and try my game, like obviously not everything is connected, but I had him try the individual scenes, and lets just say I was not happy. Before you guys all start talking about how I hired a Professional Game Tester with Money for a project for stardance, relax. The game tester is my friend, he has tested all my projects and lets just say, I am so glad he does. Anyways he found some bugs and it took a while to fix it (considering I was on a time crunch and had to go out somewhere today and the due date (the end ofthe month) is coming soon ). So first of all he tested the back ship scene which is the video linked, so what is supposed to happen when u click the cat, it is supposed to talk about either if you have completed the minigame \"Oh come eat supper again\" or if you havent \"Welcome, want to help me cook\" and then go to cooking mingame, but all this is set in one array of dialogue, and I call the dialogue from either number one or two and then I only make it go to the next dialogue if it is not one of the ending numbers for talking other wise I just make it not visible. The bug was that I needed an if statement that checked if it was an ending dialogue, and if not it goes to the next. This is the one of the least complex of problems, the second is with the digging scene. So the problem was after it started the dialogue explaining how to play, it went on one dialogue extra, I realized I had included one more so I just deleted that including code, this was the least of complex, but the third bug is massive. So the bug was after the cooking scene, once the dialogue finished (which is the tutorial) the user couldn’t play them selves. I slowly realized the problem was that it worked before and when I included the dialogue, it broke, since the tutorial completely changed how I had built it. So I had to go one by one and fix every little thing, first after you completed the tutorial, it automatically sends you back, but then you cant even get another plate, so I had to fix that, then once you get the plate I realized there was no order, then I made it so before you go back the order comes, then I realized after you got the plate nothing happens, its supposed to go to the next scene, then it went to the next scene which was getting the sand castle, which worked fine then it went to the scene to get toppings like the shell and flag and star, and that worked fine, then I went to the check scene, I realized there was no way to get back to use up the other plates. Then I fixed that, and when I went back, I realized the plate count never changed, for some reason in the code I was setting it back to 0, so it never changed how many plates the user did. So after I fixed this, I played it again, then I realized the second time you do it, the first times items that they picked were not visible and disabled, so in the reset code (after one full round) I made sure everything became visible and not disabled, then because of this I finally fixed it! Work I need to fix the star scene next, so it plays what happens before they go and after they get it right. My goal is to do as much hours as possible because I am trying to get the framework 13 in this ship, and hopefully this project will do it. After I do this ship I will work on a hard mode for this game, so if users want a challenge they shall get it. Anyways that is it for now, see you guys next devlog!"}, {"post_id": 36182, "ts": "2026-07-28T03:15:49Z", "hours": 5.3925, "text": "The Cats Can Now Talk? Hello everyone, it has been 4 days, and I have done a lot of work on the game for the past few days, and am getting very close to submitting it. So I have finished the last mini game, which is finding the treasure to save the cats (or aid them depending on how you take giving cats treats ) and now I have implemented the dialogue part such as the cats and you talking, and the map being found in most of the scenes. So without further to do lets get straight in it and talk about the minigame. Digging up treasure So right now I have made the basic part of the treasure scene, it still needs to be decorated and I need to push the borders out a little but to start its good. It will not be in the video posted but it will be tomorrow. So how it works is I have this scene called sand, it is an area 2d and everything is not visible besides the smallest hole and smalest pile of sand, and you can press the area 2d 3 times and it will have the medium pile and hole and large pile and hole. And in it, I have it calling functions from the main scene. So in the main scene I call the scene for every time the press a button (the whole screen consists of 6 buttons, if they dig fully and that button is the treasure one, then you get it for the cats) it mainly consists of buttons and randi functions and caling functions from two different scenes. Cats are Talking IF you want to see the desert scene or the cats talking you can see it on https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6k6MWErv86k , anyways the logic for this is we call next dialogue, and this checks the index and then adds one too it and goes to the next. Then if it is cat speaking, it waits for the user to press space (skip) then it adds one to the index and plays the next if it is the users turn to talk (the user can talk using a button they press) then they press a button and the text becomes the dialogue and then it adds one to its index and then plays the next. Then when the index is the second to last I stop it from playing anymore dialogue. Then when the user completes the task like sorting then it makes the map visible and then it plays the last dialogue (when they press the map because it is a button) and it says something like, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR FINDING IT, PLEASE PUT THAT PIECE OF MAP ON THE CAPTAINS DESK then that will add, and once you have all the pieces you can put the map together. That is all I have to say, and I will do alot more in the next few days, as I need to finish up dialogue and work on the save, and global variables. But for now, bye guys!"}, {"post_id": 34058, "ts": "2026-07-24T14:49:39Z", "hours": 6.0272, "text": "The Minigames Are Coming To An End… Hello everyone, I have completed two more minigames for my game pirate cat, and only have one last game to create. I have been very productive, and learned how to code more efficiently, as I finished two minigames yesterday. Without further to do, lets get into the first minigame I finished. Scrubber Cat By the name you might get what the scrubber cat does, the scrubber cat is the cat/pirate that will be scrubbing and cleaning the decks/the ship. So for a minigame I have created one where you scrub the dirt to get rid. I still need to make the colors more vibrant but the logic is done, and I did have some few bugs but we will start about the game. So for the game, for each round there are a certain amount of stains. Each stain gets its own button and each button has mouse entered and mouse exited which goes to a variable. The variable is either false or true. So if mouse entered the variable is true otherwise it is false. Then in the beginning I call round 1, in round I check if the items are visible, then I check if the mouse entered is true and if the mouse is moving, because I have a variable called mose pos, and in the ready is set it to the mouse position, and then I compare it with the current mouse position when round 1 goes, then i set it to mose pos. Then if the mouse is moving, and the variable is true. The stain looses some of its visiblity, like its going away. I am going to find out how to make the cursor a scrubber, but for now its not. And the user will do this for 3 different round. Constellations So if you saw the video you might have saw the constellation game, I recommend you watch the video to understand what I say. So there are two different types of constellations, human constellations, and cat constellations. So the goal is the user to always pick the cat constellations. So there is 2 sides, one side is the cat and the other is the human, the sides will switch, and you have to pick the cat one, if you dont, that round restarts. I had so many bugs with this, and the main one wasthe timer. In godot I had no clue that you have to stop a timer after it timed out. This created a majority of the bugs. And since it was basically the same logic for most of it, I did copy and pasting and because of this I forgot to change some of the variables, so it did changes to things that did not need changes, and did not do changes to things that did changes. I am going to finish up this game soon and submit it. Bye guys!"}, {"post_id": 33306, "ts": "2026-07-23T03:10:54Z", "hours": 7.845, "text": "Powder Monkey (Major Bug Not Fixed) Hello guys, this devlog is going to be max characters and if its not I have so much to complain about… I have worked so long today and dont so much, and I think that everything I have done was very great. So without much to do lets get into todays progress. Before Powder Monkey Mini game So I am going to talk about what I did before I started the powder monkey minigame. So today, before I ate lunch I was working on other stuff, like not minigames but the travel, so now users can travel around the boat, to the parrot area (in the front), powder monkeys area (going to be discussed in todays devlog and its on the side) the back of the ship which has both the cooking cat, and also the fishing cat. And then there is one more side of the boat, which is the other side, side view 2 which has the scrubber cat (I am going to save the scrubber cat for tomorrow when I start working on him and his mini game). So now that I have explained what I spent the first 1 and a half hours on lets get into the Powder Monkey Minigame. The powder monkey minigame Okay guys now we are going to start talking about the powder monkey’s minigame. So if you see the video you might start to see where the video game is going. But if you don’t understand the video or have not seen the video (due to personal reasons) then let me explain. Ever see those fake mobile ads that don’t let you play the game but give you a preview? Well I am building that fake mobile ad, im not trying to say it’s fake, but this time you can actually now play the one level until you beat it. So the game is like you drag the different colored balls into the different beakers and try to get beakers with only one of the same colored balls. So I spent 5 hours creating the logic, then I realized i made the game wrong 😭 Then I had to get rid of this one part of a line in 45 lines, then I deleted it and then it didnt save and I had to redo it, and that took 30 minutes already, then redoing it made it an hour. So the line I said that I deleted checked if the when placing a ball (we will call the different objects you can move a ball) so when moving the balls i made it so you had to place it in either an empty beaker or ontop of a ball of the same type. I didnt know that it could be placed on different types. So then after deleting that line of code when running there are still some bugs here and there that dont allow one of the coconuts and one of the ballons to move. I have checked 2000 LINES OF CODE 15 TIMES, MAYBE MORE. And me not finding this bug is annoying because I still have to write the check feature. Anyways I will try to fix the bugs, but here is yesterdays video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7UFbDQq-l0Q and by guys see you later!"}, {"post_id": 32344, "ts": "2026-07-21T13:34:14Z", "hours": 5.2003, "text": "You can Finally Fix the map Hello guys, we have spent another 5 hours on this game. I have got to say, I am starting to love this game. Day by day, the more I do the more I get drawn in. I have got to say at the beginning I didn’t really feel like doing this game. But now after I see everything I am amazed. As usual if you want to see yesterdays progress on the captains room you can see it on Vishy Labs or https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0w2feNxZQ5A The Map For the past few day’s I have been working on the map scene, if you see it, it may not look complicated but I have spent longer than the fishing minigame to create this, let me explain why. So there are 6 maps, and 6 panels. One panel for each map. If you place a map in the panel, either that is the right panel to place it in or the wrong one. There is over 40 variables for this scene, since there are 6 buttons, we have 6 of placed 1-6 and 6 of map 1-6, (now these are for dragging the maps) 6 offsets 1-6 6 dragging 1-6, 6 inzone 1-6 and for the panels 6 pan 1-6. So this makes it hard to keep track of all of them. And let me talk about the logic, so when you press a button like hold it down you have to change the position with the offset and the mouses position, but now we have to check if the piece of the map is intersecting with the panel, and if it is, which panel is it intersecting, then if there is already a panel there. And it gets ever more complicated, if there is a map intersecting or above 2 panels, then you have to subtract the values from all the panels and see which one is the closest from the center of the map, because in godot for some reason it likes putting its point in the top left. And I have made over 8 different functions not including the button up and down or godot made functions just for this. This has got to be one of the most complicated minigames yet but im glad I did it. We have function snap map which gets the center of the panel and places the center of the map there, and this only works if that panel doesn’t have a map and the map was placed there. We also have func_panel_taken you input the panel which in my case is closest because that is what I have put for the closest panel in the code, and you also input which map your moving, so it ignores that when it does the check for intersection. But the process_function is the most complicated to keep track of. Since it does 60 times per second, you have to make sure everything doesnt run more than once by having variables that become true when the condition is false. And you have to make sure what your doing is supposed to be checked, because if it is not and the values get changed, then you have to find a new way to implament it. If you guys saw the attachment I have showed a little of the sideview1 and I will get more into that tomorrow. Bye guys!"}, {"post_id": 31767, "ts": "2026-07-20T12:37:58Z", "hours": 3.7061, "text": "Captain’s Room + Ship Hello everyone I have done 7 hours yesterday and devloged 3 of them with the crabfight and the others hours now. I have been very productive and had a lot of progres on my game pirate cats. I have finished major parts of scenes. Captains Room First I would like to talk about the Captains Room, this is the first part of the video and you see a lot of things start to move when I put my mouse over them, that is the hover. You can do it with a button 2d with mouse entered and exited, in the start I had it as mouse entered meant animation played and mouse exited mean animation stopped on a button. and if you watched the video, you saw that my camera moved when the mouse was on the side of the view. To do this I used a camera, and put two button 2d’s on the edge, and I had mouse exited for the left side was left camera move = true and I set it false when it was exited, I did the same with the right side button and had a variable called right camera move = false . You might wonder how just having variables would move the camera, it doesn’t. In the process code (which runs 60 frames per second) there is this var delta, which means run at 60 frames per second. So for the camera to move left I did $Camera2D.global_position : Vector2 = -1 * Speed * Delta I could set speed to whatever I wanted such as 300 and then when it was for the right side I just switched -1 to 1. This was all working I had no bugs, but in the scene tree the camera is at the bottom. So the buttons are children of the camera, and there are other buttons above it such as the ones I use to hover. So when I was moving the camera my cursor landed on one of the other items that hover, and the camera stopped moving. It was very annoying and I didn’t know how to fix it. It turns out you can use area 2D’s they have a mouse entered, mouse exited, and a click function. The only difference is you can not see the area 2d’s like if you are putting an icon or text or style on the button like a panel you wont see it. But luckily for me I but the button over the assets. So this was a big problem I solved. Back of The Ship I have started working, just the back part. That is the second part of the video, when it goes to that new scene after pressing the arrow. I have the fisher and the cook there. So as you see the arrows are what guides the players, and there is a camera and some items to hover at the back of the ship and I am using area 2d’s. Game Information If you want to see my crab mini game in Pirate Cats, or previous history you can see it on Vishy Labs on Instagram https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dKRGESaI7ss I will continue working on the map part, where the user has to put the map together after getting all the pieces. See you guys later!"}, {"post_id": 31240, "ts": "2026-07-19T14:25:01Z", "hours": 7.3289, "text": "Crab Fight 🦀 Hello everyone it’s getting close to the day when I get to submit, Pirate Cats, and as usual if you want to view my game’s previous progress you can see it on youtube https://youtu.be/XgYkeBUyqbE?si=mVQkA0oVtBkzSB1x Well now I have currently finished the crab fight. I usually only devlog after the day is done, but for pirate cats I devlog when I finish one minigame, so now today I have finished the crab fight minigame, so I will be explaining all about it. I dont have the dialouge and the text or the home pages or settings done yet, but I will be submiting on the 30th. I think i might need to go back and fix the assets for some other items, as like the fishing game the place holders are still there and the cannon doesn’t really look like a cannon, but let’s get started and talk about my progress. Crabs So now it is time for me to talk on what I have been doing for the past 2 days, well I have been working on the actual minigame as always, if you watched the video and have any suggestions please comment it, I will take it into account! So for the crabs, there are 3 crabs, they dont really do anything just different colored hats for variety but what happens is that there are 3 groups, left right and middle, I do a randi function randi_range(1,2) if it is 1 the crabs in the first group are not part of the first round if it is 2 they are part of the first round. Then I do an function for each group and do an if statment to see which crab color should be visible then in that I do the calculations. Alright you might be wondering, what are the calculations? Well the calculations are how much the crab has to move each time. So I have to take account the height of the waves, how much room I have between waves, and how many times the crabs will pop up. So in the code I make the crab go up, then go down. I use the tween function to move the crab, since using an animation player and you can only run 1 animation at a time, it would be a pain to keep track of all the animation players, so I use tween as I have said before tween moves the item smootly so it is not teleporting. Then I do either of two things, one if the crab gets all the way to the bottom then the players screen flashes red, then it repeats the process. Cannon So in godot, you can add inputs, I added left, right, and space. So then in the code I did in the process, using direction and inputted left and right. The first one inputed is -1 second is 1 and if both or none is being pressed then direction is 0. This is built into godot so I got lucky, because it saved some time in the coding process. Then I have a speed, which I set to 200-300. Then in process I did ~$Cannon.global_position = direction * speed * delta` this makes it so that it moves every esecond something is being held down. Now that I have explained how the cannon is working I will explain how the cannon ball works. Cannon Ball So everyone, the cannon ball is a new scene, I can just call it every time and this makes it so I dont have to make alot of them, because I don’t know how many the user will use, so it would be hard to make so many. So in the new scene I have a panel on the cannon ball, as my other mini games. The panel on the crabs and the panel on the cannon ball interact, this happens when they are in direct contact, I check if that crab is visible, and then if that crab should be caught, it can only be caught if it is above the wave (if it is not above the wave then it is hiding but can still be triggered, not visible) then I make that group not visible, and do it for all the other crabs that got hit. I use tween to make the cannon move up by 300. The work I have done in the past few days were alot more complicated, but I will keep doing more, my goal is to reach 50 hours by the end of this month and submit. Thank you guys, if you want to see progress its Vishy Labs on both youtube and instagram. See you guys!"}, {"post_id": 30207, "ts": "2026-07-17T16:32:01Z", "hours": 2.5833, "text": "Parrot Feeding Time 🦜 Hello everyone it has been some time since I have posted a devlog, like 4 days but here I am with some exciting news to share. I have finished the parrot feeding scene and made the check feature for the cooking scene. If you want to see what I did it is on https://youtube.com/shorts/XgYkeBUyqbE?si=7PP_u8wK7GwFHCAd Parrot Scene For the parrot scene the user is supposed to feed the parrot cookies, because i dont really know anything more interesting if you guys do please tell me. So to feed the parrot cookies I have to make the cookies dragable so they can give it to the parrot, and doing this will play a cool extra animation of the parrot chewing. Since I already did the cooking scene making the dragging part was already really easy, since I just add a button and a panel. I told you guys last time what the button does it has the button up and down function so it can detect when the button is being held down and released and when the mouse is moving so I can drag the item. So then I have a panel on both the item and the parrot, and I check that when button is let go and they are making contact, then if they are it is not visible and the parrot chewing animation plays, and I did this for pretty much all of them. Cooking Scene So we did some more things for the cooking scene, so I was working on a check feature, then I was moving all my data to a new computer, and I accidently commited on both computers for same scene to github, and they both overrid eachother and all my progress was lost, then after spending some time researching I realized I can pull back commits by reverting and I got my progress on the checking part back. Then after this I checked if the items on the plate, and assigned each one to a variable, if it is visible or not then this variable is true or false, and i did that both for the order and the plate. The actual checking feature is it checks if both of the variables for the same item are the same then if they are the light for that item becomes visible, I show it in the video attached so if you want to see please watch. Future Steps So there are a few things I need to make and I need help from you guys, so what should the powder monkey do, and what should the captain do, it was thought that the map puzzle piece will just be in the captains poket, and users will have to set up the cannon for the pirate monkey, if you guys have anything else more interesting please share! Bye guys!"}, {"post_id": 28060, "ts": "2026-07-14T02:41:44Z", "hours": 5.6961, "text": "Cat Cooking Hello everyone, it might be a day or two since I have devloged, since I finished the fishing game mechanics, I wanted to take a short break and now I am back and starting the cooking minigame for the cook cat whose name is BISCUITS Thats right everybody, lets give it up for our cook cat buiscuits, and for the fisher cat, I forgot to put names back then, so his name is now Minnow If you guys have any suggestions for names I will take it in for my game! So without further to do, lets get into Pirate Cats, Cooking! (And if you wanted to see yesterdays progress you can view it on https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgLbwD1cwBg ) Logic If you saw the video (I put the link above) I made it yesterday, which is when I made the logic. So for each item, like the cakes shown in yesterday’s video, or the plates, sand castles, and toppings shown in today’s video. They all have a base node of a Sprite. But you might be thinking \"How can a sprite 2D be draggable?\" Well to make this possible, we added a button and code, so the button takes up the whole sprite space (where ever you want the user to be able to click and let it drag the item). So you add a script to your base layer, keep in mind you can do this to anything by just adding a button and script to it. In my script I had an offset, the global position and the global mouse position. I made the offset 0,0, which is where the item or sprite in my case starts off (Im just going to start referring the item using sprite from now on). Then on the button, you don’t do a button pressed signal, you do a button down and button up signal (this is to imitate the button being held down and dragged). Then you create another variable which is dragging and if you want you can have can_drag. When button is down dragging = true and when it is up dragging = false. Then in the process you subtract the offset from the global position of the mouse and the global position. And for the items to make them visible on the plate I had a plate that had all the items already there, and a panel. Because an area 2d does not react with a panel, every draggable item had to have a panel, and in their process it had when their panel interacted with the other panel, it will check if they already have it, can they have it, and it will do it, this will make the items on the plate appear and the off plate draggable’s disapear. Appearence As I have already told you guys, we are using figma. It makes the art look way better than my pixel art for other games. I guess it is just your opinion/the person. Anyways I think it all looks way better. But one thing that really weighed me down is that im not getting much support on youtube and instagram for Vishy Labs for progress on my game, and I was even accused of having my game as a copy. So I am persevering and making this game better than any game out there. If you want to support me I am Vishy Labs on youtube and instagram. Stay tunned for more progress!"}, {"post_id": 26273, "ts": "2026-07-10T23:34:22Z", "hours": 6.0039, "text": "MAJOR FISHING UPDATES, READ NOW Hello everyone, today is the best day for me! So many things happened and I can’t wait to share it. So please watch the video added below because it is basically all I did today. If you would like to know what I did yesterday, im on Vishy Labs on Youtube and Instagram , with that said lets get into todays progress. Fishing Logic I basically am done with the fishing game, but there were major things in the logic that had to be changed, and I would like to talk about it. So first I have different rarity fish. At the beginning I just made it so it pulls a random fish, but that doesn’t really aid the term rarity, and in the last devlog I was talking about how a fish was chosen, by the randi function. So to actually turn it into a rarity I just made the randi range longer, from 1-3 to 1-7, so the first fish takes number 1 2 and 3, the second takes 4 and 5, the third takes 6, the golden takes 7. Alot of places in my code, I forgot to change it because in the original code I had made it so there were only 1-3 so then in the new code when a number past 3 came, it didn’t know what to do and it ended there. I would also like to learn about this new thing I learned, clamping. $Outside/Slider.position.x = clamp( $Outside/Slider.position.x, 0, $Outside.size.x - $Outside/Slider.size.x this is clamping. There are 3 inputs, value, minimum, and maximum. You might be wondering how did I use it in my game. Well for the slider, I need to make sure that the slider does not go past the barrier/border/past the edge of the outside panel. Because if it does, it decreases the value of the game (by the value I mean it doesn’t look good for the user). So I just made the value the position of the slider, and the minimum is 0 and the maximum is the big bar, subtract the slider size (all x values). This all makes it so the slider can not escape the barrier, because I am changing the position with tween, so it moves, and since the position is manually changed it doesn’t mean that it can have contact with the collision body. I would also like to take about tween. Tween is built in godot, and there are many ways to use it, I just used it so that when I change the position of the slider it is smooth and I do not have to use an animation player ( animation player would not work because then in is all predictable). So for the tween I put what I want to smooth, and what duration, and then in the code I set the distance. All theses little features is what makes my game look better and more playable. And that is it for the logic. Fishing Visuals If you saw the video, I think you will be very pleased with the visuals. All of this is being made in figma, as it is much easier to make than libre sprite. So the waves are just the waves from the first scene, but just stacked. Then the brown stuff is not a dock, it is the ship (like you are on the edge fishing). Then everything else is pretty much self explanatory. So to make it replaced from last time, the only thing I did was add a background, change the bobber, and scale the fishing line to be attached. And because of this, in my code I am resizing the button, so the user can not press on the dock when fishing but when clicking for the actual game part, they can. That is it for today, by tomorrow I am pretty sure the whole fishing mini game will be done, with the fish popping up with a banner, and I will most likely be starting the next game."}, {"post_id": 25612, "ts": "2026-07-10T00:03:03Z", "hours": 6.6575, "text": "Pirate Cats - Fishing Hello everyone, today was a big day, as you can see I spent over 6 hours again. I have alot to say, alot to announce, and a new limit for me while I also unbox new scenes. If you want to check out my progress you can see it on Vishy Labs , on Instagram or Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv318x8ryMI-l4kxYvwhLog Bugs Well since I just started there were not many bugs, but there was one very annoying one that bothered me so much. Everything in Godot was blurry. At first I thought it was because the assets were getting made small and imported, but that was not the case. Even after scaling the assets up by a lot and re-importing it and scaling it down, you can tell it was still very blurry. I thought all the settings were correct because I put the texture/render to linear, because it is not a pixel game, so linear is the right texture for our game. But it turns out it was the view port… I set it to view_port instead of canvas_items . View port is meant to match you screen size, while canvas items matches your godot size (how you import it, basically how you make the game, just keeping the same size), now that this bug is fixed (or should I say mystery solved) let me get into what progress I made today. Fishing Mini-Game So now it is time to get into our fishing mini game. If you saw the video you either might think, “wow that is hard to build” or “that looks so bad, what even is that”. Well if you were impressed, im just building a blue print, but if you thought it was bad, don’t worry, im just planning it out. You might wonder what it is or how it works. So this is a fishing mini game, the goal of this is to find the fish with the map, and use the map piece to get the final map which leads to the treassure (I covered this last devlog) if you want to know more on how my game will work, read my last devlog. Anyways, so in this game, the user is going to cast the rod (fishing line) and then have to wait for the fish to get hooked, and when it does, they have to beat the mini game. The minigame is hard to understand but if you watch the video it will make sense. So the mini game is that there is a slider, and it is moving, left (constantly) and you goal is to not let it stay out of the safe zone for too long, or let it touch the border once, if it does you lose that fish you will have to fish more, and that fish wont add to your stats (how many fish you fish). So basically what I did I made the whole screen a button, when the user clicks the screen they cast the rod, if they click again and there is no fish caught they reel the rod in (bring it back). If they catch a fish, there is a function, it is either the fish starts to jerk, or moves slowly. If the fish jerks it will make the bar move left 40 (different based on level of the fish) if it is slow moving or idling, then the bar moves 15 (might be different for the fish types). To make this look smooth, since I am not using an animation player, I am using the godot function tween, this allows it to move smoothly and not be rapid, making my game more like a game instead of a twitch. I am mainly using randi functions (randi functions are basically random functions, if you input items into them they will choose a random item from that list). So I am randomly choosing, the time the user waits, and if their fish will be jerking or idling at the moment. Now that I have explained this I want to talk about my save manager."}, {"post_id": 23834, "ts": "2026-07-07T00:32:57Z", "hours": 5.9386, "text": "Introducing Pirate Cats Hello everyone, I am officially introducing pirate cats. Pirate cats is a 2d game, including pirates and cats with the theme of summer. Users will be helping cats find their long lost tressure (Cats love this). I am of course making this game in godot, along side with pirate cats I am also working on a hack pad and I am having a lot of trouble, so this month we are staying motivated! This game is still being planned but currently I have thought out alot of it and came up with a detailed plan which is still a work in progress. Ideas There were a lot of ideas in circulation and I still might include them but here were the ideas Cat Dress up Previously for another hackclub event called flavortown I made a game called demegorgon dressup, it was ment for the new stranger things season and it went pretty well. I was planning on making it like you give cats different accessories and fufill customer orders and that was going to be a part of the game. Keep in mind, I was planning on making a large long game. Idea number two Icecream serving I was planning on making an ice cream serving game, because ice cream relates to summer and you would have a time limit and put certain toppings on a cone. That was also going to be another part of the game not a full game. Finally my last idea Treasure Finding What if there were cats which were actually pirates trying to find treasure. Pirate Cats Finding Treasure Now that we came to the present idea that is in making, I will explain how this game will function, and currently its core features. In this game, you are not a cat you are the human. The human’s goal is to find missing pieces of the treasure map, help them defeat raids and invasions, gain loyalty and trust (may be a sidequest) and read the ancient language (english) which only humans can understand. There are different types of cats, and you must help them solve their problem so they willingly offer you the piece of the map that they somehow have. Currently the cats are Captain, Fisher, Cook, Scrubber, and Powder Monkey. Game Introduction The game starts you off looking at a moving ship with a pirate cat logo. Then you meet the scrubber cat, and the powder monkey rats you off. This leads you to the captain, which explains their map problem and you agree to help. You must defeat the crabs, this will be done by blasting cannon balls at them, possibly destroying the ship. Then you have to help the scrubber cat scrub the deck, and that helps you get a piece of the map. For the powder monkey, it is still being decided how you get the piece of a map, either you will untangle the ropes of the cannon, or set fuse to the correct barrel, and the paper will be lodged inside. For the cook, you must creat sandcastles cakes and cookies. There will be a map piece hiding behind a dish. For the fisher, you will be on the plank fishing, when a fish pops up you have to click them, one of the fish will have a map inside them. Also if you get the golden fish, you gains cats loyalty. The captains part is still being thought of, and if you have any ideas, it would be good. The captains parrot also has a piece, it needs you to answer a question correctly, and feed it, to get the piece back. After putting the pieces on the table, the human which is you will have to make sense of the ancient text and unscrammble the map. This leads them to find the ancient treasure making the cats happy again. Game Progress I have done alot of work, I dont have much space left to talk about it, but currently I have had the parallax 2d backgrounds made, so it makes the background look more live when the ship is moving past. Also I was spending alot of time today on working with the animation player so that when the menu is open, it will be clear so you can see behind it and the ship will be moving. I have much more to say but I have reached the MAX CHARACTER LENGTH, so I will explain in next devlog, bye!"}]...
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Title: Pirate Cats by @Vishy | Stardance
Devlogs: Title: Pirate Cats by @Vishy | Stardance
Devlogs:
Introducing Pirate Cats Hello everyone, I am officially introducing pirate cats. Pirate cats is a 2d game, including pirates and cats with the theme of summer. Users will be helping cats find their long lost tressure (Cats love this). I am of course making this game in godot, along side with pirate cats I am also working on a hack pad and I am having a lot of trouble, so this month we are staying motivated! This game is still being planned but currently I have thought out alot of it and came up with a detailed plan which is still a work in progress. Ideas There were a lot of ideas in circulation and I still might include them but here were the ideas Cat Dress up Previously for another hackclub event called flavortown I made a game called demegorgon dressup, it was ment for the new stranger things season and it went pretty well. I was planning on making it like you give cats different accessories and fufill customer orders and that was going to be a part of the game. Keep in mind, I was planning on making a large long game. Idea number two Icecream serving I was planning on making an ice cream serving game, because ice cream relates to summer and you would have a time limit and put certain toppings on a cone. That was also going to be another part of the game not a full game. Finally my last idea Treasure Finding What if there were cats which were actually pirates trying to find treasure. Pirate Cats Finding Treasure Now that we came to the present idea that is in making, I will explain how this game will function, and currently its core features. In this game, you are not a cat you are the human. The human’s goal is to find missing pieces of the treasure map, help them defeat raids and invasions, gain loyalty and trust (may be a sidequest) and read the ancient language (english) which only humans can understand. There are different types of cats, and you must help them solve their problem so they willingly offer you the piece of the map that they somehow have. Currently the cats are Captain, Fisher, Cook, Scrubber, and Powder Monkey. Game Introduction The game starts you off looking at a moving ship with a pirate cat logo. Then you meet the scrubber cat, and the powder monkey rats you off. This leads you to the captain, which explains their map problem and you agree to help. You must defeat the crabs, this will be done by blasting cannon balls at them, possibly destroying the ship. Then you have to help the scrubber cat scrub the deck, and that helps you get a piece of the map. For the powder monkey, it is still being decided how you get the piece of a map, either you will untangle the ropes of the cannon, or set fuse to the correct barrel, and the paper will be lodged inside. For the cook, you must creat sandcastles cakes and cookies. There will be a map piece hiding behind a dish. For the fisher, you will be on the plank fishing, when a fish pops up you have to click them, one of the fish will have a map inside them. Also if you get the golden fish, you gains cats loyalty. The captains part is still being thought of, and if you have any ideas, it would be good. The captains parrot also has a piece, it needs you to answer a question correctly, and feed it, to get the piece back. After putting the pieces on the table, the human which is you will have to make sense of the ancient text and unscrammble the map. This leads them to find the ancient treasure making the cats happy again. Game Progress I have done alot of work, I dont have much space left to talk about it, but currently I have had the parallax 2d backgrounds made, so it makes the background look more live when the ship is moving past. Also I was spending alot of time today on working with the animation player so that when the menu is open, it will be clear so you can see behind it and the ship will be moving. I have much more to say but I have reached the MAX CHARACTER LENGTH, so I will explain in next devlog, bye!
Pirate Cats - Fishing Hello everyone, today was a big day, as you can see I spent over 6 hours again. I have alot to say, alot to announce, and a new limit for me while I also unbox new scenes. If you want to check out my progress you can see it on Vishy Labs , on Instagram or Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv318x8ryMI-l4kxYvwhLog Bugs Well since I just started there were not many bugs, but there was one very annoying one that bothered me so much. Everything in Godot was blurry. At first I thought it was because the assets were getting made small and imported, but that was not the case. Even after scaling the assets up by a lot and re-importing it and scaling it down, you can tell it was still very blurry. I thought all the settings were correct because I put the texture/render to linear, because it is not a pixel game, so linear is the right texture for our game. But it turns out it was the view port… I set it to view_port instead of canvas_items . View port is meant to match you screen size, while canvas items matches your godot size (how you import it, basically how you make the game, just keeping the same size), now that this bug is fixed (or should I say mystery solved) let me get into what progress I made today. Fishing Mini-Game So now it is time to get into our fishing mini game. If you saw the video you either might think, “wow that is hard to build” or “that looks so bad, what even is that”. Well if you were impressed, im just building a blue print, but if you thought it was bad, don’t worry, im just planning it out. You might wonder what it is or how it works. So this is a fishing mini game, the goal of this is to find the fish with the map, and use the map piece to get the final map which leads to the treassure (I covered this last devlog) if you want to know more on how my game will work, read my last devlog. Anyways, so in this game, the user is going to cast the rod (fishing line) and then have to wait for the fish to get hooked, and when it does, they have to beat the mini game. The minigame is hard to understand but if you watch the video it will make sense. So the mini game is that there is a slider, and it is moving, left (constantly) and you goal is to not let it stay out of the safe zone for too long, or let it touch the border once, if it does you lose that fish you will have to fish more, and that fish wont add to your stats (how many fish you fish). So basically what I did I made the whole screen a button, when the user clicks the screen they cast the rod, if they click again and there is no fish caught they reel the rod in (bring it back). If they catch a fish, there is a function, it is either the fish starts to jerk, or moves slowly. If the fish jerks it will make the bar move left 40 (different based on level of the fish) if it is slow moving or idling, then the bar moves 15 (might be different for the fish types). To make this look smooth, since I am not using an animation player, I am using the godot function tween, this allows it to move smoothly and not be rapid, making my game more like a game instead of a twitch. I am mainly using randi functions (randi functions are basically random functions, if you input items into them they will choose a random item from that list). So I am randomly choosing, the time the user waits, and if their fish will be jerking or idling at the moment. Now that I have explained this I want to talk about my save manager.
MAJOR FISHING UPDATES, READ NOW Hello everyone, today is the best day for me! So many things happened and I can’t wait to share it. So please watch the video added below because it is basically all I did today. If you would like to know what I did yesterday, im on Vishy Labs on Youtube and Instagram , with that said lets get into todays progress. Fishing Logic I basically am done with the fishing game, but there were major things in the logic that had to be changed, and I would like to talk about it. So first I have different rarity fish. At the beginning I just made it so it pulls a random fish, but that doesn’t really aid the term rarity, and in the last devlog I was talking about how a fish was chosen, by the randi function. So to actually turn it into a rarity I just made the randi range longer, from 1-3 to 1-7, so the first fish takes number 1 2 and 3, the second takes 4 and 5, the third takes 6, the golden takes 7. Alot of places in my code, I forgot to change it because in the original code I had made it so there were only 1-3 so then in the new code when a number past 3 came, it didn’t know what to do and it ended there. I would also like to learn about this new thing I learned, clamping. $Outside/Slider.position.x = clamp( $Outside/Slider.position.x, 0, $Outside.size.x - $Outside/Slider.size.x this is clamping. There are 3 inputs, value, minimum, and maximum. You might be wondering how did I use it in my game. Well for the slider, I need to make sure that the slider does not go past the barrier/border/past the edge of the outside panel. Because if it does, it decreases the value of the game (by the value I mean it doesn’t look good for the user). So I just made the value the position of the slider, and the minimum is 0 and the maximum is the big bar, subtract the slider size (all x values). This all makes it so the slider can not escape the barrier, because I am changing the position with tween, so it moves, and since the position is manually changed it doesn’t mean that it can have contact with the collision body. I would also like to take about tween. Tween is built in godot, and there are many ways to use it, I just used it so that when I change the position of the slider it is smooth and I do not have to use an animation player ( animation player would not work because then in is all predictable). So for the tween I put what I want to smooth, and what duration, and then in the code I set the distance. All theses little features is what makes my game look better and more playable. And that is it for the logic. Fishing Visuals If you saw the video, I think you will be very pleased with the visuals. All of this is being made in figma, as it is much easier to make than libre sprite. So the waves are just the waves from the first scene, but just stacked. Then the brown stuff is not a dock, it is the ship (like you are on the edge fishing). Then everything else is pretty much self explanatory. So to make it replaced from last time, the only thing I did was add a background, change the bobber, and scale the fishing line to be attached. And because of this, in my code I am resizing the button, so the user can not press on the dock when fishing but when clicking for the actual game part, they can. That is it for today, by tomorrow I am pretty sure the whole fishing mini game will be done, with the fish popping up with a banner, and I will most likely be starting the next game.
Cat Cooking Hello everyone, it might be a day or two since I have devloged, since I finished the fishing game mechanics, I wanted to take a short break and now I am back and starting the cooking minigame for the cook cat whose name is BISCUITS Thats right everybody, lets give it up for our cook cat buiscuits, and for the fisher cat, I forgot to put names back then, so his name is now Minnow If you guys have any suggestions for names I will take it in for my game! So without further to do, lets get into Pirate Cats, Cooking! (And if you wanted to see yesterdays progress you can view it on https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgLbwD1cwBg ) Logic If you saw the video (I put the link above) I made it yesterday, which is when I made the logic. So for each item, like the cakes shown in yesterday’s video, or the plates, sand castles, and toppings shown in today’s video. They all have a base node of a Sprite. But you might be thinking "How can a sprite 2D be draggable?" Well to make this possible, we added a button and code, so the button takes up the whole sprite space (where ever you want the user to be able to click and let it drag the item). So you add a script to your base layer, keep in mind you can do this to anything by just adding a button and script to it. In my script I had an offset, the global position and the global mouse position. I made the offset 0,0, which is where the item or sprite in my case starts off (Im just going to start referring the item using sprite from now on). Then on the button, you don’t do a button pressed signal, you do a button down and button up signal (this is to imitate the button being held down and dragged). Then you create another variable which is dragging and if you want you can have can_drag. When button is down dragging = true and when it is up dragging = false. Then in the process you subtract the offset from the global position of the mouse and the global position. And for the items to make them visible on the plate I had a plate that had all the items already there, and a panel. Because an area 2d does not react with a panel, every draggable item had to have a panel, and in their process it had when their panel interacted with the other panel, it will check if they already have it, can they have it, and it will do it, this will make the items on the plate appear and the off plate draggable’s disapear. Appearence As I have already told you guys, we are using figma. It makes the art look way better than my pixel art for other games. I guess it is just your opinion/the person. Anyways I think it all looks way better. But one thing that really weighed me down is that im not getting much support on youtube and instagram for Vishy Labs for progress on my game, and I was even accused of having my game as a copy. So I am persevering and making this game better than any game out there. If you want to support me I am Vishy Labs on youtube and instagram. Stay tunned for more progress!
Parrot Feeding Time 🦜 Hello everyone it has been some time since I have posted a devlog, like 4 days but here I am with some exciting news to share. I have finished the parrot feeding scene and made the check feature for the cooking scene. If you want to see what I did it is on https://youtube.com/shorts/XgYkeBUyqbE?si=7PP_u8wK7GwFHCAd Parrot Scene For the parrot scene the user is supposed to feed the parrot cookies, because i dont really know anything more interesting if you guys do please tell me. So to feed the parrot cookies I have to make the cookies dragable so they can give it to the parrot, and doing this will play a cool extra animation of the parrot chewing. Since I already did the cooking scene making the dragging part was already really easy, since I just add a button and a panel. I told you guys last time what the button does it has the button up and down function so it can detect when the button is being held down and released and when the mouse is moving so I can drag the item. So then I have a panel on both the item and the parrot, and I check that when button is let go and they are making contact, then if they are it is not visible and the parrot chewing animation plays, and I did this for pretty much all of them. Cooking Scene So we did some more things for the cooking scene, so I was working on a check feature, then I was moving all my data to a new computer, and I accidently commited on both computers for same scene to github, and they both overrid eachother and all my progress was lost, then after spending some time researching I realized I can pull back commits by reverting and I got my progress on the checking part back. Then after this I checked if the items on the plate, and assigned each one to a variable, if it is visible or not then this variable is true or false, and i did that both for the order and the plate. The actual checking feature is it checks if both of the variables for the same item are the same then if they are the light for that item becomes visible, I show it in the video attached so if you want to see please watch. Future Steps So there are a few things I need to make and I need help from you guys, so what should the powder monkey do, and what should the captain do, it was thought that the map puzzle piece will just be in the captains poket, and users will have to set up the cannon for the pirate monkey, if you guys have anything else more interesting please share! Bye guys!
Crab Fight 🦀 Hello everyone it’s getting close to the day when I get to submit, Pirate Cats, and as usual if you want to view my game’s previous progress you can see it on youtube https://youtu.be/XgYkeBUyqbE?si=mVQkA0oVtBkzSB1x Well now I have currently finished the crab fight. I usually only devlog after the day is done, but for pirate cats I devlog when I finish one minigame, so now today I have finished the crab fight minigame, so I will be explaining all about it. I dont have the dialouge and the text or the home pages or settings done yet, but I will be submiting on the 30th. I think i might need to go back and fix the assets for some other items, as like the fishing game the place holders are still there and the cannon doesn’t really look like a cannon, but let’s get started and talk about my progress. Crabs So now it is time for me to talk on what I have been doing for the past 2 days, well I have been working on the actual minigame as always, if you watched the video and have any suggestions please comment it, I will take it into account! So for the crabs, there are 3 crabs, they dont really do anything just different colored hats for variety but what happens is that there are 3 groups, left right and middle, I do a randi function randi_range(1,2) if it is 1 the crabs in the first group are not part of the first round if it is 2 they are part of the first round. Then I do an function for each group and do an if statment to see which crab color should be visible then in that I do the calculations. Alright you might be wondering, what are the calculations? Well the calculations are how much the crab has to move each time. So I have to take account the height of the waves, how much room I have between waves, and how many times the crabs will pop up. So in the code I make the crab go up, then go down. I use the tween function to move the crab, since using an animation player and you can only run 1 animation at a time, it would be a pain to keep track of all the animation players, so I use tween as I have said before tween moves the item smootly so it is not teleporting. Then I do either of two things, one if the crab gets all the way to the bottom then the players screen flashes red, then it repeats the process. Cannon So in godot, you can add inputs, I added left, right, and space. So then in the code I did in the process, using direction and inputted left and right. The first one inputed is -1 second is 1 and if both or none is being pressed then direction is 0. This is built into godot so I got lucky, because it saved some time in the coding process. Then I have a speed, which I set to 200-300. Then in process I did ~$Cannon.global_position = direction * speed * delta` this makes it so that it moves every esecond something is being held down. Now that I have explained how the cannon is working I will explain how the cannon ball works. Cannon Ball So everyone, the cannon ball is a new scene, I can just call it every time and this makes it so I dont have to make alot of them, because I don’t know how many the user will use, so it would be hard to make so many. So in the new scene I have a panel on the cannon ball, as my other mini games. The panel on the crabs and the panel on the cannon ball interact, this happens when they are in direct contact, I check if that crab is visible, and then if that crab should be caught, it can only be caught if it is above the wave (if it is not above the wave then it is hiding but can still be triggered, not visible) then I make that group not visible, and do it for all the other crabs that got hit. I use tween to make the cannon move up by 300. The work I have done in the past few days were alot more complicated, but I will keep doing more, my goal is to reach 50 hours by the end of this month and submit. Thank you guys, if you want to see progress its Vishy Labs on both youtube and instagram. See you guys!
Captain’s Room + Ship Hello everyone I have done 7 hours yesterday and devloged 3 of them with the crabfight and the others hours now. I have been very productive and had a lot of progres on my game pirate cats. I have finished major parts of scenes. Captains Room First I would like to talk about the Captains Room, this is the first part of the video and you see a lot of things start to move when I put my mouse over them, that is the hover. You can do it with a button 2d with mouse entered and exited, in the start I had it as mouse entered meant animation played and mouse exited mean animation stopped on a button. and if you watched the video, you saw that my camera moved when the mouse was on the side of the view. To do this I used a camera, and put two button 2d’s on the edge, and I had mouse exited for the left side was left camera move = true and I set it false when it was exited, I did the same with the right side button and had a variable called right camera move = false . You might wonder how just having variables would move the camera, it doesn’t. In the process code (which runs 60 frames per second) there is this var delta, which means run at 60 frames per second. So for the camera to move left I did $Camera2D.global_position : Vector2 = -1 * Speed * Delta I could set speed to whatever I wanted such as 300 and then when it was for the right side I just switched -1 to 1. This was all working I had no bugs, but in the scene tree the camera is at the bottom. So the buttons are children of the camera, and there are other buttons above it such as the ones I use to hover. So when I was moving the camera my cursor landed on one of the other items that hover, and the camera stopped moving. It was very annoying and I didn’t know how to fix it. It turns out you can use area 2D’s they have a mouse entered, mouse exited, and a click function. The only difference is you can not see the area 2d’s like if you are putting an icon or text or style on the button like a panel you wont see it. But luckily for me I but the button over the assets. So this was a big problem I solved. Back of The Ship I have started working, just the back part. That is the second part of the video, when it goes to that new scene after pressing the arrow. I have the fisher and the cook there. So as you see the arrows are what guides the players, and there is a camera and some items to hover at the back of the ship and I am using area 2d’s. Game Information If you want to see my crab mini game in Pirate Cats, or previous history you can see it on Vishy Labs on Instagram https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dKRGESaI7ss I will continue working on the map part, where the user has to put the map together after getting all the pieces. See you guys later!
You can Finally Fix the map Hello guys, we have spent another 5 hours on this game. I have got to say, I am starting to love this game. Day by day, the more I do the more I get drawn in. I have got to say at the beginning I didn’t really feel like doing this game. But now after I see everything I am amazed. As usual if you want to see yesterdays progress on the captains room you can see it on Vishy Labs or https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0w2feNxZQ5A The Map For the past few day’s I have been working on the map scene, if you see it, it may not look complicated but I have spent longer than the fishing minigame to create this, let me explain why. So there are 6 maps, and 6 panels. One panel for each map. If you place a map in the panel, either that is the right panel to place it in or the wrong one. There is over 40 variables for this scene, since there are 6 buttons, we have 6 of placed 1-6 and 6 of map 1-6, (now these are for dragging the maps) 6 offsets 1-6 6 dragging 1-6, 6 inzone 1-6 and for the panels 6 pan 1-6. So this makes it hard to keep track of all of them. And let me talk about the logic, so when you press a button like hold it down you have to change the position with the offset and the mouses position, but now we have to check if the piece of the map is intersecting with the panel, and if it is, which panel is it intersecting, then if there is already a panel there. And it gets ever more complicated, if there is a map intersecting or above 2 panels, then you have to subtract the values from all the panels and see which one is the closest from the center of the map, because in godot for some reason it likes putting its point in the top left. And I have made over 8 different functions not including the button up and down or godot made functions just for this. This has got to be one of the most complicated minigames yet but im glad I did it. We have function snap map which gets the center of the panel and places the center of the map there, and this only works if that panel doesn’t have a map and the map was placed there. We also have func_panel_taken you input the panel which in my case is closest because that is what I have put for the closest panel in the code, and you also input which map your moving, so it ignores that when it does the check for intersection. But the process_function is the most complicated to keep track of. Since it does 60 times per second, you have to make sure everything doesnt run more than once by having variables that become true when the condition is false. And you have to make sure what your doing is supposed to be checked, because if it is not and the values get changed, then you have to find a new way to implament it. If you guys saw the attachment I have showed a little of the sideview1 and I will get more into that tomorrow. Bye guys!
Powder Monkey (Major Bug Not Fixed) Hello guys, this devlog is going to be max characters and if its not I have so much to complain about… I have worked so long today and dont so much, and I think that everything I have done was very great. So without much to do lets get into todays progress. Before Powder Monkey Mini game So I am going to talk about what I did before I started the powder monkey minigame. So today, before I ate lunch I was working on other stuff, like not minigames but the travel, so now users can travel around the boat, to the parrot area (in the front), powder monkeys area (going to be discussed in todays devlog and its on the side) the back of the ship which has both the cooking cat, and also the fishing cat. And then there is one more side of the boat, which is the other side, side view 2 which has the scrubber cat (I am going to save the scrubber cat for tomorrow when I start working on him and his mini game). So now that I have explained what I spent the first 1 and a half hours on lets get into the Powder Monkey Minigame. The powder monkey minigame Okay guys now we are going to start talking about the powder monkey’s minigame. So if you see the video you might start to see where the video game is going. But if you don’t understand the video or have not seen the video (due to personal reasons) then let me explain. Ever see those fake mobile ads that don’t let you play the game but give you a preview? Well I am building that fake mobile ad, im not trying to say it’s fake, but this time you can actually now play the one level until you beat it. So the game is like you drag the different colored balls into the different beakers and try to get beakers with only one of the same colored balls. So I spent 5 hours creating the logic, then I realized i made the game wrong 😭 Then I had to get rid of this one part of a line in 45 lines, then I deleted it and then it didnt save and I had to redo it, and that took 30 minutes already, then redoing it made it an hour. So the line I said that I deleted checked if the when placing a ball (we will call the different objects you can move a ball) so when moving the balls i made it so you had to place it in either an empty beaker or ontop of a ball of the same type. I didnt know that it could be placed on different types. So then after deleting that line of code when running there are still some bugs here and there that dont allow one of the coconuts and one of the ballons to move. I have checked 2000 LINES OF CODE 15 TIMES, MAYBE MORE. And me not finding this bug is annoying because I still have to write the check feature. Anyways I will try to fix the bugs, but here is yesterdays video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7UFbDQq-l0Q and by guys see you later!
The Minigames Are Coming To An End… Hello everyone, I have completed two more minigames for my game pirate cat, and only have one last game to create. I have been very productive, and learned how to code more efficiently, as I finished two minigames yesterday. Without further to do, lets get into the first minigame I finished. Scrubber Cat By the name you might get what the scrubber cat does, the scrubber cat is the cat/pirate that will be scrubbing and cleaning the decks/the ship. So for a minigame I have created one where you scrub the dirt to get rid. I still need to make the colors more vibrant but the logic is done, and I did have some few bugs but we will start about the game. So for the game, for each round there are a certain amount of stains. Each stain gets its own button and each button has mouse entered and mouse exited which goes to a variable. The variable is either false or true. So if mouse entered the variable is true otherwise it is false. Then in the beginning I call round 1, in round I check if the items are visible, then I check if the mouse entered is true and if the mouse is moving, because I have a variable called mose pos, and in the ready is set it to the mouse position, and then I compare it with the current mouse position when round 1 goes, then i set it to mose pos. Then if the mouse is moving, and the variable is true. The stain looses some of its visiblity, like its going away. I am going to find out how to make the cursor a scrubber, but for now its not. And the user will do this for 3 different round. Constellations So if you saw the video you might have saw the constellation game, I recommend you watch the video to understand what I say. So there are two different types of constellations, human constellations, and cat constellations. So the goal is the user to always pick the cat constellations. So there is 2 sides, one side is the cat and the other is the human, the sides will switch, and you have to pick the cat one, if you dont, that round restarts. I had so many bugs with this, and the main one wasthe timer. In godot I had no clue that you have to stop a timer after it timed out. This created a majority of the bugs. And since it was basically the same logic for most of it, I did copy and pasting and because of this I forgot to change some of the variables, so it did changes to things that did not need changes, and did not do changes to things that did changes. I am going to finish up this game soon and submit it. Bye guys!
The Cats Can Now Talk? Hello everyone, it has been 4 days, and I have done a lot of work on the game for the past few days, and am getting very close to submitting it. So I have finished the last mini game, which is finding the treasure to save the cats (or aid them depending on how you take giving cats treats ) and now I have implemented the dialogue part such as the cats and you talking, and the map being found in most of the scenes. So without further to do lets get straight in it and talk about the minigame. Digging up treasure So right now I have made the basic part of the treasure scene, it still needs to be decorated and I need to push the borders out a little but to start its good. It will not be in the video posted but it will be tomorrow. So how it works is I have this scene called sand, it is an area 2d and everything is not visible besides the smallest hole and smalest pile of sand, and you can press the area 2d 3 times and it will have the medium pile and hole and large pile and hole. And in it, I have it calling functions from the main scene. So in the main scene I call the scene for every time the press a button (the whole screen consists of 6 buttons, if they dig fully and that button is the treasure one, then you get it for the cats) it mainly consists of buttons and randi functions and caling functions from two different scenes. Cats are Talking IF you want to see the desert scene or the cats talking you can see it on https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6k6MWErv86k , anyways the logic for this is we call next dialogue, and this checks the index and then adds one too it and goes to the next. Then if it is cat speaking, it waits for the user to press space (skip) then it adds one to the index and plays the next if it is the users turn to talk (the user can talk using a button they press) then they press a button and the text becomes the dialogue and then it adds one to its index and then plays the next. Then when the index is the second to last I stop it from playing anymore dialogue. Then when the user completes the task like sorting then it makes the map visible and then it plays the last dialogue (when they press the map because it is a button) and it says something like, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR FINDING IT, PLEASE PUT THAT PIECE OF MAP ON THE CAPTAINS DESK then that will add, and once you have all the pieces you can put the map together. That is all I have to say, and I will do alot more in the next few days, as I need to finish up dialogue and work on the save, and global variables. But for now, bye guys!
Bugs + Fixes Hello everyone, I am getting very close to finishing Pirate Cats and will probably only work on it for a few more days (like until the 31st then ship on the first). I have big changes coming in after this ship. So today I will talk about to big progress and what I will be working on! The Game Tester So I had a game tester come and try my game, like obviously not everything is connected, but I had him try the individual scenes, and lets just say I was not happy. Before you guys all start talking about how I hired a Professional Game Tester with Money for a project for stardance, relax. The game tester is my friend, he has tested all my projects and lets just say, I am so glad he does. Anyways he found some bugs and it took a while to fix it (considering I was on a time crunch and had to go out somewhere today and the due date (the end ofthe month) is coming soon ). So first of all he tested the back ship scene which is the video linked, so what is supposed to happen when u click the cat, it is supposed to talk about either if you have completed the minigame "Oh come eat supper again" or if you havent "Welcome, want to help me cook" and then go to cooking mingame, but all this is set in one array of dialogue, and I call the dialogue from either number one or two and then I only make it go to the next dialogue if it is not one of the ending numbers for talking other wise I just make it not visible. The bug was that I needed an if statement that checked if it was an ending dialogue, and if not it goes to the next. This is the one of the least complex of problems, the second is with the digging scene. So the problem was after it started the dialogue explaining how to play, it went on one dialogue extra, I realized I had included one more so I just deleted that including code, this was the least of complex, but the third bug is massive. So the bug was after the cooking scene, once the dialogue finished (which is the tutorial) the user couldn’t play them selves. I slowly realized the problem was that it worked before and when I included the dialogue, it broke, since the tutorial completely changed how I had built it. So I had to go one by one and fix every little thing, first after you completed the tutorial, it automatically sends you back, but then you cant even get another plate, so I had to fix that, then once you get the plate I realized there was no order, then I made it so before you go back the order comes, then I realized after you got the plate nothing happens, its supposed to go to the next scene, then it went to the next scene which was getting the sand castle, which worked fine then it went to the scene to get toppings like the shell and flag and star, and that worked fine, then I went to the check scene, I realized there was no way to get back to use up the other plates. Then I fixed that, and when I went back, I realized the plate count never changed, for some reason in the code I was setting it back to 0, so it never changed how many plates the user did. So after I fixed this, I played it again, then I realized the second time you do it, the first times items that they picked were not visible and disabled, so in the reset code (after one full round) I made sure everything became visible and not disabled, then because of this I finally fixed it! Work I need to fix the star scene next, so it plays what happens before they go and after they get it right. My goal is to do as much hours as possible because I am trying to get the framework 13 in this ship, and hopefully this project will do it. After I do this ship I will work on a hard mode for this game, so if users want a challenge they shall get it. Anyways that is it for now, see you guys next devlog!
Finishing Touches (Saving Special ✨) Hello everyone, I am getting close to shipping this project and I have done the finishing touches today which is so much, and I just have to get my fellow game testers up and test the game for any bugs or anything. I know there are a few here and there, but I should have fixed them when I started, doing it now will be too much, and I will fix it in the second ship. So without further to do lets get straight into it. Loading Scenes The loading scenes are the guide scene, preference scene, and the loading part itself. So now in the preference scene there are volume sliders for the different things like sfx, audio in general and bg music. And there is also a slider for the speed on how fast the text goes by, since you can not skip it i thought "SHould it not be useful to just have a speed, so fast and slow readers can adjust it to make it feel more like a game? So then I added a slider, all the settings are saved I think, but since this is just finishing the logic and not the testing part I will not know for a fact. Overall the ui looks great, and mainly for the save manager, I was working on connecting the variables throughout the different scenes, and when they load a game, based on where they are in the game (like progress wise) then it will put them in the corresponding scene, this was not hard but I kept on forgetting what to add until I started wroking on a different scene. Other Fixes So one major bug I had was previously when I was working on the map scene, I thought I saved the progress but I didn’t and then I committed and all my progress was gone, so I had to spend some time today fixing all the bugs there, and then some of the dialogue in that scene, I thought for some reason was inputted incorrectly, then I proceeded to re fix the whole structure adding lines to the dialogue and then I realized it was wrong and had to put it back, since changing dialogue doesnt sound like a big deal, you have to understand, I changed all the variables because of that. Anyways that was the last thing I did today but lets talk about some other progress I did today. Audio The audio for the game was all recorded today, and everything is handmade (like in the meaning that it is not taken from somewhere else) the only thing that is going to be used for the game that is not handmade, is the background music (im not a good artist, but I am a musician so I am sure I can learn how to do it) and also the fonts, the fonts used for this game look amazing, and I will use it again for all my other games. After making the audio I had to implement it everywhere such as keyboard noise for the letters typing on the screen. Or the crabs moving, or the sponge scrubbing, or the cannons firing going like "Boom Boom" and other stuff. Anyways that summarizes most of the things I have done today, and tomorrow I will official test the game and get ready to ship, bye guys!
Finishing Touches Hello everyone we have finally finished Pirate Cats. After weeks of coding, building and testing, we have finally come up with a playable version. In this version everything is finished, but there is only one mode. So as this is the last devlog for this ship let me explain what I have done this time. Bugs After game testing we found some bugs out like there was no music for the cooking puzzle, or the sponge was not visible for the sponge scene, or the button in the island was not working, or the typing settings broke down. So let me start each of the bugs and how I fixed this (all these bugs came up yesterday as I only post a devlog once a day). So first the cooking music puzzle, I forgot to play it in the code, this was a simple fix but the other ones were not. For the scrubbing scene the sponge was not visible, in the code again I forgot to set it to visible but then I found another bug from fixing one it was that I need to turn it back after the scene otherwise it will always stay like that. So I figured out you have to set the cursor to null, that way it doesn’t put a preloaded asset and just has the normal one. This next one was tricky, on the island minigame where you are digging after you finish digging, sometimes you can not press certain parts of the button (to finish the dialogue and go to the end scene) I was so confused on what to problem was, then after some time I realized it only happened because I was initiating a scene, and I thought that it was over it, so I set some of the items including the buttons z index near 1000, because there was only going to be like 100 of the items. So then I thought the button for the sand was over, but it was not and I disabled it after the treasure was found, so I was so confused, then I realized there was a panel in the scene being initiated. So then I finally thought dont panels take the mouse input? And that was when I realized that I had a random panel there stealing the mouse, so i set the mouse input on it to pass, so it can not take it. Finally the typing settings. I learned how to use sliders, but there was one thing I could not figure out, how to flip a slider, so for the text slider, it was fast (the bottom one) to slow (the top one) instead of slow to fast as a slider should be, but then when assigning the value I put a - infront of it, I thought this fixed it because when I went in the speed was on the slower side but max speed. Then I tested it, and I could not change the speed, the problem was when you do - it puts the lowest setting meaning it can not be put to the highest, so I had to put it back and I still don not know how to flip a slider, but that is for next ship. See you guys!
Recommended Fixes Hello everyone I just recently shipped and I was really happy with the votes I got so thank you to everyone that supported me but with all the suggestions you guys gave and some of mine that I knew i had to do, I have fixed up the game. Before I get started the godot wakatime extention is broken so now I have to use lapse which makes it harder for me because I have to do the whole recording in one sitting and I cant do some work close it and continue. The video attached includes a few of the fixes and I will start using paragraphs in my writing. But without further to do lets get started. List Of Fixes With all you guys said I have made a list of fixes such as during the cooking scene it was not clear what to do after you made a plate so at the end of the training round I added a arrow so that users can try it before they are on their own. Second There is this flag in the powder monkey’s area, which is side ship view 1. When the flag raises its fine but it does some bugs when coming back down and the way I structured it was weird so I deleted all the code and had a area 2d mouse enter and exit, and I start the animation one 1 speed when they hover over it and when they let go I put it on -1 speed and play it. This makes it look like you are raising the flag and when you stop it goes down. Another thing was all the shells in that scene were blurry. I forgot what did but in figma I think the items were way to small so when scaling up t was very blurry. Also for the space star scene when the user gets it wrong the dialogue for it says that they found the island but then says they should set sail tomorrow, I had the order of items wrong so I flipped them (in the dialogue) and made it stop 1 line earlier in the code. Also after the user gets 3 constellations correct to go to the island it goes to the scene fades in and out then next scene then fades in and out and same for third scene. The problem was that it was making things visible after the fade out finished, it should have been doing it when fade in was done so when fade out was done like you were traveling. Skip text!!! I know this is a big one, so I added it, so I had a line of code that was like if event.is_action_pressed("ui_accept") and !typing: So I just flipped it so that when the dialogue is playing and if they call it it makes a variable true, and in the code where it is playing the text out (its a for loop) I break the for loop and make the ammount of characters visible the ammount of characters there are. Then I also made all the text that says space to continue, to space to skip. This one I did most recently but it was with the crabs, I added a randomizer for the audio so when they shoot the cannons, I just made a randi for -0.1 - 0.1 and added it to the pitch of 1 to the audio stream player so it was random. I also made a new scene for the explosion boom like visual effect and made it fade in and out. I have also commented all the code to make it easier for you guys to understand! That is all I have done and will always be looking for more suggestions to do more work, thank you and hope yall enjoy!
Captains Secret??? I designeed the figma cat for the captain, along with the frame, then implemented the photo/frame in godot behind the chair in the captains room. This is a relatively short devlog as it is just one added feature that I think makes the game cooler. Figma For the figma first we start off with creating the cat, it is the same as usual, I don’t use the pen tool because it is very unconsistent, anyways we start with the head then the body then add legs, one thing about figma is they dont have vertical and horizontal align just horizontal with items, they should have an option to enable a grid. Anyways for the secret I figured I would make it contrast the captain ( we are talking about the cat) the captain has textured and not very furry fur, but I made this cat have furry skin/fur, and not textured, and kind of short/tall (depending on which cat you are comparing it to). Anyways I used the Pen tool to create the frame as it is easier and faster, even though the alignment is not perfect, it is hard to see just from the human eye, Godot To input this in godot we have to get the image, so we upload it into the file system then I had to re export the chair (seperatley) so I could have it like the photo is behind the chair and the user can press the photo (only the part sticking out) then the captains text plays. This is like a secret and for you guys to find out, so good luck and go try it out!
Ships:
Welcome to my ship of Pirate Cats. Pirate Cats is a 2d godot interactive game using point and click and other buttons such as arrow keys and space. This was the most complex game I have ever built and I have learned so much from it. This game has taken me over a month to build and I am so proud of my self. From learning that there are other ways to create assets (like figma) to how to create save manager (saving the users progress) this was a very fun game to build. Building this game was not so easy, as it required alot of logic, and some of that was repeating so I had to keep rechecking it. Also there were some items I did not know how to use so I had to do research. As this game is only a point and click I am sure you guys will find it entertaining, as I spent a long time on making this good. After building a game so long, and finishing, I realized I want to expand on this! So this is version one where I have your guys feedback! So I can improve my game and add a hard mode where you have lives and other suggestions you guys have. This game has tested my patience as I have spent countless nights coding and building this game from scratch. I have learned so many things that I previously did not know. I didnt know a panel takes mouse input or that there were sliders, those were the easy things to conquer. But items such as creating a full on working save manager took some time to understand, or creating a full fishing minigame, with different sounds and other cool features. I am sure you guys will love what I have put into this game. It also makes me want to learn how to use figma more. From playing minigames on the ship, to steering a ship, to helping the cats escape from crabs, this game has great variety. So who is ready to help the cats (and of course a parrot) and find their treasure!
Second Ship for Pirate Cats. In this ship there have been many changes to the games. Some changes include making instructions/tasks clearer, many visual changes, and easter eggs/new features. Many of you guys said the instructions were not clear so I spent a lot of time going through to fix it, and made it more clearer here and there. Also you guys said to put space to skip, so I added that now you can just zoom through the text (if you please). There were not any bugs but some items that were not connected allowing you to not see the bubbles, making some visual fixes like the shells was so blurry and there were some fade in’s coming in really early. Then I added some easter eggs and new dialogue for you guys to find. I hope you guys enjoy the new and improved version!...
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Pterodactyl Panel (Android App) by @stefdp | Stard Pterodactyl Panel (Android App) by @stefdp | Stardance...
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-07T14:34:43Z", "hours": 106.0, "multiplier": 15.23, "payout": 1608, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "For rating & testing the project, please first read all of the text in the release. I made an Android app to manage your self-hosted Pterodactyl Panel instance (Currently only the client side, later I’ll also add the admin side). For who doesn’t know, Pterodactyl Panel is a panel usually used to manage game servers, but it can run anything, each server is just a docker container. The most challenging part was prob downloading files, and it still confuses me tbh because on the Android Studio emulator it works fine, but when if I try it on my actual phone (Samsung A55 5G) it randomly stops after a few seconds and I can’t seem to understand why", "repo": "https://git.stefdp.com/Stef/Pterodactyl-Panel-Android-App", "demo": "https://git.stefdp.com/Stef/Pterodactyl-Panel-Android-App/releases/latest"}]...
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[{"post_id": 55643, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 55643, "ts": "2026-08-27T16:32:55Z", "hours": 2.5833, "text": "Added updated checking For F-Droid flavor it doesn’t do anything For APK flavor it checks my git repo For Play Store flavor it uses play store com.google.android.play:app-update library Updated the app site, available at https://ptero.stefdp.com Updated the changelog & app images in the fastlane folder Added an animation when switching between loading states with circular loading"}, {"post_id": 55485, "ts": "2026-08-27T11:17:55Z", "hours": 1.5147, "text": "Added optional biometric authentication so people can lock their app behind phone code or biometric verification (like fingerprint etc.)"}, {"post_id": 54826, "ts": "2026-08-25T23:53:13Z", "hours": 3.245, "text": "Created nests, nest & nest egg screens For nest egg screen, created 3 tabs: Configuration Variables Install Script it was pretty easy and quick to create those cuz they’re read-only as there’s no API endpoint to edit/delete them Added a back handler in the tabbed screens so that back button now goes to the previous tab instead of the entire previous screen In the client servers screen added a switch to see others’ server (admin only) Fixed capitalization in the getNestEgg function ( eggid -> eggId )"}, {"post_id": 54513, "ts": "2026-08-25T15:20:42Z", "hours": 2.9808, "text": "Created users & user screen Updated the AGP (Android Gradle Plugin) Table headers now properly support multi line text (previously if one text was multiline while everything else wasn’t, all the divider would have a gap on the bottom except for the multiline one) In the client server screen, settings tab the UUID is now aligned to the right Improved screen change when deleting a server/node/user/location (instead of navController.popBackStack() (which basically acts as the back button) i specifically navigate to generic screen (eg. “user” -> “users”) and remove current screen from the back history so in the case that there is no screen to back into (eg if the app is opened via a deep link or stuff like that) it will go to the generic tab anyway) Added pull to refresh in the location screen"}, {"post_id": 53949, "ts": "2026-08-24T17:33:07Z", "hours": 1.9753, "text": "Created server manage tab (only reinstall & suspend/unsuspend cuz there seem to be no API endpoint to toggle install status & transfer) Created server delete tab Added 2 new button types, SUCCESS (green) and WARNING (yellow) In the admin server screen now most tabs are hidden whent he server is installing"}, {"post_id": 53378, "ts": "2026-08-23T22:08:42Z", "hours": 1.3206, "text": "Created the admin server databases tab (it only supports resetting the password and deleting the databases because for creating a database i need the hosts IDs, which there seem to be no API endpoint to get them) Added a modifier param to the Container component In the client server screen added a param to directly switch to the databases tab (this is used when the user goes from the admin server screen to the client server screen) Fixed “Missing Server ID” notification when client server is opened with databases tab as first tab"}, {"post_id": 52489, "ts": "2026-08-22T17:05:09Z", "hours": 1.9144, "text": "Created the server startup tab Changed the way Container components are spaced in the Build Configuration tab and create server popup In the create server popup disabled the docker image select when only 1 image is available"}, {"post_id": 52173, "ts": "2026-08-22T08:15:57Z", "hours": 4.4989, "text": "Created server screen with its: About tab Details tab Build Configuration tab Fixed pull to reload, it was updating the refreshIndex variable before the main resource actually refreshed and this caused the tabs not to refresh unless the user pulled to refresh twice CodeText component now uses default text style & font weight instead of pre-defined ones (for some reasons with pre-defined ones, in the ScrollableTabRow component it adds like a margin on the bottom of the blue active indicator) Updated UpdateServerDetailsBody to mark required fields as non-nullable In the server owner select, fixed the selected user disappearing if it was not in the search results In the allocation selects: Made the UI use alias:port when an alias is available, otherwise will default to ip:port Moved the ip:port text to a variable to avoid writing the same thing twice"}, {"post_id": 50274, "ts": "2026-08-19T13:03:15Z", "hours": 2.3186, "text": "Added server creation Added a searchable property in the Select component that adds a text input to filter the options Created a regex to check node & server names"}, {"post_id": 49934, "ts": "2026-08-18T22:04:46Z", "hours": 1.0625, "text": "All *Include enums are now chainable so doing ListNodesQueryInclude.SERVERS + ListServersQueryInclude.USER returns servers.user Also now instead of <enum>.toQueryString(...) (like ListServersQueryInclude.toQueryString(...) ) i do listOf(...).toQueryString() Used the new include enum chaining in 2 places: node servers tab: it now makes way less HTTP requests since the user, nest & egg are directly returned with the server, saving me from making multiple HTTP requests to fetch all users, nests & eggs (which would’ve taken a long time on a large server that for example has thousands of users, since it was fetching at a rate of 50 users per HTTP request, and it being a mobile app, internet might not be fast too) servers screen, now it fetches the egg variable together with the nest instead of having to fetch the egg’s data Moved ApiErrorResponse in a models folder for better organization this is a code only change so ig i’ll show pics of the code"}, {"post_id": 49856, "ts": "2026-08-18T20:07:04Z", "hours": 5.0992, "text": "Created the servers screen (WIP, inputs are untested and creating servers is not implemented yet) Created node servers tab Added pagination to the list nests HTTP request response Removed useless reset of the allocations in the node allocations tab In the created node popup, switched some inputs description from \"quoted\" test to actual inline code blocks CodeText component now uses CharSequence instead of String so it also supports annotated strings Switched main components from Text to CodeText Application server status is now an enum Updated list nests query to include eggs variables too (i just found out i can do this so i’m gonna prob do in in all the other ones in the next devlog too)"}, {"post_id": 48195, "ts": "2026-08-16T14:20:45Z", "hours": 4.3858, "text": "Created the node allocations tab The servers screen now shows the server description when available The 2FA check now considers 2FA as enabled even if the status code is 400 other than checking the error message (ptero got no way of knowing if 2FA is enabled other than that ) Update the TextInput component to allow showing optional suggestions (used in the assign new allocations popup, IP Address input) The Checkbox component now is more transparent when disabled (from 0.5 to 0.2 alpha) Changed how padding works in the Pager component Updated the Table component to add a param to disable lazy loading (for some reason it was laggier) Updated the libs"}, {"post_id": 47489, "ts": "2026-08-15T13:07:23Z", "hours": 2.2333, "text": "Created the node configuration tab Renamed the CodeText component to CodeBlockText and added params to highlight the content with a specific language Created the CodeText component to have both normal text and inline code text (kinda like markdown when you do this )"}, {"post_id": 47046, "ts": "2026-08-14T17:23:43Z", "hours": 1.6747, "text": "Create the settings tab in the node screen Added enabled state to all the inputs & switches in the create node popup Updated the updateNode function’s body & params since some required params were marked as nullable"}, {"post_id": 46843, "ts": "2026-08-14T11:23:01Z", "hours": 2.9253, "text": "Created the node screen & its about tab Moved node specific endpoints to their own ApiService instead of having them in the ApplicationApiService and added 2 endpoints to respectively fetch system data in v1 and v2 Made it so create new node button is disabled until all locations are fetched"}, {"post_id": 45978, "ts": "2026-08-12T20:16:10Z", "hours": 2.9544, "text": "Created the popup to create a node When fetching the node lists, now it also fetches all the locations (needed for a select in the create popup) Added fastlane metadata (will be used for F-Droid in the future) The Popup component now has a scrollbar Updated the scrollbar so now it only shows up when the container has enough contents to be scrollable Added an arrangement property in the Table ’s headers & row cells so that i can center certain things Updated TextInput and Switch components to make their description text color customizable Updated the workflow to automatically push the .aab file to play store after it’s built and made the release (hopefully, i didn’t test it) Fixed create location popup not clearing the inputs upon closing"}, {"post_id": 45461, "ts": "2026-08-11T23:00:38Z", "hours": 0.5592, "text": "Fixed admins not being able to manage servers subusers’ permissions Fixed not being aple to open sub-directories in the file browser Fixed create location popup not closing after creating the location"}, {"post_id": 45335, "ts": "2026-08-11T18:39:18Z", "hours": 1.6944, "text": "Created nodes screen (missing the popup to create a node for now) App name is now dynamically generated in the build.gradle.kts file (so debug build get the (Debug) suffix) Added an HTTP endpoint to check a node status"}, {"post_id": 45109, "ts": "2026-08-11T11:53:58Z", "hours": 0.4881, "text": "Created a CodeText component to display text as code (kinda like this ) and applied it in all the places where I previously just copy pasted same code Creating an API key now copies the key to the clipboard"}, {"post_id": 45061, "ts": "2026-08-11T10:17:04Z", "hours": 5.8633, "text": "Created the locations screen Created the location screen Took and modified to adapt to this app the Table component, originally from my Zipline app Fixed the pull to refresh, when calling onRefresh it didn’t actually set isRefreshing to true so the spinner would immediately disappear instead of swithcing to the spinner state till it finished loading Removed the page property from functions since the page is already stored in the viewModel so it made no sense to retrieve it from the viewModel just to send it to a function in the viewModel Fixed the formatDate function, it was crashing the app on older Android versions (<= 13) because the date time parser couldn’t understand the timezone (it expected a date like 2026-08-08-T15:43:30Z instead of 2026-08-08-T15:43:30+02:00 ) Added a new primary color variant that looks good enough on light bgs Fixed some multi-line TextInput s being marked as singleLine"}, {"post_id": 42647, "ts": "2026-08-07T14:13:23Z", "hours": 0.4458, "text": "Fixed the pull to refresh box having incorrect padding, so the circle was being hidden by the header and by the time it was out, it was already fully pulled and so it would refresh Updated the README also did some tests with downloading but i failed so i just undid them without committing or anything"}, {"post_id": 42285, "ts": "2026-08-06T22:21:15Z", "hours": 2.0292, "text": "Created a website for the app & a privacy policy (that was needed for the play store app), it’s available at https://ptero.stefdp.com Added a prompt to request the notification permission in the login screen and a button in the settings in case you want to enable notification in a second moment Improved the eventDescription variable in the ActivityDisplay component (i didn’t even know that was possible, i found it out cuz i made a _count variable and android studio suggested me to put it directly in the when , lmao) Updated versioning to follow SemVer ( 1.0 -> 1.0.0 )"}, {"post_id": 41895, "ts": "2026-08-06T12:09:27Z", "hours": 3.0606, "text": "in the account settings screen added a tab for the app settings Fixed some activity log event having incorrect names and causing the app to crash Added an action to build the app when the commit is prefixed with [build] or [release] Moved the *Scrollbar modifiers above any padding modifier so they look better Switch ScrollableTabRow to a normal Row instead of LazyRow since it’ll never have enough items to cause any lag Updated the README Removed the admin input in the login screen since it’s currently not available"}, {"post_id": 41497, "ts": "2026-08-05T19:00:04Z", "hours": 1.0289, "text": "In the account settings screen created the activity tab (i think i finished all the client side of the app , now i just gotta finish the small importance TODOs like removing the padding to the scrollbar in most scrollable views & stuff like that) Moved ActivityDisplay in the general components as it’s used in the accoutn activity too Updated ActivityDisplay to include the user agent button when available"}, {"post_id": 41417, "ts": "2026-08-05T16:42:56Z", "hours": 0.65, "text": "In the account settings screen added the SSH Keys tab (basically a almost full copy paste of the API Credentials for the frontend) Fixed capitalization of a variable & function in the api key tab"}, {"post_id": 41037, "ts": "2026-08-04T23:29:22Z", "hours": 2.9483, "text": "In the account settings screen created the API credentials tab Update the server screen so each tabs remembers its own data after switching to another tab (previously it would reset when the user switched to another tab). Also tabs now only fetch data on first render, then they use the previously fetched data instead of re-fetching, unless the user manually refreshes via the “pull to refresh” action (the thing where you swipe from top to down and it shows the refresh circle, idk it’s “professional” name ) Applied same changes as above to the account settings screen Updated the formatDate function to include a param to toggle the year in the date"}, {"post_id": 40669, "ts": "2026-08-04T11:04:30Z", "hours": 5.4211, "text": "Added the account settings screen and its account tab (now missing “API Credentials”, “SSH Keys” and “Activity” tabs, then the app is done ) in the server screen’s files tab file names are now limited to one line and if they overflow, they get cut off and “…” is added Now each warning popup in the server screen has its own icon instead of all using the suspended icon in all places, replaced refreshIndex += 1 with refreshIndex++ The app now no longer shows “Missing Server ID” toast as soon as you open a server Fixed disable 2FA endpoint (i forgot to add /disable at the end and i was wondering why 2FA wasn’t getting disabled even tho the request succeeded (without /disable it acts as enable endpoint)) Fixed get qr code response as it was different from what the API docs listed In the get qr code function added a secondary response to tell that 2FA is already enabled (used to check 2FA status so i know whether to show enable or disable button in the 2FA cuz the user object doesn’t tell me if the user has 2FA on … shitty API fr) Added a simple regex to parse emails (so the change email button is enabled only if this regex passes) Servers screen now uses a normal Column instead of a LazyColumn as lazily loading the server was causing more lag than loading all at once (after all it’s just 10 servers per page) Same as above for the server screen activity tab (jusy 25 logs per page) Fixed the pagination system in servers screen and server screen activity tab (for total amount of pages it was using the total amount of items in the current pages ( .total ) instead of the total number of pages ( .totalPages ), idk how i missed that ) Moved the file picker stuff outside of the LazyColumn & put the permissions in a remember to hopefully try to decrease lag I wanted to make a screen rec but i was too lazy to then go and censor my 2FA secret"}, {"post_id": 39547, "ts": "2026-08-02T15:55:34Z", "hours": 5.2503, "text": "Created the activity tab (finally finished all server tabs :D) along with a function to parse the variables in the logs’ description Improved loading for schedules, backup and databases tabs Fixed JSON text highlighting not highlighting strings inside of arrays Added padding for the Waterfall Cutout (aka screens with rounded edges) in the Header and ScrollableTabRow components In the settings tab added a popup to confirm the reinstallation of the server Added the endpoint to get the server activity (idk how i had skipped that one) and its function to call it Renamed AccountActivity to ActivityLog as it’s used in server activity too Installed a lib to generate avatars thta look like “Boring Avatars” one (cuz boring avatars API is paid ) add .trim() to all user inputs Now tabs refresh only when the server ID changes instead of anything in the server object"}, {"post_id": 39101, "ts": "2026-08-01T20:10:32Z", "hours": 4.3317, "text": "Create a custom PullToRefreshBox component that just uses Material3 PullToRefreshBox under the hood, i just made a component so i can easily style it as it’s in 1 single place Added the pull to refresh gesture to servers list & server details screens Added a warning for when the server is suspended, installing, transferring, restoring from a backup or its node is under maintenance (all warnings for now use same icons, i gotta change that) In the servers list servers now are disable and show a pill when they are suspended, installing, transferring, restoring from a backup or their node is under maintenance (basically when the warning is displayed, the server is also disabled aka you can’t access its data like console, files etc.) The app now properly handles padding for devices that have a “waterfall inset” (aka those kind of phones with curved screen at the edge) The top bar in the server list now properly shows a loading state instead of just disappearing and appearing when the user permissions are fetched Created a function hasPermission to check if an user has a certain permission instead of repeating the same code like 20 times Moved StartupContainer to a more general Container Moved ServerStatus enum to Server.Status Removed navController from all tabs as it was unused"}, {"post_id": 38795, "ts": "2026-08-01T11:14:01Z", "hours": 2.0736, "text": "Created the startup tab Made startup variable description nullable as it’s an optional property"}, {"post_id": 38468, "ts": "2026-07-31T21:10:19Z", "hours": 0.7469, "text": "Network tab now just disables all the buttons when loading instead of switching to skeleton loading for any small change like updating an allocation’s notes Doubled hamburger menu icon left padding to match the avatar padding on the right Doubled the gaps between the cards in the backups & network tabs Halved the gaps between the cards in the schedules tab I also tried to make the TextInput label not squared for a while but failed 😭 , for some reasons even if i clip my highest component to rounded corners, it still has the squared bg in the back"}, {"post_id": 38370, "ts": "2026-07-31T18:28:20Z", "hours": 1.9514, "text": "Added the network tab to manage server allocations Added a “Tertiary” button type (just cuz secondary was almost invisible on the allocation bg 🥀) Fixed allocation endpoints using String instead of Long Moved backup popups outside of the padded Column Updated my github username in the readme"}, {"post_id": 36009, "ts": "2026-07-27T20:28:50Z", "hours": 0.4436, "text": "After i tested more the additions of the last devlog i found some issues so here i fixed them Fixed backups downloading as .gz instead of .tar.gz Fixed “Create Backup” not showing up when the current backup count was 0 (making it impossible to create backups at all) Disabled inputs in the restore & create popups when respectively restoring and creating Removed the enabled param in the BackupDisplay as it was basically useless"}, {"post_id": 35992, "ts": "2026-07-27T19:54:26Z", "hours": 4.4839, "text": "Finished the users tab Made the backups tab Made all popup’s horizontal padding equal When editing or creating a new subuser, the permissins that the current user doesn’t have are disabled in the permissions list Disabled the “Create Database” button when at the limit Renamed File to FileDisplay for consistency with other components Fixed edit & create user body still using String instead of ServerSubuser.Permission Fixed the deleteServerBackup function which was marked as GET instead of DELETE Made the truncate param required in the restoreServerBackup function as it’s required in the API"}, {"post_id": 34673, "ts": "2026-07-25T16:12:15Z", "hours": 5.4628, "text": "Started making the users tab but it’s really WIP, none of the buttons except create new user works) Handled subuser permissions for all current tabs Added a LabeledCheckbox component Removed some function params that were pointless to have Installed the Gravatar SDK for the subusers’ avatar I legit think Android Studio is ragebaiting me, as soon as i start the rec the app starts to lag, when i stop the rec it’s fine"}, {"post_id": 34147, "ts": "2026-07-24T17:24:53Z", "hours": 3.77, "text": "Finished handling buttons in the schedules tab & created all the popups for schedule & tasks management In all screens & tab now all the inputs, switches, selects etc. are disabled when loading or making a HTTP request (like delete schedule, update file name etc.) Added a function to convert ISO date strings in human-readable strings Added a missing endpoint to execute a schedule Added a missing only_when_online property in the ServerSchedule data class Fixed schedule & tasks endpoint types (was using String instead of Long for the IDs) Fixed ScrollableTabRow not using all the horizontal space when in landscape mode"}, {"post_id": 33800, "ts": "2026-07-24T00:56:20Z", "hours": 2.5242, "text": "Finished the UI side of the schedule details popup (still WIP for backend like button handling) Moved each popup into its own folder & file to avoid having many long Popup calls at the top of screen/tab files Changed task action from a normal screen to an enum Took the formatDate function from my Zipline app"}, {"post_id": 33067, "ts": "2026-07-22T17:17:14Z", "hours": 4.2242, "text": "Created the schedules tab for the server screen (still WIP, for now only works for displaying & creating schedules, gotta add edit, deletion and task management) Moved each tab to its own ViewModel for better ordering instead of putting everything is a generic one Improved code layout by using return s in some places instead of many if else blocks Fixed ScrollableTabRow component improperly placing icons when there was no text Moved ‘linked’ data class es inside each other so i can do Server.Attributes.Limits instead of having a class with a long name like ApplicationServerAttributesLimits"}, {"post_id": 32681, "ts": "2026-07-22T00:08:40Z", "hours": 5.6317, "text": "Updated the file edit screen to use VSCode’s Dark+ theme colors for highlighting and added Java and CASM/Crawssembly by @The_Craw Added the databases tab with handling for creation, deletion and rotation of the password Fixed rotateServerDatabasePassword and deleteServerDatabase , they were using the wrong endpoint ( /server instead of /servers ) Made each tab independently scrollable instead of making the parent component scrollable Took the IconButton component from my Zipline app and slightly modified it (the MoreActionsButton component now uses that) Changed the Notification object component’s background color"}, {"post_id": 31859, "ts": "2026-07-20T16:06:12Z", "hours": 2.1247, "text": "FInished file handling (handled edit & save files & create new file) Added file highlighting for .env files Fixed writeServerFile having a wrong Content-Type (it had application/json instead of text/plain since the input is a raw string) Fixed HTML syntax highlighting, it wasn’t highlighting the > part of the tag"}, {"post_id": 31721, "ts": "2026-07-20T10:47:03Z", "hours": 2.645, "text": "Added a screen for code editing with simple syntax highlighting (via a newly installed library) and a warning if you try to leave without saving (that’s still WIP, saving isn’t implemented yet and neither reading the content of the selected file) Updated the TextInput component to have a fontFamily property so that in the core editor i can set the text to be monospace On the login screen i disabled the application api key input till the admin side is actually done"}, {"post_id": 31407, "ts": "2026-07-19T19:00:46Z", "hours": 4.4347, "text": "(Sorry for the slightly laggy video, not sure if it’s cuz it’s via a emulator or cuz i compressed the video from 136 MiB down to 36 MB) In the server screen added the handling for download, upload, delete, copy, create folder, rename/move, change permissions, archive & unarchive Filled the File component’s “more actions” menu (before it was empty) Updated uploadServerFiles to be able to upload multiple files at once Added a function to convert linux string permissions (like drwxr-xr-x ) to int/octal (like 755 ) Added a regex for the linux int/octal permission Took the Popup component and Storage object form my Zipline app Updated the SecureStorage class to add the file download folder variable"}, {"post_id": 30962, "ts": "2026-07-18T23:42:06Z", "hours": 2.1631, "text": "Created the Files tab in the server screen (still WIP, most of the buttons do nothing rn) Created a File component to avoid repeating same code Added a new color surfaceContainer used in notifications Took the “More Actions” component from my Zipline app Took the “Checkbox” component from my Zipline app and modified it to be toggleable In server screen disable global scroll on certain tabs as they’d cause the app to crash for infinite scroll moved the WebSocket connection to the Console tab instead of the general server screen, this way it auto reconnects when the user switches back to the console tab (since it disconnects when the user moves to another tab to save resources)"}, {"post_id": 30840, "ts": "2026-07-18T19:40:14Z", "hours": 3.5069, "text": "Added charts to the console tab of the server screen Added a top scrollbar like ptero’s to the server screen and moved the console stuff to its own file for better sorting Created a component for the chart container & top scrollbar to avoid repetition Added AI declaration in the readme cuz i only found out now that it’s required Removed a double new line the Button component"}, {"post_id": 29863, "ts": "2026-07-17T00:51:22Z", "hours": 3.43, "text": "Created the server screen and right now i only made the console section out of all the ones i gotta do (console, files, databases, schedules, users, backups, network, startup, settings & activity) The server screen itself is WIP as it’s missing the buttons to switch between the sections The console tab is also WIP as i haven’t done the line charts for CPU, RAM & Network I/O) (devlogging with this stuff half-made cuz it’s almost 3AM so i gotta sleep ) Took the formatMs function from my zipline app to convert ms to human readable time like “1h 30m 20s” for the server uptime In the WebSocketManager class renamed the setPowerState function to sendPowerSignal as it makes more sense On the console screen i wanted the console to follow its actual colors but only lib i found to do that doesn’t support jetpack compose that well so i had to rely on the XML’s TextView (but in compose thanks to the AndroidView component)"}, {"post_id": 29055, "ts": "2026-07-15T18:23:36Z", "hours": 2.9633, "text": "Fixed websocket not working (apparently it 403’s unless you put the panel URL as Origin header) Added pagination to the servers screen and also made the server load lazily and get unrendered when out of the display Also suspended servers’ names now are grayed out Installed a ANSI parser library to correctly color console output (hopefully it works however they already said it won’t work for outline 😭) Took the scrollbar modifiers from my Zipline app and put a scrollbar in the servers list Created a object to easily access the WebSocketManager from a ViewModel class Currently working on the specific server page, right now it’s empty but i got websocket working, i’ll push it once it’s finished"}, {"post_id": 28568, "ts": "2026-07-14T21:58:36Z", "hours": 3.9736, "text": "Added the UI for the client servers list screen (still gotta finish it tho, just have to add pagination and will only shows 10 servers per page to avoid getting ratelimited as i have to make a separate HTTP request for each server to get their resources usage) Added pterodactyl panel colors to be used in the server status (red, green and yellow) Fixed listServers not working cuz of wrong path (i didn’t know how to tell retrofit to use just the baseUrl , then after it threw an error i googled it and realized i just had to put . ) Updated getServerResources response class, now the server state uses a enum instead of a generic string Updated Server class to better fix some typed and add 1 missing key Added the uploadServerFile HTTP method (i didn’t do i it initially cuz the docs were confusing and i couldn’t understand how to select the upload directory, turns out i was setting the directory query on the request to get the signed url instead of the signed url itself 😭 Improved login process to handle the case when the user logged with just an application api key and not a client one Added application API key validation for the same reason as the login Took shimmerable modifier from my Zipline app to make skeleton loading Added definitions & placeholders for all screens until i make them"}, {"post_id": 28257, "ts": "2026-07-14T12:33:25Z", "hours": 2.8692, "text": "Created Loading and Login Screen After making a HTTP request the app crashed and only then i realized that i didn’t make the HTTP request suspend functions so i fixed it Took the Notification object from my Zipline app, tho i gotta fix it a bit cuz the color is kinda ugly and i still don’t know which one in the palette to use cuz imo none of them fits, maybe i’ll just use a separate color out of the palette for it Updated the TextInput component to add a optional required field which when set to true adds a red * next to the label, might do this with switches too I took some common regex (domain, IPv4, number and decimal) since i might need them later and some of them (domain & IPv4) are also aready used in the login"}, {"post_id": 27777, "ts": "2026-07-13T17:06:27Z", "hours": 2.8914, "text": "Finished creating the methods to call the client API (same as application ones, copy pasted same code and changed method & function vars) (except for the download* ones, i took those from my other app Zipline) I also took the Transfer Service from my Zipline app Updated all the libraries Set target SDK to 37 (Android 17) now i gotta do the frontend part"}, {"post_id": 27272, "ts": "2026-07-12T18:21:50Z", "hours": 0.7419, "text": "Finished creating the methods to call the application API (basically just copy pasted same code and changed the method & the fuction vars) Now i gotta make the same thing for the client API"}, {"post_id": 27163, "ts": "2026-07-12T14:07:41Z", "hours": 1.4042, "text": "Started creating methods to call the API endpoints easily Took the Header component from one of my other apps"}, {"post_id": 26528, "ts": "2026-07-11T12:05:14Z", "hours": 0.8058, "text": "Set up color scheme (right now both light and dark color are the same, idk what colors to use to differ but make it still look like the official app) Added some util modules that i also use in my other apps Created an empty login screen"}, {"post_id": 26500, "ts": "2026-07-11T10:27:23Z", "hours": 0.9733, "text": "I had forgotten to add the client API HTTP endpoint to get the console websocket token & URL so i added it now Added the WebSocket handling (untested) Updated the proguard rules so that HTTP request/response classes are not shrunk or minified by R6"}, {"post_id": 26100, "ts": "2026-07-10T18:05:31Z", "hours": 0.6336, "text": "Finished adding the application API HTTP requests (added application/servers/{serverId}/databases , application/nests and application/nests/{nestId}/eggs ) Also fixed some classes having wrong data cuz i realized that i copy pasted them without actually changing their name in some places 😭 you can see them in the commit here even tho i’m kinda confused cuz in the docs i didn’t see any endpoint to create or manage nests, eggs and database hosts"}, {"post_id": 26051, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:14:07Z", "hours": 2.1628, "text": "Added more application API HTTP requests (all the application/nodes/{nodeId}/allocations , application/locations and application/servers endpoints) you can see them in the commit here"}, {"post_id": 21431, "ts": "2026-07-03T11:41:26Z", "hours": 2.1569, "text": "Added more application API HTTP requests (all the /application/user and /application/nodes endpoints) you can see them in the commit here"}, {"post_id": 7486, "ts": "2026-06-12T14:24:53Z", "hours": 1.1056, "text": "Split the API in 2 types: application and client (as pterodactyl handles those differently with 2 diff api keys) Fixed some wrong or missing types Finished adding the HTTP requests for the client API Started adding the HTTP requests for the application API"}, {"post_id": 7451, "ts": "2026-06-12T12:46:34Z", "hours": 1.6653, "text": "Added more HTTP requests (ngl am too lazy to list them all, just watch them in the commit here )"}, {"post_id": 4342, "ts": "2026-06-07T16:58:23Z", "hours": 4.2092, "text": "Added even more HTTP requests, tho could be not 100% accurate cuz ptero API is shit 😭, the official one is AI generated and has hallucinations…. anyway i added: GET /api/client/account/activity GET /api/client/account/ssh-keys POST /api/client/account/ssh-keys POST /api/client/account/ssh-keys/remove GET /api/client/servers/{identifier} GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/resources POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/command POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/power GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/databases POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/databases POST /api/client/server/{serverIdentifier}/databases/{databaseIdentifier)/rotate-password DELETE /api/client/server/{serverIdentifier}/databases/{databaseIdentifier} GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/list GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/contents GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/download POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/write POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/create-folder POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/copy PUT /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/rename POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/compress POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/decompress POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/delete GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/upload POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/chmod GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} DELETE /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} POST /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks POST /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks/{taskIdentifier} DELETE /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks/{taskIdentifier} Writing all these took alot of time"}, {"post_id": 3759, "ts": "2026-06-06T20:13:46Z", "hours": 1.5667, "text": "Started adding some HTTP requests typedef, still missing alot tho for now i added: GET /api/client GET /api/client/permissions GET /api/client/account GET /api/client/account/two-factor POST /api/client/account/two-factor (enable) POST /api/client/account/two-factor (disable) PUT /api/client/account/email PUT /api/client/account/password GET /api/client/account/api-keys DELETE /api/client/account/api-keys/{identifier} POST /api/client/account/api-keys no frontend yet, i’m doing the backend first"}, {"post_id": 3611, "ts": "2026-06-06T16:44:59Z", "hours": 0.7236, "text": "Just created the app skeleton based on the other 2 apps i’ve already made (with alot of TODOs for now) now working on writing the code for HTTP requests to the pterodactyl API and their response types"}]...
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Title: Pterodactyl Panel (Android App) by @stefdp Title: Pterodactyl Panel (Android App) by @stefdp | Stardance
Devlogs:
Just created the app skeleton based on the other 2 apps i’ve already made (with alot of TODOs for now) now working on writing the code for HTTP requests to the pterodactyl API and their response types
Started adding some HTTP requests typedef, still missing alot tho for now i added: GET /api/client GET /api/client/permissions GET /api/client/account GET /api/client/account/two-factor POST /api/client/account/two-factor (enable) POST /api/client/account/two-factor (disable) PUT /api/client/account/email PUT /api/client/account/password GET /api/client/account/api-keys DELETE /api/client/account/api-keys/{identifier} POST /api/client/account/api-keys no frontend yet, i’m doing the backend first
Added even more HTTP requests, tho could be not 100% accurate cuz ptero API is shit 😭, the official one is AI generated and has hallucinations…. anyway i added: GET /api/client/account/activity GET /api/client/account/ssh-keys POST /api/client/account/ssh-keys POST /api/client/account/ssh-keys/remove GET /api/client/servers/{identifier} GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/resources POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/command POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/power GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/databases POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/databases POST /api/client/server/{serverIdentifier}/databases/{databaseIdentifier)/rotate-password DELETE /api/client/server/{serverIdentifier}/databases/{databaseIdentifier} GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/list GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/contents GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/download POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/write POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/create-folder POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/copy PUT /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/rename POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/compress POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/decompress POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/delete GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/upload POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/files/chmod GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules GET /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules POST /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} DELETE /api/client/servers/{identifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier} POST /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks POST /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks/{taskIdentifier} DELETE /api/client/servers/{serverIdentifier}/schedules/{scheduleIdentifier}/tasks/{taskIdentifier} Writing all these took alot of time
Added more HTTP requests (ngl am too lazy to list them all, just watch them in the commit here )
Split the API in 2 types: application and client (as pterodactyl handles those differently with 2 diff api keys) Fixed some wrong or missing types Finished adding the HTTP requests for the client API Started adding the HTTP requests for the application API
Added more application API HTTP requests (all the /application/user and /application/nodes endpoints) you can see them in the commit here
Added more application API HTTP requests (all the application/nodes/{nodeId}/allocations , application/locations and application/servers endpoints) you can see them in the commit here
Finished adding the application API HTTP requests (added application/servers/{serverId}/databases , application/nests and application/nests/{nestId}/eggs ) Also fixed some classes having wrong data cuz i realized that i copy pasted them without actually changing their name in some places 😭 you can see them in the commit here even tho i’m kinda confused cuz in the docs i didn’t see any endpoint to create or manage nests, eggs and database hosts
I had forgotten to add the client API HTTP endpoint to get the console websocket token & URL so i added it now Added the WebSocket handling (untested) Updated the proguard rules so that HTTP request/response classes are not shrunk or minified by R6
Set up color scheme (right now both light and dark color are the same, idk what colors to use to differ but make it still look like the official app) Added some util modules that i also use in my other apps Created an empty login screen
Started creating methods to call the API endpoints easily Took the Header component from one of my other apps
Finished creating the methods to call the application API (basically just copy pasted same code and changed the method & the fuction vars) Now i gotta make the same thing for the client API
Finished creating the methods to call the client API (same as application ones, copy pasted same code and changed method & function vars) (except for the download* ones, i took those from my other app Zipline) I also took the Transfer Service from my Zipline app Updated all the libraries Set target SDK to 37 (Android 17) now i gotta do the frontend part
Created Loading and Login Screen After making a HTTP request the app crashed and only then i realized that i didn’t make the HTTP request suspend functions so i fixed it Took the Notification object from my Zipline app, tho i gotta fix it a bit cuz the color is kinda ugly and i still don’t know which one in the palette to use cuz imo none of them fits, maybe i’ll just use a separate color out of the palette for it Updated the TextInput component to add a optional required field which when set to true adds a red * next to the label, might do this with switches too I took some common regex (domain, IPv4, number and decimal) since i might need them later and some of them (domain & IPv4) are also aready used in the login
Added the UI for the client servers list screen (still gotta finish it tho, just have to add pagination and will only shows 10 servers per page to avoid getting ratelimited as i have to make a separate HTTP request for each server to get their resources usage) Added pterodactyl panel colors to be used in the server status (red, green and yellow) Fixed listServers not working cuz of wrong path (i didn’t know how to tell retrofit to use just the baseUrl , then after it threw an error i googled it and realized i just had to put . ) Updated getServerResources response class, now the server state uses a enum instead of a generic string Updated Server class to better fix some typed and add 1 missing key Added the uploadServerFile HTTP method (i didn’t do i it initially cuz the docs were confusing and i couldn’t understand how to select the upload directory, turns out i was setting the directory query on the request to get the signed url instead of the signed url itself 😭 Improved login process to handle the case when the user logged with just an application api key and not a client one Added application API key validation for the same reason as the login Took shimmerable modifier from my Zipline app to make skeleton loading Added definitions & placeholders for all screens until i make them
Fixed websocket not working (apparently it 403’s unless you put the panel URL as Origin header) Added pagination to the servers screen and also made the server load lazily and get unrendered when out of the display Also suspended servers’ names now are grayed out Installed a ANSI parser library to correctly color console output (hopefully it works however they already said it won’t work for outline 😭) Took the scrollbar modifiers from my Zipline app and put a scrollbar in the servers list Created a object to easily access the WebSocketManager from a ViewModel class Currently working on the specific server page, right now it’s empty but i got websocket working, i’ll push it once it’s finished
Created the server screen and right now i only made the console section out of all the ones i gotta do (console, files, databases, schedules, users, backups, network, startup, settings & activity) The server screen itself is WIP as it’s missing the buttons to switch between the sections The console tab is also WIP as i haven’t done the line charts for CPU, RAM & Network I/O) (devlogging with this stuff half-made cuz it’s almost 3AM so i gotta sleep ) Took the formatMs function from my zipline app to convert ms to human readable time like “1h 30m 20s” for the server uptime In the WebSocketManager class renamed the setPowerState function to sendPowerSignal as it makes more sense On the console screen i wanted the console to follow its actual colors but only lib i found to do that doesn’t support jetpack compose that well so i had to rely on the XML’s TextView (but in compose thanks to the AndroidView component)
Added charts to the console tab of the server screen Added a top scrollbar like ptero’s to the server screen and moved the console stuff to its own file for better sorting Created a component for the chart container & top scrollbar to avoid repetition Added AI declaration in the readme cuz i only found out now that it’s required Removed a double new line the Button component
Created the Files tab in the server screen (still WIP, most of the buttons do nothing rn) Created a File component to avoid repeating same code Added a new color surfaceContainer used in notifications Took the “More Actions” component from my Zipline app Took the “Checkbox” component from my Zipline app and modified it to be toggleable In server screen disable global scroll on certain tabs as they’d cause the app to crash for infinite scroll moved the WebSocket connection to the Console tab instead of the general server screen, this way it auto reconnects when the user switches back to the console tab (since it disconnects when the user moves to another tab to save resources)
(Sorry for the slightly laggy video, not sure if it’s cuz it’s via a emulator or cuz i compressed the video from 136 MiB down to 36 MB) In the server screen added the handling for download, upload, delete, copy, create folder, rename/move, change permissions, archive & unarchive Filled the File component’s “more actions” menu (before it was empty) Updated uploadServerFiles to be able to upload multiple files at once Added a function to convert linux string permissions (like drwxr-xr-x ) to int/octal (like 755 ) Added a regex for the linux int/octal permission Took the Popup component and Storage object form my Zipline app Updated the SecureStorage class to add the file download folder variable
Added a screen for code editing with simple syntax highlighting (via a newly installed library) and a warning if you try to leave without saving (that’s still WIP, saving isn’t implemented yet and neither reading the content of the selected file) Updated the TextInput component to have a fontFamily property so that in the core editor i can set the text to be monospace On the login screen i disabled the application api key input till the admin side is actually done
FInished file handling (handled edit & save files & create new file) Added file highlighting for .env files Fixed writeServerFile having a wrong Content-Type (it had application/json instead of text/plain since the input is a raw string) Fixed HTML syntax highlighting, it wasn’t highlighting the > part of the tag
Updated the file edit screen to use VSCode’s Dark+ theme colors for highlighting and added Java and CASM/Crawssembly by @The_Craw Added the databases tab with handling for creation, deletion and rotation of the password Fixed rotateServerDatabasePassword and deleteServerDatabase , they were using the wrong endpoint ( /server instead of /servers ) Made each tab independently scrollable instead of making the parent component scrollable Took the IconButton component from my Zipline app and slightly modified it (the MoreActionsButton component now uses that) Changed the Notification object component’s background color
Created the schedules tab for the server screen (still WIP, for now only works for displaying & creating schedules, gotta add edit, deletion and task management) Moved each tab to its own ViewModel for better ordering instead of putting everything is a generic one Improved code layout by using return s in some places instead of many if else blocks Fixed ScrollableTabRow component improperly placing icons when there was no text Moved ‘linked’ data class es inside each other so i can do Server.Attributes.Limits instead of having a class with a long name like ApplicationServerAttributesLimits
Finished the UI side of the schedule details popup (still WIP for backend like button handling) Moved each popup into its own folder & file to avoid having many long Popup calls at the top of screen/tab files Changed task action from a normal screen to an enum Took the formatDate function from my Zipline app
Finished handling buttons in the schedules tab & created all the popups for schedule & tasks management In all screens & tab now all the inputs, switches, selects etc. are disabled when loading or making a HTTP request (like delete schedule, update file name etc.) Added a function to convert ISO date strings in human-readable strings Added a missing endpoint to execute a schedule Added a missing only_when_online property in the ServerSchedule data class Fixed schedule & tasks endpoint types (was using String instead of Long for the IDs) Fixed ScrollableTabRow not using all the horizontal space when in landscape mode
Started making the users tab but it’s really WIP, none of the buttons except create new user works) Handled subuser permissions for all current tabs Added a LabeledCheckbox component Removed some function params that were pointless to have Installed the Gravatar SDK for the subusers’ avatar I legit think Android Studio is ragebaiting me, as soon as i start the rec the app starts to lag, when i stop the rec it’s fine
Finished the users tab Made the backups tab Made all popup’s horizontal padding equal When editing or creating a new subuser, the permissins that the current user doesn’t have are disabled in the permissions list Disabled the “Create Database” button when at the limit Renamed File to FileDisplay for consistency with other components Fixed edit & create user body still using String instead of ServerSubuser.Permission Fixed the deleteServerBackup function which was marked as GET instead of DELETE Made the truncate param required in the restoreServerBackup function as it’s required in the API
After i tested more the additions of the last devlog i found some issues so here i fixed them Fixed backups downloading as .gz instead of .tar.gz Fixed “Create Backup” not showing up when the current backup count was 0 (making it impossible to create backups at all) Disabled inputs in the restore & create popups when respectively restoring and creating Removed the enabled param in the BackupDisplay as it was basically useless
Added the network tab to manage server allocations Added a “Tertiary” button type (just cuz secondary was almost invisible on the allocation bg 🥀) Fixed allocation endpoints using String instead of Long Moved backup popups outside of the padded Column Updated my github username in the readme
Network tab now just disables all the buttons when loading instead of switching to skeleton loading for any small change like updating an allocation’s notes Doubled hamburger menu icon left padding to match the avatar padding on the right Doubled the gaps between the cards in the backups & network tabs Halved the gaps between the cards in the schedules tab I also tried to make the TextInput label not squared for a while but failed 😭 , for some reasons even if i clip my highest component to rounded corners, it still has the squared bg in the back
Created the startup tab Made startup variable description nullable as it’s an optional property
Create a custom PullToRefreshBox component that just uses Material3 PullToRefreshBox under the hood, i just made a component so i can easily style it as it’s in 1 single place Added the pull to refresh gesture to servers list & server details screens Added a warning for when the server is suspended, installing, transferring, restoring from a backup or its node is under maintenance (all warnings for now use same icons, i gotta change that) In the servers list servers now are disable and show a pill when they are suspended, installing, transferring, restoring from a backup or their node is under maintenance (basically when the warning is displayed, the server is also disabled aka you can’t access its data like console, files etc.) The app now properly handles padding for devices that have a “waterfall inset” (aka those kind of phones with curved screen at the edge) The top bar in the server list now properly shows a loading state instead of just disappearing and appearing when the user permissions are fetched Created a function hasPermission to check if an user has a certain permission instead of repeating the same code like 20 times Moved StartupContainer to a more general Container Moved ServerStatus enum to Server.Status Removed navController from all tabs as it was unused
Created the activity tab (finally finished all server tabs :D) along with a function to parse the variables in the logs’ description Improved loading for schedules, backup and databases tabs Fixed JSON text highlighting not highlighting strings inside of arrays Added padding for the Waterfall Cutout (aka screens with rounded edges) in the Header and ScrollableTabRow components In the settings tab added a popup to confirm the reinstallation of the server Added the endpoint to get the server activity (idk how i had skipped that one) and its function to call it Renamed AccountActivity to ActivityLog as it’s used in server activity too Installed a lib to generate avatars thta look like “Boring Avatars” one (cuz boring avatars API is paid ) add .trim() to all user inputs Now tabs refresh only when the server ID changes instead of anything in the server object
Added the account settings screen and its account tab (now missing “API Credentials”, “SSH Keys” and “Activity” tabs, then the app is done ) in the server screen’s files tab file names are now limited to one line and if they overflow, they get cut off and “…” is added Now each warning popup in the server screen has its own icon instead of all using the suspended icon in all places, replaced refreshIndex += 1 with refreshIndex++ The app now no longer shows “Missing Server ID” toast as soon as you open a server Fixed disable 2FA endpoint (i forgot to add /disable at the end and i was wondering why 2FA wasn’t getting disabled even tho the request succeeded (without /disable it acts as enable endpoint)) Fixed get qr code response as it was different from what the API docs listed In the get qr code function added a secondary response to tell that 2FA is already enabled (used to check 2FA status so i know whether to show enable or disable button in the 2FA cuz the user object doesn’t tell me if the user has 2FA on … shitty API fr) Added a simple regex to parse emails (so the change email button is enabled only if this regex passes) Servers screen now uses a normal Column instead of a LazyColumn as lazily loading the server was causing more lag than loading all at once (after all it’s just 10 servers per page) Same as above for the server screen activity tab (jusy 25 logs per page) Fixed the pagination system in servers screen and server screen activity tab (for total amount of pages it was using the total amount of items in the current pages ( .total ) instead of the total number of pages ( .totalPages ), idk how i missed that ) Moved the file picker stuff outside of the LazyColumn & put the permissions in a remember to hopefully try to decrease lag I wanted to make a screen rec but i was too lazy to then go and censor my 2FA secret
In the account settings screen created the API credentials tab Update the server screen so each tabs remembers its own data after switching to another tab (previously it would reset when the user switched to another tab). Also tabs now only fetch data on first render, then they use the previously fetched data instead of re-fetching, unless the user manually refreshes via the “pull to refresh” action (the thing where you swipe from top to down and it shows the refresh circle, idk it’s “professional” name ) Applied same changes as above to the account settings screen Updated the formatDate function to include a param to toggle the year in the date
In the account settings screen added the SSH Keys tab (basically a almost full copy paste of the API Credentials for the frontend) Fixed capitalization of a variable & function in the api key tab
In the account settings screen created the activity tab (i think i finished all the client side of the app , now i just gotta finish the small importance TODOs like removing the padding to the scrollbar in most scrollable views & stuff like that) Moved ActivityDisplay in the general components as it’s used in the accoutn activity too Updated ActivityDisplay to include the user agent button when available
in the account settings screen added a tab for the app settings Fixed some activity log event having incorrect names and causing the app to crash Added an action to build the app when the commit is prefixed with [build] or [release] Moved the *Scrollbar modifiers above any padding modifier so they look better Switch ScrollableTabRow to a normal Row instead of LazyRow since it’ll never have enough items to cause any lag Updated the README Removed the admin input in the login screen since it’s currently not available
Created a website for the app & a privacy policy (that was needed for the play store app), it’s available at https://ptero.stefdp.com Added a prompt to request the notification permission in the login screen and a button in the settings in case you want to enable notification in a second moment Improved the eventDescription variable in the ActivityDisplay component (i didn’t even know that was possible, i found it out cuz i made a _count variable and android studio suggested me to put it directly in the when , lmao) Updated versioning to follow SemVer ( 1.0 -> 1.0.0 )
Fixed the pull to refresh box having incorrect padding, so the circle was being hidden by the header and by the time it was out, it was already fully pulled and so it would refresh Updated the README also did some tests with downloading but i failed so i just undid them without committing or anything
Created the locations screen Created the location screen Took and modified to adapt to this app the Table component, originally from my Zipline app Fixed the pull to refresh, when calling onRefresh it didn’t actually set isRefreshing to true so the spinner would immediately disappear instead of swithcing to the spinner state till it finished loading Removed the page property from functions since the page is already stored in the viewModel so it made no sense to retrieve it from the viewModel just to send it to a function in the viewModel Fixed the formatDate function, it was crashing the app on older Android versions (<= 13) because the date time parser couldn’t understand the timezone (it expected a date like 2026-08-08-T15:43:30Z instead of 2026-08-08-T15:43:30+02:00 ) Added a new primary color variant that looks good enough on light bgs Fixed some multi-line TextInput s being marked as singleLine
Created a CodeText component to display text as code (kinda like this ) and applied it in all the places where I previously just copy pasted same code Creating an API key now copies the key to the clipboard
Created nodes screen (missing the popup to create a node for now) App name is now dynamically generated in the build.gradle.kts file (so debug build get the (Debug) suffix) Added an HTTP endpoint to check a node status
Fixed admins not being able to manage servers subusers’ permissions Fixed not being aple to open sub-directories in the file browser Fixed create location popup not closing after creating the location
Created the popup to create a node When fetching the node lists, now it also fetches all the locations (needed for a select in the create popup) Added fastlane metadata (will be used for F-Droid in the future) The Popup component now has a scrollbar Updated the scrollbar so now it only shows up when the container has enough contents to be scrollable Added an arrangement property in the Table ’s headers & row cells so that i can center certain things Updated TextInput and Switch components to make their description text color customizable Updated the workflow to automatically push the .aab file to play store after it’s built and made the release (hopefully, i didn’t test it) Fixed create location popup not clearing the inputs upon closing
Created the node screen & its about tab Moved node specific endpoints to their own ApiService instead of having them in the ApplicationApiService and added 2 endpoints to respectively fetch system data in v1 and v2 Made it so create new node button is disabled until all locations are fetched
Create the settings tab in the node screen Added enabled state to all the inputs & switches in the create node popup Updated the updateNode function’s body & params since some required params were marked as nullable
Created the node configuration tab Renamed the CodeText component to CodeBlockText and added params to highlight the content with a specific language Created the CodeText component to have both normal text and inline code text (kinda like markdown when you do this )
Created the node allocations tab The servers screen now shows the server description when available The 2FA check now considers 2FA as enabled even if the status code is 400 other than checking the error message (ptero got no way of knowing if 2FA is enabled other than that ) Update the TextInput component to allow showing optional suggestions (used in the assign new allocations popup, IP Address input) The Checkbox component now is more transparent when disabled (from 0.5 to 0.2 alpha) Changed how padding works in the Pager component Updated the Table component to add a param to disable lazy loading (for some reason it was laggier) Updated the libs
Created the servers screen (WIP, inputs are untested and creating servers is not implemented yet) Created node servers tab Added pagination to the list nests HTTP request response Removed useless reset of the allocations in the node allocations tab In the created node popup, switched some inputs description from "quoted" test to actual inline code blocks CodeText component now uses CharSequence instead of String so it also supports annotated strings Switched main components from Text to CodeText Application server status is now an enum Updated list nests query to include eggs variables too (i just found out i can do this so i’m gonna prob do in in all the other ones in the next devlog too)
All *Include enums are now chainable so doing ListNodesQueryInclude.SERVERS + ListServersQueryInclude.USER returns servers.user Also now instead of <enum>.toQueryString(...) (like ListServersQueryInclude.toQueryString(...) ) i do listOf(...).toQueryString() Used the new include enum chaining in 2 places: node servers tab: it now makes way less HTTP requests since the user, nest & egg are directly returned with the server, saving me from making multiple HTTP requests to fetch all users, nests & eggs (which would’ve taken a long time on a large server that for example has thousands of users, since it was fetching at a rate of 50 users per HTTP request, and it being a mobile app, internet might not be fast too) servers screen, now it fetches the egg variable together with the nest instead of having to fetch the egg’s data Moved ApiErrorResponse in a models folder for better organization this is a code only change so ig i’ll show pics of the code
Added server creation Added a searchable property in the Select component that adds a text input to filter the options Created a regex to check node & server names
Created server screen with its: About tab Details tab Build Configuration tab Fixed pull to reload, it was updating the refreshIndex variable before the main resource actually refreshed and this caused the tabs not to refresh unless the user pulled to refresh twice CodeText component now uses default text style & font weight instead of pre-defined ones (for some reasons with pre-defined ones, in the ScrollableTabRow component it adds like a margin on the bottom of the blue active indicator) Updated UpdateServerDetailsBody to mark required fields as non-nullable In the server owner select, fixed the selected user disappearing if it was not in the search results In the allocation selects: Made the UI use alias:port when an alias is available, otherwise will default to ip:port Moved the ip:port text to a variable to avoid writing the same thing twice
Created the server startup tab Changed the way Container components are spaced in the Build Configuration tab and create server popup In the create server popup disabled the docker image select when only 1 image is available
Created the admin server databases tab (it only supports resetting the password and deleting the databases because for creating a database i need the hosts IDs, which there seem to be no API endpoint to get them) Added a modifier param to the Container component In the client server screen added a param to directly switch to the databases tab (this is used when the user goes from the admin server screen to the client server screen) Fixed “Missing Server ID” notification when client server is opened with databases tab as first tab
Created server manage tab (only reinstall & suspend/unsuspend cuz there seem to be no API endpoint to toggle install status & transfer) Created server delete tab Added 2 new button types, SUCCESS (green) and WARNING (yellow) In the admin server screen now most tabs are hidden whent he server is installing
Created users & user screen Updated the AGP (Android Gradle Plugin) Table headers now properly support multi line text (previously if one text was multiline while everything else wasn’t, all the divider would have a gap on the bottom except for the multiline one) In the client server screen, settings tab the UUID is now aligned to the right Improved screen change when deleting a server/node/user/location (instead of navController.popBackStack() (which basically acts as the back button) i specifically navigate to generic screen (eg. “user” -> “users”) and remove current screen from the back history so in the case that there is no screen to back into (eg if the app is opened via a deep link or stuff like that) it will go to the generic tab anyway) Added pull to refresh in the location screen
Created nests, nest & nest egg screens For nest egg screen, created 3 tabs: Configuration Variables Install Script it was pretty easy and quick to create those cuz they’re read-only as there’s no API endpoint to edit/delete them Added a back handler in the tabbed screens so that back button now goes to the previous tab instead of the entire previous screen In the client servers screen added a switch to see others’ server (admin only) Fixed capitalization in the getNestEgg function ( eggid -> eggId )
Added optional biometric authentication so people can lock their app behind phone code or biometric verification (like fingerprint etc.)
Added updated checking For F-Droid flavor it doesn’t do anything For APK flavor it checks my git repo For Play Store flavor it uses play store com.google.android.play:app-update library Updated the app site, available at https://ptero.stefdp.com Updated the changelog & app images in the fastlane folder Added an animation when switching between loading states with circular loading
Ships:
For rating & testing the project, please first read all of the text in the release. I made an Android app to manage your self-hosted Pterodactyl Panel instance (Currently only the client side, later I’ll also add the admin side). For who doesn’t know, Pterodactyl Panel is a panel usually used to manage game servers, but it can run anything, each server is just a docker container. The most challenging part was prob downloading files, and it still confuses me tbh because on the Android Studio emulator it works fine, but when if I try it on my actual phone (Samsung A55 5G) it randomly stops after a few seconds and I can’t seem to understand why...
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Holy Moley by @GeorgeSun | Stardance
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GeorgeSun
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3
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96.74
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1613
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-07T23:43:28Z", "hours": 65.0, "multiplier": 19.59, "payout": 1513, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are 14 different levels, an inventory system, main menu, health system, map/quick travel system, shop system, and four different items. There are also two bossfights that multiple different attacks and are quite challenging. The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. There has been many changes since the last ship which I feel make the game a lot more complete such as the mole village where there are NPC moles for you to talk to. The game has side quests for you to accomplish now which give you exclusive unlocks that help you along your adventure. Click try project below to play on web or on PC!", "repo": "https://github.com/Geofoods/Holy-Moly", "demo": "https://bryanjietang-boop.itch.io/holy-moly"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-09-03T22:02:25Z", "hours": 2.0, "multiplier": 12.89, "payout": 24, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are nine different levels, inventory system, main menu, health system, and many different intricate systems such as the parry system! The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. I am also proud of the fact that this is now available on mobile and can be played on Andriod and Iphone! (although not available on the app store. You can play my project with the demo link! The Android version is downloadable, you just have to give it permissions. IOS needs an apple developer license however so it will take a while.", "repo": "https://github.com/Geofoods/Holy-Moly", "demo": "https://bryanjietang-boop.itch.io/holy-moly"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-07-10T14:24:37Z", "hours": 12.0, "multiplier": 12.93, "payout": 76, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are nine different levels, inventory system, main menu, health system, and many different intricate systems such as the parry system! The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. You can play my project with the demo link!", "repo": "https://github.com/Geofoods/Holy-Moly", "demo": "https://bryanjietang-boop.itch.io/holy-moly"}]...
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[{"post_id": 82122, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 82122, "ts": "2026-10-24T00:29:19Z", "hours": 9.1569, "text": "I created a level editor so that everyone can make their own levels. You can create blocks, enemies, checkpoints, chests, items, decorations, and spawnpoints! You can even change the background, music, and VFX! After you have created your level, you can upload your levels to the public server so that everyone can play your level. You can also sort levels by date, likes, downloads, and keywords!"}, {"post_id": 80043, "ts": "2026-10-16T01:49:13Z", "hours": 8.5842, "text": "I polished the map menu to be more consistent to the rest of the menus in the game. I also added more selection to the shop where now you can also sell things in the shop. There are also two new weapons which is the miner’s pickaxe and the wizard’s staff which is the first ranged weapon. I also am currently working on a multiplayer battle mode."}, {"post_id": 77696, "ts": "2026-10-07T23:19:00Z", "hours": 3.3469, "text": "I made my final bugfixes and a few optimizations for web, I think you guys will really enjoy the game!"}, {"post_id": 77189, "ts": "2026-10-06T00:18:02Z", "hours": 10.3744, "text": "This will probably be the final devlog as the game is super close to being finished! I added houses that the mole can enter and also added an extra phase to the corrupted snail boss. There are also new quests for you to partipate in and there are more points for you to quick travel from. I also added in some more music and sound effects and more polishing. You can also now save and erase game data"}, {"post_id": 75730, "ts": "2026-09-30T21:36:11Z", "hours": 9.2133, "text": "I created a new boss called the corrupted snail which will be the final boss and also reworked the corrupted heart as well. I also added some extra story and dialogue and added a new map with quick travel so that you can travel from mole village to the shopkeeper"}, {"post_id": 73767, "ts": "2026-09-25T21:55:35Z", "hours": 7.4275, "text": "I added extra polishing to the arena such as a new enemy spawning animation, and reworked the hornets which is the new enemy that dashes into you. I also added some story and dialogue."}, {"post_id": 72415, "ts": "2026-09-22T21:35:48Z", "hours": 10.3656, "text": "I changed the colours to make the visuals more aesthetic. I also added mole village where you can talk to other moles. I also revamped the tutorial so that the player learns the controls better"}, {"post_id": 70715, "ts": "2026-09-19T17:16:05Z", "hours": 8.8269, "text": "There are now new enemies such as hornets and I have been working on a lot of new levels for my open world 2d platformer called Holy Moly!"}, {"post_id": 69410, "ts": "2026-09-17T00:24:37Z", "hours": 7.6839, "text": "I want to make this an Open World 2D Platformer Game so I have it so that you can travel between levels freely without select screen. I also changed the lighting and added various QOL features"}, {"post_id": 68317, "ts": "2026-09-14T22:37:20Z", "hours": 5.8411, "text": "Made a new shop UI, cave system, and a dynamic camera. I also changed the block breaking physics so that the dirt particles have physics and also added ranged weapons and a grappling hook"}, {"post_id": 64521, "ts": "2026-09-09T00:01:03Z", "hours": 2.0364, "text": "I created a world system where are the levels are connected and also added a damage indicator when hitting enemies and how much damage you inflicted. I also tweaked the combat system so now there is an aerial attack when you attack in the air which is faster than ground attacking"}, {"post_id": 52028, "ts": "2026-08-22T02:07:00Z", "hours": 1.5547, "text": "I ported my Game onto Android and Apple phones and added mobile support!"}, {"post_id": 23539, "ts": "2026-07-06T15:49:12Z", "hours": 10.8819, "text": "Finished the game with 9 levels, end screen, win screen, and boss at the end. You can play the game right now!"}, {"post_id": 20425, "ts": "2026-07-02T00:51:13Z", "hours": 0.8114, "text": "Added a cave parallax background, the player sprite animations and the health indicator"}]...
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Title: Holy Moley by @GeorgeSun | Stardance
Devlo Title: Holy Moley by @GeorgeSun | Stardance
Devlogs:
Added a cave parallax background, the player sprite animations and the health indicator
Finished the game with 9 levels, end screen, win screen, and boss at the end. You can play the game right now!
I ported my Game onto Android and Apple phones and added mobile support!
I created a world system where are the levels are connected and also added a damage indicator when hitting enemies and how much damage you inflicted. I also tweaked the combat system so now there is an aerial attack when you attack in the air which is faster than ground attacking
Made a new shop UI, cave system, and a dynamic camera. I also changed the block breaking physics so that the dirt particles have physics and also added ranged weapons and a grappling hook
I want to make this an Open World 2D Platformer Game so I have it so that you can travel between levels freely without select screen. I also changed the lighting and added various QOL features
There are now new enemies such as hornets and I have been working on a lot of new levels for my open world 2d platformer called Holy Moly!
I changed the colours to make the visuals more aesthetic. I also added mole village where you can talk to other moles. I also revamped the tutorial so that the player learns the controls better
I added extra polishing to the arena such as a new enemy spawning animation, and reworked the hornets which is the new enemy that dashes into you. I also added some story and dialogue.
I created a new boss called the corrupted snail which will be the final boss and also reworked the corrupted heart as well. I also added some extra story and dialogue and added a new map with quick travel so that you can travel from mole village to the shopkeeper
This will probably be the final devlog as the game is super close to being finished! I added houses that the mole can enter and also added an extra phase to the corrupted snail boss. There are also new quests for you to partipate in and there are more points for you to quick travel from. I also added in some more music and sound effects and more polishing. You can also now save and erase game data
I made my final bugfixes and a few optimizations for web, I think you guys will really enjoy the game!
I polished the map menu to be more consistent to the rest of the menus in the game. I also added more selection to the shop where now you can also sell things in the shop. There are also two new weapons which is the miner’s pickaxe and the wizard’s staff which is the first ranged weapon. I also am currently working on a multiplayer battle mode.
I created a level editor so that everyone can make their own levels. You can create blocks, enemies, checkpoints, chests, items, decorations, and spawnpoints! You can even change the background, music, and VFX! After you have created your level, you can upload your levels to the public server so that everyone can play your level. You can also sort levels by date, likes, downloads, and keywords!
Ships:
Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are nine different levels, inventory system, main menu, health system, and many different intricate systems such as the parry system! The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. You can play my project with the demo link!
Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are nine different levels, inventory system, main menu, health system, and many different intricate systems such as the parry system! The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. I am also proud of the fact that this is now available on mobile and can be played on Andriod and Iphone! (although not available on the app store. You can play my project with the demo link! The Android version is downloadable, you just have to give it permissions. IOS needs an apple developer license however so it will take a while.
Me and my friends made a game about a little mole that fights demons! There are 14 different levels, an inventory system, main menu, health system, map/quick travel system, shop system, and four different items. There are also two bossfights that multiple different attacks and are quite challenging. The most challenging part about this was making the enemy pathfinding as there were many bugs and glitches during the creation process. I am most proud of how polished the game is because the game feels very reactive and fun to play. There has been many changes since the last ship which I feel make the game a lot more complete such as the mole village where there are NPC moles for you to talk to. The game has side quests for you to accomplish now which give you exclusive unlocks that help you along your adventure. Click try project below to play on web or on PC!...
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InviteHub by @Mrithul_E | Stardance
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Mrithul_E
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2
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85.0
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1614
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-13T15:04:05Z", "hours": 4.0, "multiplier": 12.49, "payout": 49, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a website for creating digital invitation webpages by simply selecting a template and filling out a form. This can help reduce paper usage by decreasing printed inviation lol .. I faced many challenges during the development: Building the logic for creating different different forms for each and every templates Limiting the total file size in http request Building a UI for creating forms by Drag-and-Droping Couldn’t host in vercel because vercel blocks requests more that ~4 MB Admin centralized working (only admin can create templates, this ensures security) I am proud of dedecating 3 months to complete this project, without doing any other project. To run my project my project you will need firebase api key, and hackclub cdn api. But you can’t get the already created templates because those are stored in firebase. what’s new in this ship 2 fixed some security vulnerability as per github code scan Added assets completely handmade with canva replaced many fonts in home page with cursive fonts added our mission section in the home page", "repo": "https://github.com/Mrithul-E/InviteHub", "demo": "https://invitehub.mrithul.in/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-09-06T13:06:11Z", "hours": 81.0, "multiplier": 19.23, "payout": 1565, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a website for creating digital invitation webpages by simply selecting a template and filling out a form. This can help reduce paper usage by decreasing printed inviation lol .. I faced many challenges during the development: Building the logic for creating different different forms for each and every templates Limiting the total file size in http request Building a UI for creating forms by Drag-and-Droping Couldn’t host in vercel because vercel blocks requests more that ~4 MB Admin centralized working (only admin can create templates, this ensures security) I am proud of dedecating 3 months to complete this project, without doing any other project. To run my project my project you will need firebase api key, and hackclub cdn api. But you can’t get the already created templates because those are stored in firebase.", "repo": "https://github.com/Mrithul-E/InviteHub", "demo": "https://invitehub.mrithul.in/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 66105, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 66105, "ts": "2026-09-11T18:10:15Z", "hours": 0.3892, "text": "Minor security fixes as per GitHub security scan Inclusion of functionality from an untrusted source Client-side URL redirect using query in URL"}, {"post_id": 66022, "ts": "2026-09-11T15:47:24Z", "hours": 1.2178, "text": "Some reworks readme updated added more gap in between the template card added the github link to the navbar changed some fonts in homepage and added some paragraph sections there"}, {"post_id": 64908, "ts": "2026-09-09T16:58:28Z", "hours": 1.6047, "text": "full css and ui rework: Changed the background image Made the design and animation minimalistic updated the navbar and footer removed unwanted styling in css removed unwanted gradient from text made minimal footer"}, {"post_id": 63600, "ts": "2026-09-07T14:55:46Z", "hours": 0.7089, "text": "Minor css fix removed many useless css code. Made it more good. not that the gradients are not generated by AI, instead it is generated by online CSS gradient maker. Don’t this that this is a AI generated/AI styled project. This site doesn’t have that much huge css to use AI. The Login with Google button is copied by some article in Medium. The gradient used in the home page Get Started button is custom made using CSS gradient generator The background image and the animated phone image is generated by Chatgpt. I don’t know whether this is contributing to the AI feel 🥲🥲😭😭 UPDATE: : By asking to shipwrights, they say that it was flagged and AI because it used AI generated images, which is not allowed. So i made it my self using canva, here it is:"}, {"post_id": 62873, "ts": "2026-09-06T12:22:58Z", "hours": 0.3833, "text": "Fix: Chrome media hub staying active even when video stops fixed this by removing the src and loading the video again into chrome’s memory, this solves the problem ."}, {"post_id": 62835, "ts": "2026-09-06T11:22:25Z", "hours": 1.3864, "text": "Added demo video to the home page Updated README.md and also fixed many minor css and html issues"}, {"post_id": 62397, "ts": "2026-09-05T18:51:00Z", "hours": 1.4019, "text": "Added README.md !! *Not comleted yet, no images and videos are added yet"}, {"post_id": 62092, "ts": "2026-09-05T10:41:55Z", "hours": 1.1986, "text": "Added the pages such as About, privacy-policies etc… Added About, Privacy policies , Terms of service page in hbs and added the corresponding routers for it"}, {"post_id": 62018, "ts": "2026-09-05T07:10:46Z", "hours": 0.5586, "text": "Added confirmation for logout and Added redirect to the last visited URL in login Added redirect to the last visited URL in login Added confirmation for logout, and made the logout route a long random string"}, {"post_id": 61684, "ts": "2026-09-04T18:32:50Z", "hours": 3.3572, "text": "Added ‘My invitations’ section in website Added My invitations section that shows the invitations created by that user. From here user can see the invitation, creation date, and user can also delete the invitation. Delete option will delete all files that are part of that invitation from the cdn, then delete the complete invitation from the db. And also added some minor fixes such as: webpage title issues added favicon etc…"}, {"post_id": 61049, "ts": "2026-09-03T19:19:07Z", "hours": 1.6256, "text": "User experience improvement implemented: made the created invitation url return fron server to frontend removed unwanted console.log used for debugging made the “Get started” button in frontend functional Added: invitation link and copy button in invitation creation form submission page"}, {"post_id": 60427, "ts": "2026-09-02T18:50:07Z", "hours": 1.5317, "text": "Added search option in templates Implemented using Fuse.js *images are placeholders"}, {"post_id": 60264, "ts": "2026-09-02T15:01:57Z", "hours": 1.1522, "text": "Reached initial working stage First working template added Added: render of hbs from cdn rendering of custom form from database"}, {"post_id": 59313, "ts": "2026-09-01T01:12:28Z", "hours": 2.1864, "text": "added template and form rendering from Database"}, {"post_id": 58317, "ts": "2026-08-30T18:12:36Z", "hours": 4.9681, "text": "Added a option to write the template(HBS) and the form from frontend implemented: option to write the template(HBS) and the form from frontend hbs to CDN script 10 MB fields limit in template creation router (multer) Invitation total file size limit 50 MB (formidable) Invitation data processing and cleanup"}, {"post_id": 56814, "ts": "2026-08-28T18:55:14Z", "hours": 1.57, "text": "Connected the form created using jquery forms to HackClub CDN My website is basically a site that have many templates for different kind of event. A user can select a template , this will redirect to a form. Each template have entirely different forms , each form is created by the Admin using a jquery form builder ui. Because these form structures are unknow to the server, the server dont know how much file input fields are there. so we cant set a limit on number of file input fields and per input size. So I set a 50 MB total upload limit using formidable before sending files to hackclub cdn. This makes the usage fair."}, {"post_id": 56609, "ts": "2026-08-28T13:05:06Z", "hours": 1.4072, "text": "Handle multipart uploads with file size limits using busboy formidable ✓ In the last devlog I shared a very large code to limit max total requiest size using busboy. Yesterday , In a simple google search , the Google AI mode suggested me of Formidable previously idk formidable … So I learned about that , it made my code so tiny frontend logic was already there"}, {"post_id": 54984, "ts": "2026-08-26T12:38:33Z", "hours": 2.4072, "text": "Handle multipart uploads with file size limits using busboy i want to limit the max total file upload to 50 MB, multer cant have this feature so I use busboy and wrote long long code to solve this problem code :"}, {"post_id": 54621, "ts": "2026-08-25T17:23:09Z", "hours": 0.6072, "text": "Research: How to limit the total file size in a multipart/formData (Express.js) After many searches I found out that multer don’t support this I am planning to use Busboy directly"}, {"post_id": 54387, "ts": "2026-08-25T11:35:57Z", "hours": 2.1842, "text": "Added error messages in data submissions in rendered template form Added a 50 MB file size limit in file upload (for now only frontend checks are implemented, backend check is TODO)."}, {"post_id": 51711, "ts": "2026-08-21T15:19:40Z", "hours": 2.8461, "text": "Added delete template option for admin The delete option will delete the template from the database and also delete the thumbnail image stored in hackclub CDN"}, {"post_id": 34488, "ts": "2026-07-25T07:52:12Z", "hours": 4.4856, "text": "Switched from formeo to jquery form builder formeo doesn’t support many input types"}, {"post_id": 30066, "ts": "2026-07-17T10:51:07Z", "hours": 1.1742, "text": "Researching on custom form builder On deep research on making a custom form builder form my each templates , I found : formeo, jquery form builder and survayJS"}, {"post_id": 28398, "ts": "2026-07-14T17:08:38Z", "hours": 4.6656, "text": "connected the admin only template creation form to the firestore AND also made the template cards load dynamically currently provided image is a placeholder This is admin page , only admin page have create template button"}, {"post_id": 25450, "ts": "2026-07-09T18:43:35Z", "hours": 1.7492, "text": "Added hackclub cdn to the project !!! At first it didn’t worked because of compatibly issue of new nodejs’s fetch and npm form-data module fixed using new build-in formData()"}, {"post_id": 23622, "ts": "2026-07-06T18:04:21Z", "hours": 2.0433, "text": "new knoledge unlocked: I can use : app . use ( ' /admin ' , requireAdmin , adminRouter ) instead of : app . use ( requireAdmin ) app . use ( ' /admin ' , adminRouter ) I know everybody knows this, but this is a knowledge to me"}, {"post_id": 21534, "ts": "2026-07-03T15:40:01Z", "hours": 1.2683, "text": "added a very very cool text area for entering description for each field completely build on bootstrap accordion check it out !!!"}, {"post_id": 20136, "ts": "2026-07-01T17:55:02Z", "hours": 1.2319, "text": "First template design completed !!! fully using Bootstrap , and some css"}, {"post_id": 19898, "ts": "2026-07-01T10:16:49Z", "hours": 1.5828, "text": "Continuing the writting of the first template for the site !!! basically my project is a invitation page builder, it needs a lot of custom template. | ▽ not complete yet"}, {"post_id": 18554, "ts": "2026-06-29T18:58:19Z", "hours": 6.7694, "text": "Devlog 6 - Template creation form In this 6h 44m, I made a lot of features but the main highlight was the work on the template creation form ( continuation of previous devlog) Story Time: Basically my project is a wedding invitation page generator. My website will have a lot of prebuild invitation template(HBS) for different different events So the point is different templates require different forms should be filled by the user. Therefore when the admin create different template, the admin should list the require fields for the form of the specific template. Problems faced: My thoughts was to make a prebuild list of fields, from that the admin should list them in specific order. Problem - 1 The first problem was there is no form element to do these. So i used a select element with a ‘Add’ btn. For the sorting, at first i used up/down button, but that wasn’t smooth. After researching I found sortable js. At first sortable js also was not smooth, I fixed that by removing some bootstrap classes from the tag. Problem - 2 The next problem I faced was I cant use required in the custom fields list maker, So I can’t make that field mandatory. Solution (simple) The solution was simple, I made a invisible <textarea required .....> , and add the list of fields to that in json string when the admin edited the list. Thank you for reading ❤️, Mrithul."}, {"post_id": 15040, "ts": "2026-06-24T12:54:36Z", "hours": 4.9608, "text": "Devlog 5 - Templates Page Spent 4 hours and 52 minutes working on the templates page today. This page is going to be the main place where all invitation templates are managed, so I wanted to get the basic structure done before moving on to creating more templates. Templates Grid The first thing I worked on was the layout. I switched the page to a responsive grid system and started building the actual templates page. I also added a Create Template card that is only visible to admins. Clicking the card opens a modal for creating new templates. Template Creation Modal The modal is still incomplete, but the basic flow is now working. Currently it has fields for: Template name HTML file name Preview image Template category Template fields There’s still quite a bit of work left to do here, but at least the structure is finally in place. Template Categories & Fields One thing I didn’t want to do was create a completely separate form for every invitation type. Instead, I’m building a system where templates can be configured using categories and predefined fields. const templateCategories = [ { id : \" wedding \" , name : \" Wedding \" }, { id : \" engagement \" , name : \" Engagement \" }, { id : \" birthday \" , name : \" Birthday \" } .... ] const templateFields = [ { id : \" eventTitle \" , label : \" Event Title \" , type : \" text \" , category : \" common \" }, { id : \" groomName \" , label : \" Groom Name \" , type : \" text \" , category : \" wedding \" } .... ] Right now I’ve added categories for weddings, birthdays, engagements, housewarmings, baby showers and several other event types. The field system should make adding future templates a lot easier. Small UI Improvements I also spent some time cleaning up the page and added a footer. The site is slowly starting to look more like an actual product instead of a collection of pages. Next The next step is finishing the template creation page and making the field selection system fully functional. Once that’s done, adding new templates should be much faster than it is right now."}, {"post_id": 8246, "ts": "2026-06-13T18:26:46Z", "hours": 1.1044, "text": "Devlog - 4 Today I connected my website to firestore for database I have implemented the saving of login information of user to user collection of firestore database This is the implementation code: service\\userService.js : async function saveUserLogin ( userRecord ) { return db . collection ( \" users \" ) . doc ( userRecord . uid ) . set ( { displayName : userRecord . displayName || null , email : userRecord . email , photoURL : userRecord . photoURL || null , lastLoginAt : new Date ( userRecord . metadata . lastSignInTime ) }, { merge : true } ) } service\\userService.js : router . post ( \" /sessionLogin \" , async ( req , res ) => { const idToken = req . body . idToken ; const expiresIn = 60 * 60 * 24 * 13 * 1000 ; try { const sessionCookie = await admin . auth (). createSessionCookie ( idToken , { expiresIn : expiresIn }); const options = { maxAge : expiresIn , httpOnly : true , secure : false }; const decodedClaims = await admin . auth (). verifySessionCookie ( sessionCookie , true ); const userRecord = await admin . auth (). getUser ( decodedClaims . uid ); await saveUserLogin ( userRecord ) res . cookie ( ' session ' , sessionCookie , options ) res . status ( 200 ). send ({ status : \" success \" }) } catch ( err ) { console . error ( err ) res . status ( 401 ). send ( ' Unauthorized request! ' ); } }) I also created the redirect from login page if login successful / refresh in login fail (these things where previously missing) Also there are many UI improvements made, that’s not written in this Devlog (●’◡’●)"}, {"post_id": 7934, "ts": "2026-06-13T07:31:13Z", "hours": 8.3672, "text": "Devlog Time spent: 8 hours 15 minutes across ~6 days This week I mostly worked on security-related improvements and continued work on the invitation template system. Security Fixes When I opened GitHub, I got a security notification. After checking it, I found that a Firebase client-side API key was present in the repository. I know Firebase client API keys are not secret credentials by themselves, but leaving them exposed can still make abuse easier, especially if other protections are missing. Since the project is still in development, I decided to clean it up now rather than later. What I did: Revoked the old API key Generated a new one Moved the configuration into environment variables Made sure sensitive files are not pushed to GitHub res . locals . firebaseClientCred = Buffer . from ( process . env . firebaseClientCred , \" base64 \" ) . toString ( \" utf-8 \" ); The long-term plan is to separate development and production configurations. Right now localhost access is required for development, so strict domain restrictions are not practical yet. Once the project is deployed, I plan to have: A development API configuration that allows localhost A production API configuration that only allows requests from the final website domain The developer configuration will stay out of production deployments. Even if development code is accidentally pushed, it should fail instead of exposing access that was never intended for production. The backend Firebase SDK setup was already safe, so most of this work was focused on the client-side configuration. Navbar Improvements I also implemented automatic navbar link highlighting. Instead of manually setting the active page for every route, the navbar now checks the current URL and highlights the correct link automatically. function highlightCurrentPageLink () { const currentPageUrl = window . location . pathname ; const links = document . querySelectorAll ( \" #navbar-ul li a \" ); links . forEach (( link ) => { const href = link . getAttribute ( \" href \" ); if ( href . split ( \" / \" )[ 1 ] === currentPageUrl . split ( \" / \" )[ 1 ]) { link . classList . add ( \" active \" ); } else { link . classList . remove ( \" active \" ); } }); } Small change, but it makes maintaining the navigation much easier. User Menu Worked on the user menu and logout functionality. Nothing huge here, but it is another piece of the authentication flow that is now coming together. Template System I created the HBS file structure for the template page and spent a lot of time thinking about how templates should actually be implemented. This is currently the biggest blocker. There are several ways to handle template rendering and customization, and I don’t want to lock myself into a design that becomes difficult to maintain later. A lot of the development time this week went into planning, experimenting, and changing approaches rather than writing large amounts of code. Next Create separate Firebase development and production configurations Add domain restrictions after deployment Continue work on the invitation template system Finish the template rendering workflow Improve user account features There is still a lot to do, but the project is becoming more stable and secure before moving further into feature development."}, {"post_id": 3693, "ts": "2026-06-06T18:57:54Z", "hours": 2.5967, "text": "Devlog-2: Today , I added a beautiful animation to the home page made the home page overall beautiful Also fixed a authentication error : the fix was simple - I accidently wrote (res, req) instead of (req, res) in express router Also completed the login page design What’s next : Surely build a footer tomorrow 😁 Also planning to create a template creation tool for Admin Note: the PHONE image have a cool animation effect. completely done by hands , no AI only used AI for clearing doubt"}, {"post_id": 2855, "ts": "2026-06-05T18:18:17Z", "hours": 8.5736, "text": "Login Page within 8h 33m , I made the home page, firebase auth, designed logo etc.. currently I am working on designing the ‘Login with google’ page I thought I should only submit and link the project after completing the full project … 😟 but I didn’t forget to connect hackatime 😁🥳"}]...
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Title: InviteHub by @Mrithul_E | Stardance
Devlog Title: InviteHub by @Mrithul_E | Stardance
Devlogs:
Login Page within 8h 33m , I made the home page, firebase auth, designed logo etc.. currently I am working on designing the ‘Login with google’ page I thought I should only submit and link the project after completing the full project … 😟 but I didn’t forget to connect hackatime 😁🥳
Devlog-2: Today , I added a beautiful animation to the home page made the home page overall beautiful Also fixed a authentication error : the fix was simple - I accidently wrote (res, req) instead of (req, res) in express router Also completed the login page design What’s next : Surely build a footer tomorrow 😁 Also planning to create a template creation tool for Admin Note: the PHONE image have a cool animation effect. completely done by hands , no AI only used AI for clearing doubt
Devlog Time spent: 8 hours 15 minutes across ~6 days This week I mostly worked on security-related improvements and continued work on the invitation template system. Security Fixes When I opened GitHub, I got a security notification. After checking it, I found that a Firebase client-side API key was present in the repository. I know Firebase client API keys are not secret credentials by themselves, but leaving them exposed can still make abuse easier, especially if other protections are missing. Since the project is still in development, I decided to clean it up now rather than later. What I did: Revoked the old API key Generated a new one Moved the configuration into environment variables Made sure sensitive files are not pushed to GitHub res . locals . firebaseClientCred = Buffer . from ( process . env . firebaseClientCred , " base64 " ) . toString ( " utf-8 " ); The long-term plan is to separate development and production configurations. Right now localhost access is required for development, so strict domain restrictions are not practical yet. Once the project is deployed, I plan to have: A development API configuration that allows localhost A production API configuration that only allows requests from the final website domain The developer configuration will stay out of production deployments. Even if development code is accidentally pushed, it should fail instead of exposing access that was never intended for production. The backend Firebase SDK setup was already safe, so most of this work was focused on the client-side configuration. Navbar Improvements I also implemented automatic navbar link highlighting. Instead of manually setting the active page for every route, the navbar now checks the current URL and highlights the correct link automatically. function highlightCurrentPageLink () { const currentPageUrl = window . location . pathname ; const links = document . querySelectorAll ( " #navbar-ul li a " ); links . forEach (( link ) => { const href = link . getAttribute ( " href " ); if ( href . split ( " / " )[ 1 ] === currentPageUrl . split ( " / " )[ 1 ]) { link . classList . add ( " active " ); } else { link . classList . remove ( " active " ); } }); } Small change, but it makes maintaining the navigation much easier. User Menu Worked on the user menu and logout functionality. Nothing huge here, but it is another piece of the authentication flow that is now coming together. Template System I created the HBS file structure for the template page and spent a lot of time thinking about how templates should actually be implemented. This is currently the biggest blocker. There are several ways to handle template rendering and customization, and I don’t want to lock myself into a design that becomes difficult to maintain later. A lot of the development time this week went into planning, experimenting, and changing approaches rather than writing large amounts of code. Next Create separate Firebase development and production configurations Add domain restrictions after deployment Continue work on the invitation template system Finish the template rendering workflow Improve user account features There is still a lot to do, but the project is becoming more stable and secure before moving further into feature development.
Devlog - 4 Today I connected my website to firestore for database I have implemented the saving of login information of user to user collection of firestore database This is the implementation code: service\userService.js : async function saveUserLogin ( userRecord ) { return db . collection ( " users " ) . doc ( userRecord . uid ) . set ( { displayName : userRecord . displayName || null , email : userRecord . email , photoURL : userRecord . photoURL || null , lastLoginAt : new Date ( userRecord . metadata . lastSignInTime ) }, { merge : true } ) } service\userService.js : router . post ( " /sessionLogin " , async ( req , res ) => { const idToken = req . body . idToken ; const expiresIn = 60 * 60 * 24 * 13 * 1000 ; try { const sessionCookie = await admin . auth (). createSessionCookie ( idToken , { expiresIn : expiresIn }); const options = { maxAge : expiresIn , httpOnly : true , secure : false }; const decodedClaims = await admin . auth (). verifySessionCookie ( sessionCookie , true ); const userRecord = await admin . auth (). getUser ( decodedClaims . uid ); await saveUserLogin ( userRecord ) res . cookie ( ' session ' , sessionCookie , options ) res . status ( 200 ). send ({ status : " success " }) } catch ( err ) { console . error ( err ) res . status ( 401 ). send ( ' Unauthorized request! ' ); } }) I also created the redirect from login page if login successful / refresh in login fail (these things where previously missing) Also there are many UI improvements made, that’s not written in this Devlog (●’◡’●)
Devlog 5 - Templates Page Spent 4 hours and 52 minutes working on the templates page today. This page is going to be the main place where all invitation templates are managed, so I wanted to get the basic structure done before moving on to creating more templates. Templates Grid The first thing I worked on was the layout. I switched the page to a responsive grid system and started building the actual templates page. I also added a Create Template card that is only visible to admins. Clicking the card opens a modal for creating new templates. Template Creation Modal The modal is still incomplete, but the basic flow is now working. Currently it has fields for: Template name HTML file name Preview image Template category Template fields There’s still quite a bit of work left to do here, but at least the structure is finally in place. Template Categories & Fields One thing I didn’t want to do was create a completely separate form for every invitation type. Instead, I’m building a system where templates can be configured using categories and predefined fields. const templateCategories = [ { id : " wedding " , name : " Wedding " }, { id : " engagement " , name : " Engagement " }, { id : " birthday " , name : " Birthday " } .... ] const templateFields = [ { id : " eventTitle " , label : " Event Title " , type : " text " , category : " common " }, { id : " groomName " , label : " Groom Name " , type : " text " , category : " wedding " } .... ] Right now I’ve added categories for weddings, birthdays, engagements, housewarmings, baby showers and several other event types. The field system should make adding future templates a lot easier. Small UI Improvements I also spent some time cleaning up the page and added a footer. The site is slowly starting to look more like an actual product instead of a collection of pages. Next The next step is finishing the template creation page and making the field selection system fully functional. Once that’s done, adding new templates should be much faster than it is right now.
Devlog 6 - Template creation form In this 6h 44m, I made a lot of features but the main highlight was the work on the template creation form ( continuation of previous devlog) Story Time: Basically my project is a wedding invitation page generator. My website will have a lot of prebuild invitation template(HBS) for different different events So the point is different templates require different forms should be filled by the user. Therefore when the admin create different template, the admin should list the require fields for the form of the specific template. Problems faced: My thoughts was to make a prebuild list of fields, from that the admin should list them in specific order. Problem - 1 The first problem was there is no form element to do these. So i used a select element with a ‘Add’ btn. For the sorting, at first i used up/down button, but that wasn’t smooth. After researching I found sortable js. At first sortable js also was not smooth, I fixed that by removing some bootstrap classes from the tag. Problem - 2 The next problem I faced was I cant use required in the custom fields list maker, So I can’t make that field mandatory. Solution (simple) The solution was simple, I made a invisible <textarea required .....> , and add the list of fields to that in json string when the admin edited the list. Thank you for reading ❤️, Mrithul.
Continuing the writting of the first template for the site !!! basically my project is a invitation page builder, it needs a lot of custom template. | ▽ not complete yet
First template design completed !!! fully using Bootstrap , and some css
added a very very cool text area for entering description for each field completely build on bootstrap accordion check it out !!!
new knoledge unlocked: I can use : app . use ( ' /admin ' , requireAdmin , adminRouter ) instead of : app . use ( requireAdmin ) app . use ( ' /admin ' , adminRouter ) I know everybody knows this, but this is a knowledge to me
Added hackclub cdn to the project !!! At first it didn’t worked because of compatibly issue of new nodejs’s fetch and npm form-data module fixed using new build-in formData()
connected the admin only template creation form to the firestore AND also made the template cards load dynamically currently provided image is a placeholder This is admin page , only admin page have create template button
Researching on custom form builder On deep research on making a custom form builder form my each templates , I found : formeo, jquery form builder and survayJS
Switched from formeo to jquery form builder formeo doesn’t support many input types
Added delete template option for admin The delete option will delete the template from the database and also delete the thumbnail image stored in hackclub CDN
Added error messages in data submissions in rendered template form Added a 50 MB file size limit in file upload (for now only frontend checks are implemented, backend check is TODO).
Research: How to limit the total file size in a multipart/formData (Express.js) After many searches I found out that multer don’t support this I am planning to use Busboy directly
Handle multipart uploads with file size limits using busboy i want to limit the max total file upload to 50 MB, multer cant have this feature so I use busboy and wrote long long code to solve this problem code :
Handle multipart uploads with file size limits using busboy formidable ✓ In the last devlog I shared a very large code to limit max total requiest size using busboy. Yesterday , In a simple google search , the Google AI mode suggested me of Formidable previously idk formidable … So I learned about that , it made my code so tiny frontend logic was already there
Connected the form created using jquery forms to HackClub CDN My website is basically a site that have many templates for different kind of event. A user can select a template , this will redirect to a form. Each template have entirely different forms , each form is created by the Admin using a jquery form builder ui. Because these form structures are unknow to the server, the server dont know how much file input fields are there. so we cant set a limit on number of file input fields and per input size. So I set a 50 MB total upload limit using formidable before sending files to hackclub cdn. This makes the usage fair.
Added a option to write the template(HBS) and the form from frontend implemented: option to write the template(HBS) and the form from frontend hbs to CDN script 10 MB fields limit in template creation router (multer) Invitation total file size limit 50 MB (formidable) Invitation data processing and cleanup
added template and form rendering from Database
Reached initial working stage First working template added Added: render of hbs from cdn rendering of custom form from database
Added search option in templates Implemented using Fuse.js *images are placeholders
User experience improvement implemented: made the created invitation url return fron server to frontend removed unwanted console.log used for debugging made the “Get started” button in frontend functional Added: invitation link and copy button in invitation creation form submission page
Added ‘My invitations’ section in website Added My invitations section that shows the invitations created by that user. From here user can see the invitation, creation date, and user can also delete the invitation. Delete option will delete all files that are part of that invitation from the cdn, then delete the complete invitation from the db. And also added some minor fixes such as: webpage title issues added favicon etc…
Added confirmation for logout and Added redirect to the last visited URL in login Added redirect to the last visited URL in login Added confirmation for logout, and made the logout route a long random string
Added the pages such as About, privacy-policies etc… Added About, Privacy policies , Terms of service page in hbs and added the corresponding routers for it
Added README.md !! *Not comleted yet, no images and videos are added yet
Added demo video to the home page Updated README.md and also fixed many minor css and html issues
Fix: Chrome media hub staying active even when video stops fixed this by removing the src and loading the video again into chrome’s memory, this solves the problem .
Minor css fix removed many useless css code. Made it more good. not that the gradients are not generated by AI, instead it is generated by online CSS gradient maker. Don’t this that this is a AI generated/AI styled project. This site doesn’t have that much huge css to use AI. The Login with Google button is copied by some article in Medium. The gradient used in the home page Get Started button is custom made using CSS gradient generator The background image and the animated phone image is generated by Chatgpt. I don’t know whether this is contributing to the AI feel 🥲🥲😭😭 UPDATE: : By asking to shipwrights, they say that it was flagged and AI because it used AI generated images, which is not allowed. So i made it my self using canva, here it is:
full css and ui rework: Changed the background image Made the design and animation minimalistic updated the navbar and footer removed unwanted styling in css removed unwanted gradient from text made minimal footer
Some reworks readme updated added more gap in between the template card added the github link to the navbar changed some fonts in homepage and added some paragraph sections there
Minor security fixes as per GitHub security scan Inclusion of functionality from an untrusted source Client-side URL redirect using query in URL
Ships:
I made a website for creating digital invitation webpages by simply selecting a template and filling out a form. This can help reduce paper usage by decreasing printed inviation lol .. I faced many challenges during the development: Building the logic for creating different different forms for each and every templates Limiting the total file size in http request Building a UI for creating forms by Drag-and-Droping Couldn’t host in vercel because vercel blocks requests more that ~4 MB Admin centralized working (only admin can create templates, this ensures security) I am proud of dedecating 3 months to complete this project, without doing any other project. To run my project my project you will need firebase api key, and hackclub cdn api. But you can’t get the already created templates because those are stored in firebase.
I made a website for creating digital invitation webpages by simply selecting a template and filling out a form. This can help reduce paper usage by decreasing printed inviation lol .. I faced many challenges during the development: Building the logic for creating different different forms for each and every templates Limiting the total file size in http request Building a UI for creating forms by Drag-and-Droping Couldn’t host in vercel because vercel blocks requests more that ~4 MB Admin centralized working (only admin can create templates, this ensures security) I am proud of dedecating 3 months to complete this project, without doing any other project. To run my project my project you will need firebase api key, and hackclub cdn api. But you can’t get the already created templates because those are stored in firebase. what’s new in this ship 2 fixed some security vulnerability as per github code scan Added assets completely handmade with canva replaced many fonts in home page with cursive fonts added our mission section in the home page...
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SlopUI by @racek256 | Stardance
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racek256
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95.0
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1637
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-12T15:49:06Z", "hours": 95.0, "multiplier": 17.25, "payout": 1637, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made SlopUI, a local and private AI assistant interface featuring Slopper as your assistant. Just a few features to flag: memory, MCPs, a mobile page, and much more. The best part of this project is probably the local web search and memory engine, since they required me to benchmark multiple solutions and system prompts and iterate on result quality. The most challenging part was building the frontend. I am not a designer, so I had some trouble with the design, but I managed to get a design I am happy with. Mostly in dark mode, the light mode is not so great.", "repo": "https://github.com/racek256/SlopUI", "demo": "https://slop.racek.xyz"}]...
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[{"post_id": 79066, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 79066, "ts": "2026-10-12T15:39:34Z", "hours": 2.4158, "text": "devlog 12 Memory engine finished and deployed Few of AI assisted bug fixes README.md + docs/ + License Pre ship fixes and stuff"}, {"post_id": 78753, "ts": "2026-10-11T14:39:37Z", "hours": 9.5125, "text": "Devlog 11 Today I’ve been cooking hard. Currently I’m working on the memory engine for SlopUI. The architecture is quite simple: A cheap extractor analyzes all conversations, extracts context, and suggests memories. All context gets passed to a smarter filter that has tools to directly manage the entire memory system: add, edit, remove, and list memories. All saved memories get embedded and saved into the DB. Search uses an embedder + reranker for quick lookup. Search takes around 0.5s per message, but I’ll optimize it before the next devlog. I’ve also improved the mobile version of SlopUI and added PWA support so you can install it similarly to a normal app. The memory engine is still in development, and I have a few experimental ideas in mind that might make the memory crazy good. But first I need to finish it."}, {"post_id": 77122, "ts": "2026-10-05T18:18:31Z", "hours": 10.3761, "text": "Ups, looks like I overshot the 10 hours again and Stardance is forcing me to make another devlog. I guess it’s time for DEVLOG 10 You don’t have to stare into a white screen anymore thanks to my genius invention dark mode (I know it still looks terrible, I’m not a designer) configuration was migrated to a config.yaml file with more configuration options websearch got improved (I know I’m saying this every devlog and I’m probably gonna keep saying it even in the following ones) sidebar has an option to pin/unpin chat Discord OAuth is implemented and it’s used even on the demo deployment https://slop.racek.xyz more stable generation"}, {"post_id": 69094, "ts": "2026-09-16T11:14:35Z", "hours": 8.8664, "text": "Devlog 9 Yupiiii another version focused on stability and it is looking stable Generation is now separated from Request so even when connection dies frontend can reconnect without user noticing Full File Uploading support for basic text and image formats websearch, webfetch functions are stable enough to be considered usable websearch has gained massive speed improvements although it will improve even further in the future Frontend Polish, fixes and stuff ( the boring stuff that actually makes this app usable ) here is picture of slopper saying hello although it didn’t really understood what devlog means:"}, {"post_id": 63767, "ts": "2026-09-07T18:44:22Z", "hours": 9.16, "text": "Devlog 8 This version is mostly Quality of Life improvements and stability, but it really improves a lot. This update brings: Backend Working config.json file for basic model configuration Not crashing every second prompt webfetch/websearch somewhat faster and not crashing anymore Better security Improved SearXNG default configuration Frontend Mobile interface — the webpage finally works on phones Regeneration — now, even when the backend throws an error, the frontend gives you the option to retry the request Reasoning popup — you can now see what the model is actually thinking about WIP File attachments — frontend part finished, not wired into the backend I’m probably going to stop working on new features and rather start finishing this project up, so probably another QoL update will be next, alongside one last large feature I need to do: proper demo account creation, ’cause right now demo mode is just one large shared account. I know, pretty bad."}, {"post_id": 54052, "ts": "2026-08-24T20:18:35Z", "hours": 8.8131, "text": "devlog 7 In this version I finally added full MCP support. Websearch also got a few improvements, plus the full Lightpanda browser through MCP integration. Backend has improved stability. I have started on the mobile interface, although it’s not yet ready. I’ve also started working on the config system, for now most of it is in .env, but soon I’m gonna replace it with a proper .yaml file."}, {"post_id": 45845, "ts": "2026-08-12T15:56:54Z", "hours": 9.0239, "text": "Devlog 6 The demo is finally out on slop.racek.xyz. The demo won’t have all the features of the full dev build, because my server isn’t able to run proper embedding and reranking models. That’s why the demo relies on the Tavily API for web searches, it’s nearly identical. The harness is finally starting to come together. I implemented just two tools: websearch and webfetch . This took me so long because I wasn’t only adding those tools, but also benchmarking different embedding and reranking models, so I can be sure I’m not losing performance for no reason. The websearch tool is definitely going to go through more improvements, but for now this is the version I’m okay with and the AI also seems to like it (yes I asked it)"}, {"post_id": 44544, "ts": "2026-08-10T11:38:58Z", "hours": 8.0272, "text": "Devlog 5 After some time, I’m back with new features and improvements. I finally added a Reasoning/Websearch indicator so users can see what the AI is currently doing. This gives users a sense that something is happening, which makes the entire process feel faster. I’ve also removed the search button from the sidebar since I’m not going to work on it anytime soon. I’ll probably implement it for the second release, but not right now. If everything goes correctly, today I hope to release a demo with DeepSeek V4 Flash as a free model. All I need to do before releasing the demo is: Finish demo sign-in Fix a few frontend bugs Add rate limiting to the backend Deploy on my server After releasing the demo, I’ll have a really basic AI chat interface: you send a message, the AI responds. It has one tool, websearch . That’s why after releasing the demo, I want to focus on the harness and make it actually good. I’m definitely going to do a SearXNG implementation for the websearch tool (currently it uses the Tavily API) and implement a custom page loader/parser and some basic RAG. I haven’t used RAG for a long time, so I’m going to have to do some research on it. I definitely want to add more tools later on, but I’ll keep that for future devlogs."}, {"post_id": 40010, "ts": "2026-08-03T11:13:25Z", "hours": 9.7369, "text": "Devlog 4 Holy moly, it’s again another 9 hours. Thankfully, I finally have something to talk about in this devlog. I’m getting really close to publishing the demo page. I have a mostly working frontend, and the backend has just a few bugs I need to handle. I’m still missing rate limiting and model verification on the backend. For now, the harness has just one websearch tool. in the future, I want to add much more and make it a full harness, but for the first release I hope this is enough. One last feature I want to implement on the frontend is displaying the harness state, so instead of showing the user a simple loader, they will see what’s currently happening in the harness — what the agent is reasoning about, and so on. So the plan for now is: Complete frontend integration Fix backend bugs Display harness state on frontend Release public demo page with rate limiting Improve harness Ship first release"}, {"post_id": 36988, "ts": "2026-07-29T12:53:51Z", "hours": 9.6169, "text": "Devlog 3 After a week I’m finally back home and continuing my work on this project. I noticed I’ve already gone 9 hours without a devlog, but I don’t have much to talk about yet. Well, I started working on the backend — it’s taking quite slow because I’m giving it the proper time to ensure its security and ease of implementation for the frontend. I guess I’ll just list the stuff I have implemented or am working on implementing: JWT Authentication (finished) Conversation Branching (finished) AI Harness (mostly finished) DB implementation (mostly implemented) Rate limiting (not yet) API User focused / Authentication (finished) Inference / AI (not started yet) Still got some work to do, but the backend is getting close to finished. The last step will be frontend API implementation, and the project will be ready for demo deployment. I’ll probably launch the public demo without the need to create an account, with free inference on DeepSeek v4 Flash. I’ll use the OpenCode Zen API for that because they offer free DeepSeek v4 Flash inference. I hate the person who tought is good idea to block publishing copied messages i didn’t use AI to write it but i wrote it in my code editor and now i have to rewrite this entire message cause stardance thinks i AI generated this."}, {"post_id": 29121, "ts": "2026-07-15T19:46:05Z", "hours": 5.9314, "text": "Devlog 2 The frontend is finally in a usable state, which means I can finally start working on the backend. I intentionally kept the frontend simple no special features yet. I have plenty of ideas for special features and improvements, but my first priority is getting the application into a polished, presentable state. Once that’s done, I’ll start experimenting with those ideas. Now, let’s talk about the backend. What do I actually want? I’ll probably use basic Python with SQLite. There’s no need for a separate database for this project. The backend will include simple JWT authentication, response streaming, model selection, and some basic rate limiting. Once everything is working reliably, I’ll start thinking about building a custom harness or maybe even experimenting with some multi-agent workflows. But first, I don’t want to get sidetracked, I want to finish the base application."}, {"post_id": 27824, "ts": "2026-07-13T18:26:21Z", "hours": 3.8267, "text": "Devlog #1 I’m starting with a simple agentic web interface. For the first release, I want to focus mainly on the user interface and finishing the frontend. The backend will just be a simple API or an Ollama proxy with rate limiting. I also want to create a custom harness in Python, but not for the first release. I prepared some design files beforehand, but they look bad, so I’m not really following them much. If I don’t mess up the UI, it should come out looking okay, but I’m a bit more worried about the UX. I like putting animations everywhere, which always absolutely ruins UX, so I’ll try to be more conservative with them this time. I’m working on the frontend mostly without AI, using it only as interactive documentation. I’m hoping to get the frontend into a usable form asap so I can start working on other features and the custom harness."}]...
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Title: SlopUI by @racek256 | Stardance
Devlogs:
D Title: SlopUI by @racek256 | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog #1 I’m starting with a simple agentic web interface. For the first release, I want to focus mainly on the user interface and finishing the frontend. The backend will just be a simple API or an Ollama proxy with rate limiting. I also want to create a custom harness in Python, but not for the first release. I prepared some design files beforehand, but they look bad, so I’m not really following them much. If I don’t mess up the UI, it should come out looking okay, but I’m a bit more worried about the UX. I like putting animations everywhere, which always absolutely ruins UX, so I’ll try to be more conservative with them this time. I’m working on the frontend mostly without AI, using it only as interactive documentation. I’m hoping to get the frontend into a usable form asap so I can start working on other features and the custom harness.
Devlog 2 The frontend is finally in a usable state, which means I can finally start working on the backend. I intentionally kept the frontend simple no special features yet. I have plenty of ideas for special features and improvements, but my first priority is getting the application into a polished, presentable state. Once that’s done, I’ll start experimenting with those ideas. Now, let’s talk about the backend. What do I actually want? I’ll probably use basic Python with SQLite. There’s no need for a separate database for this project. The backend will include simple JWT authentication, response streaming, model selection, and some basic rate limiting. Once everything is working reliably, I’ll start thinking about building a custom harness or maybe even experimenting with some multi-agent workflows. But first, I don’t want to get sidetracked, I want to finish the base application.
Devlog 3 After a week I’m finally back home and continuing my work on this project. I noticed I’ve already gone 9 hours without a devlog, but I don’t have much to talk about yet. Well, I started working on the backend — it’s taking quite slow because I’m giving it the proper time to ensure its security and ease of implementation for the frontend. I guess I’ll just list the stuff I have implemented or am working on implementing: JWT Authentication (finished) Conversation Branching (finished) AI Harness (mostly finished) DB implementation (mostly implemented) Rate limiting (not yet) API User focused / Authentication (finished) Inference / AI (not started yet) Still got some work to do, but the backend is getting close to finished. The last step will be frontend API implementation, and the project will be ready for demo deployment. I’ll probably launch the public demo without the need to create an account, with free inference on DeepSeek v4 Flash. I’ll use the OpenCode Zen API for that because they offer free DeepSeek v4 Flash inference. I hate the person who tought is good idea to block publishing copied messages i didn’t use AI to write it but i wrote it in my code editor and now i have to rewrite this entire message cause stardance thinks i AI generated this.
Devlog 4 Holy moly, it’s again another 9 hours. Thankfully, I finally have something to talk about in this devlog. I’m getting really close to publishing the demo page. I have a mostly working frontend, and the backend has just a few bugs I need to handle. I’m still missing rate limiting and model verification on the backend. For now, the harness has just one websearch tool. in the future, I want to add much more and make it a full harness, but for the first release I hope this is enough. One last feature I want to implement on the frontend is displaying the harness state, so instead of showing the user a simple loader, they will see what’s currently happening in the harness — what the agent is reasoning about, and so on. So the plan for now is: Complete frontend integration Fix backend bugs Display harness state on frontend Release public demo page with rate limiting Improve harness Ship first release
Devlog 5 After some time, I’m back with new features and improvements. I finally added a Reasoning/Websearch indicator so users can see what the AI is currently doing. This gives users a sense that something is happening, which makes the entire process feel faster. I’ve also removed the search button from the sidebar since I’m not going to work on it anytime soon. I’ll probably implement it for the second release, but not right now. If everything goes correctly, today I hope to release a demo with DeepSeek V4 Flash as a free model. All I need to do before releasing the demo is: Finish demo sign-in Fix a few frontend bugs Add rate limiting to the backend Deploy on my server After releasing the demo, I’ll have a really basic AI chat interface: you send a message, the AI responds. It has one tool, websearch . That’s why after releasing the demo, I want to focus on the harness and make it actually good. I’m definitely going to do a SearXNG implementation for the websearch tool (currently it uses the Tavily API) and implement a custom page loader/parser and some basic RAG. I haven’t used RAG for a long time, so I’m going to have to do some research on it. I definitely want to add more tools later on, but I’ll keep that for future devlogs.
Devlog 6 The demo is finally out on slop.racek.xyz. The demo won’t have all the features of the full dev build, because my server isn’t able to run proper embedding and reranking models. That’s why the demo relies on the Tavily API for web searches, it’s nearly identical. The harness is finally starting to come together. I implemented just two tools: websearch and webfetch . This took me so long because I wasn’t only adding those tools, but also benchmarking different embedding and reranking models, so I can be sure I’m not losing performance for no reason. The websearch tool is definitely going to go through more improvements, but for now this is the version I’m okay with and the AI also seems to like it (yes I asked it)
devlog 7 In this version I finally added full MCP support. Websearch also got a few improvements, plus the full Lightpanda browser through MCP integration. Backend has improved stability. I have started on the mobile interface, although it’s not yet ready. I’ve also started working on the config system, for now most of it is in .env, but soon I’m gonna replace it with a proper .yaml file.
Devlog 8 This version is mostly Quality of Life improvements and stability, but it really improves a lot. This update brings: Backend Working config.json file for basic model configuration Not crashing every second prompt webfetch/websearch somewhat faster and not crashing anymore Better security Improved SearXNG default configuration Frontend Mobile interface — the webpage finally works on phones Regeneration — now, even when the backend throws an error, the frontend gives you the option to retry the request Reasoning popup — you can now see what the model is actually thinking about WIP File attachments — frontend part finished, not wired into the backend I’m probably going to stop working on new features and rather start finishing this project up, so probably another QoL update will be next, alongside one last large feature I need to do: proper demo account creation, ’cause right now demo mode is just one large shared account. I know, pretty bad.
Devlog 9 Yupiiii another version focused on stability and it is looking stable Generation is now separated from Request so even when connection dies frontend can reconnect without user noticing Full File Uploading support for basic text and image formats websearch, webfetch functions are stable enough to be considered usable websearch has gained massive speed improvements although it will improve even further in the future Frontend Polish, fixes and stuff ( the boring stuff that actually makes this app usable ) here is picture of slopper saying hello although it didn’t really understood what devlog means:
Ups, looks like I overshot the 10 hours again and Stardance is forcing me to make another devlog. I guess it’s time for DEVLOG 10 You don’t have to stare into a white screen anymore thanks to my genius invention dark mode (I know it still looks terrible, I’m not a designer) configuration was migrated to a config.yaml file with more configuration options websearch got improved (I know I’m saying this every devlog and I’m probably gonna keep saying it even in the following ones) sidebar has an option to pin/unpin chat Discord OAuth is implemented and it’s used even on the demo deployment https://slop.racek.xyz more stable generation
Devlog 11 Today I’ve been cooking hard. Currently I’m working on the memory engine for SlopUI. The architecture is quite simple: A cheap extractor analyzes all conversations, extracts context, and suggests memories. All context gets passed to a smarter filter that has tools to directly manage the entire memory system: add, edit, remove, and list memories. All saved memories get embedded and saved into the DB. Search uses an embedder + reranker for quick lookup. Search takes around 0.5s per message, but I’ll optimize it before the next devlog. I’ve also improved the mobile version of SlopUI and added PWA support so you can install it similarly to a normal app. The memory engine is still in development, and I have a few experimental ideas in mind that might make the memory crazy good. But first I need to finish it.
devlog 12 Memory engine finished and deployed Few of AI assisted bug fixes README.md + docs/ + License Pre ship fixes and stuff
Ships:
I made SlopUI, a local and private AI assistant interface featuring Slopper as your assistant. Just a few features to flag: memory, MCPs, a mobile page, and much more. The best part of this project is probably the local web search and memory engine, since they required me to benchmark multiple solutions and system prompts and iterate on result quality. The most challenging part was building the frontend. I am not a designer, so I had some trouble with the design, but I managed to get a design I am happy with. Mostly in dark mode, the light mode is not so great....
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Origin Engine by @aloyak | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-29T14:54:41Z", "hours": 74.0, "multiplier": 19.01, "payout": 1696, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a custom game engine from scratch! it has a fast opengl pixelart renderer, builtin physics, lighting, an entity-component system, a spatial audio system, terrain system, it can load and save scenes on the fly, supports many 3d asset extensions… Its what i used to create my other big project! (JSP) the engine is cross-platform and works right out of the box for linux, windows and web!! and also it comes with a lightweight level editor and ive also made a website for it Hope you like it!! made with <3 from @aloyak", "repo": "https://github.com/aloyak/origin", "demo": "https://origin.aloyak.dev/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 57380, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 57380, "ts": "2026-08-29T14:44:05Z", "hours": 5.4342, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE version 0.19.3 First ship is coming up soon! Even tho ive been working on really exciting stuff, i really would like to focus on actually learning and having a deep enough understanding of vulkan and other stuff like the best engine’s architecture before actually logging and building something open and usable, thats why i feel this is a good place to finally ship this project as it is and maybe come back to it at some point Pre-ship checklist! I’ve updated the website! now you have a few new sections with new information like the game i build using this engine and other cool stuff! published a new version to the github releases page (0.19.3 i think), with the binaries for the demo game and the sandbox for both windows and linux! the web build is still there on the website but it is marked as legacy tho Its been super fun to work on this and ive learnt a lot but i really really really think i could make something so much better with all the knowledge i now have and with some serious research, this is pretty much what ive explained in most of all the previous devlogs (the last 2 or 3) I’ve been working on applying some of the stuff ive been working on to the engine, like the new renderer class its now pretty much ported nicely! ive also tested that everything worked cross platform and yay! the project is very ready to hold any new game or project you might wanna do with it, although i might wanna make a quick tutorial on how to work with the engine on a github repo cuz its not very intuitive Known issue I’ve been trying to add support to the engine for builtin shaders but ive realized that its a super deeper problem than what i was expecting, id honestly do something like making all the shaders be done with something like slang and then compile them to spirv without any glsl intermediary PD: the video you see is a demo scene you can find at assets/scenes/physics.scene if you wanna try it by yourself!!!"}, {"post_id": 54613, "ts": "2026-08-25T17:11:59Z", "hours": 10.0381, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE I’ve finally managed to port enough of the original engine to setup an imgui layer to have this little built-in launcher! it currently only works when using opengl, but its completely supported by both the windowing backends (glfw & sdl3) Its hard to make videos like this on a steamdeck so please like lol. Other stuff I completely restructured the new engine architecture to be a layered system, the engine holds a stack of layers and updates them independently! each layer holds stuff like OnAttach OnLateUpdate OnEvent etc, which is a much better approach compared to what we had before! I created a completely new custom file system, as the sandbox and games use completely different files and base directories, you can now mount/dismount different “aliases” for each program, so you can find your assets easily with custom virtual paths like sandbox://settings.json or project://scenes/scene.json Literally ported the scene/entity system right from the previous version, but it is a lot smaller currently, because the previous one wasnt really good, we now can load scenes from a file but now those get added to a scene stack, which is a lot more efficient if you wanna load them again! Overall the project’s code quality is so much better too!! After these bases are set im gonna be focusing on getting a full render layer working with at least opengl, even tho the vulkan renderer is already setup… PD: Origin Zero is just the new “protoype” name i gave it, just like with when i started this project i called it Origin “Zeus” lmao"}, {"post_id": 53290, "ts": "2026-08-23T19:02:52Z", "hours": 9.1458, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE I’m sorry in advance that these and probably the next few devlogs wont have very exiting things or new and awesome information but sometimes you gotta focus on boring structural stuff that its just not really fun… The new Project-Based System The engine is now very dependent on the sandbox editor, sort of like a symbiotic relationship between the sandbox and your code editor, because thats where you will not only handle your assets but also play the game. The previous version just had the sandbox to be a tiny map editor tool that not even i would use half of the time The project (also called environment) then would have its own “environment” literally where all your assets would be included, with very little naming restrictions, this would make working on the project super easy and itd be easy too to use git with it (maybe build a builtin git UI??? it could be cool) I’ve already built the base for it and I’ve already added support for ImGui only for the OpenGL backend, i was thinking of adding a different UI system but this one will do for now :))"}, {"post_id": 51278, "ts": "2026-08-20T20:19:45Z", "hours": 8.3647, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE A NEW UPDATE! I’m building a huge update for the origin engine! it might even be considered a new engine all together. The same philosophy is still there but I’m re-writting and refactoring the base structure of the whole engine. For now this refactor is close source tho, ill publish it once its ready for ship! What we currently have: I have the structure already though: A new project-based system where all the shader compilation and asset handling is done for each project, this + a simple abstraction layer should allow the sandbox to be a hugely more important tool as you will be able to play your game right in the editor! Compile time switch between SDL3 or GLFW for windowing, input is not yet “ported” if you consider it that way What i wanna add but may be difficult Runtime api switching between OpenGL, Vulkan and DirectX3D 11. even tho for now i have a super basic abstraction layer and only opengl is even able to initialize so….. maybe too hard i hope i manage to do it tho , was thinking of doing a similar thing for switching between physics engines like bullet3, physicsX or Box3D, this is very much in the future of course Project export/ editor previews This is a major step and im learning a lot!! but its very difficult to handle new stuff like vulkan with other new c++ architectural stuff, hope it goes well"}, {"post_id": 50196, "ts": "2026-08-19T10:21:29Z", "hours": 7.615, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE Another update to the best game engine there is that starts with the letter “O” (i think). Today’s devlog is small, bust most likely will be start of a new series of very much needed updates to the engine!. It’s important to note that most of the things ive been working on are not yet finished :(( New stuff! New things that are completely finished: Fix the sandbox UI, it was missing imgui flags from previous bug fixes i had to do because the docking branch of imgui was broken, they fixed it so i just rolled back! Cleaned up the rendering class, specially important for the new updates im working on, because im gonna need to do a hell lot of abstraction! Things im working on Im taking the current base of the engine to make a new “modular” system just for the love of the game, the most basic thing ive done is to allow the user to choose between SDL3 or GLFW for windowing, although input is currently only handled with SDL3 regardless…. There’s a lot of exiting stuff coming SOON^(TM), hope you like them!! (vulkan?, probably not lmfao) PD: yes! this is the origin engine running nicely in a steamdeck!!!"}, {"post_id": 41213, "ts": "2026-08-05T09:19:15Z", "hours": 6.7264, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE Yippi another round of improvements to the best and certainty not over engineered game engine out there! Out of all the things ive been working on with the engine ive only really finished one, but it was rather a big change tho NEW input system I’ve added a new action-based input system that handles by itself connected devices (because we now support gamepads!!! ), input modes and preferences, keybinds and settings all in one simple system The new system instead of reading “raw” input from SDL3 now instead has a wrapper that sets all input to “actions”. All actions have assigned a certain key/button/axis etc… It allows you to use keyboard/mouse and gamepad all at the same time Games can now have support for handheld devices like your steamdeck! Support for precompiled shaders (GLSL -> SPV) This is still work in progress!! The engine itself supports the compiled GLSL files very quickly but the problem is to get those shaders to compile in the first place The shader class gets the relative path for the shader, before actually compiling it, it checks if theres a file with the same name but that ends with “.spv”, in that case it uses that one Right now theres not an easy utility script that will handle compilation for you, that needs to be done next!! Dynamically Chunked Terrain Collisions Very early and of course WIP, I still haven’t done much but i have a pretty good idea of how this will work: You bake the local position of all the vertex of a terrain model and then, when you require it, you get all the triangles close to the player in real time (with a basic “chunked” system), then Bullet3 generates that mesh collider rather quickly as the mesh is not so big (this will probably require multi-threading ). More on this on the next devlog Other small changes Fixed the sandbox not having docking enabled Added ImPlot3D to project, might use it at some point PD: This picture is from my other project that you should check out! It showcases the new terrain system (WIP)"}, {"post_id": 33210, "ts": "2026-07-22T22:17:42Z", "hours": 8.1519, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE I’ve been adding some quality of life changes that make working with this engine a lot easier, which means more abstraction in some cases which is not always the best but whatever. Ive also worked very hard on fixing and improving the physics (even considered porting it to now use Box3D instead of Bullet3, but that will probably happen in the far future, and Bullet3 will be kept as a fallback) What have i been working on i see you ask? Added the ParentEntityComponent , a very simple work around for the lack of parent-child entities on my engine, this will probably be deprecated sooner or later but its a decent solution instead of doing all the work all at once Added GetRefreshRate to window class, so for example, your game can set the target fps based on this Changes to physics system (Bullet3) Fixed a super hard to find bug where models vertex and physics-engine vertex would have shifter coords and would make the objects act weird on real time, this is such a huge change, it makes physics really good to play with, see the video!! Added functions to apply force, impulse and torque to a dynamic rigidbody Added the teleport function for kinematic rigidbodies Added getLinearVelocity and getAngularVelocity Added options to freeze rotation on independent axis HUGE: allow the engine to support different physics worlds to live in one same game in real time! this needs some work tho, not featured in the video PD: This is getting super nice but also growing in complexity, once i finish with my game i will surely start improving the overall structure and start thinking about more serious changes, maybe another graphics api????"}, {"post_id": 27690, "ts": "2026-07-13T14:02:40Z", "hours": 9.3322, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE Yippie! another update to the engine powering my game, i’ve added quite a lot of things but also managed to clean up some dead code in the way. The most excinting new thing is probably the new postprocessing layer system! this is what ive added in the past 3 weeks: Postprocessing layer: you can now code different vertex & fragment shaders that drawn on top of the main buffer, you can stack as many as youd like in order to create many new cool effects spent hours trying to fix the sandbox editor’s rendering being completely broken, took about 3-4 days lol added new getters to camera like a directly inversed view matrix or setMat4() and setTexture() functions with shaders add localToWorld() and worldToLocal() to the transform class fixed specular lighting leaking to some dark areas fix handle untextured materials in model import added a built-in user settings save/load system based on json serialization refactor a part of the audio system to now have built-in fade ins/out, volume control and async background music The biggest change coming up would probably be to develop a dynamic rendering system that allows me to use different cameras rendering at the same time, as I’ll probably need it for JSP PD: this engine is being used for my current main project (almost 100 hours!), please check it out! JSP: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/14066"}, {"post_id": 11317, "ts": "2026-06-18T14:52:15Z", "hours": 9.5539, "text": "ORIGIN ENGINE This is my custom engine that im using for my other big project, the Janitor Space Program (go check it out!: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/14066 ), most of these changes come from having to create or update an engine feature so that the game im building is easier and faster to develop, and in the meantime im also upgrading this engine to something more powerful and mature, although i feel like im making it also a bit more complex or spaghetti, ill work on that later over this last 2 weeks ive added so many features like: improved logging library, allows you to use formatting directly support for embedded textures in .fbx models added a lookAt() method to the camera component fixed web support for the audio system added more features and functions to the in-house math library, like the cross and dot products, a 4x4 Matrix and other small stuff scenes now can be either “.json” or “.scene” sandbox: shortcut to align an entity to the sandbox scene view camera added color tint to the skybox component added quick line rendering for fast debugging, probably needs refactoring tho added LateLoop() , which obviously happens after Loop() and its mainly used for UI and stuff added setTargetFps() so that gpu doesnt work to 100% if vsync is disabled changed the builtin shaders path to assets/shaders/builtin wip: added imgui support to the web builds Most relevant new features: added instanced rendering! still sort of a WIP added real-time texture editing, allows the cpu to have ownership of a texture instead of the gpu and do whatever it wants with it, currently just paint it wip: huge refactoring of the render class to allow for different postprocessing layers to render on top of each other with custom shaders, this allows for any kind of postprocessing effect to be made without much issue, i managed to get a simple vignette shader working quickly! the render class still needs some cleanup tho This was fun but if they gave me an euro for every seg fault ive endured elon musk would be small next to me. i love to see how this small side project i started long ago is now something a lot bigger than i expected, this literally started as a learnopengl tutorial :))"}]...
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Title: Origin Engine by @aloyak | Stardance
Devlo Title: Origin Engine by @aloyak | Stardance
Devlogs:
ORIGIN ENGINE This is my custom engine that im using for my other big project, the Janitor Space Program (go check it out!: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/14066 ), most of these changes come from having to create or update an engine feature so that the game im building is easier and faster to develop, and in the meantime im also upgrading this engine to something more powerful and mature, although i feel like im making it also a bit more complex or spaghetti, ill work on that later over this last 2 weeks ive added so many features like: improved logging library, allows you to use formatting directly support for embedded textures in .fbx models added a lookAt() method to the camera component fixed web support for the audio system added more features and functions to the in-house math library, like the cross and dot products, a 4x4 Matrix and other small stuff scenes now can be either “.json” or “.scene” sandbox: shortcut to align an entity to the sandbox scene view camera added color tint to the skybox component added quick line rendering for fast debugging, probably needs refactoring tho added LateLoop() , which obviously happens after Loop() and its mainly used for UI and stuff added setTargetFps() so that gpu doesnt work to 100% if vsync is disabled changed the builtin shaders path to assets/shaders/builtin wip: added imgui support to the web builds Most relevant new features: added instanced rendering! still sort of a WIP added real-time texture editing, allows the cpu to have ownership of a texture instead of the gpu and do whatever it wants with it, currently just paint it wip: huge refactoring of the render class to allow for different postprocessing layers to render on top of each other with custom shaders, this allows for any kind of postprocessing effect to be made without much issue, i managed to get a simple vignette shader working quickly! the render class still needs some cleanup tho This was fun but if they gave me an euro for every seg fault ive endured elon musk would be small next to me. i love to see how this small side project i started long ago is now something a lot bigger than i expected, this literally started as a learnopengl tutorial :))
ORIGIN ENGINE Yippie! another update to the engine powering my game, i’ve added quite a lot of things but also managed to clean up some dead code in the way. The most excinting new thing is probably the new postprocessing layer system! this is what ive added in the past 3 weeks: Postprocessing layer: you can now code different vertex & fragment shaders that drawn on top of the main buffer, you can stack as many as youd like in order to create many new cool effects spent hours trying to fix the sandbox editor’s rendering being completely broken, took about 3-4 days lol added new getters to camera like a directly inversed view matrix or setMat4() and setTexture() functions with shaders add localToWorld() and worldToLocal() to the transform class fixed specular lighting leaking to some dark areas fix handle untextured materials in model import added a built-in user settings save/load system based on json serialization refactor a part of the audio system to now have built-in fade ins/out, volume control and async background music The biggest change coming up would probably be to develop a dynamic rendering system that allows me to use different cameras rendering at the same time, as I’ll probably need it for JSP PD: this engine is being used for my current main project (almost 100 hours!), please check it out! JSP: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/14066
ORIGIN ENGINE I’ve been adding some quality of life changes that make working with this engine a lot easier, which means more abstraction in some cases which is not always the best but whatever. Ive also worked very hard on fixing and improving the physics (even considered porting it to now use Box3D instead of Bullet3, but that will probably happen in the far future, and Bullet3 will be kept as a fallback) What have i been working on i see you ask? Added the ParentEntityComponent , a very simple work around for the lack of parent-child entities on my engine, this will probably be deprecated sooner or later but its a decent solution instead of doing all the work all at once Added GetRefreshRate to window class, so for example, your game can set the target fps based on this Changes to physics system (Bullet3) Fixed a super hard to find bug where models vertex and physics-engine vertex would have shifter coords and would make the objects act weird on real time, this is such a huge change, it makes physics really good to play with, see the video!! Added functions to apply force, impulse and torque to a dynamic rigidbody Added the teleport function for kinematic rigidbodies Added getLinearVelocity and getAngularVelocity Added options to freeze rotation on independent axis HUGE: allow the engine to support different physics worlds to live in one same game in real time! this needs some work tho, not featured in the video PD: This is getting super nice but also growing in complexity, once i finish with my game i will surely start improving the overall structure and start thinking about more serious changes, maybe another graphics api????
ORIGIN ENGINE Yippi another round of improvements to the best and certainty not over engineered game engine out there! Out of all the things ive been working on with the engine ive only really finished one, but it was rather a big change tho NEW input system I’ve added a new action-based input system that handles by itself connected devices (because we now support gamepads!!! ), input modes and preferences, keybinds and settings all in one simple system The new system instead of reading “raw” input from SDL3 now instead has a wrapper that sets all input to “actions”. All actions have assigned a certain key/button/axis etc… It allows you to use keyboard/mouse and gamepad all at the same time Games can now have support for handheld devices like your steamdeck! Support for precompiled shaders (GLSL -> SPV) This is still work in progress!! The engine itself supports the compiled GLSL files very quickly but the problem is to get those shaders to compile in the first place The shader class gets the relative path for the shader, before actually compiling it, it checks if theres a file with the same name but that ends with “.spv”, in that case it uses that one Right now theres not an easy utility script that will handle compilation for you, that needs to be done next!! Dynamically Chunked Terrain Collisions Very early and of course WIP, I still haven’t done much but i have a pretty good idea of how this will work: You bake the local position of all the vertex of a terrain model and then, when you require it, you get all the triangles close to the player in real time (with a basic “chunked” system), then Bullet3 generates that mesh collider rather quickly as the mesh is not so big (this will probably require multi-threading ). More on this on the next devlog Other small changes Fixed the sandbox not having docking enabled Added ImPlot3D to project, might use it at some point PD: This picture is from my other project that you should check out! It showcases the new terrain system (WIP)
ORIGIN ENGINE Another update to the best game engine there is that starts with the letter “O” (i think). Today’s devlog is small, bust most likely will be start of a new series of very much needed updates to the engine!. It’s important to note that most of the things ive been working on are not yet finished :(( New stuff! New things that are completely finished: Fix the sandbox UI, it was missing imgui flags from previous bug fixes i had to do because the docking branch of imgui was broken, they fixed it so i just rolled back! Cleaned up the rendering class, specially important for the new updates im working on, because im gonna need to do a hell lot of abstraction! Things im working on Im taking the current base of the engine to make a new “modular” system just for the love of the game, the most basic thing ive done is to allow the user to choose between SDL3 or GLFW for windowing, although input is currently only handled with SDL3 regardless…. There’s a lot of exiting stuff coming SOON^(TM), hope you like them!! (vulkan?, probably not lmfao) PD: yes! this is the origin engine running nicely in a steamdeck!!!
ORIGIN ENGINE A NEW UPDATE! I’m building a huge update for the origin engine! it might even be considered a new engine all together. The same philosophy is still there but I’m re-writting and refactoring the base structure of the whole engine. For now this refactor is close source tho, ill publish it once its ready for ship! What we currently have: I have the structure already though: A new project-based system where all the shader compilation and asset handling is done for each project, this + a simple abstraction layer should allow the sandbox to be a hugely more important tool as you will be able to play your game right in the editor! Compile time switch between SDL3 or GLFW for windowing, input is not yet “ported” if you consider it that way What i wanna add but may be difficult Runtime api switching between OpenGL, Vulkan and DirectX3D 11. even tho for now i have a super basic abstraction layer and only opengl is even able to initialize so….. maybe too hard i hope i manage to do it tho , was thinking of doing a similar thing for switching between physics engines like bullet3, physicsX or Box3D, this is very much in the future of course Project export/ editor previews This is a major step and im learning a lot!! but its very difficult to handle new stuff like vulkan with other new c++ architectural stuff, hope it goes well
ORIGIN ENGINE I’m sorry in advance that these and probably the next few devlogs wont have very exiting things or new and awesome information but sometimes you gotta focus on boring structural stuff that its just not really fun… The new Project-Based System The engine is now very dependent on the sandbox editor, sort of like a symbiotic relationship between the sandbox and your code editor, because thats where you will not only handle your assets but also play the game. The previous version just had the sandbox to be a tiny map editor tool that not even i would use half of the time The project (also called environment) then would have its own “environment” literally where all your assets would be included, with very little naming restrictions, this would make working on the project super easy and itd be easy too to use git with it (maybe build a builtin git UI??? it could be cool) I’ve already built the base for it and I’ve already added support for ImGui only for the OpenGL backend, i was thinking of adding a different UI system but this one will do for now :))
ORIGIN ENGINE I’ve finally managed to port enough of the original engine to setup an imgui layer to have this little built-in launcher! it currently only works when using opengl, but its completely supported by both the windowing backends (glfw & sdl3) Its hard to make videos like this on a steamdeck so please like lol. Other stuff I completely restructured the new engine architecture to be a layered system, the engine holds a stack of layers and updates them independently! each layer holds stuff like OnAttach OnLateUpdate OnEvent etc, which is a much better approach compared to what we had before! I created a completely new custom file system, as the sandbox and games use completely different files and base directories, you can now mount/dismount different “aliases” for each program, so you can find your assets easily with custom virtual paths like sandbox://settings.json or project://scenes/scene.json Literally ported the scene/entity system right from the previous version, but it is a lot smaller currently, because the previous one wasnt really good, we now can load scenes from a file but now those get added to a scene stack, which is a lot more efficient if you wanna load them again! Overall the project’s code quality is so much better too!! After these bases are set im gonna be focusing on getting a full render layer working with at least opengl, even tho the vulkan renderer is already setup… PD: Origin Zero is just the new “protoype” name i gave it, just like with when i started this project i called it Origin “Zeus” lmao
ORIGIN ENGINE version 0.19.3 First ship is coming up soon! Even tho ive been working on really exciting stuff, i really would like to focus on actually learning and having a deep enough understanding of vulkan and other stuff like the best engine’s architecture before actually logging and building something open and usable, thats why i feel this is a good place to finally ship this project as it is and maybe come back to it at some point Pre-ship checklist! I’ve updated the website! now you have a few new sections with new information like the game i build using this engine and other cool stuff! published a new version to the github releases page (0.19.3 i think), with the binaries for the demo game and the sandbox for both windows and linux! the web build is still there on the website but it is marked as legacy tho Its been super fun to work on this and ive learnt a lot but i really really really think i could make something so much better with all the knowledge i now have and with some serious research, this is pretty much what ive explained in most of all the previous devlogs (the last 2 or 3) I’ve been working on applying some of the stuff ive been working on to the engine, like the new renderer class its now pretty much ported nicely! ive also tested that everything worked cross platform and yay! the project is very ready to hold any new game or project you might wanna do with it, although i might wanna make a quick tutorial on how to work with the engine on a github repo cuz its not very intuitive Known issue I’ve been trying to add support to the engine for builtin shaders but ive realized that its a super deeper problem than what i was expecting, id honestly do something like making all the shaders be done with something like slang and then compile them to spirv without any glsl intermediary PD: the video you see is a demo scene you can find at assets/scenes/physics.scene if you wanna try it by yourself!!!
Ships:
I made a custom game engine from scratch! it has a fast opengl pixelart renderer, builtin physics, lighting, an entity-component system, a spatial audio system, terrain system, it can load and save scenes on the fly, supports many 3d asset extensions… Its what i used to create my other big project! (JSP) the engine is cross-platform and works right out of the box for linux, windows and web!! and also it comes with a lightweight level editor and ive also made a website for it Hope you like it!! made with <3 from @aloyak...
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trout by @nosrep | Stardance
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nosrep
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85.0
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1696
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-13T06:51:47Z", "hours": 85.0, "multiplier": 16.67, "payout": 1696, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "welcome to trout v2! the goal of this period was to upgrade trout v1 to finally become the strongest chess engine written in haskell (it’s a cool title, ok). i believe it is done, and trout now beats the previous #1, barbarossa. writing a chess engine in haskell is hard and annoying and probably a not good use of my time, but i am stubborn and not very bright so here we are. writing a chess engine is also very annoying in general, involving thousands of hours of cpu time to test changes. everyone say thank you to my poor i7 10700k together with the +300elo (!!!) strength improvement over v1, i also corrected the engine’s time management (no more timing out in chess GUIs) and cleaned up the web interface. to play the engine, you have three options: the demo link: this has the web interface for trout. it’s the original engine compiled down to WASM with a nice ui on top. lichess bot: you can find the lichess bot link at the bottom of the demo website, @TroutBot . it’s running on an oracle free tier server and can only play two games simultaneously; if challenging it hangs, it’s probably playing 2 already. locally: if you want troutbot at peak performance, you can download a chess GUI like En Croissant or Arena, and configure the trout binary (on github releases) in the GUI. trout speaks the standard UCI protocol.", "repo": "https://github.com/Osrepnay/trout", "demo": "https://osrepnay.github.io/trout-web"}]...
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[{"post_id": 67147, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 67147, "ts": "2026-09-13T06:34:52Z", "hours": 1.16, "text": "I did some more frontend work! i made the chessground rank/file responsive: for some reason, the default ones are positioned by pixel offsets and break pretty quickly on smaller screens. some light css max fixes this recolored everything: stock chessground theme is kinda lame made the time slider exponential: I wanted to give a larger time range (previous is 100ms-1000ms), but everything past 1s on the high end makes it really unwieldy to set the time on the low end, where people usually play. i made it exponential, i can expand the top end (3000ms now) without the slider feeling weird. it’s easier to show than explain"}, {"post_id": 65064, "ts": "2026-09-09T22:19:08Z", "hours": 4.8239, "text": "managed to update the website to the new version. It was much easier than I expected, considering the amount of changes I’ve made. new version is better (besides just being stronger) in that I factored the iterative deepening code out, which means the website can have sensible time settings now instead of the stupid “max time per depth” thing it had before. I also implemented IIR (internal iterative reductions). I’ve tried it like 10 times before, but this specific version worked for some reason. +28 elo! engine is now safely better than barbarossa."}, {"post_id": 64248, "ts": "2026-09-08T14:43:59Z", "hours": 0.6486, "text": "2.0 release has been tagged! i set up a dockerfile to make static linux binaries and created a windows github action to make the windows binaries. I also finished the test against the last version of the engine:"}, {"post_id": 63549, "ts": "2026-09-07T13:53:00Z", "hours": 4.9844, "text": "it is done….. i think trout is the strongest haskell engine now (i made the passed pawn bonus tunable per-rank, which added around 20 elo. re-tested some other search stuff but they all kinda sucked) i think i’m going to work on polishing the frontend now, tag a 2.0 release soon."}, {"post_id": 62696, "ts": "2026-09-06T05:49:18Z", "hours": 8.5936, "text": "i’ve been doing some tuner work, it’s not great the old tuner was pretty bad. very janky, repeated code, very hard to read, and sloooowwww…. i optimized it by precomputing the factors for each position so it’s just a bunch of multiplications to get the score. upside: order of magnitude speed improvement. downside: 20+ gb memory…. other problem is that the new tuner’s results are not great. they aren’t horribly bad like some other tests, but the gains aren’t as big as i was expecting. this might be a data quality issue? i might write proper datagen code at some point instead of just relying on the output of SPRT tests. I did get a nice 7 elo from removing floating point ops in eval, so that’s nice i guess. i can smell the goal already. Soon (i would attach a picture of the 20gb but i’m kinda running a sprt right now… maybe next time)"}, {"post_id": 60920, "ts": "2026-09-03T16:06:58Z", "hours": 9.0614, "text": "big gap! some stuff came up and i don’t fully remember what i’ve done since the last devlog. git log tells me i did some minor logic fixes and added SEE pruning in pvs (32 elo), which prunes nodes based on their static exchange evaluation. i do remember that the current version of the engine can beat barbarossa at LTC now. STC it still loses (i.e. my engine scales better… glass half full), but I am now working on eval tuning to hopefully bump the elo up some more. i am now working on this through ssh. negative: lag. positive: there is almost nothing running on my computer aside from the language server. should make testing easier and more predictable"}, {"post_id": 43577, "ts": "2026-08-08T22:09:51Z", "hours": 8.8139, "text": "i’m now within 100 elo of my target, but it’s still not looking great. it seems i have hit another wall. there’s this copypasta around chess programming circles with a rough order of search features to implement, and i’ve tried 3 in a row, none doing much. since last time, i’ve just added two things that have gained elo: history decay tweak (10 elo): after searching a position, decay history by 50% instead of 80%, helps retain memory from previous searches check extensions (23 elo): extend a search by 1 more move if in check. it’s very simple. i’ve since tried IIR (internal iterative reductions), SEE pruning in PVS (more moveloop pruning), and continuation history (like the history heuristic, but More™️). only continuation history has kinda done something, but only when comparing against a version that’s just as slow; when comparing against the original, it’s much closer because for some reason continuation history slows down the search by almost 10% (??????). The main slow-down-er seems to be indexing the continuation history array, which is absolutely baffling to me. i’ve even tried to start reading the GHC Core again, until i remembered why it was so painful last time."}, {"post_id": 41607, "ts": "2026-08-05T22:20:00Z", "hours": 8.6608, "text": "a lot of changes in this batch, but not all of them were for strength. here’s a quick runthrough of the elo-affecting changes: add improving heuristic to rfp (prune more nodes while improving) add staticEval >= beta guard to nmp (restrict the usage of null move pruning to moves that already seem good from static eval) futility pruning (very similar to reverse futility pruning - removes quiet moves when static eval is pretty far below alpha) tempo bonus (side to move gets a bonus to eval for having tempo) add quiescence search results to transposition table (i had this in the old version but i guess i forgot to port it over until now) soft time bounds in search (instead of searching for as long as possible and nuking the search thread mid-search, stop iterative deepening if it looks like the next node will take too long) to fix this, i moved the timing-out logic inside the search function, which is what most engines do. I didn’t do this earlier because 1. it’s marginally harder and 2. it would require making the search functions IO instead of ST. ST is escapable, so it’s more pure, so this was kinda a bummer to do, but i didn’t see any way to get around this. here’s a graph i made while i was looking at aspiration windows more. it shows the average centipawn change between successive depths of search. the current aspiration window implementation assumes that depth and avg cp change is inversely related, but it doesn’t look like this is true. (what is the hump doing??) I tried a couple of aspiration window implementations that don’t make this assumption but didn’t get anything huge. I’ll probably replace it at some point."}, {"post_id": 39895, "ts": "2026-08-03T05:39:33Z", "hours": 5.7494, "text": "the engine is finally in the strongest state it’s ever been! (i think) for those who have not been obsessively following this project, the search part of the engine has gone through two rewrites now. i kept hitting walls where i really shouldn’t have; improvements that should have been huge gains did a lot less than expected. i did the rewrites in an attempt to find a potential bug that would kill future attempts at improvements, but i never really found anything significant. i never really got the engine to it’s pre-rewrites strength until now. read it and weep (~17 elo gain) -------------------------------------------------- Results of trout-exe-max vs trout-exe-asp-tweak (8+0.08, NULL, 16.000000MB, UHO_Lichess_4852_v1.epd): Elo: -16.96 +/- 14.18, nElo: -22.54 +/- 18.80 LOS: 0.94 %, DrawRatio: 33.99 %, PairsRatio: 0.82 Games: 1312, Wins: 380, Losses: 444, Draws: 488, Points: 624.0 (47.56 %) Ptnml(0-2): [63, 175, 223, 153, 42], WL/DD Ratio: 1.79 LLR: -2.98 (-101.3%) (-2.94, 2.94) [0.00, 10.00] -------------------------------------------------- it’s still not super great because elo improvements are coming slooowww and we’re still only 17 elo up with many more features than before. it’s still nice, though. implemented since last devlog: “improving” heuristic (13 elo): a position is said to be “improving” if the static evaluation now is higher than the one from a move ago. we can use this to tweak some parameters in the search, like when to cut off for LMP, which is what i did. need more testing for the other features. lmr limit (16 elo): my LMR implementation was slightly bugged and would reduce too many moves; normally the first couple are spared, but i had every move except the first reduced. negative captures below quiet moves (13 elo): for some reason, i had captures that were deemed negative by SEE (bad captures, basically - trading a queen for a pawn would be one) sorted above all quiet moves. i moved them to the bottom of move sorting. redo aspiration windows (36 elo): i redid the implementation for aspiration windows slightly. it should be smarter about bounds now. that makes around 100 elo for aspiration windows cumulatively now, which is kinda crazy here’s a picture of htop when i was running the engines against each othe for elo testing. i thought it was kinda funny"}, {"post_id": 38604, "ts": "2026-08-01T02:40:06Z", "hours": 8.2208, "text": "oh no, 8 hours i need to devlog more holy moly from last devlog, i kinda found a solution to the fail-soft problem? Most engine’s LMR implementations will re-search twice if the previous search went over alpha (lower bound). The first search has reduced depth AND a null-window around alpha (search window of 1 centipawn; searches faster, but can only tell the direction of the true search result); if this is over alpha, it’ll re-search with full depth; if this is again over alpha, it’ll re-search with full depth and full bounds. My engine was skipping the middle step and jumping from reduced depth + null window -> full depth + full bounds. Apparently this is an accepted method and it was working fine compared to the other version, EXCEPT once I switched to fail-soft on beta. in other news, I added: aspiration windows (75 elo): the initial search is normally unbounded, but aspiration windows try to clamp the search around a “guess” based on the previous depth of iterative deepening, and widen if it fails high or low. it did almost nothing before, and randomly became really good. don’t ask me why. razoring (22 elo): prunes a node if quiescence search says it’s too far below alpha. I already had it in a previous version and brought it over to the search rewrite. pretty simple, smallish elo boost. late move pruning (39 elo): prunes the latter part of move list; moves are sorted by how good they’re predicted to be, so latter moves are usually pretty garbage fixes (23 elo): small logic changes to LMR and LMP. don’t know how they didn’t lose more elo, the LMR bug was kinda bad. separate PV tracking: the PV (principal variation, the best moves for each player as calculated by the engine) was previously tracked by the transposition table, but that meant i didn’t have a lot of flexibility with the replacement strategy for the table, lest it wipe an important PV entry. tracking it separately lets me fiddle with the replacement strategy more, although I haven’t actually found one better than what I have now here’s a graph generated from a google sheet with 100k rows (!?). it’s a histogram of every time a move was marked as “currently the best”, indexed by entry. ideally, it’d be all 0, meaning the best move was searched first every time, meaning there was basically no wasted effort."}, {"post_id": 37391, "ts": "2026-07-30T02:23:34Z", "hours": 6.5078, "text": "6.5 hours? oh man i was right, nmp only gained like 30 elo, gained much much more before. i tried to hunt down anything weird but i had to leave it at that. i also implemented pruning in quiescence search, so the engine only searches moves that have a positive static exchange evaluation (essentially, the result of all trades on a particular square). i also accidentally found out my engine was doing fail-hard on beta cutoffs instead of fail-soft! in a fail-soft framework, the search is allowed to return outside of the bounds set by the alpha and beta parameters (it’s hard to explain succinctly here and i don’t want to keep doing it, search up alpha-beta search if you’re interested). thus, alpha and beta are soft bounds. this means each search returns more information about the move score. i successfully did fail-soft on the alpha (lower bound) side, but not on the beta side due to what i can only assume is a coding mistake. the problem is, when switching to fail-soft on beta, the engine lost like 30 elo! i bisected the change to the LMR (late move reductions) patch, but still have no idea why LMR doesn’t play nice with fail-soft beta. i’m kinda at the end of my rope here, i might just have to eat the elo loss…"}, {"post_id": 36088, "ts": "2026-07-27T23:22:04Z", "hours": 5.5464, "text": "I finally got RFP to gain! but it might not be as good as it seems… ive been struggling to get rfp, a pretty basic improvement, to actually do anything, and redid everything search step-by-step to make sure i didn’t do anything wrong. so far, i’ve added back SEE move ordering, butterfly heuristic, PVS, transposition table move ordering, and RFP. however, i don’t think this actually fixes my problem; the code is largely the same aside from some parameter changes, so my theory is that rfp is only working now because i added everything back in a different order, and now i might struggle with adding back different features that aren’t gaining anymore. i’m currently testing null move pruning (based on the null move observation: doing something is basically always better than doing nothing), and it’s not doing as much as it used to… disturbing"}, {"post_id": 35484, "ts": "2026-07-26T23:08:41Z", "hours": 1.4153, "text": "ive nuked it…. i kept fighting rfp and talking with other people about this. apparently, rfp is one of the easiest gainers (something that gains elo/strength), and usually gains a lot, but again, nothing. i ran an overnight test of like 5000 games and the rfp version manages to LOSE 8 elo, where other people have gained 80. i’m gonna try to restart search again, but basically fully. i don’t know if this will actually do anything, but i don’t see many other choices…"}, {"post_id": 34984, "ts": "2026-07-26T03:58:38Z", "hours": 6.8525, "text": "i’ve reentered the nightmare when i last left off this project in ~september, I basically hit a wall with optimizations. I had a crapload of pruning and whatnot, but the elo of the engine didn’t really reflect it. I then did a search rewrite but got stuck on RFP (reverse futility pruning), which is supposed to gain a lot of strength but did basically nothing for me. brief (??) aside: reverse futility pruning, in simple terms, checks if the static evaluation (evaluation without searching moves) is above beta (if a move scores above beta, it’s “too good,” and the opponent won’t allow that position to happen in the first place) by some margin. if it is, it’ll return without searching any moves, because it’s not likely that the player can lose that much material/positional advantage in whatever depth is left to search. anyway, i’m still stuck on this. I’ve re-reimplemented half the search to recheck its correctness, because correctness issues can sometimes stuff new optimizations, but it seems to be all good. RFP still doesn’t do jack. i don’t really know where to go from here. I could just ignore it, but the fact that RFP doesn’t do anything (for reference, another engine dev i talked to got like 80 elo out of RFP, which is insane) is a troubling sign and might mean something else is wrong."}, {"post_id": 34363, "ts": "2026-07-25T00:30:18Z", "hours": 3.7367, "text": "hello! trout again. i’m gonna try to get this to #1 haskell engine, but it’s been such a pain… after summer of making I did some more work on this, but hit a wall where all my changes either did nothing or gained like 10elo (which is not enough for the hundreds i need). I tried rewriting part of search but hit a wall again with the same problem, on features that should have made improvements! i’ve been fighting with the search some more trying to get reverse futility pruning to do something meaningful. in someone else’s engine, it gained i think 80+ elo in total (!!!), which is bonkers compared to the 20 or something i get on a good day. it’s not a good day, so RFP actually manages to lose elo here. i might have to rewrite search again. i don’t know how much of this is just wrong. (here’s the commented out old search)"}]...
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Title: trout by @nosrep | Stardance
Devlogs:
hell Title: trout by @nosrep | Stardance
Devlogs:
hello! trout again. i’m gonna try to get this to #1 haskell engine, but it’s been such a pain… after summer of making I did some more work on this, but hit a wall where all my changes either did nothing or gained like 10elo (which is not enough for the hundreds i need). I tried rewriting part of search but hit a wall again with the same problem, on features that should have made improvements! i’ve been fighting with the search some more trying to get reverse futility pruning to do something meaningful. in someone else’s engine, it gained i think 80+ elo in total (!!!), which is bonkers compared to the 20 or something i get on a good day. it’s not a good day, so RFP actually manages to lose elo here. i might have to rewrite search again. i don’t know how much of this is just wrong. (here’s the commented out old search)
i’ve reentered the nightmare when i last left off this project in ~september, I basically hit a wall with optimizations. I had a crapload of pruning and whatnot, but the elo of the engine didn’t really reflect it. I then did a search rewrite but got stuck on RFP (reverse futility pruning), which is supposed to gain a lot of strength but did basically nothing for me. brief (??) aside: reverse futility pruning, in simple terms, checks if the static evaluation (evaluation without searching moves) is above beta (if a move scores above beta, it’s “too good,” and the opponent won’t allow that position to happen in the first place) by some margin. if it is, it’ll return without searching any moves, because it’s not likely that the player can lose that much material/positional advantage in whatever depth is left to search. anyway, i’m still stuck on this. I’ve re-reimplemented half the search to recheck its correctness, because correctness issues can sometimes stuff new optimizations, but it seems to be all good. RFP still doesn’t do jack. i don’t really know where to go from here. I could just ignore it, but the fact that RFP doesn’t do anything (for reference, another engine dev i talked to got like 80 elo out of RFP, which is insane) is a troubling sign and might mean something else is wrong.
ive nuked it…. i kept fighting rfp and talking with other people about this. apparently, rfp is one of the easiest gainers (something that gains elo/strength), and usually gains a lot, but again, nothing. i ran an overnight test of like 5000 games and the rfp version manages to LOSE 8 elo, where other people have gained 80. i’m gonna try to restart search again, but basically fully. i don’t know if this will actually do anything, but i don’t see many other choices…
I finally got RFP to gain! but it might not be as good as it seems… ive been struggling to get rfp, a pretty basic improvement, to actually do anything, and redid everything search step-by-step to make sure i didn’t do anything wrong. so far, i’ve added back SEE move ordering, butterfly heuristic, PVS, transposition table move ordering, and RFP. however, i don’t think this actually fixes my problem; the code is largely the same aside from some parameter changes, so my theory is that rfp is only working now because i added everything back in a different order, and now i might struggle with adding back different features that aren’t gaining anymore. i’m currently testing null move pruning (based on the null move observation: doing something is basically always better than doing nothing), and it’s not doing as much as it used to… disturbing
6.5 hours? oh man i was right, nmp only gained like 30 elo, gained much much more before. i tried to hunt down anything weird but i had to leave it at that. i also implemented pruning in quiescence search, so the engine only searches moves that have a positive static exchange evaluation (essentially, the result of all trades on a particular square). i also accidentally found out my engine was doing fail-hard on beta cutoffs instead of fail-soft! in a fail-soft framework, the search is allowed to return outside of the bounds set by the alpha and beta parameters (it’s hard to explain succinctly here and i don’t want to keep doing it, search up alpha-beta search if you’re interested). thus, alpha and beta are soft bounds. this means each search returns more information about the move score. i successfully did fail-soft on the alpha (lower bound) side, but not on the beta side due to what i can only assume is a coding mistake. the problem is, when switching to fail-soft on beta, the engine lost like 30 elo! i bisected the change to the LMR (late move reductions) patch, but still have no idea why LMR doesn’t play nice with fail-soft beta. i’m kinda at the end of my rope here, i might just have to eat the elo loss…
oh no, 8 hours i need to devlog more holy moly from last devlog, i kinda found a solution to the fail-soft problem? Most engine’s LMR implementations will re-search twice if the previous search went over alpha (lower bound). The first search has reduced depth AND a null-window around alpha (search window of 1 centipawn; searches faster, but can only tell the direction of the true search result); if this is over alpha, it’ll re-search with full depth; if this is again over alpha, it’ll re-search with full depth and full bounds. My engine was skipping the middle step and jumping from reduced depth + null window -> full depth + full bounds. Apparently this is an accepted method and it was working fine compared to the other version, EXCEPT once I switched to fail-soft on beta. in other news, I added: aspiration windows (75 elo): the initial search is normally unbounded, but aspiration windows try to clamp the search around a “guess” based on the previous depth of iterative deepening, and widen if it fails high or low. it did almost nothing before, and randomly became really good. don’t ask me why. razoring (22 elo): prunes a node if quiescence search says it’s too far below alpha. I already had it in a previous version and brought it over to the search rewrite. pretty simple, smallish elo boost. late move pruning (39 elo): prunes the latter part of move list; moves are sorted by how good they’re predicted to be, so latter moves are usually pretty garbage fixes (23 elo): small logic changes to LMR and LMP. don’t know how they didn’t lose more elo, the LMR bug was kinda bad. separate PV tracking: the PV (principal variation, the best moves for each player as calculated by the engine) was previously tracked by the transposition table, but that meant i didn’t have a lot of flexibility with the replacement strategy for the table, lest it wipe an important PV entry. tracking it separately lets me fiddle with the replacement strategy more, although I haven’t actually found one better than what I have now here’s a graph generated from a google sheet with 100k rows (!?). it’s a histogram of every time a move was marked as “currently the best”, indexed by entry. ideally, it’d be all 0, meaning the best move was searched first every time, meaning there was basically no wasted effort.
the engine is finally in the strongest state it’s ever been! (i think) for those who have not been obsessively following this project, the search part of the engine has gone through two rewrites now. i kept hitting walls where i really shouldn’t have; improvements that should have been huge gains did a lot less than expected. i did the rewrites in an attempt to find a potential bug that would kill future attempts at improvements, but i never really found anything significant. i never really got the engine to it’s pre-rewrites strength until now. read it and weep (~17 elo gain) -------------------------------------------------- Results of trout-exe-max vs trout-exe-asp-tweak (8+0.08, NULL, 16.000000MB, UHO_Lichess_4852_v1.epd): Elo: -16.96 +/- 14.18, nElo: -22.54 +/- 18.80 LOS: 0.94 %, DrawRatio: 33.99 %, PairsRatio: 0.82 Games: 1312, Wins: 380, Losses: 444, Draws: 488, Points: 624.0 (47.56 %) Ptnml(0-2): [63, 175, 223, 153, 42], WL/DD Ratio: 1.79 LLR: -2.98 (-101.3%) (-2.94, 2.94) [0.00, 10.00] -------------------------------------------------- it’s still not super great because elo improvements are coming slooowww and we’re still only 17 elo up with many more features than before. it’s still nice, though. implemented since last devlog: “improving” heuristic (13 elo): a position is said to be “improving” if the static evaluation now is higher than the one from a move ago. we can use this to tweak some parameters in the search, like when to cut off for LMP, which is what i did. need more testing for the other features. lmr limit (16 elo): my LMR implementation was slightly bugged and would reduce too many moves; normally the first couple are spared, but i had every move except the first reduced. negative captures below quiet moves (13 elo): for some reason, i had captures that were deemed negative by SEE (bad captures, basically - trading a queen for a pawn would be one) sorted above all quiet moves. i moved them to the bottom of move sorting. redo aspiration windows (36 elo): i redid the implementation for aspiration windows slightly. it should be smarter about bounds now. that makes around 100 elo for aspiration windows cumulatively now, which is kinda crazy here’s a picture of htop when i was running the engines against each othe for elo testing. i thought it was kinda funny
a lot of changes in this batch, but not all of them were for strength. here’s a quick runthrough of the elo-affecting changes: add improving heuristic to rfp (prune more nodes while improving) add staticEval >= beta guard to nmp (restrict the usage of null move pruning to moves that already seem good from static eval) futility pruning (very similar to reverse futility pruning - removes quiet moves when static eval is pretty far below alpha) tempo bonus (side to move gets a bonus to eval for having tempo) add quiescence search results to transposition table (i had this in the old version but i guess i forgot to port it over until now) soft time bounds in search (instead of searching for as long as possible and nuking the search thread mid-search, stop iterative deepening if it looks like the next node will take too long) to fix this, i moved the timing-out logic inside the search function, which is what most engines do. I didn’t do this earlier because 1. it’s marginally harder and 2. it would require making the search functions IO instead of ST. ST is escapable, so it’s more pure, so this was kinda a bummer to do, but i didn’t see any way to get around this. here’s a graph i made while i was looking at aspiration windows more. it shows the average centipawn change between successive depths of search. the current aspiration window implementation assumes that depth and avg cp change is inversely related, but it doesn’t look like this is true. (what is the hump doing??) I tried a couple of aspiration window implementations that don’t make this assumption but didn’t get anything huge. I’ll probably replace it at some point.
i’m now within 100 elo of my target, but it’s still not looking great. it seems i have hit another wall. there’s this copypasta around chess programming circles with a rough order of search features to implement, and i’ve tried 3 in a row, none doing much. since last time, i’ve just added two things that have gained elo: history decay tweak (10 elo): after searching a position, decay history by 50% instead of 80%, helps retain memory from previous searches check extensions (23 elo): extend a search by 1 more move if in check. it’s very simple. i’ve since tried IIR (internal iterative reductions), SEE pruning in PVS (more moveloop pruning), and continuation history (like the history heuristic, but More™️). only continuation history has kinda done something, but only when comparing against a version that’s just as slow; when comparing against the original, it’s much closer because for some reason continuation history slows down the search by almost 10% (??????). The main slow-down-er seems to be indexing the continuation history array, which is absolutely baffling to me. i’ve even tried to start reading the GHC Core again, until i remembered why it was so painful last time.
big gap! some stuff came up and i don’t fully remember what i’ve done since the last devlog. git log tells me i did some minor logic fixes and added SEE pruning in pvs (32 elo), which prunes nodes based on their static exchange evaluation. i do remember that the current version of the engine can beat barbarossa at LTC now. STC it still loses (i.e. my engine scales better… glass half full), but I am now working on eval tuning to hopefully bump the elo up some more. i am now working on this through ssh. negative: lag. positive: there is almost nothing running on my computer aside from the language server. should make testing easier and more predictable
i’ve been doing some tuner work, it’s not great the old tuner was pretty bad. very janky, repeated code, very hard to read, and sloooowwww…. i optimized it by precomputing the factors for each position so it’s just a bunch of multiplications to get the score. upside: order of magnitude speed improvement. downside: 20+ gb memory…. other problem is that the new tuner’s results are not great. they aren’t horribly bad like some other tests, but the gains aren’t as big as i was expecting. this might be a data quality issue? i might write proper datagen code at some point instead of just relying on the output of SPRT tests. I did get a nice 7 elo from removing floating point ops in eval, so that’s nice i guess. i can smell the goal already. Soon (i would attach a picture of the 20gb but i’m kinda running a sprt right now… maybe next time)
it is done….. i think trout is the strongest haskell engine now (i made the passed pawn bonus tunable per-rank, which added around 20 elo. re-tested some other search stuff but they all kinda sucked) i think i’m going to work on polishing the frontend now, tag a 2.0 release soon.
2.0 release has been tagged! i set up a dockerfile to make static linux binaries and created a windows github action to make the windows binaries. I also finished the test against the last version of the engine:
managed to update the website to the new version. It was much easier than I expected, considering the amount of changes I’ve made. new version is better (besides just being stronger) in that I factored the iterative deepening code out, which means the website can have sensible time settings now instead of the stupid “max time per depth” thing it had before. I also implemented IIR (internal iterative reductions). I’ve tried it like 10 times before, but this specific version worked for some reason. +28 elo! engine is now safely better than barbarossa.
I did some more frontend work! i made the chessground rank/file responsive: for some reason, the default ones are positioned by pixel offsets and break pretty quickly on smaller screens. some light css max fixes this recolored everything: stock chessground theme is kinda lame made the time slider exponential: I wanted to give a larger time range (previous is 100ms-1000ms), but everything past 1s on the high end makes it really unwieldy to set the time on the low end, where people usually play. i made it exponential, i can expand the top end (3000ms now) without the slider feeling weird. it’s easier to show than explain
Ships:
welcome to trout v2! the goal of this period was to upgrade trout v1 to finally become the strongest chess engine written in haskell (it’s a cool title, ok). i believe it is done, and trout now beats the previous #1, barbarossa. writing a chess engine in haskell is hard and annoying and probably a not good use of my time, but i am stubborn and not very bright so here we are. writing a chess engine is also very annoying in general, involving thousands of hours of cpu time to test changes. everyone say thank you to my poor i7 10700k together with the +300elo (!!!) strength improvement over v1, i also corrected the engine’s time management (no more timing out in chess GUIs) and cleaned up the web interface. to play the engine, you have three options: the demo link: this has the web interface for trout. it’s the original engine compiled down to WASM with a nice ui on top. lichess bot: you can find the lichess bot link at the bottom of the demo website, @TroutBot . it’s running on an oracle free tier server and can only play two games simultaneously; if challenging it hangs, it’s probably playing 2 already. locally: if you want troutbot at peak performance, you can download a chess GUI like En Croissant or Arena, and configure the trout binary (on github releases) in the GUI. trout speaks the standard UCI protocol....
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Boba Cats! by @grassyd | Stardance
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grassyd
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1
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92.31
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1697
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-09T20:09:37Z", "hours": 91.0, "multiplier": 19.1, "payout": 1697, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Check out @Jewelia ’s version of the project here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/1894 Boba Cats! is a 2D adventure platformer game about, well, boba and cats! It was made with @Jewelia and @kimeowsu ! The first world of the game is fully playable! Music and extra touches will be added in the future! You can play the game on the itch app for Windows, Mac, or Linux, or you can directly download the game for Windows! (This is a collaborative project! @Jewelia ’s project links to the same thing; it’s up to you if you want to rate hers or mine or both)", "repo": "https://github.com/grassybox/Boba-Cats", "demo": "https://grassinabox.itch.io/boba-cats"}]...
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[{"post_id": 60021, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 60021, "ts": "2026-09-02T03:46:55Z", "hours": 1.3117, "text": "Hello hello! Thank you so much for all the support and feedback on our game!! It really means a lot! And huge thank you Stardance team for the Super Star!!?! 🤯🤯🤯 I’m so grateful for this program, it’s been awesome 💖 Sorry it’s been a while since the last update… 😔 (though if you’ve never seen me before I guess you wouldn’t know lol…) We took quite a break now that we’re all starting school and are busy with other things too . However, we still hope to do one more ship with a more complete version of this world of the game! So what is next? 🎵 Music!! - This is probably the biggest thing we’ve been wanting to add, so music is in the works! We are also thinking of adding more sound effects and improving the sound design overall! 🎮 Gameplay improvements - We are working to tweak some things based on our ideas and the wonderful feedback we gotten! For example, some parts are kind of confusing to navigate at the moment 😅, so we hope to make it more clear! 🌐 Web version? - We’ve been wanting to make the game playable on the web! I’m not sure how possible this is since Godot 4 does not officially support exporting C# projects to web yet… but we’ll see what we can do! 👍 And whatever other miscellaneous additions we decide to add! Thanks for reading!! (p.s. I finally put a linux version of the demo on the game’s itch.io page sorry it took so long 😭)"}, {"post_id": 43760, "ts": "2026-08-09T05:39:46Z", "hours": 12.5853, "text": "Playtesting!! EDIT: the ship is shipping!! It is currently pending review!! It may take a few days to show up because I forgot you have to get it reviewed!! 😅😅😅🆒 _ @kimeowsu spent some time playtesting our game! She’s quite good at finding issues 😅 As per usual, the seabunny had a lot of issues >:/ …but they should be fixed now! _ Some of the stuff we fixed include: ⛸️ Player doesn’t slide away during a conversation anymore Seabunny no longer freezes the game ➡️⬅️ Seabunny no longer occasionally moves backwards Player is no longer able to collect the same coin over and over again 🖼️ Visual fixes (ex. one of the cats no longer has only half of a helmet) 🌟 And many more miscellaneous tweaks! I know I said that we would ship earlier… but I think this time we are actually going to ship in the next 24 hours… for real… probably… 🎉 🥳 🎈 🆒"}, {"post_id": 39755, "ts": "2026-08-02T22:31:52Z", "hours": 7.4647, "text": "Sound Effects!! 🔊 [Game update] Our game has sound effects now! @kimeowsu actually got sound effects from the website aidn.jp/dotvoice by daniwell ! The sound effects are quite minimal so it sounds quite empty for now… we will have original music eventually from a friend , but good things take time 😋 I also fixed some bugs (mostly ones I caused myself 😅) and added a quit button (as cool as Boba Cats! is, I don’t think anyone wants to play it forever and ever and ever) As @Jewelia said in her post, we are hoping to ship this week!! World 1 will be completely playable!! 🎉🥳🎊 In the future, we may have another ship just to include the music and any fixes and extra touches Thanks for reading!! :D"}, {"post_id": 36053, "ts": "2026-07-27T21:52:46Z", "hours": 4.7814, "text": "spinny item animation thing! [Game update] I made this animation that plays whenever you get an item! Some other small additions: 🦪 Pearls are new! They will be hidden in a couple places and will be able to be gifted to the townspeople in exchange for stories ✨ Added sparkles to the miniboss arena to better show where to go 🪸 Tube coral now teleport you back to the beginning of the room if you get hit 🗃️ Organized scene files into folders Since this project has gotten more attention recently, thank you for the support!!!! @Jewelia and I hope to have a ship ready soon…"}, {"post_id": 33180, "ts": "2026-07-22T21:04:15Z", "hours": 4.3947, "text": "You can go backwards now… ( !) [Game update] I added stuff like this conveniently left behind ladder so you can actually go back to the previous rooms after finishing the seabunny miniboss I finished the last cutscene in the area! @kimeowsu helped add some more decorative vines in some of the areas I made collectable coins! You can’t see your number of coins collected yet so you’re just gonna have to trust me they’re getting collected"}, {"post_id": 31927, "ts": "2026-07-20T18:37:03Z", "hours": 6.5889, "text": "Game Update #I didn’t count! I finished my secret room! (but you don’t get to see it here because it’s secret… 😼) Coded the plant shop with @Jewelia ! Finally finished the seabunny miniboss with some animation tweaks! Fixed an issue where pressing enter to finish a dialogue would restart the dialogue, trapping you in an infinite loop… 😵💫 Added the title screen + opening (created by @kimeowsu !)"}, {"post_id": 28421, "ts": "2026-07-14T17:35:17Z", "hours": 8.9475, "text": "Almost done with the seabunny miniboss!! but then I realized I had to fix the camera movement to stay still during the miniboss (actually @Jewelia ended up doing that because I couldn’t figure it out ), edit all of the seabunny animations because switching animations caused the seabunny to start floating , make the exit of the room higher so that the player can’t escape without actually finishing the miniboss , make the climbable vine sprite longer so the player can actually reach that exit when it’s time, fix issues in the player’s movement code (which have been there the whole time…😅), implement the quest system we made so that the game keeps track of when you’ve beaten the miniboss and when to play which cutscene, make the ending cutscene, make the world 1 end screen (which doesn’t work yet oops), uhhh But that didn’t take too long… So yeah we’re almost done with the seabunny miniboss! Anyway, I also added another short cutscene at the beginning of the game, began working on my secret room , and finally organized all of the game files into folders! (I also renamed my project folder… which created a new project in Hackatime… but I didn’t realize and thought I lost my hours and made it so that I could never get hours on Stardance ever again… but actually I just had to add the new Hackatime project to Stardance and I was just stupid and everything’s fine )"}, {"post_id": 26094, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:57:43Z", "hours": 7.7283, "text": "We’re continuing to tweak things and add the final additions to our game! Including: A room full of vines 🪴 A plant shop 🌷 A geyser shortcut that shoots the player up! 🌊 A gate that opens when you click on it 🖱️ And more!"}, {"post_id": 20415, "ts": "2026-07-02T00:36:24Z", "hours": 8.0689, "text": "I keep forgetting to post devlogs… We’ve been continuing to add more rooms, such as this long coral room. (Unfortunately, the tube coral sprites are a little broken right now and look like they are on the ceiling… ) Now there’s only 2 rooms left to add for world 1!! 🎉 🎉 We also worked on finishing up the sea bunny miniboss (still not working right now) and making cutscene animations like this one in the boba room ⬇️. They’re actually so silly and fun to make 😆 so you better watch the video (if you want to) As always, @kimeowsu made the art, and @Jewelia added plenty of new updates too!"}, {"post_id": 18476, "ts": "2026-06-29T17:15:26Z", "hours": 7.2158, "text": "Fish minigame ! 🐟 We created a minigame where you collect fish within a time limit to get coins! You have to be careful, though, because if you get too close, you can get hit by them. @Jewelia also started making a menu to show the controls and inventory. Additionally, we’re continuing to add new rooms and dialogue scenes!"}, {"post_id": 17352, "ts": "2026-06-28T03:07:24Z", "hours": 6.3483, "text": "New Rooms !! Sorry it’s been a while… @Jewelia , @kimeowsu , and I have been adding a lot of new rooms to the underwater section of the game, like this submarine workshop and this cave room! We also added screen transitions and a way to enter and exit buildings. Now, we are beginning to add in the dialogue! The first world of our game may be done very, very soon! (Maybe even soon enough for a free sticker? ) Until next time!"}, {"post_id": 12273, "ts": "2026-06-20T01:11:20Z", "hours": 5.1033, "text": "WORDS !! 🗣️ @Jewelia and I started making the dialogue system! The only issue is that the font is blurry. I thought I fixed it… but no… 😔 Maybe it will work better with a more pixelated font. 🤔 Actually I think half of the time I spent was just importing sprites 😅 @kimeowsu has been doing a ton of pixel art! 🔥🔥🔥We also added a big jellyfish! kimeowsu says it’s based on the Sea Nettle :0 Anyway sorry the video is so chaotic 👻😆"}, {"post_id": 10958, "ts": "2026-06-17T23:33:57Z", "hours": 3.5786, "text": "New Room!! 📦📦📦✨ @kimeowsu brought us some lovely art for this box room! There’s a big jellyfish at the top that hurts you if you go near… We also added a parallax effect, so the different layers of the background move at different speeds! (It’s most noticeable in the rocks at the top.) Don’t ask what the bomb does…"}, {"post_id": 6867, "ts": "2026-06-11T14:54:12Z", "hours": 1.5281, "text": "Flashlight system!! ✨ We added darkness and a flashlight system, which will be used in certain rooms of the game! (and the code for this worked first try?!? OK more like second try but still 🤯) Right now the flashlight can follow where your mouse pointer is! Also, @Jewelia did some magic and fixed the camera so it looks great now! 😄"}, {"post_id": 5969, "ts": "2026-06-10T00:25:20Z", "hours": 4.1497, "text": "WE HAVE ART!! 🥳 @kimeowsu helped make some amazing art for the game! Doesn’t it look great? Aside from that, @Jewelia and I added a health and hitbox system. She also added walls and floors. Now we need to adjust the camera because, well, the game isn’t fully on screen. 😅"}, {"post_id": 1621, "ts": "2026-06-03T19:12:23Z", "hours": 2.9072, "text": "I’m making an adventure game with an underwater area! 🌊🐟🦀🪸🐈🐳😄🆒😆👾‼️‼️Ok sorry for all the emojis 😔 Anyway I made a tube coral that pulls the player down when they swim above it! @Jewelia helped make it so that they turn on and off every two seconds using a timer! (Her hours are logged separately) It works now except for some reason the coral in the middle doesn’t want to cooperate!! It turns on at a different time then the others for some reason and doesn’t pull the player when it’s supposed to! IDK why this is happening they should all be the same Once we figure out how to fix that, the next step is to make it so that if you get pulled too close to the bottom, you take damage. and at some point add the art graphics!"}]...
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Title: Boba Cats! by @grassyd | Stardance
Devlogs Title: Boba Cats! by @grassyd | Stardance
Devlogs:
I’m making an adventure game with an underwater area! 🌊🐟🦀🪸🐈🐳😄🆒😆👾‼️‼️Ok sorry for all the emojis 😔 Anyway I made a tube coral that pulls the player down when they swim above it! @Jewelia helped make it so that they turn on and off every two seconds using a timer! (Her hours are logged separately) It works now except for some reason the coral in the middle doesn’t want to cooperate!! It turns on at a different time then the others for some reason and doesn’t pull the player when it’s supposed to! IDK why this is happening they should all be the same Once we figure out how to fix that, the next step is to make it so that if you get pulled too close to the bottom, you take damage. and at some point add the art graphics!
WE HAVE ART!! 🥳 @kimeowsu helped make some amazing art for the game! Doesn’t it look great? Aside from that, @Jewelia and I added a health and hitbox system. She also added walls and floors. Now we need to adjust the camera because, well, the game isn’t fully on screen. 😅
Flashlight system!! ✨ We added darkness and a flashlight system, which will be used in certain rooms of the game! (and the code for this worked first try?!? OK more like second try but still 🤯) Right now the flashlight can follow where your mouse pointer is! Also, @Jewelia did some magic and fixed the camera so it looks great now! 😄
New Room!! 📦📦📦✨ @kimeowsu brought us some lovely art for this box room! There’s a big jellyfish at the top that hurts you if you go near… We also added a parallax effect, so the different layers of the background move at different speeds! (It’s most noticeable in the rocks at the top.) Don’t ask what the bomb does…
WORDS !! 🗣️ @Jewelia and I started making the dialogue system! The only issue is that the font is blurry. I thought I fixed it… but no… 😔 Maybe it will work better with a more pixelated font. 🤔 Actually I think half of the time I spent was just importing sprites 😅 @kimeowsu has been doing a ton of pixel art! 🔥🔥🔥We also added a big jellyfish! kimeowsu says it’s based on the Sea Nettle :0 Anyway sorry the video is so chaotic 👻😆
New Rooms !! Sorry it’s been a while… @Jewelia , @kimeowsu , and I have been adding a lot of new rooms to the underwater section of the game, like this submarine workshop and this cave room! We also added screen transitions and a way to enter and exit buildings. Now, we are beginning to add in the dialogue! The first world of our game may be done very, very soon! (Maybe even soon enough for a free sticker? ) Until next time!
Fish minigame ! 🐟 We created a minigame where you collect fish within a time limit to get coins! You have to be careful, though, because if you get too close, you can get hit by them. @Jewelia also started making a menu to show the controls and inventory. Additionally, we’re continuing to add new rooms and dialogue scenes!
I keep forgetting to post devlogs… We’ve been continuing to add more rooms, such as this long coral room. (Unfortunately, the tube coral sprites are a little broken right now and look like they are on the ceiling… ) Now there’s only 2 rooms left to add for world 1!! 🎉 🎉 We also worked on finishing up the sea bunny miniboss (still not working right now) and making cutscene animations like this one in the boba room ⬇️. They’re actually so silly and fun to make 😆 so you better watch the video (if you want to) As always, @kimeowsu made the art, and @Jewelia added plenty of new updates too!
We’re continuing to tweak things and add the final additions to our game! Including: A room full of vines 🪴 A plant shop 🌷 A geyser shortcut that shoots the player up! 🌊 A gate that opens when you click on it 🖱️ And more!
Almost done with the seabunny miniboss!! but then I realized I had to fix the camera movement to stay still during the miniboss (actually @Jewelia ended up doing that because I couldn’t figure it out ), edit all of the seabunny animations because switching animations caused the seabunny to start floating , make the exit of the room higher so that the player can’t escape without actually finishing the miniboss , make the climbable vine sprite longer so the player can actually reach that exit when it’s time, fix issues in the player’s movement code (which have been there the whole time…😅), implement the quest system we made so that the game keeps track of when you’ve beaten the miniboss and when to play which cutscene, make the ending cutscene, make the world 1 end screen (which doesn’t work yet oops), uhhh But that didn’t take too long… So yeah we’re almost done with the seabunny miniboss! Anyway, I also added another short cutscene at the beginning of the game, began working on my secret room , and finally organized all of the game files into folders! (I also renamed my project folder… which created a new project in Hackatime… but I didn’t realize and thought I lost my hours and made it so that I could never get hours on Stardance ever again… but actually I just had to add the new Hackatime project to Stardance and I was just stupid and everything’s fine )
Game Update #I didn’t count! I finished my secret room! (but you don’t get to see it here because it’s secret… 😼) Coded the plant shop with @Jewelia ! Finally finished the seabunny miniboss with some animation tweaks! Fixed an issue where pressing enter to finish a dialogue would restart the dialogue, trapping you in an infinite loop… 😵💫 Added the title screen + opening (created by @kimeowsu !)
You can go backwards now… ( !) [Game update] I added stuff like this conveniently left behind ladder so you can actually go back to the previous rooms after finishing the seabunny miniboss I finished the last cutscene in the area! @kimeowsu helped add some more decorative vines in some of the areas I made collectable coins! You can’t see your number of coins collected yet so you’re just gonna have to trust me they’re getting collected
spinny item animation thing! [Game update] I made this animation that plays whenever you get an item! Some other small additions: 🦪 Pearls are new! They will be hidden in a couple places and will be able to be gifted to the townspeople in exchange for stories ✨ Added sparkles to the miniboss arena to better show where to go 🪸 Tube coral now teleport you back to the beginning of the room if you get hit 🗃️ Organized scene files into folders Since this project has gotten more attention recently, thank you for the support!!!! @Jewelia and I hope to have a ship ready soon…
Sound Effects!! 🔊 [Game update] Our game has sound effects now! @kimeowsu actually got sound effects from the website aidn.jp/dotvoice by daniwell ! The sound effects are quite minimal so it sounds quite empty for now… we will have original music eventually from a friend , but good things take time 😋 I also fixed some bugs (mostly ones I caused myself 😅) and added a quit button (as cool as Boba Cats! is, I don’t think anyone wants to play it forever and ever and ever) As @Jewelia said in her post, we are hoping to ship this week!! World 1 will be completely playable!! 🎉🥳🎊 In the future, we may have another ship just to include the music and any fixes and extra touches Thanks for reading!! :D
Playtesting!! EDIT: the ship is shipping!! It is currently pending review!! It may take a few days to show up because I forgot you have to get it reviewed!! 😅😅😅🆒 _ @kimeowsu spent some time playtesting our game! She’s quite good at finding issues 😅 As per usual, the seabunny had a lot of issues >:/ …but they should be fixed now! _ Some of the stuff we fixed include: ⛸️ Player doesn’t slide away during a conversation anymore Seabunny no longer freezes the game ➡️⬅️ Seabunny no longer occasionally moves backwards Player is no longer able to collect the same coin over and over again 🖼️ Visual fixes (ex. one of the cats no longer has only half of a helmet) 🌟 And many more miscellaneous tweaks! I know I said that we would ship earlier… but I think this time we are actually going to ship in the next 24 hours… for real… probably… 🎉 🥳 🎈 🆒
Hello hello! Thank you so much for all the support and feedback on our game!! It really means a lot! And huge thank you Stardance team for the Super Star!!?! 🤯🤯🤯 I’m so grateful for this program, it’s been awesome 💖 Sorry it’s been a while since the last update… 😔 (though if you’ve never seen me before I guess you wouldn’t know lol…) We took quite a break now that we’re all starting school and are busy with other things too . However, we still hope to do one more ship with a more complete version of this world of the game! So what is next? 🎵 Music!! - This is probably the biggest thing we’ve been wanting to add, so music is in the works! We are also thinking of adding more sound effects and improving the sound design overall! 🎮 Gameplay improvements - We are working to tweak some things based on our ideas and the wonderful feedback we gotten! For example, some parts are kind of confusing to navigate at the moment 😅, so we hope to make it more clear! 🌐 Web version? - We’ve been wanting to make the game playable on the web! I’m not sure how possible this is since Godot 4 does not officially support exporting C# projects to web yet… but we’ll see what we can do! 👍 And whatever other miscellaneous additions we decide to add! Thanks for reading!! (p.s. I finally put a linux version of the demo on the game’s itch.io page sorry it took so long 😭)
Ships:
Check out @Jewelia ’s version of the project here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/1894 Boba Cats! is a 2D adventure platformer game about, well, boba and cats! It was made with @Jewelia and @kimeowsu ! The first world of the game is fully playable! Music and extra touches will be added in the future! You can play the game on the itch app for Windows, Mac, or Linux, or you can directly download the game for Windows! (This is a collaborative project! @Jewelia ’s project links to the same thing; it’s up to you if you want to rate hers or mine or both)...
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NaOs by @Phonemi | Stardance
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Phonemi
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-09T20:49:35Z", "hours": 80.0, "multiplier": 19.49, "payout": 1568, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "NaOS [+_+] NaOS is short for Not an Operating System (it’s cool because Naos is also one of the hottest and most luminous stars you can see with the naked eye) in my project i tried to make the WebOS feel like a normal os that you can daily drive, that’s why there is no fancy feature that just advertises my os (makes no sense if you want something usable) all the features of my os: a bar (clock, launcher, applications, shutdown menu, sound and workspaces) sound effects (some of them are self recorded) a calendar (next to it is the notification overview) notifications app launcher (you can also change settings from the launcher, you have to type > for that) – widgets (you can code infinite ones, but if you don’t there are 2): todo widget (a todo list, you can add counters for things like hours of sleep or drink water, or normal check marks) clock (just a normal clock) – applications (also infinite if you code, but if not there are 12): terminal (34 commands, its own filesystem, nano for editing) files (to browse the virtual filesystem) code (text editor, saves to the filesystem or downloads, you can also compile your code (like 30 programming languages) and interpret it too, clone from github, and if you name a file .window or .widget it becomes an application or a widget (they are html files)) browser (web search, image search, page proxy, downloads into the filesystem. info: youtube is not working, the rest should be fine. you can use google (or bing if you want, but nobody wants to use bing anyway)) paint (draw on a canvas, save into the filesystem or download) viewer (look at wallpapers and anything you drew or downloaded, set any as background) monitor (btop style, real load and fps graphs, memory, filesystem stats, open windows) calculator (just a calculator) snake (it’s snake, not much) settings (change your config, kinda useless because you can do all of it better in my config files) config files pets (easter egg + new AI, you can click to pet them, they won’t leave the white glow) – the stuff that makes it feel like a real wm: 3 window manager layouts: normal (floating windows you drag and resize), hyprland (dwindle tiling, every new window splits the focused one) and niri (scrollable columns) — switch in settings, the terminal or with a keybind 4 workspaces you can switch between and throw windows across, plus an overview windows snap to the edges and you can open multiple instances of the same app a lock screen boot and shutdown animations break reminders (look away from the screen) and drink reminders keybinds dark and light mode self drawn icons very clean closing, hiding and fullscreen animations and it does not run on vercel, it runs on my school’s kubernetes cluster hope you like it [-_-]", "repo": "https://github.com/Phonokles/NaOS", "demo": "https://buyers-russia-investigation-expires.trycloudflare.com/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-17T21:37:17Z", "hours": 16.0, "multiplier": 10.17, "payout": 162, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This WebOS was made to improve real life. It’s really comfortable and has cool colors, fonts, etc. It has apps: calc, folders, code, terminal, snake, todo, and settings - all resizable and movable. There are pets on your bar. There are WMs (Window Managers), fully movable and resizable widgets (clock and todo), workspaces, and overviews (the overview depends on the WM). There’s a top bar with shutdown, a calendar, and the workspaces. Popups remind you to drink. New features for WebOS2, missions are: the WMs the movable and resizable widgets (including the clock widget) desktop overview (2 different variants) a RAM file system new terminal commands Snake game popups (the drink one)", "repo": "https://github.com/Phonokles/NaOS", "demo": "https://buyers-russia-investigation-expires.trycloudflare.com/"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-07-01T13:30:16Z", "hours": 20.0, "multiplier": null, "payout": 0, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Get a life WebOS: It’s a web OS which runs smooth and clean its made to make your life a better one (but that’s contradictory, because you’re a loser(Programmer)) but there is a widget which helps you to do your daily to do’s there is a calc(calc is slang for calculator btw), a calendar, terminal and a settings app. You can click on the icons on the Taskbar to open the applications. On the top bar there is a clock and the date if you click on them a calendar pops up which is not draggable same if you press on the power button there is a pop up which allows you to lock, reboot and shutdown the OS On the bar there are animals but don’t put more than 4 on it or something terrible is going to happen. There is an Akita, a Panda and a Fox which only move on the taskbar which follows your cursor. On the top right you can find numbers. They indicate the workspace you’re currently on and if you press on a other number which is not marked, you switch to the workspace. Hope you all like it!", "repo": "https://github.com/Phonokles/NaOS", "demo": "https://buyers-russia-investigation-expires.trycloudflare.com/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 43505, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 43505, "ts": "2026-08-08T20:29:14Z", "hours": 8.4136, "text": "last devblog[+_+] so this is the last devblog on the project and here are my last changes I rebranded from get a life WebOS to Na-Os(it is the brightest star in the northern hemisphere) and it is Not an Os i fixed a lot of bugs espacialy when it comes to compiling and searching images it now runs on my schools kubernetes cluster instead of vercel because i used all my vercel limits and i will put a custom sub domain on it tomorow to and it uses a cloud flare tunnel so it was a fun journee never thought that i am gona work over a 100h on this project but yea and i think i did a great job at trying to make it work just like a normal os hope you like it and if you like the project my other ones are cool to so take a look at those[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 41852, "ts": "2026-08-06T10:12:56Z", "hours": 8.2286, "text": "infinite apps backgrounds and widgets[+_+] so i made if you name a html file .window i will pop up as a window and work as a app and also get displayed in the search and if you name a html file .widget it becoes a fully functionale widget also displayed in the settings you can also download images now through the browser so there is a image option and you can download images there and also you can now download files generaly though the browser and you can now clone project from github and also commit through my webos hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 39408, "ts": "2026-08-02T11:03:39Z", "hours": 8.1969, "text": "extreme ui changes[+_+] new launcher look aplications reworked: (code, files, paint, browser) icons now work great because i converted them to pngs you can change bar position (no fox and widget bugs) you can change bar and window transparincy new top window design a bit cleaner and a new settings menu plus settings icon browser and todo ando overview bug fixes and redisign hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 39109, "ts": "2026-08-01T20:21:45Z", "hours": 5.2419, "text": "the interpreter is working yay[+_+] so this interpreter finaly works front end and you can now execute most py programms i will need to do some things to help you to execute all programm but for that i ned to host this project on a local server so i will do that in the future but not now hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 38698, "ts": "2026-08-01T06:53:16Z", "hours": 9.0414, "text": "so i added a compiler to my webos[+_+] in my webos your are now able to execute any file tha you created in the code editor or the ones who sit on your virtual file system they perfectly run in the terminal without any problems to execute them just press the run button or execute the comand it was a bit complicated but a lot of fun hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 37671, "ts": "2026-07-30T15:52:02Z", "hours": 2.265, "text": "you can now execute html files in the browser that was pretty easy so you can create a html file with your folder app or with the code app and execute it. it works great and without any problems hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 37592, "ts": "2026-07-30T12:57:00Z", "hours": 4.3206, "text": "i think the browser is finished[+_+] the browser can now search the web its not the best search but i am happy with it you can open most websites youtube doas not work but if you have a playing tab so a vid which is not directly in youtube it works some other websites block you to but most of them work (i am so happy i am finished with that shit i had so many burnouts) hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 37369, "ts": "2026-07-30T01:14:43Z", "hours": 4.5939, "text": "Browser is kinda working you can now open most websites unfotunatly not youtube or search engins like bing or duck duck they block you because vercel is a data center i am working on the fix for that but its working great and is preaty cool sry if my code is not the best and also my time (i didnt sleep for 2 days to code) so i will tr to if x it in this night and then rest a bit hope you like it"}, {"post_id": 36870, "ts": "2026-07-29T06:53:16Z", "hours": 6.7442, "text": "i added a Browser(but its shitti like most online browsers)[+_+] i added a browser with wiki search and you can open wikipedia articles unfortunatly nothing else i am workin on that right now i needed a bit longer because i worked through the night and was realy tiered hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 36642, "ts": "2026-07-28T21:10:39Z", "hours": 4.7825, "text": "i added icons and sound effects and a new animal bot with new fetures[+_+] so there are icons right now they are a bit buggy but i will fix that there are sound effects which are realy bad but hope thats ok and a sound settings menu and a slider the animals dont overlap that often animore and you can pet them and in the end i fixed the ram bug in the drawing app earlyer when you risized your window it wouldonly load evrthing you see in the ram but thats fixed now hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 35993, "ts": "2026-07-27T19:55:23Z", "hours": 3.6594, "text": "cool closing hiding and fullscreen animation [+_+] its hard to explain just watch the video hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 35844, "ts": "2026-07-27T15:21:40Z", "hours": 5.9306, "text": "So now new changes are online (design rework)[+_+] the launcher looks acceptable now you can see it in a picture below the drawing app looks prety good now to and there is a galary took some insperations from procreate for the layout there is no top bar anymore i thought it was anoying to have 2 bars and it looks better know only 3 apps displayed and if you open a app it doas get displayed you can hover over them to see the windows i removed no fetures there is no welcome screen anymore and you boot directly but there is a welcome app which is prety clean i am working right now on better closing hiding and fulscreen animation, bug fixes, that you can pet pets, a browser where you can download pngs, executable programs and a rework for the pet death easter egg, and sound effects. hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 35482, "ts": "2026-07-26T23:05:57Z", "hours": 9.0283, "text": "3 new apps key binds and launcher but all in beta[+_+] so i made 3 new apps paint: where you can paint in and save the image in the ram filesystem or localy but i am still woking on it imageviewer: shows all the image on your desktop and you can also put anything as your background now btop: a fake system where you can see what needs how much power etc mostly fake and random values i added keybinds so you can open up epplicaions per keybinds and do other cool stuff i also added a launcher but its realy ugly so i am working on a 3 redisign but everthing is a bit ugg thats why you cant try out the new fetures sry even though i hope you like it"}, {"post_id": 30090, "ts": "2026-07-17T12:04:52Z", "hours": 4.0786, "text": "i added a desktop overview and a snake game[+_+] i added a desktop overview diferent depending on your wm in hyprland and desktop you have the basic windows 11 overview i think or macos idk and if you chose niri you have the niri desktop overview wich expandes in 2 dimensions and there is a super dupper cool snake game which absulutly works totaly fine. idk know why but my ram file system broke like 1000 times so i fixed that to hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 28967, "ts": "2026-07-15T16:16:02Z", "hours": 3.3625, "text": "I added window tiling Managers[+_+] so now there are window tiling manager there is the default (but that is boring)and there is hyprland and niri i dont want to describe them so just watch the video or google it hope u like it [-_-]"}, {"post_id": 28472, "ts": "2026-07-14T18:40:40Z", "hours": 5.9744, "text": "NEW WIDGET AND A FILE SYSTEM[+_+] i added a clock widget with also a liquid glass lok and a supper cool file system that work just like on a normal pc but only on ram you can also resize the widget hope you like it[-_-]"}, {"post_id": 27799, "ts": "2026-07-13T17:51:33Z", "hours": 0.5594, "text": "i changed the color theme a it it looks a lot better"}, {"post_id": 26092, "ts": "2026-07-10T17:56:26Z", "hours": 2.0528, "text": "i added a drink notifiation thee will be more in the future"}, {"post_id": 19471, "ts": "2026-06-30T20:03:23Z", "hours": 1.9661, "text": "I added a lot of things (I don’t know why, but Hackatime didn’t work properly, so it only shows 2 hours. I actually worked around 4–5 hours).There are now multiple pets, a to-do list, a terminal, a code editor, a calculator, and a to-do widget.I also added a little easter egg: if you put more than 4 animals in there, they’ll explode. (I’m still working on the crashout page after that, as well as voice acting and sound effects in general.)There are workspaces now too. Hope you like it!"}, {"post_id": 19171, "ts": "2026-06-30T13:00:15Z", "hours": 2.3544, "text": "I changed a few things, made the calendar a bit shorter, and also added a settings app where you can change background images and switch between light and dark mode. I also added a few new SVGs (grabbed online)."}, {"post_id": 17737, "ts": "2026-06-28T17:33:28Z", "hours": 3.3497, "text": "i added a button on the top bar where you can lock shutdown and reboot with cool animation(i am proud of the lock on sry for the bad quality my laptop is broken so i have to use the old Budget ubuntu laptop of my father)"}, {"post_id": 17488, "ts": "2026-06-28T09:15:18Z", "hours": 2.0619, "text": "now there is a top bar with time and a calendar. i will be focusing on more pets and some calender applications and widgets"}, {"post_id": 17191, "ts": "2026-06-27T22:01:38Z", "hours": 2.7978, "text": "This time i made a boot screen with a checklist of things loading, as well as the rough desktop, for which i added a wallpaper and the fox from the welcome page. That’s all for this devlog, hope you like it, see you next time!"}, {"post_id": 17008, "ts": "2026-06-27T16:34:05Z", "hours": 5.7586, "text": "For the welcome screen, I added a cute little fox and made a button about me, which I made a little bit cleaner since it was somewhat ugly before. I took the fox animations from the VS-Pets vscode extension, but I coded functions myself. For example I made it so that the fox starts moving on its own after 5 seconds of inactivity and it always stays on the green platform which follows the mouse cursor. It also always has a chance to start running and a chance to lie down. The next devlog will be about a boot screen and a desktop. Hope you guys like it!"}, {"post_id": 12080, "ts": "2026-06-19T18:30:34Z", "hours": 1.9469, "text": "i added a welcome screen"}]...
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Title: NaOs by @Phonemi | Stardance
Devlogs:
i ad Title: NaOs by @Phonemi | Stardance
Devlogs:
i added a welcome screen
For the welcome screen, I added a cute little fox and made a button about me, which I made a little bit cleaner since it was somewhat ugly before. I took the fox animations from the VS-Pets vscode extension, but I coded functions myself. For example I made it so that the fox starts moving on its own after 5 seconds of inactivity and it always stays on the green platform which follows the mouse cursor. It also always has a chance to start running and a chance to lie down. The next devlog will be about a boot screen and a desktop. Hope you guys like it!
This time i made a boot screen with a checklist of things loading, as well as the rough desktop, for which i added a wallpaper and the fox from the welcome page. That’s all for this devlog, hope you like it, see you next time!
now there is a top bar with time and a calendar. i will be focusing on more pets and some calender applications and widgets
i added a button on the top bar where you can lock shutdown and reboot with cool animation(i am proud of the lock on sry for the bad quality my laptop is broken so i have to use the old Budget ubuntu laptop of my father)
I changed a few things, made the calendar a bit shorter, and also added a settings app where you can change background images and switch between light and dark mode. I also added a few new SVGs (grabbed online).
I added a lot of things (I don’t know why, but Hackatime didn’t work properly, so it only shows 2 hours. I actually worked around 4–5 hours).There are now multiple pets, a to-do list, a terminal, a code editor, a calculator, and a to-do widget.I also added a little easter egg: if you put more than 4 animals in there, they’ll explode. (I’m still working on the crashout page after that, as well as voice acting and sound effects in general.)There are workspaces now too. Hope you like it!
i added a drink notifiation thee will be more in the future
i changed the color theme a it it looks a lot better
NEW WIDGET AND A FILE SYSTEM[+_+] i added a clock widget with also a liquid glass lok and a supper cool file system that work just like on a normal pc but only on ram you can also resize the widget hope you like it[-_-]
I added window tiling Managers[+_+] so now there are window tiling manager there is the default (but that is boring)and there is hyprland and niri i dont want to describe them so just watch the video or google it hope u like it [-_-]
i added a desktop overview and a snake game[+_+] i added a desktop overview diferent depending on your wm in hyprland and desktop you have the basic windows 11 overview i think or macos idk and if you chose niri you have the niri desktop overview wich expandes in 2 dimensions and there is a super dupper cool snake game which absulutly works totaly fine. idk know why but my ram file system broke like 1000 times so i fixed that to hope you like it[-_-]
3 new apps key binds and launcher but all in beta[+_+] so i made 3 new apps paint: where you can paint in and save the image in the ram filesystem or localy but i am still woking on it imageviewer: shows all the image on your desktop and you can also put anything as your background now btop: a fake system where you can see what needs how much power etc mostly fake and random values i added keybinds so you can open up epplicaions per keybinds and do other cool stuff i also added a launcher but its realy ugly so i am working on a 3 redisign but everthing is a bit ugg thats why you cant try out the new fetures sry even though i hope you like it
So now new changes are online (design rework)[+_+] the launcher looks acceptable now you can see it in a picture below the drawing app looks prety good now to and there is a galary took some insperations from procreate for the layout there is no top bar anymore i thought it was anoying to have 2 bars and it looks better know only 3 apps displayed and if you open a app it doas get displayed you can hover over them to see the windows i removed no fetures there is no welcome screen anymore and you boot directly but there is a welcome app which is prety clean i am working right now on better closing hiding and fulscreen animation, bug fixes, that you can pet pets, a browser where you can download pngs, executable programs and a rework for the pet death easter egg, and sound effects. hope you like it[-_-]
cool closing hiding and fullscreen animation [+_+] its hard to explain just watch the video hope you like it[-_-]
i added icons and sound effects and a new animal bot with new fetures[+_+] so there are icons right now they are a bit buggy but i will fix that there are sound effects which are realy bad but hope thats ok and a sound settings menu and a slider the animals dont overlap that often animore and you can pet them and in the end i fixed the ram bug in the drawing app earlyer when you risized your window it wouldonly load evrthing you see in the ram but thats fixed now hope you like it[-_-]
i added a Browser(but its shitti like most online browsers)[+_+] i added a browser with wiki search and you can open wikipedia articles unfortunatly nothing else i am workin on that right now i needed a bit longer because i worked through the night and was realy tiered hope you like it[-_-]
Browser is kinda working you can now open most websites unfotunatly not youtube or search engins like bing or duck duck they block you because vercel is a data center i am working on the fix for that but its working great and is preaty cool sry if my code is not the best and also my time (i didnt sleep for 2 days to code) so i will tr to if x it in this night and then rest a bit hope you like it
i think the browser is finished[+_+] the browser can now search the web its not the best search but i am happy with it you can open most websites youtube doas not work but if you have a playing tab so a vid which is not directly in youtube it works some other websites block you to but most of them work (i am so happy i am finished with that shit i had so many burnouts) hope you like it[-_-]
you can now execute html files in the browser that was pretty easy so you can create a html file with your folder app or with the code app and execute it. it works great and without any problems hope you like it[-_-]
so i added a compiler to my webos[+_+] in my webos your are now able to execute any file tha you created in the code editor or the ones who sit on your virtual file system they perfectly run in the terminal without any problems to execute them just press the run button or execute the comand it was a bit complicated but a lot of fun hope you like it[-_-]
the interpreter is working yay[+_+] so this interpreter finaly works front end and you can now execute most py programms i will need to do some things to help you to execute all programm but for that i ned to host this project on a local server so i will do that in the future but not now hope you like it[-_-]
extreme ui changes[+_+] new launcher look aplications reworked: (code, files, paint, browser) icons now work great because i converted them to pngs you can change bar position (no fox and widget bugs) you can change bar and window transparincy new top window design a bit cleaner and a new settings menu plus settings icon browser and todo ando overview bug fixes and redisign hope you like it[-_-]
infinite apps backgrounds and widgets[+_+] so i made if you name a html file .window i will pop up as a window and work as a app and also get displayed in the search and if you name a html file .widget it becoes a fully functionale widget also displayed in the settings you can also download images now through the browser so there is a image option and you can download images there and also you can now download files generaly though the browser and you can now clone project from github and also commit through my webos hope you like it[-_-]
last devblog[+_+] so this is the last devblog on the project and here are my last changes I rebranded from get a life WebOS to Na-Os(it is the brightest star in the northern hemisphere) and it is Not an Os i fixed a lot of bugs espacialy when it comes to compiling and searching images it now runs on my schools kubernetes cluster instead of vercel because i used all my vercel limits and i will put a custom sub domain on it tomorow to and it uses a cloud flare tunnel so it was a fun journee never thought that i am gona work over a 100h on this project but yea and i think i did a great job at trying to make it work just like a normal os hope you like it and if you like the project my other ones are cool to so take a look at those[-_-]
Ships:
Get a life WebOS: It’s a web OS which runs smooth and clean its made to make your life a better one (but that’s contradictory, because you’re a loser(Programmer)) but there is a widget which helps you to do your daily to do’s there is a calc(calc is slang for calculator btw), a calendar, terminal and a settings app. You can click on the icons on the Taskbar to open the applications. On the top bar there is a clock and the date if you click on them a calendar pops up which is not draggable same if you press on the power button there is a pop up which allows you to lock, reboot and shutdown the OS On the bar there are animals but don’t put more than 4 on it or something terrible is going to happen. There is an Akita, a Panda and a Fox which only move on the taskbar which follows your cursor. On the top right you can find numbers. They indicate the workspace you’re currently on and if you press on a other number which is not marked, you switch to the workspace. Hope you all like it!
This WebOS was made to improve real life. It’s really comfortable and has cool colors, fonts, etc. It has apps: calc, folders, code, terminal, snake, todo, and settings - all resizable and movable. There are pets on your bar. There are WMs (Window Managers), fully movable and resizable widgets (clock and todo), workspaces, and overviews (the overview depends on the WM). There’s a top bar with shutdown, a calendar, and the workspaces. Popups remind you to drink. New features for WebOS2, missions are: the WMs the movable and resizable widgets (including the clock widget) desktop overview (2 different variants) a RAM file system new terminal commands Snake game popups (the drink one)
NaOS [+_+] NaOS is short for Not an Operating System (it’s cool because Naos is also one of the hottest and most luminous stars you can see with the naked eye) in my project i tried to make the WebOS feel like a normal os that you can daily drive, that’s why there is no fancy feature that just advertises my os (makes no sense if you want something usable) all the features of my os: a bar (clock, launcher, applications, shutdown menu, sound and workspaces) sound effects (some of them are self recorded) a calendar (next to it is the notification overview) notifications app launcher (you can also change settings from the launcher, you have to type > for that) – widgets (you can code infinite ones, but if you don’t there are 2): todo widget (a todo list, you can add counters for things like hours of sleep or drink water, or normal check marks) clock (just a normal clock) – applications (also infinite if you code, but if not there are 12): terminal (34 commands, its own filesystem, nano for editing) files (to browse the virtual filesystem) code (text editor, saves to the filesystem or downloads, you can also compile your code (like 30 programming languages) and interpret it too, clone from github, and if you name a file .window or .widget it becomes an application or a widget (they are html files)) browser (web search, image search, page proxy, downloads into the filesystem. info: youtube is not working, the rest should be fine. you can use google (or bing if you want, but nobody wants to use bing anyway)) paint (draw on a canvas, save into the filesystem or download) viewer (look at wallpapers and anything you drew or downloaded, set any as background) monitor (btop style, real load and fps graphs, memory, filesystem stats, open windows) calculator (just a calculator) snake (it’s snake, not much) settings (change your config, kinda useless because you can do all of it better in my config files) config files pets (easter egg + new AI, you can click to pet them, they won’t leave the white glow) – the stuff that makes it feel like a real wm: 3 window manager layouts: normal (floating windows you drag and resize), hyprland (dwindle tiling, every new window splits the focused one) and niri (scrollable columns) — switch in settings, the terminal or with a keybind 4 workspaces you can switch between and throw windows across, plus an overview windows snap to the edges and you can open multiple instances of the same app a lock screen boot and shutdown animations break reminders (look away from the screen) and drink reminders keybinds dark and light mode self drawn icons very clean closing, hiding and fullscreen animations and it does not run on vercel, it runs on my school’s kubernetes cluster hope you like it [-_-]...
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Hackfetch by @xerneas | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-22T11:04:00Z", "hours": 63.0, "multiplier": 19.6, "payout": 1381, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "HACKFETCH V2.0 it’s been a few weeks since ship #1 and hackfetch is a completely different tool now. faster, smaller, quieter, actually correct, and now lives in places besides your terminal window. v2.0.0 is out. what changed: fits in your tmux status bar with one line of config. same story for lualine. hackfetch -status prints a compact one-liner meant to be shelled out to every minute. fits everywhere else too. now on the AUR (yay -S hackfetch-bin) alongside the existing brew tap, curl installer, powershell installer, and go install. seven install channels total. runs in ~20ms on repeat calls thanks to an on-disk cache. tmux polling every minute is basically free now. was ~700ms cold before. runs in ~0.7s cold thanks to a parallel API fetch. was ~1.7s before. shows a smooth truecolor gradient on any modern terminal. auto-detects $COLORTERM. falls back to 256-color on older ones. -doctor walks a colored checklist of your setup and tells you exactly what’s broken. green if fine, orange if not, non-zero exit if you wanna script it. new pizza logo because hack club runs on pizza. seven logos total. streak is finally correct after silently saying “1 day” for a month. /summaries is gone from hackatime so hackfetch now reconstructs streak from every coding session in your history via /heartbeats/spans. real streak: 9 days for me right now. 7-day sparkline baked into the fetch (with -v) and available as -status –sparkline for the tmux bar. default fetch got leaner. slack handle, machines count, and the sparkline moved behind -v so the normal fetch stays focused on hours + project + language. loading spinner on the api fetch so you know something is happening. and then the cache made it show up almost never. one install: Linux / Mac: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Windows: irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.ps1 | iex Arch family: yay -S hackfetch-bin macOS / Linuxbrew: brew install xerneas3318/tap/hackfetch For more install methods check out the github page: https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch teasing the next big thing: hackfetch -leaderboard is coming next, using the public leaderboard endpoints i found in hackatime’s routes file. compete with friends on daily and weekly hours right from your terminal. private friend groups on a hackclub nest box after that. if you try it, thanks. send me some feedback", "repo": "https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch", "demo": "https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/releases"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-07T00:01:54Z", "hours": 27.0, "multiplier": 17.78, "payout": 370, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Every fetch tool tells you your OS. Mine tells you your streak. hackfetch is a Hack Club themed terminal fetch tool. Inspired by neofetch (originally bash, now archived) and fastfetch (its C successor), written in pure Go. Instead of just showing your kernel and CPU, it pulls live stats from your Hackatime account: today’s hours, weekly total, current streak, top project, top language. Right in your terminal. Six Hack Club themed ASCII logos (including my GOAT orpheus). Fourteen color schemes (pride, trans, bi, pan included). Live watch mode that refreshes while you code. And as of today, you can export the whole thing as a PNG, JPG, or SVG card and post it anywhere. One line to install: Linux / Mac: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Windows: irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.ps1 | iex Tell me how it was! Follow and like for updates.", "repo": "https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch", "demo": "https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/releases"}]...
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[{"post_id": 39919, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 39919, "ts": "2026-08-03T07:26:53Z", "hours": 6.6894, "text": "Hackfetdch natively in your readme hackfetch -readme it spits out a markdown stats card ready to paste straight into your github profile README. pipe it into a file and commit: hackfetch -readme > stats.md this is the cool bit or drop it in your README.md between two html comments and set up a github action to run it on a schedule so it auto refreshes every day. your profile now has a live coding stats card next to your pinned repos with no cron server, no vercel deploy, no api key stashed in secrets. its literally just markdown. zero extra api calls too. the readme card reads from the same cached hackatime response the normal fetch uses so if you just ran hackfetch it takes ~20ms. the streak emoji is a lil detail i had fun with. 3+ days gets a 🔥 upgrade with brew upgrade hackfetch or yay -S hackfetch-bin (once aur maintenance wraps up) or curl the installer curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh"}, {"post_id": 39223, "ts": "2026-08-02T01:40:31Z", "hours": 7.6967, "text": "HACKFETCH BATTLES??? two features in one release. hackfetch already knows a scary amount about you (thanks hackatime) so why not turn that into more features. hackfetch vs @ someone head to head compare. give it a hackatime username and hackfetch fetches both your histories in parallel, buckets them into today / this week / all time / streak, and prints them side by side with a winner arrow on every row. accepts @name , name , or a full profile url like hackatime.hackclub.com/@name . also works positional: hackfetch vs @you . use it to settle arguments, motivate yourself, or realize your friend has coded 265 hours and you should probably close discord. hackfetch -records personal bests. computed entirely from data hackfetch already fetches (streak + sparkline already use it), so zero new api calls $ hackfetch -records ✦ personal records @you biggest day 12h 41m on 2026-07-18 longest streak 25 days ended 2026-07-01 longest session 43m on 2026-07-17 days coded 86 first day 2026-04-24 99 days ago lifetime 208h 29m the “longest streak” tracks your all time best not just your current one. and “first day” tells you how long ago you started so you can feel old. grab it brew upgrade hackfetch yay -S hackfetch-bin install curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Next devlog is gonna be a fun one, I have an idea cooking up"}, {"post_id": 38323, "ts": "2026-07-31T17:22:26Z", "hours": 9.4408, "text": "big thank you for everyone’s feedback! fresh out of the oven: hackfetch v2.1.1 (aka the reviewer bug fix pass) what got fixed: shell detection used to just read $SHELL which is your login shell. if you log in as bash but run fish, hackfetch was calling you a bash user. it now checks $FISH_VERSION / $ZSH_VERSION / $BASH_VERSION and falls back to asking the OS who your parent process actually is editor detection was two bugs in a trench coat. it wasnt stripping args so zeditor --wait showed up as “zeditor –wait” instead of “Zed”, and if you had no $EDITOR set it defaulted to nano even if you had literally never opened nano. now it strips flags, maps launcher names to human ones (zeditor -> Zed, code -> VS Code, cursor -> Cursor, hx -> Helix etc), and says “-” instead of nano if nothing is set. top project label was ambiguous. it was pulling weekly stats but the row just said “top project” so people thought it meant all time. now weekly rows read top proj 7d , top lang 7d , top ed 7d , top cat 7d . setup dialog was scaring people. it always printed “file exists but has no api_key” whenever it reached the setup flow, even if the api_key line was actually there but just failing to parse. loadConfig is now more forgiving (inline comments, quoted values, case insensitive keys) and setup tells you WHY its stuck instead of gaslighting you about your own config. also short circuits if you run hackfetch -setup when youre already set up. people said they wanted a gay flag color was already there under the name pride but that wasnt obvious. gay is now an alias so both work. grab it: brew upgrade hackfetch or yay -S hackfetch-bin or curl / powershell installer if you don’t have it yet curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh again thank you to everyone who took the time to actually run it and tell me what was broken!"}, {"post_id": 34562, "ts": "2026-07-25T12:00:09Z", "hours": 10.5769, "text": "hackfetch COLLAB?? so my last two devlogs teased two features. shipping both today. -leaderboard last devlog i said “compete with your friends on hackatime hours is coming soon.” i thought i was gonna have to build a whole nest server for it. turns out /api/v1/leaderboard/daily and /api/v1/leaderboard/weekly already exist and are public on hackatime. just a single call!! so hackfetch -leaderboard daily (or weekly) now shows the top 10: ✦ daily leaderboard Last 24 hours 🥇 1. soaphia14 11h 12m 🥈 2. AnastKara 10h 32m 🥉 3. RoSerMar 10h 6m 4. euledone 10h 5. TheShovel 10h 6. Dylhouse 9h 1m 7. Dexrn 8h 59m 8. HexFud 8h 31m 9. zeddash 8h 29m 10. Trtotomotoro 8h 26m every username is an OSC 8 clickable link to that person’s hackatime profile. modern terminals (iterm2, kitty, wezterm, alacritty, gnome-terminal) render it as an actual hyperlink you can click. terminals without OSC 8 just show the plain text so it doesnt look broken. if you’re on the board it highlights your row in orange and adds (you) next to your name. json addon the other thing. someone else competing in stardance messaged me the other day about integrating hackatime into their own project and needed help figuring out the api (YAY). helping them made me realize hackfetch is doing a bunch of work (auth, caching, streak reconstruction, per-day bucketing) that other tools would love to piggyback on. so now: $ hackfetch -json { \"version\": \"2\", \"fetched_at\": \"2026-07-25T17:00: 20.900829+05:30\", \"system\": { \"user\": \"xerneas\", \"host\": \"Macbook-Pro\", \"os\": \"macOS 26.5.2\", ... }, \"hackatime\": { \"slack\": \"@U0B8FHHRQPJ\", \"streak\": 12, \"today_seconds\": 15820, \"week_seconds\": 237501, \"top_project\": { \"name\": \"hackfetch\", \" \"top_language\": { \"name\": \"Go\", \"seconds\": 97418 }, \"week_chart\": [36967, 31651, 33841, 284 \"machines\": 3 } } week_chart is 7 numbers = daily seconds oldest to newest same as the sparkline. top_language skips the unknown/other buckets. everything lines up with what the normal fetch would show, just parseable. ship landed in v2.1.0. brew update && brew upgrade hackfetch or arch: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin then try: hackfetch -leaderboard weekly hackfetch -json | jq For a general install use: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh"}, {"post_id": 32880, "ts": "2026-07-22T10:20:45Z", "hours": 8.6689, "text": "my streak was lying to me for a month went to add a simple 7-day sparkline. by the end of the night i had rewritten how hackfetch talks to hackatime and my streak field is finally accurate for the first time in weeks. the plan was get the status from the last 7 days. draw ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ bars except the endpoint i needed straight up 404s. /users/current/summaries doesnt exist on the current hackatime deployment. Which means every single time i ran hackfetch it was quietly making a 30-day range call that always failed, then falling back to a placeholder that said “if today has activity, streak = 1”. thats it. no matter how long ive actually been on a streak, the fetch would just show 1 day. 🤦 my streak has said 1 day for the last 2 weeks even though ive been coding literally every day. never noticed because 1 day looks kinda plausible (i added 1 day as a fallback so that it didn’t show an error a couple weeks ago and forgot ) the fix: went digging in hackatimes rails routes on github. turns out theres a whole /api/v1/ namespace i was never using. and one of the endpoints is /api/v1/users/:id/heartbeats/spans. one call, ~150kb of json, every coding session ive ever logged with start_time, end_time, duration. 2000+ spans. which is exactly what i need for both features. bucket the timestamps by local calendar day, count unique days for streak, sum durations per day for the sparkline. one request covers both. and while i was already in the api layer i noticed fetchUser was making a whole separate call for my slack handle, which is silly because that data is already in the weekly stats response we cache. so i piggybacked it. weve gone from 4 api calls per fetch to 3. the sparkline: 7-day chart ▄▄▇▅▄▅▃ 65h 28m oldest on the left, newest on the right. that tall bar in the middle is a big lock-in session from earlier in the week. the two shorter ones on the right are today (still coding) and yesterday (took a break). opt in for -status --sparkline if you want it in your tmux bar too: 2h 9m today · streak 9 · ▄▄▇▅▄▅▃ 65h 28m teasing a backend: I’m planning on building a whole leaderboard server on a free hack club nest box so people can compete on their hackatime hours. while i was poking around the routes file for the streak fix i noticed something. /api/v1/leaderboard/daily and /api/v1/leaderboard/weekly already exist. public. no auth needed. no server needed. no cron sync. hackatime literally already has it directly. so hackfetch -leaderboard is coming soon (private friend groups and personal competitions can come later) last devlog before my next ship after the ship the devlogs are going to be huge. stay tuned :P"}, {"post_id": 32268, "ts": "2026-07-21T10:28:54Z", "hours": 9.7706, "text": "caching or i owe hackclub money so heres what my day looked like: nvim was calling hackfetch -status on every redraw for my lualine. tmux was calling it every 60 seconds for the status bar. i had 3 tmux sessions open. and every time i actually opened a new terminal, hackfetch fired again on shell start. quick napkin math: nvim redraws are basically continuous when im typing, tmux was hitting the api 3x/minute across sessions, plus every terminal open = another fetch. we’re talking hundreds of calls to hackatime in a normal work session. from ONE user. me hackatime is a free hack club service and i was starting to feel bad lol. the fix: cache the response ~/.cache/hackfetch/last.json stores the last snapshot with a timestamp. every fetch checks that file first. if its fresh enough, skip the network entirely and just render from disk. TTL is different depending on the caller: hackfetch (one-shot): 30 seconds. long enough that a normal re-run inside a devlog attempt is instant, short enough that you dont get badly stale numbers. hackfetch -status: 60 seconds tmux polls roughly this often anyway so its basically free now. hackfetch -watch: ignores the cache, always fresh (thats the whole point of watch mode). opt out with -no-cache or HACKFETCH_CACHE_TTL=0 if you want. also HACKFETCH_CACHE_TTL=300 to be even more polite. So yea tmux is now basically free . but the real win writing this made me realize the cache does more than save milliseconds: every fetch was a full TLS handshake, wifi radio spin up, etc. now most fetches touch the disk once and nothing else. macbook fan appreciates it. offline. if your wifi drops mid coding session you keep working from the cache instead of showing a spinner forever. tmux bar just keeps saying what it said 40 seconds ago. battery again but for the hackatime server. hackfetch stops asking the api 5-10x more than they need to. multiply by everyone who has it in their tmux config and thats a real thing. atomic write via .tmp + rename so nothing ever reads a half-written file. cache is user-only (0600), because it does contain your top project name. bonus: -doctor while i was fixing the polite-to-the-api stuff i added -doctor , which walks a checklist and tells you whats broken: hackfetch doctor ✓ wakatime config exists /Users/xerneas/.wakatime.cfg ✓ api_key present loaded from config ✓ wakatime-cli found /Users/xerneas/.wakatime/wakatime-cli ✓ hackatime api reachable today: 28m ✓ terminal supports truecolor $COLORTERM=truecolor ✓ browser opener available /usr/bin/open green if its working, orange if its not, and non-zero exit if anything failed so you can script it. this was going to be a small self-diagnosis feature and it caught a real bug in the api client on the very first run i did while writing it lol (a string field where hackatime returns an int, so one of the fields was silently missing from every fetch since v1.0). fixed that too. ship both landed in v1.10.0. update as usual: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch or arch: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin then run hackfetch -doctor first, and if anything is broken it’ll tell you exactly what."}, {"post_id": 31673, "ts": "2026-07-20T08:45:06Z", "hours": 8.4247, "text": "hackfetch is now TMUX + NVIM COMPATIBLE new thing today: hackfetch will just show up wherever you already look. tmux status bar. nvim statusline. any tool that can shell out to a command and put text on a screen. The addition was simple: hackfetch -status prints one line: 2h 11m today · hackfetch (45m) · streak 12 just the numbers, for tools that already have their own rendering. hackfetch is a data source now, not just a display. in tmux two lines in ~/.tmux.conf : set -g status-interval 60 thats it. every tmux session, every window, refreshing once a minute. i dropped it in a pink Catppuccin capsule to the left of my existing date capsule and now i cant stop glancing at it lol. in neovim (lualine) same story, five lines of lua: sections = { lualine_z = { function () return vim . fn . system ( \"hackfetch -status\" ): gsub ( \" \\n \" , \"\" ) end } } } shells out on every redraw. works with airline too, or any custom statusline that lets you plug in a function. the fun part making hackfetch call safe for “something tmux runs every 60s forever” meant fixing three assumptions the normal fetch was making. this was way harder than it should have been ngl. setup cant block. if you dont have ~/.wakatime.cfg, normal hackfetch throws you into an interactive setup wizard (ask me how i know). in status mode that would freeze your tmux bar until you notice and Ctrl+C it. so status mode is fully non interactive now. no config → print nothing → tmux shows nothing → no deadlock 🙏 api errors cant leak into your bar. hackatime offline? old behavior would dump HTTP 500 timeout into your status area which looks INSANE. now status mode exits silently instead so your bar stays clean every call has to be cheap. hackfetch’s parallel fetch alr seconds, and the shared HTTP client keeps connections alive across the 4 API calls it fires, so tmux polling every 60s is easy on the API. a proper local file cache is on the list for later but honestly not needed for now (i’m lazy) ship landed in v1.9.0. if you already have it: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch or arch family: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin (for more installs for ur specific os check out the github pls) then drop the tmux or lualine snippet above into your dotfiles and its just there in every terminal. no plugin. no config. no daemon. just a flag."}, {"post_id": 31042, "ts": "2026-07-19T03:42:21Z", "hours": 8.7494, "text": "Hackfetch Gets Real Colors New thing today: hackfetch now emits 24-bit color when your terminal supports it, and spreads gradients smoothly across each row instead of cycling through the palette one character at a time. Before and after Old behavior: for a per-char scheme like rainbow , each character got exactly one palette entry, wrapping around every N characters. On a 30-column row with a 3-color palette, that looked like ten cycles of red, green, blue, red, green, blue… basically RGB static. New behavior: the palette spreads across the row once, and characters between palette entries get interpolated in-between colors. Same 3-color palette on a 30-column row now shows red, olive, green, teal, blue, magenta, back to red. Why the rebuild Terminals speak two color modes: 256-color ( \\x1b[38;5;Nm ): pick from a fixed palette of 256 preset RGB values. 24-bit / truecolor ( \\x1b[38;2;R;G;Bm ): specify any of ~16 million RGB values directly. The old code always used 256-color. That meant every character had to snap to one of the palette entries. No in-betweens possible. The new code checks $COLORTERM (set to truecolor by iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty, GNOME Terminal, and most modern terminals) and emits 24-bit escapes when supported. When it’s not, it falls back to the old cycled-palette behavior automatically. You can force it either way with HACKFETCH_TRUECOLOR=1 or =0 . Where you’ll notice it The built-in rainbow scheme has 23 palette stops, so the difference on that one is small. You just see a smoother color distribution and less banding. The change is dramatic on: custom themes with few stops (try 3 colors in your ~/.config/hackfetch/colors.json for the wildest gradient) the stardance palette (11 stops, per-char), where sparkles now flow through the spectrum in order instead of landing on random-looking colors any per-line scheme ( pride , trans , bi , pan , sunset , ocean , forest ) since they now emit exact RGB values instead of nearest-256-color Bonus: the SVG, PNG, and JPG export paths use the smooth interpolation too, so exported cards look better regardless of your terminal. Ship Landed in v1.8.0 . brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Or on the Arch family: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin Try hackfetch rocket forest and just watch."}, {"post_id": 30475, "ts": "2026-07-18T02:33:55Z", "hours": 10.1122, "text": "One More Way to Install (and Pizza) Two small things today: hackfetch is now on the AUR, and there’s a new logo. hackfetch on the AUR A reviewer on my last ship said they had a hard time getting hackfetch running on CachyOS (an Arch-based Linux distro). Instead of trying to reproduce their exact issue, I figured the cleanest fix was to publish hackfetch through the package manager Arch users already trust. So hackfetch is now up as hackfetch-bin on the AUR: aur.archlinux.org/packages/hackfetch-bin If you’re on Arch, CachyOS, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda, or any other Arch-based distro: yay -S hackfetch-bin Or with paru: paru -S hackfetch-bin The package pulls the pre-built binary straight from the GitHub release, so there’s no waiting on a source build. Works on both x86_64 and aarch64 . Add it up and hackfetch is now installable one command from: brew (macOS and Linuxbrew) apt / dnf / yum / pacman / zypper / apk (all through the curl installer) the AUR (Arch family) go install (any platform with Go) the PowerShell installer (Windows) This thing is getting kind of hard to NOT install. Pizza logo Hack Club runs on pizza. Now hackfetch does too. hackfetch pizza It’s a triangular slice viewed from the tip, HACK CLUB baked into the middle, and a rolled crust at the wide edge. The tricky part was the crust. I went through three drafts trying to make it curve at the bottom without breaking the connection to the slice’s diagonal sides (turns out you can’t cleanly connect diagonal characters to horizontal ones in a monospace grid). Landed on a two-row rolled crust where the diagonals keep going and the interior fills with a double horizontal band. Pairs surprisingly well with sunset: hackfetch pizza sunset Turns your terminal into a golden-hour pizza box. Ship Both landed in v1.7.3 . If you’re on Arch-family: yay -S hackfetch-bin Elsewhere: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Now try hackfetch pizza and tell me if the crust looks right."}, {"post_id": 29524, "ts": "2026-07-16T14:40:13Z", "hours": 3.2108, "text": "Hackfetch Is Now Actually Fast Last log I added a loading spinner so you’d have something to look at while hackfetch was hitting the Hackatime API. This week I made it so you barely have time to see the spinner at all (undoing all my work lol) The problem hackfetch was making four separate calls to Hackatime for every fetch: /users/current/heartbeats/most_recent (for your slack handle) /users/current/summaries (for your streak) /users/current/statusbar/today (for today's coding time) /users/current/stats/last_7_days (for weekly stats) Doing them one after another meant the total wait was the sum of all four. Turns out that’s about 1.7 seconds on a normal connection. Not the end of the world, but very noticeable when you just want to open a terminal. The fix: run them all at the same time Now hackfetch fires all four calls in parallel using goroutines, waits for the slowest one to come back, and then builds the fetch from the responses. Total wait drops from “sum of all four” to “just the slowest one.” Before: ~1.7 seconds After: ~0.7 seconds 60% faster . Every single fetch. Every single time. One tiny bonus optimization While I was in there, I also switched to a single shared HTTP client with a bigger connection pool. The default Go setup caps you at 2 open connections per host, which is fine when you’re calling one endpoint at a time but hurts when you’re firing four at once. Now the parallel calls can share connections instead of stacking up on each other. Nothing about the fetch itself changed. Same info, same layout, same colors. Just faster. Ship Shipped in v1.7.2. If you have hackfetch installed: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch time hackfetch Watch the spinner barely have time to appear."}, {"post_id": 29398, "ts": "2026-07-16T10:18:00Z", "hours": 13.6781, "text": "Loading Spinner and Splitting Up main.go Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to comment, rate, and drop feedback on my latest ship. All of it was genuinely so helpful and I’ve been spending the last couple days fixing things up a bit. I totally forgot to devlog so I’m actually losing a couple hours since it’s been over ten hours since my last one :sob A loading spinner while Hackatime fetches One reviewer pointed out that hackfetch takes a couple of seconds when it’s pulling your Hackatime stats for the first time, and there was no signal that anything was happening. Now there is. ⠋ fetching Hackatime... The spinner cycles through 10 braille frames and the whole line clears out the instant the fetch finishes. Same fetch, way less awkward pause. Two small details that make it feel right: It only shows when stderr is actually a terminal, so it doesn’t spam control codes into your log files if you redirect output. It prints one frame immediately, so fast fetches still flash something instead of nothing. hackfetch runs it around the API calls automatically. No config, no opt-in. It’s just there. Splitting up main.go Another reviewer said the 1.5k-line file was too much. They were completely right. hackfetch had grown into one giant main.go that held the logos, the color schemes, the Hackatime API client, the terminal render, the SVG exporter, the PNG rasterizer, everything. Refactored today into files that each do one thing: logos.go: the ASCII logos colors.go: color schemes and the ANSI → hex table config.go: reads ~/.wakatime.cfg hackatime.go: the API client, caching, and language inference sysinfo.go: OS, shell, editor, terminal setup.go: the -setup flow render.go: terminal render, watch loop, and layout export.go: SVG, PNG, and JPG exporters main.go: just flag parsing and the entry point (~100 lines instead of 1,600) Same binary, same behavior, zero user-visible change. But next time I want to add a new logo or a new color scheme, I know exactly which file to open. Also way friendlier for anyone who wants to hack on it. Ship Both landed in v1.7.1. If you already have it: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Or the curl installer will pull v1.7.1 the next time you run it. Try it."}, {"post_id": 23812, "ts": "2026-07-06T23:42:52Z", "hours": 7.1119, "text": "New feature today: hackfetch can turn itself into a shareable image. The goal was simple: your terminal fetch should be more than a terminal thing. If it looks cool on your screen, you should be able to post it in a Slack channel or drop it in a devlog without ever having to take a screenshot. hackfetch -export card.svg Run that and instead of printing to your terminal, hackfetch writes an SVG file that looks exactly like the fetch on your screen: logo on the left, stats on the right, rounded corners, monospace font, every color preserved. Getting the general SVG output was the easy part. Draw a rectangle, put text inside it, done. The hard part was preserving the colors. Terminals speak ANSI 256-color codes. SVGs speak hex color strings. They don’t line up one-to-one, so a naive export just drops every color and produces a black-and-white version of the fetch. Not very shareable. The fix: a lookup table from ANSI 256-color codes to hex values, plus a rendering path that emits every styled character as its own SVG element with the correct fill color. That’s actually a lot of tspans. Schemes like per-char, where every single glyph has its own gradient stop, can produce hundreds of colored elements per fetch. But it works. The SVG renders smoothly in any browser and looks identical to what shows up in your terminal. Use It Anywhere Some things you can do with the exported card: open it in a browser to see it drop it into a Slack channel or a devlog convert it to PNG with rsvg-convert if you need a raster image hackfetch -export card.svg trans Open it. Post it. Ship it."}, {"post_id": 19472, "ts": "2026-06-30T20:03:24Z", "hours": 2.2483, "text": "Live Hackfetch New milestone today: hackfetch can now stay open and update itself while you code. The goal was simple: run hackfetch once, leave it in the corner of your terminal, and watch the numbers move in real time as you work. hackfetch -watch Your today-hours tick up. Your top project changes when you switch repos. Your streak rolls over at midnight. All without running the command a second time. The static render was already in place from the regular one-shot fetch. The new part was redrawing without scrolling. That sounds simple. It is not. In a terminal, every time you print something, it appends to the bottom of the screen. By default, refreshing the fetch would just print a second copy of itself underneath the first, then a third, then a fourth. Within a minute you’d have a wall of identical fetches scrolling away into the past. The trick is ANSI escape codes. There’s a sequence that means “move the cursor up N lines” and one that means “clear the rest of the screen from here down.” Together they let you erase the previous fetch and redraw a new one in the same spot. Same screen, fresh data, no scroll. Why every 30 seconds? Two reasons: Hackatime aggregates heartbeats in 1-minute buckets internally, so polling faster than that doesn’t tell you anything new 30 seconds is fast enough to feel “live” without hammering the API for no reason Ctrl+C to quit. Resizing the terminal doesn’t break it. Pair it with a gradient color scheme and the whole thing turns into a tiny dashboard for your coding session: hackfetch -watch sunset"}, {"post_id": 16604, "ts": "2026-06-27T00:38:28Z", "hours": 0.5825, "text": "Hackfetch Installs Itself Anywhere Hackfetch crossed another milestone today: you no longer need Go installed to use it. Or Homebrew. Or anything, really. The goal was simple: one command, any Linux, any Mac, no prerequisites. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Run that on Ubuntu, Fedora, Alpine, Arch, openSUSE, whatever you have, and a few seconds later hackfetch is on your PATH. Getting the basic installer working was the easy part. Detect your OS, detect your CPU architecture, grab the matching binary from GitHub Releases, drop it in /usr/local/bin. Standard installer stuff. The harder problem was the script itself failing on some Linuxes. I’d written the first version in Bash, with set -euo pipefail at the top and $'\\033[1m' style escape sequences sprinkled through. Worked great on my Mac. Worked great on Ubuntu. Then I checked which shell Alpine Linux ships by default. Not Bash. The whole script would die on line one for anyone on a minimal container. So I rewrote it in POSIX sh, which is the one shell every Unix system actually has. No Bash-isms, no fancy quoting, no pipefail. Smaller, dumber, way more portable. Speaking Seven Package Managers The next problem: the script needs curl and tar to do its job. If you don’t have them, normally you’d just be stuck. Instead, the installer now detects your system’s package manager and installs the missing prereqs for you: apt (Debian, Ubuntu) dnf (Fedora, RHEL) yum (CentOS, older RHEL) pacman (Arch) zypper (openSUSE) apk (Alpine) brew (macOS) They all do the same thing. They all use different words for it. The installer knows all seven. One line. Any Linux. No prereqs."}, {"post_id": 15120, "ts": "2026-06-24T15:57:10Z", "hours": 0.4172, "text": "Hackfetch Meets Orpheus! If you’ve been around Hack Club for more than five minutes, you know Orpheus. The little dinosaur shows up everywhere: stickers, websites, T-shirts, hackathon merch. Until today, he wasn’t in hackfetch. That’s been bugging me since v1.0. The goal was simple: give Orpheus a spot in the logo lineup, the same way flag, bot, and rocket already have one. hackfetch orpheus Drawing him was the harder part. Every logo in hackfetch has to fit inside a fixed width of 33 characters, otherwise the system info column next to it gets pushed off the screen. 33 characters is not a lot of room to draw a recognizable dinosaur, especially one with personality. I tried him head-on first. It didn’t work. Round dinosaur faces in ASCII end up looking like blobs because you don’t have curves, only corners. So I redrew him in profile. The result: a snout sticking out to one side one big eye (◉) that catches the light a HACK CLUB body underneath two tiny stubby legs at the bottom Nine lines tall. No wasted rows. He plays especially well with the gradient color schemes: hackfetch orpheus -color forest hackfetch orpheus -color sunset Forest makes him look like he’s wandering through tall grass. Sunset gives him a “main character in the closing shot” vibe. The mascot finally has a seat at the terminal. Long overdue! Also if any better artists want to have a crack at it, I’m super open to that, and I can credit you in my repo as a collaborator! THNX!"}, {"post_id": 14410, "ts": "2026-06-23T15:08:46Z", "hours": 6.8756, "text": "Hackfetch Can Finally Fetch Hackfetch crossed a pretty big milestone today: it actually fetches things. The goal is simple: build a Neofetch-style dashboard for Hack Club. Run a single command and get a snapshot of your machine alongside your Hack Club activity. hackfetch and instantly see information like: OS Hostname Username Shell Terminal Editor Hackatime stats Getting the system information was the easy part. Go makes it straightforward to grab things like the current user, hostname, operating system, and environment variables. The harder problem was rendering everything cleanly beside an ASCII logo. Each logo has different dimensions and line lengths, so I ended up building a small layout engine that calculates the width of every logo row and pads it dynamically before printing the corresponding information. Without that, the text column slowly drifts into the logo and the entire fetch screen looks broken. Hooking into Hackatime The more interesting work was integrating with the Hackatime API.Hackfetch reads your API key from: ~/.wakatime.cfg authenticates with Hackatime, and pulls fresh coding statistics every time you run the command.Right now it can display: Today’s coding time Weekly coding time Current streak Top project Most-used language No browser. No dashboard. Just a terminal command."}, {"post_id": 7579, "ts": "2026-06-12T17:50:14Z", "hours": 0.5989, "text": "In honor of pride month, I have added a pride color scheme to my custom hackfetch. It is currently installable via brew. On macs, simply run: brew install xerneas3318/tap/hackfetch Currently working on better support for more operating systems. Follow and like to stay updated!"}, {"post_id": 7526, "ts": "2026-06-12T15:50:51Z", "hours": 8.7181, "text": "Introducing hackfetch a tiny terminal fetch tool for hackatime. Run hackfetch and get your hours today, weekly total, streak, top project, and top language right in your terminal. 5 logos. 8 color schemes. mix and match: hackfetch stardance rainbow How it works: hackfetch reads your hackatime key from ~/.wakatime.cfg, fetches your Hackatime summaries and heartbeats, then renders your stats directly in the terminal."}]...
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Title: Hackfetch by @xerneas | Stardance
Devlogs: Title: Hackfetch by @xerneas | Stardance
Devlogs:
Introducing hackfetch a tiny terminal fetch tool for hackatime. Run hackfetch and get your hours today, weekly total, streak, top project, and top language right in your terminal. 5 logos. 8 color schemes. mix and match: hackfetch stardance rainbow How it works: hackfetch reads your hackatime key from ~/.wakatime.cfg, fetches your Hackatime summaries and heartbeats, then renders your stats directly in the terminal.
In honor of pride month, I have added a pride color scheme to my custom hackfetch. It is currently installable via brew. On macs, simply run: brew install xerneas3318/tap/hackfetch Currently working on better support for more operating systems. Follow and like to stay updated!
Hackfetch Can Finally Fetch Hackfetch crossed a pretty big milestone today: it actually fetches things. The goal is simple: build a Neofetch-style dashboard for Hack Club. Run a single command and get a snapshot of your machine alongside your Hack Club activity. hackfetch and instantly see information like: OS Hostname Username Shell Terminal Editor Hackatime stats Getting the system information was the easy part. Go makes it straightforward to grab things like the current user, hostname, operating system, and environment variables. The harder problem was rendering everything cleanly beside an ASCII logo. Each logo has different dimensions and line lengths, so I ended up building a small layout engine that calculates the width of every logo row and pads it dynamically before printing the corresponding information. Without that, the text column slowly drifts into the logo and the entire fetch screen looks broken. Hooking into Hackatime The more interesting work was integrating with the Hackatime API.Hackfetch reads your API key from: ~/.wakatime.cfg authenticates with Hackatime, and pulls fresh coding statistics every time you run the command.Right now it can display: Today’s coding time Weekly coding time Current streak Top project Most-used language No browser. No dashboard. Just a terminal command.
Hackfetch Meets Orpheus! If you’ve been around Hack Club for more than five minutes, you know Orpheus. The little dinosaur shows up everywhere: stickers, websites, T-shirts, hackathon merch. Until today, he wasn’t in hackfetch. That’s been bugging me since v1.0. The goal was simple: give Orpheus a spot in the logo lineup, the same way flag, bot, and rocket already have one. hackfetch orpheus Drawing him was the harder part. Every logo in hackfetch has to fit inside a fixed width of 33 characters, otherwise the system info column next to it gets pushed off the screen. 33 characters is not a lot of room to draw a recognizable dinosaur, especially one with personality. I tried him head-on first. It didn’t work. Round dinosaur faces in ASCII end up looking like blobs because you don’t have curves, only corners. So I redrew him in profile. The result: a snout sticking out to one side one big eye (◉) that catches the light a HACK CLUB body underneath two tiny stubby legs at the bottom Nine lines tall. No wasted rows. He plays especially well with the gradient color schemes: hackfetch orpheus -color forest hackfetch orpheus -color sunset Forest makes him look like he’s wandering through tall grass. Sunset gives him a “main character in the closing shot” vibe. The mascot finally has a seat at the terminal. Long overdue! Also if any better artists want to have a crack at it, I’m super open to that, and I can credit you in my repo as a collaborator! THNX!
Hackfetch Installs Itself Anywhere Hackfetch crossed another milestone today: you no longer need Go installed to use it. Or Homebrew. Or anything, really. The goal was simple: one command, any Linux, any Mac, no prerequisites. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Run that on Ubuntu, Fedora, Alpine, Arch, openSUSE, whatever you have, and a few seconds later hackfetch is on your PATH. Getting the basic installer working was the easy part. Detect your OS, detect your CPU architecture, grab the matching binary from GitHub Releases, drop it in /usr/local/bin. Standard installer stuff. The harder problem was the script itself failing on some Linuxes. I’d written the first version in Bash, with set -euo pipefail at the top and $'\033[1m' style escape sequences sprinkled through. Worked great on my Mac. Worked great on Ubuntu. Then I checked which shell Alpine Linux ships by default. Not Bash. The whole script would die on line one for anyone on a minimal container. So I rewrote it in POSIX sh, which is the one shell every Unix system actually has. No Bash-isms, no fancy quoting, no pipefail. Smaller, dumber, way more portable. Speaking Seven Package Managers The next problem: the script needs curl and tar to do its job. If you don’t have them, normally you’d just be stuck. Instead, the installer now detects your system’s package manager and installs the missing prereqs for you: apt (Debian, Ubuntu) dnf (Fedora, RHEL) yum (CentOS, older RHEL) pacman (Arch) zypper (openSUSE) apk (Alpine) brew (macOS) They all do the same thing. They all use different words for it. The installer knows all seven. One line. Any Linux. No prereqs.
Live Hackfetch New milestone today: hackfetch can now stay open and update itself while you code. The goal was simple: run hackfetch once, leave it in the corner of your terminal, and watch the numbers move in real time as you work. hackfetch -watch Your today-hours tick up. Your top project changes when you switch repos. Your streak rolls over at midnight. All without running the command a second time. The static render was already in place from the regular one-shot fetch. The new part was redrawing without scrolling. That sounds simple. It is not. In a terminal, every time you print something, it appends to the bottom of the screen. By default, refreshing the fetch would just print a second copy of itself underneath the first, then a third, then a fourth. Within a minute you’d have a wall of identical fetches scrolling away into the past. The trick is ANSI escape codes. There’s a sequence that means “move the cursor up N lines” and one that means “clear the rest of the screen from here down.” Together they let you erase the previous fetch and redraw a new one in the same spot. Same screen, fresh data, no scroll. Why every 30 seconds? Two reasons: Hackatime aggregates heartbeats in 1-minute buckets internally, so polling faster than that doesn’t tell you anything new 30 seconds is fast enough to feel “live” without hammering the API for no reason Ctrl+C to quit. Resizing the terminal doesn’t break it. Pair it with a gradient color scheme and the whole thing turns into a tiny dashboard for your coding session: hackfetch -watch sunset
New feature today: hackfetch can turn itself into a shareable image. The goal was simple: your terminal fetch should be more than a terminal thing. If it looks cool on your screen, you should be able to post it in a Slack channel or drop it in a devlog without ever having to take a screenshot. hackfetch -export card.svg Run that and instead of printing to your terminal, hackfetch writes an SVG file that looks exactly like the fetch on your screen: logo on the left, stats on the right, rounded corners, monospace font, every color preserved. Getting the general SVG output was the easy part. Draw a rectangle, put text inside it, done. The hard part was preserving the colors. Terminals speak ANSI 256-color codes. SVGs speak hex color strings. They don’t line up one-to-one, so a naive export just drops every color and produces a black-and-white version of the fetch. Not very shareable. The fix: a lookup table from ANSI 256-color codes to hex values, plus a rendering path that emits every styled character as its own SVG element with the correct fill color. That’s actually a lot of tspans. Schemes like per-char, where every single glyph has its own gradient stop, can produce hundreds of colored elements per fetch. But it works. The SVG renders smoothly in any browser and looks identical to what shows up in your terminal. Use It Anywhere Some things you can do with the exported card: open it in a browser to see it drop it into a Slack channel or a devlog convert it to PNG with rsvg-convert if you need a raster image hackfetch -export card.svg trans Open it. Post it. Ship it.
Loading Spinner and Splitting Up main.go Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to comment, rate, and drop feedback on my latest ship. All of it was genuinely so helpful and I’ve been spending the last couple days fixing things up a bit. I totally forgot to devlog so I’m actually losing a couple hours since it’s been over ten hours since my last one :sob A loading spinner while Hackatime fetches One reviewer pointed out that hackfetch takes a couple of seconds when it’s pulling your Hackatime stats for the first time, and there was no signal that anything was happening. Now there is. ⠋ fetching Hackatime... The spinner cycles through 10 braille frames and the whole line clears out the instant the fetch finishes. Same fetch, way less awkward pause. Two small details that make it feel right: It only shows when stderr is actually a terminal, so it doesn’t spam control codes into your log files if you redirect output. It prints one frame immediately, so fast fetches still flash something instead of nothing. hackfetch runs it around the API calls automatically. No config, no opt-in. It’s just there. Splitting up main.go Another reviewer said the 1.5k-line file was too much. They were completely right. hackfetch had grown into one giant main.go that held the logos, the color schemes, the Hackatime API client, the terminal render, the SVG exporter, the PNG rasterizer, everything. Refactored today into files that each do one thing: logos.go: the ASCII logos colors.go: color schemes and the ANSI → hex table config.go: reads ~/.wakatime.cfg hackatime.go: the API client, caching, and language inference sysinfo.go: OS, shell, editor, terminal setup.go: the -setup flow render.go: terminal render, watch loop, and layout export.go: SVG, PNG, and JPG exporters main.go: just flag parsing and the entry point (~100 lines instead of 1,600) Same binary, same behavior, zero user-visible change. But next time I want to add a new logo or a new color scheme, I know exactly which file to open. Also way friendlier for anyone who wants to hack on it. Ship Both landed in v1.7.1. If you already have it: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Or the curl installer will pull v1.7.1 the next time you run it. Try it.
Hackfetch Is Now Actually Fast Last log I added a loading spinner so you’d have something to look at while hackfetch was hitting the Hackatime API. This week I made it so you barely have time to see the spinner at all (undoing all my work lol) The problem hackfetch was making four separate calls to Hackatime for every fetch: /users/current/heartbeats/most_recent (for your slack handle) /users/current/summaries (for your streak) /users/current/statusbar/today (for today's coding time) /users/current/stats/last_7_days (for weekly stats) Doing them one after another meant the total wait was the sum of all four. Turns out that’s about 1.7 seconds on a normal connection. Not the end of the world, but very noticeable when you just want to open a terminal. The fix: run them all at the same time Now hackfetch fires all four calls in parallel using goroutines, waits for the slowest one to come back, and then builds the fetch from the responses. Total wait drops from “sum of all four” to “just the slowest one.” Before: ~1.7 seconds After: ~0.7 seconds 60% faster . Every single fetch. Every single time. One tiny bonus optimization While I was in there, I also switched to a single shared HTTP client with a bigger connection pool. The default Go setup caps you at 2 open connections per host, which is fine when you’re calling one endpoint at a time but hurts when you’re firing four at once. Now the parallel calls can share connections instead of stacking up on each other. Nothing about the fetch itself changed. Same info, same layout, same colors. Just faster. Ship Shipped in v1.7.2. If you have hackfetch installed: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch time hackfetch Watch the spinner barely have time to appear.
One More Way to Install (and Pizza) Two small things today: hackfetch is now on the AUR, and there’s a new logo. hackfetch on the AUR A reviewer on my last ship said they had a hard time getting hackfetch running on CachyOS (an Arch-based Linux distro). Instead of trying to reproduce their exact issue, I figured the cleanest fix was to publish hackfetch through the package manager Arch users already trust. So hackfetch is now up as hackfetch-bin on the AUR: aur.archlinux.org/packages/hackfetch-bin If you’re on Arch, CachyOS, Manjaro, EndeavourOS, Garuda, or any other Arch-based distro: yay -S hackfetch-bin Or with paru: paru -S hackfetch-bin The package pulls the pre-built binary straight from the GitHub release, so there’s no waiting on a source build. Works on both x86_64 and aarch64 . Add it up and hackfetch is now installable one command from: brew (macOS and Linuxbrew) apt / dnf / yum / pacman / zypper / apk (all through the curl installer) the AUR (Arch family) go install (any platform with Go) the PowerShell installer (Windows) This thing is getting kind of hard to NOT install. Pizza logo Hack Club runs on pizza. Now hackfetch does too. hackfetch pizza It’s a triangular slice viewed from the tip, HACK CLUB baked into the middle, and a rolled crust at the wide edge. The tricky part was the crust. I went through three drafts trying to make it curve at the bottom without breaking the connection to the slice’s diagonal sides (turns out you can’t cleanly connect diagonal characters to horizontal ones in a monospace grid). Landed on a two-row rolled crust where the diagonals keep going and the interior fills with a double horizontal band. Pairs surprisingly well with sunset: hackfetch pizza sunset Turns your terminal into a golden-hour pizza box. Ship Both landed in v1.7.3 . If you’re on Arch-family: yay -S hackfetch-bin Elsewhere: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Now try hackfetch pizza and tell me if the crust looks right.
Hackfetch Gets Real Colors New thing today: hackfetch now emits 24-bit color when your terminal supports it, and spreads gradients smoothly across each row instead of cycling through the palette one character at a time. Before and after Old behavior: for a per-char scheme like rainbow , each character got exactly one palette entry, wrapping around every N characters. On a 30-column row with a 3-color palette, that looked like ten cycles of red, green, blue, red, green, blue… basically RGB static. New behavior: the palette spreads across the row once, and characters between palette entries get interpolated in-between colors. Same 3-color palette on a 30-column row now shows red, olive, green, teal, blue, magenta, back to red. Why the rebuild Terminals speak two color modes: 256-color ( \x1b[38;5;Nm ): pick from a fixed palette of 256 preset RGB values. 24-bit / truecolor ( \x1b[38;2;R;G;Bm ): specify any of ~16 million RGB values directly. The old code always used 256-color. That meant every character had to snap to one of the palette entries. No in-betweens possible. The new code checks $COLORTERM (set to truecolor by iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty, GNOME Terminal, and most modern terminals) and emits 24-bit escapes when supported. When it’s not, it falls back to the old cycled-palette behavior automatically. You can force it either way with HACKFETCH_TRUECOLOR=1 or =0 . Where you’ll notice it The built-in rainbow scheme has 23 palette stops, so the difference on that one is small. You just see a smoother color distribution and less banding. The change is dramatic on: custom themes with few stops (try 3 colors in your ~/.config/hackfetch/colors.json for the wildest gradient) the stardance palette (11 stops, per-char), where sparkles now flow through the spectrum in order instead of landing on random-looking colors any per-line scheme ( pride , trans , bi , pan , sunset , ocean , forest ) since they now emit exact RGB values instead of nearest-256-color Bonus: the SVG, PNG, and JPG export paths use the smooth interpolation too, so exported cards look better regardless of your terminal. Ship Landed in v1.8.0 . brew update brew upgrade hackfetch Or on the Arch family: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin Try hackfetch rocket forest and just watch.
hackfetch is now TMUX + NVIM COMPATIBLE new thing today: hackfetch will just show up wherever you already look. tmux status bar. nvim statusline. any tool that can shell out to a command and put text on a screen. The addition was simple: hackfetch -status prints one line: 2h 11m today · hackfetch (45m) · streak 12 just the numbers, for tools that already have their own rendering. hackfetch is a data source now, not just a display. in tmux two lines in ~/.tmux.conf : set -g status-interval 60 thats it. every tmux session, every window, refreshing once a minute. i dropped it in a pink Catppuccin capsule to the left of my existing date capsule and now i cant stop glancing at it lol. in neovim (lualine) same story, five lines of lua: sections = { lualine_z = { function () return vim . fn . system ( "hackfetch -status" ): gsub ( " \n " , "" ) end } } } shells out on every redraw. works with airline too, or any custom statusline that lets you plug in a function. the fun part making hackfetch call safe for “something tmux runs every 60s forever” meant fixing three assumptions the normal fetch was making. this was way harder than it should have been ngl. setup cant block. if you dont have ~/.wakatime.cfg, normal hackfetch throws you into an interactive setup wizard (ask me how i know). in status mode that would freeze your tmux bar until you notice and Ctrl+C it. so status mode is fully non interactive now. no config → print nothing → tmux shows nothing → no deadlock 🙏 api errors cant leak into your bar. hackatime offline? old behavior would dump HTTP 500 timeout into your status area which looks INSANE. now status mode exits silently instead so your bar stays clean every call has to be cheap. hackfetch’s parallel fetch alr seconds, and the shared HTTP client keeps connections alive across the 4 API calls it fires, so tmux polling every 60s is easy on the API. a proper local file cache is on the list for later but honestly not needed for now (i’m lazy) ship landed in v1.9.0. if you already have it: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch or arch family: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin (for more installs for ur specific os check out the github pls) then drop the tmux or lualine snippet above into your dotfiles and its just there in every terminal. no plugin. no config. no daemon. just a flag.
caching or i owe hackclub money so heres what my day looked like: nvim was calling hackfetch -status on every redraw for my lualine. tmux was calling it every 60 seconds for the status bar. i had 3 tmux sessions open. and every time i actually opened a new terminal, hackfetch fired again on shell start. quick napkin math: nvim redraws are basically continuous when im typing, tmux was hitting the api 3x/minute across sessions, plus every terminal open = another fetch. we’re talking hundreds of calls to hackatime in a normal work session. from ONE user. me hackatime is a free hack club service and i was starting to feel bad lol. the fix: cache the response ~/.cache/hackfetch/last.json stores the last snapshot with a timestamp. every fetch checks that file first. if its fresh enough, skip the network entirely and just render from disk. TTL is different depending on the caller: hackfetch (one-shot): 30 seconds. long enough that a normal re-run inside a devlog attempt is instant, short enough that you dont get badly stale numbers. hackfetch -status: 60 seconds tmux polls roughly this often anyway so its basically free now. hackfetch -watch: ignores the cache, always fresh (thats the whole point of watch mode). opt out with -no-cache or HACKFETCH_CACHE_TTL=0 if you want. also HACKFETCH_CACHE_TTL=300 to be even more polite. So yea tmux is now basically free . but the real win writing this made me realize the cache does more than save milliseconds: every fetch was a full TLS handshake, wifi radio spin up, etc. now most fetches touch the disk once and nothing else. macbook fan appreciates it. offline. if your wifi drops mid coding session you keep working from the cache instead of showing a spinner forever. tmux bar just keeps saying what it said 40 seconds ago. battery again but for the hackatime server. hackfetch stops asking the api 5-10x more than they need to. multiply by everyone who has it in their tmux config and thats a real thing. atomic write via .tmp + rename so nothing ever reads a half-written file. cache is user-only (0600), because it does contain your top project name. bonus: -doctor while i was fixing the polite-to-the-api stuff i added -doctor , which walks a checklist and tells you whats broken: hackfetch doctor ✓ wakatime config exists /Users/xerneas/.wakatime.cfg ✓ api_key present loaded from config ✓ wakatime-cli found /Users/xerneas/.wakatime/wakatime-cli ✓ hackatime api reachable today: 28m ✓ terminal supports truecolor $COLORTERM=truecolor ✓ browser opener available /usr/bin/open green if its working, orange if its not, and non-zero exit if anything failed so you can script it. this was going to be a small self-diagnosis feature and it caught a real bug in the api client on the very first run i did while writing it lol (a string field where hackatime returns an int, so one of the fields was silently missing from every fetch since v1.0). fixed that too. ship both landed in v1.10.0. update as usual: brew update brew upgrade hackfetch or arch: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin then run hackfetch -doctor first, and if anything is broken it’ll tell you exactly what.
my streak was lying to me for a month went to add a simple 7-day sparkline. by the end of the night i had rewritten how hackfetch talks to hackatime and my streak field is finally accurate for the first time in weeks. the plan was get the status from the last 7 days. draw ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ bars except the endpoint i needed straight up 404s. /users/current/summaries doesnt exist on the current hackatime deployment. Which means every single time i ran hackfetch it was quietly making a 30-day range call that always failed, then falling back to a placeholder that said “if today has activity, streak = 1”. thats it. no matter how long ive actually been on a streak, the fetch would just show 1 day. 🤦 my streak has said 1 day for the last 2 weeks even though ive been coding literally every day. never noticed because 1 day looks kinda plausible (i added 1 day as a fallback so that it didn’t show an error a couple weeks ago and forgot ) the fix: went digging in hackatimes rails routes on github. turns out theres a whole /api/v1/ namespace i was never using. and one of the endpoints is /api/v1/users/:id/heartbeats/spans. one call, ~150kb of json, every coding session ive ever logged with start_time, end_time, duration. 2000+ spans. which is exactly what i need for both features. bucket the timestamps by local calendar day, count unique days for streak, sum durations per day for the sparkline. one request covers both. and while i was already in the api layer i noticed fetchUser was making a whole separate call for my slack handle, which is silly because that data is already in the weekly stats response we cache. so i piggybacked it. weve gone from 4 api calls per fetch to 3. the sparkline: 7-day chart ▄▄▇▅▄▅▃ 65h 28m oldest on the left, newest on the right. that tall bar in the middle is a big lock-in session from earlier in the week. the two shorter ones on the right are today (still coding) and yesterday (took a break). opt in for -status --sparkline if you want it in your tmux bar too: 2h 9m today · streak 9 · ▄▄▇▅▄▅▃ 65h 28m teasing a backend: I’m planning on building a whole leaderboard server on a free hack club nest box so people can compete on their hackatime hours. while i was poking around the routes file for the streak fix i noticed something. /api/v1/leaderboard/daily and /api/v1/leaderboard/weekly already exist. public. no auth needed. no server needed. no cron sync. hackatime literally already has it directly. so hackfetch -leaderboard is coming soon (private friend groups and personal competitions can come later) last devlog before my next ship after the ship the devlogs are going to be huge. stay tuned :P
hackfetch COLLAB?? so my last two devlogs teased two features. shipping both today. -leaderboard last devlog i said “compete with your friends on hackatime hours is coming soon.” i thought i was gonna have to build a whole nest server for it. turns out /api/v1/leaderboard/daily and /api/v1/leaderboard/weekly already exist and are public on hackatime. just a single call!! so hackfetch -leaderboard daily (or weekly) now shows the top 10: ✦ daily leaderboard Last 24 hours 🥇 1. soaphia14 11h 12m 🥈 2. AnastKara 10h 32m 🥉 3. RoSerMar 10h 6m 4. euledone 10h 5. TheShovel 10h 6. Dylhouse 9h 1m 7. Dexrn 8h 59m 8. HexFud 8h 31m 9. zeddash 8h 29m 10. Trtotomotoro 8h 26m every username is an OSC 8 clickable link to that person’s hackatime profile. modern terminals (iterm2, kitty, wezterm, alacritty, gnome-terminal) render it as an actual hyperlink you can click. terminals without OSC 8 just show the plain text so it doesnt look broken. if you’re on the board it highlights your row in orange and adds (you) next to your name. json addon the other thing. someone else competing in stardance messaged me the other day about integrating hackatime into their own project and needed help figuring out the api (YAY). helping them made me realize hackfetch is doing a bunch of work (auth, caching, streak reconstruction, per-day bucketing) that other tools would love to piggyback on. so now: $ hackfetch -json { "version": "2", "fetched_at": "2026-07-25T17:00: 20.900829+05:30", "system": { "user": "xerneas", "host": "Macbook-Pro", "os": "macOS 26.5.2", ... }, "hackatime": { "slack": "@U0B8FHHRQPJ", "streak": 12, "today_seconds": 15820, "week_seconds": 237501, "top_project": { "name": "hackfetch", " "top_language": { "name": "Go", "seconds": 97418 }, "week_chart": [36967, 31651, 33841, 284 "machines": 3 } } week_chart is 7 numbers = daily seconds oldest to newest same as the sparkline. top_language skips the unknown/other buckets. everything lines up with what the normal fetch would show, just parseable. ship landed in v2.1.0. brew update && brew upgrade hackfetch or arch: yay -Syu hackfetch-bin then try: hackfetch -leaderboard weekly hackfetch -json | jq For a general install use: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh
big thank you for everyone’s feedback! fresh out of the oven: hackfetch v2.1.1 (aka the reviewer bug fix pass) what got fixed: shell detection used to just read $SHELL which is your login shell. if you log in as bash but run fish, hackfetch was calling you a bash user. it now checks $FISH_VERSION / $ZSH_VERSION / $BASH_VERSION and falls back to asking the OS who your parent process actually is editor detection was two bugs in a trench coat. it wasnt stripping args so zeditor --wait showed up as “zeditor –wait” instead of “Zed”, and if you had no $EDITOR set it defaulted to nano even if you had literally never opened nano. now it strips flags, maps launcher names to human ones (zeditor -> Zed, code -> VS Code, cursor -> Cursor, hx -> Helix etc), and says “-” instead of nano if nothing is set. top project label was ambiguous. it was pulling weekly stats but the row just said “top project” so people thought it meant all time. now weekly rows read top proj 7d , top lang 7d , top ed 7d , top cat 7d . setup dialog was scaring people. it always printed “file exists but has no api_key” whenever it reached the setup flow, even if the api_key line was actually there but just failing to parse. loadConfig is now more forgiving (inline comments, quoted values, case insensitive keys) and setup tells you WHY its stuck instead of gaslighting you about your own config. also short circuits if you run hackfetch -setup when youre already set up. people said they wanted a gay flag color was already there under the name pride but that wasnt obvious. gay is now an alias so both work. grab it: brew upgrade hackfetch or yay -S hackfetch-bin or curl / powershell installer if you don’t have it yet curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh again thank you to everyone who took the time to actually run it and tell me what was broken!
HACKFETCH BATTLES??? two features in one release. hackfetch already knows a scary amount about you (thanks hackatime) so why not turn that into more features. hackfetch vs @ someone head to head compare. give it a hackatime username and hackfetch fetches both your histories in parallel, buckets them into today / this week / all time / streak, and prints them side by side with a winner arrow on every row. accepts @name , name , or a full profile url like hackatime.hackclub.com/@name . also works positional: hackfetch vs @you . use it to settle arguments, motivate yourself, or realize your friend has coded 265 hours and you should probably close discord. hackfetch -records personal bests. computed entirely from data hackfetch already fetches (streak + sparkline already use it), so zero new api calls $ hackfetch -records ✦ personal records @you biggest day 12h 41m on 2026-07-18 longest streak 25 days ended 2026-07-01 longest session 43m on 2026-07-17 days coded 86 first day 2026-04-24 99 days ago lifetime 208h 29m the “longest streak” tracks your all time best not just your current one. and “first day” tells you how long ago you started so you can feel old. grab it brew upgrade hackfetch yay -S hackfetch-bin install curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Next devlog is gonna be a fun one, I have an idea cooking up
Hackfetdch natively in your readme hackfetch -readme it spits out a markdown stats card ready to paste straight into your github profile README. pipe it into a file and commit: hackfetch -readme > stats.md this is the cool bit or drop it in your README.md between two html comments and set up a github action to run it on a schedule so it auto refreshes every day. your profile now has a live coding stats card next to your pinned repos with no cron server, no vercel deploy, no api key stashed in secrets. its literally just markdown. zero extra api calls too. the readme card reads from the same cached hackatime response the normal fetch uses so if you just ran hackfetch it takes ~20ms. the streak emoji is a lil detail i had fun with. 3+ days gets a 🔥 upgrade with brew upgrade hackfetch or yay -S hackfetch-bin (once aur maintenance wraps up) or curl the installer curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh
Ships:
Every fetch tool tells you your OS. Mine tells you your streak. hackfetch is a Hack Club themed terminal fetch tool. Inspired by neofetch (originally bash, now archived) and fastfetch (its C successor), written in pure Go. Instead of just showing your kernel and CPU, it pulls live stats from your Hackatime account: today’s hours, weekly total, current streak, top project, top language. Right in your terminal. Six Hack Club themed ASCII logos (including my GOAT orpheus). Fourteen color schemes (pride, trans, bi, pan included). Live watch mode that refreshes while you code. And as of today, you can export the whole thing as a PNG, JPG, or SVG card and post it anywhere. One line to install: Linux / Mac: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Windows: irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.ps1 | iex Tell me how it was! Follow and like for updates.
HACKFETCH V2.0 it’s been a few weeks since ship #1 and hackfetch is a completely different tool now. faster, smaller, quieter, actually correct, and now lives in places besides your terminal window. v2.0.0 is out. what changed: fits in your tmux status bar with one line of config. same story for lualine. hackfetch -status prints a compact one-liner meant to be shelled out to every minute. fits everywhere else too. now on the AUR (yay -S hackfetch-bin) alongside the existing brew tap, curl installer, powershell installer, and go install. seven install channels total. runs in ~20ms on repeat calls thanks to an on-disk cache. tmux polling every minute is basically free now. was ~700ms cold before. runs in ~0.7s cold thanks to a parallel API fetch. was ~1.7s before. shows a smooth truecolor gradient on any modern terminal. auto-detects $COLORTERM. falls back to 256-color on older ones. -doctor walks a colored checklist of your setup and tells you exactly what’s broken. green if fine, orange if not, non-zero exit if you wanna script it. new pizza logo because hack club runs on pizza. seven logos total. streak is finally correct after silently saying “1 day” for a month. /summaries is gone from hackatime so hackfetch now reconstructs streak from every coding session in your history via /heartbeats/spans. real streak: 9 days for me right now. 7-day sparkline baked into the fetch (with -v) and available as -status –sparkline for the tmux bar. default fetch got leaner. slack handle, machines count, and the sparkline moved behind -v so the normal fetch stays focused on hours + project + language. loading spinner on the api fetch so you know something is happening. and then the cache made it show up almost never. one install: Linux / Mac: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.sh | sh Windows: irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch/main/install.ps1 | iex Arch family: yay -S hackfetch-bin macOS / Linuxbrew: brew install xerneas3318/tap/hackfetch For more install methods check out the github page: https://github.com/xerneas3318/hackfetch teasing the next big thing: hackfetch -leaderboard is coming next, using the public leaderboard endpoints i found in hackatime’s routes file. compete with friends on daily and weekly hours right from your terminal. private friend groups on a hackclub nest box after that. if you try it, thanks. send me some feedback...
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Thintensors by @satvikhardat | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-23T10:54:37Z", "hours": 74.0, "multiplier": 18.49, "payout": 1252, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Its a runtime-aware LLM archive format built for fast, efficient inference, This ship basically integrates MoE model paths, that allows you to run models like gpt-oss-20B on speeds and quality faster and better than llama.cpp!! (at q4) its not just the storage format that allows for the improvements, its a combination of different selective layers being quantized with the better storage format, allowing to run inference with higher speed and quality than just simple q8,q4 etc quants. the storage format only gain is only like 10%, but combined with middle out fp8 quants, and even int4 for some performance profiles, it can reach better speeds than the other ways to run inference This does not beat TRT / TRT LM, it does allow for quicker inference, and a more portable solution because for TRT you need to compile the plan (one time) for a few mins before being able to run the model, and it has to be compiled on every machine you run the model on, thintensor allows you to directly have the .thin file and run it on any machine with similar results! and it takes just a few seconds compared to about 30 mins on trt and trt lm reddit post for this project- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1uqr1o3/i_made_a_llm_storage_format_that_makes_llms_run/ independent tester’s view- https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor/issues/1 Let me know if u find any issues, tried a lot of other models here too, as u can see in the graphs :D let me know of any bugs on slack", "repo": "https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor", "demo": "https://pypi.org/project/thintensor/1.0.1/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-08T11:29:10Z", "hours": 32.0, "multiplier": 18.95, "payout": 511, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made ThinTensor, a runtime-aware LLM archive and inference runtime. Instead of only storing tensor bytes, it stores tensor roles, memory pages, quant metadata, and execution hints so the runtime can choose faster kernels and precision paths. The hardest part was keeping speed gains honest with HF correctness checks. So far it reaches up to ~94 tok/s on SmolLM3-3B with full BF16 KV retention and high logit similarity. After being tested on multiple models, you can get a avg 2x performance increase on most LLM archs, all archs are still not implemented, ik but this is workable with qwen, gemma, some MoE models, and SmolLM and a most others, but it wont be as optimized for all the model types Follow the guide at https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor#fast-path-setting-up-on-a-new-laptop To install thintensor runtime and use this guide to get a sample qwen model up and running https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor#quickstart-downloading--running-a-sample-model-qwen-08b", "repo": "https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor", "demo": "https://pypi.org/project/thintensor/1.0.1/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 52970, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 52970, "ts": "2026-08-23T10:50:48Z", "hours": 0.4203, "text": "Fixed a few Dense path issues, because the MoE path somehow made the dense path completely usable, fixed a few small one line bugs i got to know from the last ship’s reviews, read to for ship 2!!"}, {"post_id": 47007, "ts": "2026-08-14T16:14:41Z", "hours": 7.4253, "text": "Hitting 100hrs and final ship Didnt get time to work on this idea, since quite the while. And it has js about reached the state i can probably get it to MoE arch works, dense models work, cpu/gpu streaming works well, context/kv cache is also dynamically quanted lm_head quants are also there now The motivation really died out because of this project not getting reviewed its been over a month, leaving this as is, tho its not perfect, but it js about has enough features that i wanted Here are the final results after a ton of benchmarking- Phi-4: ThinTensor 28.21 tok/s vs llama.cpp 17.50 tok/s — 1.61× faster (+61.2%). Quality: 0.999949 cosine vs 0.997281. OpenReasoning-Nemotron-14B: ThinTensor 23.79 tok/s vs llama.cpp 19.79 tok/s — 1.20× faster (+20.2%). Quality: 0.999533 vs 0.967140. Llama 3.2 11B: ThinTensor 41.02 tok/s vs llama.cpp 39.82 tok/s — 1.03× faster (+3.0%). Quality: 0.995095 vs 0.991938. Qwen3.5-9B: ThinTensor 43.28 tok/s vs llama.cpp 42.83 tok/s — 1.01× faster (+1.1%). Quality: 0.973334 vs 0.894908. GPT-OSS-20B: ThinTensor 50.34 tok/s vs llama.cpp 40.36 tok/s — 1.25× faster (+24.7%). Quality: 0.983299 vs 0.792350. *all are apples to apples btw Overall: ThinTensor beats llama.cpp Q4 throughput on 5/5 tested architectures , with a geometric-mean speedup of approximately 1.203× . Probably gonna take a break, and learn before comming back to this, after the ship-2 on stardance!"}, {"post_id": 36344, "ts": "2026-07-28T12:16:13Z", "hours": 6.2056, "text": "ThinTensor Improvements Universal semantic-IR runtime for mixed attention, dense and MoE architectures. Per-tensor precision, kernel and residency planning instead of layer-wide quantization. Production FP8, INT4, MXFP4, Q2 and Q1 quantizers with calibration-aware scoring. Hard ≥0.995 cosine certification with exact routing, greedy-token and KV checks. Qwen3.5 hybrid linear-attention, shared-expert and packed rank-3 MoE support. Durable grouped-INT4 expert sidecars with bounded-RAM, mmap-based construction. Fixed four-matrix Triton projection, cuda / cuda:0 , layer-zero and converter-role bugs. Improved fused kernels, KV caching, expert routing and decode hot paths. Strict cache identity across model, tokenizer, GPU, CUDA, kernels and calibration. Remaining goal: prove ≥30 tok/s on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at certified ≥0.995 cosine. Getting way better speed on 27B dense models at a cosine that is also way better"}, {"post_id": 34506, "ts": "2026-07-25T08:53:57Z", "hours": 11.7969, "text": "I ammmm tierdd i tried a billionn things over the last 8 hours i just cant seem to understand why gemma4 doesnt want to workkkkk I dont have much to write in this devlog, other than, i am not gonna implement gemma arch for now"}, {"post_id": 33051, "ts": "2026-07-22T17:00:01Z", "hours": 1.0547, "text": "what I did to fix the numerical drift & get some speedups: The Root Cause of the Drift (The Cosine Fix): I discovered that in triton_kernels.py , the tl.dot_scaled call inside _mxfp_lowbit_selected_tensorcore_matvec_kernel (and the mxfp4 variant) had fast_math=True . The fast_math option drops critical precision bits during accumulator addition which was causing the MoE kernels to completely obliterate the trajectory. I disabled it globally using fast_math=False , and this instantly restored our cosine similarity to a perfect 1.000000 over the entire benchmark trajectory. The VRAM Bottleneck: When relying purely on MXFP4 experts, they required over 9.5 GB, breaking the 6.6 GiB budget and forcing the runtime to stream them via PCIe (which tanks performance down to ~5-10tok/s). The Q2 and Q1 low-bit expert decoding kernels actually achieve identical numerical accuracy to the baseline while aggressively packing the weights. The 97.87 tok/s Optimization: I configured bench.py and check_baseline_cosine.py to use: packed_expert_q1_layers=\"0:24\" : All 24 layers of MoE experts are now tightly packed into 1-bit Q1 structures, shrinking the expert memory footprint down to just 2.38 GB (from 9.52 GB). dense_int4_layers=\"all\" : Shrunk the non-expert dense projection weights (Q, K, V, O) into INT4, dropping their footprint from ~1.1 GB to ~0.27 GB. Since the entire model now takes 5.29 GiB (fitting entirely within the 6.6 GiB budget), all layers are pinned directly to VRAM. Because zero layers are streamed (any_streamed=False), the runtime successfully builds the fully fused cuda_graphs execution path, accelerating generation from a crawl to 97.87 tok/s ON gpt-oss-20b. I believe ill be moving to dense models just about now All these issues took SOOO many tests to find"}, {"post_id": 32869, "ts": "2026-07-22T09:43:09Z", "hours": 6.2739, "text": "What I’ve Done: Fixed KV Cache Indexing in Graph Mode: The previous cudaErrorStreamCaptureUnsupported error and out-of-bounds access were caused by assigning python integers dynamically during capture, and failing to respect block sizing. I modified the KV cache’s _in_graph_mode behavior to compute the tensor-based slot offset dynamically ((slot % block_size).view(1)) directly inside the graph capture. This worked successfully and fully restored the model’s coherent output without breaking graph logic. Experimented with MLP Block Sizing: I attempted to increase block_m and num_warps in the 1-bit Triton kernel (mxfp_lowbit_selected_swiglu) to reduce redundant memory loads of the intermediate x tensor. Unfortunately, register limits and memory layout meant it actually resulted in worse throughput, so I reverted those changes. Experimented with Attention Loop Early Exit: The single_token_gqa_attention_kernel is statically unrolled up to token_bucket (256). I tried adding a dynamic while loop to break early for short context sizes, but Triton’s compiler handles static for loops much better. reached around 65tk/s on gpt-oss-20b, constantly improvising MoE performance, next ima lock in for dense models but for now on MoE"}, {"post_id": 32489, "ts": "2026-07-21T18:25:21Z", "hours": 3.3508, "text": "Implemented a huge list of fixes Lazy page-ID tensor resolution after quantization Storage-alias-aware VRAM accounting Correct affine INT4 partial-group quantization KV sequence continuity checks Free-page geometry invalidation Canonical LM-head bias and final-softcap handling Certified shortlist logic with exact fallback Gemma-style attention scaling/softcap fixes Removal of hot-path CUDA scalar tensor allocations Device normalization for “cuda”, “cuda:N”, and torch.device Profile separation has been reconnected and different profiles select different kernels. Paged KV storage exists through SlabbedKVCache. A prior paged-attention slowdown was caused by GPU synchronization from .item() calls in SlabbedKVCache.append(), not by paged addressing itself. Logical page ownership is now tracked CPU-side to avoid those synchronizations. Paged attention has measured approximately: Materialized: 55.1 tok/s Paged: 57.5 tok/s on a relevant smaller models"}, {"post_id": 32108, "ts": "2026-07-21T01:27:17Z", "hours": 10.3133, "text": "Devlog-idk atp Well i said that i would stop working on this project last devlog, butttt, i just saw this https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor/issues/1 Someone tried thintensor on a 128gb unified ram DGX spark, ANDDDDD now i wanna make it good enough like so its a finished thing"}, {"post_id": 28811, "ts": "2026-07-15T09:45:15Z", "hours": 0.805, "text": "Final devlog: I would be moving from this project to other cool stuff i have in mind, the final benchmarks i got and everything, is pushed, had to do a lot of improvements to get bigger models running just as good as small ones I know there can be a lot of other optmizations, but maybe a few months later ill come back to this, but for now, its gonna stay as is."}, {"post_id": 28164, "ts": "2026-07-14T09:02:15Z", "hours": 13.7189, "text": "This devlog retains the apples-to-apples GPT-OSS control plus fresh Qwen3.5-9B, Llama 3.2 11B text-path, OpenReasoning-Nemotron-14B, and Phi-4 A LOT of optimizations were done to achive this results and 100s of benchmarks in different profiles and stuff, to get to this final table"}, {"post_id": 26560, "ts": "2026-07-11T13:36:08Z", "hours": 2.2911, "text": "ThinRuntime GPT-OSS-20B now achieves: 50.3445 tok/s median across three explicit 200-token runs. llama.cpp b9964 Q4_K_M: 40.3631 tok/s mean. ThinRuntime is 24.73% faster. Exact embedding and LM head; Q1/Q2 applies only to experts. Zero expert transfers during decode. Top-1 unchanged through step 4. Cosine: 0.987376 step 1, 0.983299 step 4. Accepted one-step configuration: 0.991415 cosine. llama.cpp Q4_K_M source-relative cosine: 0.792350."}, {"post_id": 26399, "ts": "2026-07-11T05:13:04Z", "hours": 7.2128, "text": "Worked over a LOT of stuff, like doing apples to apples comparisions of models such as LLama 11b vision instruct, So over time I fixed a lot of stuff added a new profile, that quants and quants and quants all layers till the model fits your VRAM, it doesnt care if the model is 20gb in weigths and you have a 8gb vram, it will quant and make it fit So testing this autofit profile on LLama 11b vision instruct, heres what i found it hit a cosine of 0.939758 and around 24tk/s on a 200 token test Similarly i tested ollama Llama 11b vision instruct with q4_k_m quant, it got a cosine close to 0.720495 i would say it would be more closer to 0.8 because this cosine was for only top 20 logprobes that ollama exposes This was done on 8gb vram rtx 5050 laptop 32gb ddr 5 ryzen 7 250 arch linux and the comparision is apples to apples because the thinruntime also quanted the model aggressively"}, {"post_id": 25725, "ts": "2026-07-10T05:02:15Z", "hours": 1.8908, "text": "Devlog: Resolving GPU Memory Corruption & CUDA Assertions on Wide Matvecs 1. The Symptoms When running inference/benchmarks on unquantized models (like Qwen3.5-9B) using the Triton backend on laptop GPUs (e.g., RTX 5050), the runtime encountered two asynchronous CUDA faults: • cudaErrorIllegalAddress (Illegal memory access) during cache eviction. • device-side assert triggered ( indexSelectSmallIndex assertion failed) during embedding vocabulary lookups. 2. The Root Cause (Resource Starvation & Memory Corruption) Wide Layer Geometries: In Qwen3.5, the projection matrices (Query, Key, Value) have a columns dimension of cols = 3584 . Triton Padded Tiling: Triton pads non-power-of-two shapes to the next power of two ( BLOCK_N = 4096 ). Static Tile Size: The default Triton config mapping uses BLOCK_M = 64 for wide matrices. This instructs Triton to compile a kernel loading a massive static tile size of 64 × 4096 = 262,144 elements. Register & Shared Memory Overflow: In FP32 accumulation, this tile requires 1 MB of memory per thread block. However, laptop GPU streaming multiprocessors (SMs) have a physical hardware limit of 96KB–100KB of shared memory/register files. The Failure Cascade: The compiler failed to allocate resources cleanly, resulting in severe register spills and memory read violations. Triton silently returned corrupted/NaN outputs. The subsequent argmax logit lookup generated a garbage token index (out of bounds), which triggered the PyTorch device-side assertion on the next step. 3. The Fix (Dynamic Chunked Looping) To prevent resource starvation, we modified Triton’s launching configuration in triton_kernels.py: Wide Column Routing: Added a check to detect if cols > 2048 . Looped Execution: Instead of loading the entire 4096 columns block statically, we force the kernel to execute _matvec_looped_kernel using a chunk size of BLOCK_N = 512 . Memory Optimization: The kernel loops through the columns sequentially in chunks of 512. This drops the tile size memory requirement per block to under 64 KB, which safely fits inside any laptop GPU’s physical SM limits. 4. Results I am currently running the final profiles ( max-performance and max-max-perf ). Let me check on the status!"}, {"post_id": 25311, "ts": "2026-07-09T15:03:13Z", "hours": 0.8025, "text": "Posted about this on reddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1uqr1o3/i_made_a_llm_storage_format_that_makes_llms_run/ Got a lot of feedback, gonna try to work over it over the next few weeks"}, {"post_id": 24643, "ts": "2026-07-08T11:18:54Z", "hours": 0.3739, "text": "Final benchmarks Smaller models have lower cosine because there are like really small like 1B but, some archs are still not fully optimized to run at a good bit faster speed, ik, but i would want to do a ship before working on getting the speed up on those"}, {"post_id": 24238, "ts": "2026-07-07T17:44:41Z", "hours": 0.9025, "text": "Finished benchmarking a few more models Hitting really really good tk/s when compared to hf that even fails to load the models on my 8gb vram, so its a HUGE improvement for gpu poor ppl like me 😭 Reason a lot less improvement for many models is that, each model has a different structure and i havent been able to make a generalized algorithm that would work for all, so for now, we are working with just a simple implementation Benchmark Methodology and Metrics Calculation To ensure accurate, robust, and reproducible results, the benchmarking and correctness scoring flow is executed as follows: 1. Benchmark Execution Workflow Benchmarks are run in isolated, dedicated Python processes for each engine (ThinTensor vs. Hugging Face Transformers) to prevent memory leakage or process interference: ThinTensor Baseline : The model is loaded via the thin_runtime.py engine. Weight Fit Planning : The runtime runs _automatic_fit_plan to estimate weight size. If the model’s weights do not fit within the available GPU VRAM (accounting for system/display manager overhead), it dynamically configures streaming weight residency ( --weight-residency stream ) and streams layers/experts block-by-block from CPU/RAM to the GPU. If the weights fit, it uses fully resident weights ( --weight-residency all ). Timing : Prefills the prompt (default “Hello”), decodes a number of warmup tokens (default 10) to initialize caches and compile/warm up Triton kernels, and then times the next decode steps (default 200) using wall-clock time ( time.perf_counter() ). Transformers (Hugging Face) Baseline : The model is loaded via a dedicated script bench_hf_transformers_decode.py in BF16 precision. RAM/CPU Offloading : For larger models (e.g. Gemma-4-E2B, OLMoE), loading the model fully on memory-constrained GPUs (like the RTX 5050 Laptop GPU with 7.57 GiB VRAM) causes CUDA OOM. To prevent OOM, RAM offloading is enabled via device_map=\"auto\" . Weights that exceed VRAM capacity are kept in CPU system RAM and loaded/swapped as needed. Timing : Like ThinTensor, it pre-runs a prompt prefill, decodes warmup tokens (default 10), and then times steps (default 200) decode steps. The decode loop avoids GPU-to-CPU synchronization (e.g. calling .item() inside the timed loop) to measure pure GPU decoding speed. 2. Metrics & Scores Calculation Thin/HF Peak GiB (Peak GPU Memory) : Tracks peak allocated VRAM in GiB using torch.cuda.max_memory_allocated() . This measures active tensors allocated by PyTorch’s allocator during the decode phase (excluding unallocated cache reserve or general display server memory). Min Cosine (Cosine Similarity) : In compare_hf_thin_logits.py , the logits of the final linear projection layer are collected for both models. Cosine similarity is calculated for the target token index at each step. The minimum cosine similarity found across all decode steps (e.g., step 1 and step 10) and prefill lengths (e.g., 1 and 128) is reported. Top-1 Match : A boolean check indicating whether the token ID with the highest probability (highest logit value) is identical between ThinTensor and HF at all decode steps. Top-5 Set : A boolean check indicating whether the set of top-5 highest-probability token IDs is identical between the two models at all steps (ignoring their internal sorted order). Top-5 Order : A boolean check indicating whether the exact sorted order of the top-5 token IDs matches between ThinTensor and HF at all steps. KV Retention : Specifies the KV cache precision format (e.g. full BF16 )."}, {"post_id": 24052, "ts": "2026-07-07T10:55:07Z", "hours": 5.2325, "text": "Dev Log #4 — 91–96 tok/s with Selective MXFP4 This was the first ThinTensor run that felt genuinely fast. On SmolLM3-3B, the selective MXFP4 gate/up profile reached around: ~91–96 tok/s and on the strong tested record it still preserved: cosine_similarity: 0.9994624257087708 top1_same: true top5_overlap: 0.8 generated_token_match_rate: 0.875 KV retention: full BF16 That cosine is extremely close to the HF BF16 reference: 1.0 - 0.9994624257087708 = 0.0005375742912292 So the run was only about 0.054% away from perfect cosine on that tested checkpoint. Why this was not just normal quantization The profile was selective: MXFP4 gate/up layers: 0:24 MXFP4 row postscale: enabled LM head: FP8 guarded path KV cache: full BF16 attention path: causal KV QKV/O/down: not blindly pushed into MXFP4 A full MXFP4 sweep over QKV, O, down, and gate/up was fast, but it destroyed the logits. That proved the obvious thing: fewer bytes alone is not enough. ThinTensor’s win comes from being role-aware. The runtime knows what each tensor does: Q / K / V O projection gate projection up projection down projection norm embedding LM head KV cache That means the runtime can apply aggressive precision only to the parts that tolerate it. For this result, the safe target was the MLP gate/up path. Why gate/up was the right target Single-token decoding is mostly a weight-read problem. Tthe goal became: reduce gate/up bytes keep attention stable keep KV exact keep LM head guarded preserve token ranking That is exactly what the selective MXFP4 profile does. It uses MXFP4 on the gate/up projections for layers 0:24 , but it does not blindly lower every sensitive path. Where Blackwell helps The test GPU is an RTX 5050 laptop GPU, which is Blackwell. That matters because Blackwell has native low-precision paths for FP4/MXFP4-style execution. ThinTensor uses this through Triton kernels that treat MXFP4 as an execution format, not just a smaller storage format. The idea is: store/read fewer bytes use block scales multiply against BF16 activations accumulate safely then apply row postscale The goal is to make each token cheaper to decode while keeping the output distribution close to HF BF16. The code side The relevant code is built around these ideas: 1. Honest quantization descriptors The QuantizationDescriptor describes the source format: method storage_dtype bits group_size scale_dtype zero_point modules_to_not_convert source_config For example: INT4 != FP4 Q8 != FP8 MXFP4 != generic Q4 The precision_ladder() function makes that explicit. It lists safe choices, opt-in choices, and lossy choices. So instead of silently lowering precision, the runtime can say: preserve native format fallback to BF16 or require explicit validation before requantization 2. Execution planning plan_quantization() decides what should happen at runtime. It can choose: preserve source storage use native kernel dequantize to BF16 or reject unsupported requantization The important flag is this: exact_storage_preserved If this is true, the runtime is using the source encoding directly. Whats next I would have to implement all mainstream model archs manually because all are diff, and like right now you can see, there are a lot of models that are heavily un-optimized Also im messaging stardance team on slack these devlogs too smol for me"}, {"post_id": 22313, "ts": "2026-07-04T18:31:05Z", "hours": 0.8797, "text": "Just hit 91tk/s with “cosine_similarity”: 0.9994624257087708 its actually crazy its like 5x faster the hf full devlog comming soon! ITS LIKE 0.054% away from perfect!!! The selective MXFP4 gate/up profile reached ~96 tok/s while preserving top-1 on the tested SmolLM3-3B through my thintensor runtimeeeee Full DevLogs gonna be crazy"}, {"post_id": 22113, "ts": "2026-07-04T12:07:02Z", "hours": 0.4494, "text": "Initial benchmarks based on some testing on a 3B model Why response similarity? Because we are making a storage format not “just” a runtime, so we need to ensure the model we are optimizing using thintensor runtime it HAS to be replying with the same responses like the original model! So with casual Kv implemented these are the benchmarks i gathered, if you wanna learn what quality fp8 is read my last devlog :D PS- the vram usage on our ThinTensor quality FP8 is just 500 mb more than the q8 even though there is a HUGE difference in the response similarity"}, {"post_id": 22063, "ts": "2026-07-04T09:46:10Z", "hours": 7.5944, "text": "Dev Log #3 — SmolLM3-3B Results SmolLM3-3B was the first real test of ThinTensor as an inference runtime. The baseline was Hugging Face BF16 on my RTX 5050 laptop GPU: HF BF16: ~17.8 tok/s ThinTensor BF16 reached: ThinTensor BF16: ~32–33 tok/s with cosine around 0.999 , meaning the logits stayed extremely close to the original SafeTensors/HF path. That matters because a storage/runtime format should not make the model noticeably worse. Then came the quality FP8 profile: ThinTensor quality FP8: ~46–48 tok/s This was not “quantize everything.” The profile was selective: gate/up projections: FP8 middle down projections: FP8 attention path: BF16 O-proj: BF16 LM head: BF16 KV cache: BF16 ThinTensor can do this because the .thin manifest and execution tape know tensor roles: Q, K, V, O, gate, up, down, norm, embedding, LM head, etc. The runtime can then lower precision only where the model tolerates it, while keeping sensitive paths in BF16. The kernel side reflects this. Attention uses single-token GQA and maps each query head to the right KV head: head = tl . program_id ( 0 ) kv_head = head // ( heads // kv_heads ) scores = tl . sum ( key * q [ None , :], axis = 1 ) * scale The FP8 MLP path uses scaled matvecs: w = tl . load ( weight + offs_m [:, None ] * stride_wm + offs_n [ None , :]) xv = tl . load ( x + offs_n ). to ( tl . float32 ) scale = tl . load ( scales + offs_m ). to ( tl . float32 ) acc = tl . sum ( w * xv [ None , :], axis = 1 ) * scale In one full-vocab centered-logit comparison: GGUF Q8_0 min cosine: 0.952666 ThinTensor BF16 min cosine: 0.999596 ThinTensor quality FP8 min cosine: 0.995366 So ThinTensor quality FP8 stayed much closer to BF16 than the measured Q8 path, while staying in the same speed class. Final speed table: HF BF16: ~17.8 tok/s ThinTensor BF16: ~32–33 tok/s ThinTensor quality FP8: ~46–48 tok/s Ollama / GGUF Q8_0: ~44.1 tok/s Headline: ThinTensor BF16 was ~1.8x faster than HF BF16. ThinTensor quality FP8 was ~2.6x faster than HF BF16. ThinTensor quality FP8 was faster than the measured Q8 baseline while preserving much better logit fidelity. This is where ThinTensor stopped being just an archive experiment and started looking like a real inference runtime :D"}, {"post_id": 20838, "ts": "2026-07-02T15:28:02Z", "hours": 1.5392, "text": "Js got to know that devlogs longer than 10hrs are stripped to 10 😭, i cant have more than 4k char so bear with me theres a LOT to tell that im not able to fit, but ill try my best anyways Dev Log #2 — Converting SafeTensors Into .thin (had to cut so much explaination bcs i HATE THE CHAR LIMIT, id add them in another devlog) The main conversion flow is: pub fn convert_hf ( options : ConvertHfOptions ) -> Result < ConvertHfResult > { let config : Value = serde_json :: from_reader ( File :: open ( options .hf_dir .join ( \"config.json\" )) ? ) ? ; let safetensor_paths = collect_safetensors ( & options .hf_dir ) ? ; let tensors = collect_tensors ( & safetensor_paths ) ? ; let layers = required_u32 ( & config , \"num_hidden_layers\" ) ? ; let model = build_model_spec ( & config , layers , & tensors , & options , & mut warnings ) ? ; let pages = build_pages ( & tensors , & config ) ? ; let execution_tape = build_execution_tape ( layers , & tensors , & mut warnings ) ? ; let manifest = Manifest { format : FORMAT_NAME .to_string (), version : FORMAT_VERSION , model , execution_tape , pages , memory_plan : build_memory_plan ( & config , & tensors ), }; write_archive_pages ( & options .out_path , & manifest , & archive_pages ) ? ; let archive = Archive :: open ( & options .out_path ) ? ; verify_archive ( & archive ) ? ; Ok ( ConvertHfResult { archive , warnings }) } The converter memory-maps each SafeTensors file read-only: let mmap = unsafe { Mmap :: map ( & file ) ? }; let safetensors = SafeTensors :: deserialize ( & mmap ) ? ; let base = mmap .as_ptr () as usize ; Then every tensor becomes a page candidate. The converter records where the tensor bytes live inside the mapped file: let data = tensor .data (); let offset = ( data .as_ptr () as usize ) .checked_sub ( base ) ? ; and stores: struct TensorPage { id : String , path : PathBuf , offset : u64 , size : u64 , checksum : [ u8 ; 32 ], dtype : String , shape : Vec < u64 > , } This avoids rebuilding every tensor in memory. The archive can later copy the original byte range directly: ArchivePageSource :: FileRange { path : tensor .path .clone (), offset : tensor .offset , } After collecting raw tensor data, the converter builds the model spec. It extracts or infers things like hidden size, layer count, attention heads, KV heads, head dimension, RoPE settings, vocab size, activation type, quantization config, and required runtime operators. One important field is attention type: let attention_kind = if kv_heads == heads { \"mha\" } else if kv_heads == 1 { \"mqa\" } else { \"gqa\" }; This matters because many modern decoder models use grouped-query attention. If the runtime only sees shapes but does not understand Q heads vs KV heads, causal attention can be wrong while still looking structurally valid. The converter also records required operators: let mut required_operators = vec! [ \"embedding\" .to_string (), \"rms_norm\" .to_string (), \"qkv_projection\" .to_string (), \"rope\" .to_string (), format! ( \"{attention_kind}_attention\" ), \"o_projection\" .to_string (), \"lm_head\" .to_string (), ]; For dense MLPs it adds: gated_activation down_projection For MoE models it records router and expert stages instead. the rest would be explained in another devlog, i hate the char limit (had to re-write like 10 times btw)"}, {"post_id": 20663, "ts": "2026-07-02T10:03:23Z", "hours": 14.5956, "text": "Dev Log #1 — Why ThinTensor Exists SafeTensors is already a very good format for what it was designed to do: store tensors safely. It keeps tensor metadata simple. For normal model distribution, that is enough. The problem starts when the tensor file becomes the runtime boundary. That is enough if another framework already knows the model class and execution graph. But for an inference runtime, especially one focused on single-token decode, those fields are not enough. The runtime needs to know what each tensor means . The .thin Format The first .thin archive is intentionally simple: .thin = fixed header + JSON manifest + page table + raw page data The Rust implementation defines the archive identity and header size directly: pub const MAGIC: &[u8; 8] = b\"THINv0\\0\\0\"; pub const HEADER_LEN: u32 = 88; The header stores the physical structure of the archive: pub struct Header { pub header_len: u32, pub version: u32, pub manifest_off: u64, pub manifest_len: u64, pub page_table_off: u64, pub page_count: u64, pub data_off: u64, pub archive_hash: [u8; 32], } This lets the loader open the file without guessing. It reads the header, jumps to the manifest, then reads the page table, then maps the raw page data. The manifest is JSON because the early format needed to stay inspectable. It contains the model-level information needed to reconstruct decode: architecture hidden size number of layers attention heads KV heads head dimension vocabulary size RoPE settings tensor names tensor shapes tensor dtypes tensor roles quantization metadata runtime/backend hints validation metadata The page table connects the manifest to real bytes inside the archive: pub struct PageTableRecord { pub page_id: String, pub offset: u64, pub stored_size: u64, pub raw_size: u64, pub flags: u32, pub checksum: [u8; 32], } A page record gives the runtime a verified byte range, not just a tensor name. This matters because pages can later be scheduled, streamed, cached, kept on CPU, moved to GPU, or assigned different execution policies. Packing and Verification The packer does not blindly write files into an archive. It validates the manifest first: let report = validate_manifest(&manifest); if !report.is_ok() { bail!(\"manifest invalid:\\n{}\", report.errors.join(\"\\n\")); } Then every page declared in the manifest must exist and match its declared size: if bytes.len() as u64 != page.size { bail!(\"page declared size does not match file size\"); } It also verifies the page checksum: let checksum = blake3::hash(&bytes); if checksum.as_bytes().as_slice() != expected.as_slice() { bail!(\"page checksum does not match manifest\"); } Only after validation does the writer emit the archive: write_header(&mut file, &header)?; file.write_all(&manifest_bytes)?; for record in &records { write_page_table_record(&mut file, record)?; } for page in pages { write_page_source(&mut file, page)?; } So the final file is structured as: [ header ] [ manifest JSON ] [ page table records ] [ raw page blobs ]"}]...
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Title: Thintensors by @satvikhardat | Stardance
D Title: Thintensors by @satvikhardat | Stardance
Devlogs:
Dev Log #1 — Why ThinTensor Exists SafeTensors is already a very good format for what it was designed to do: store tensors safely. It keeps tensor metadata simple. For normal model distribution, that is enough. The problem starts when the tensor file becomes the runtime boundary. That is enough if another framework already knows the model class and execution graph. But for an inference runtime, especially one focused on single-token decode, those fields are not enough. The runtime needs to know what each tensor means . The .thin Format The first .thin archive is intentionally simple: .thin = fixed header + JSON manifest + page table + raw page data The Rust implementation defines the archive identity and header size directly: pub const MAGIC: &[u8; 8] = b"THINv0\0\0"; pub const HEADER_LEN: u32 = 88; The header stores the physical structure of the archive: pub struct Header { pub header_len: u32, pub version: u32, pub manifest_off: u64, pub manifest_len: u64, pub page_table_off: u64, pub page_count: u64, pub data_off: u64, pub archive_hash: [u8; 32], } This lets the loader open the file without guessing. It reads the header, jumps to the manifest, then reads the page table, then maps the raw page data. The manifest is JSON because the early format needed to stay inspectable. It contains the model-level information needed to reconstruct decode: architecture hidden size number of layers attention heads KV heads head dimension vocabulary size RoPE settings tensor names tensor shapes tensor dtypes tensor roles quantization metadata runtime/backend hints validation metadata The page table connects the manifest to real bytes inside the archive: pub struct PageTableRecord { pub page_id: String, pub offset: u64, pub stored_size: u64, pub raw_size: u64, pub flags: u32, pub checksum: [u8; 32], } A page record gives the runtime a verified byte range, not just a tensor name. This matters because pages can later be scheduled, streamed, cached, kept on CPU, moved to GPU, or assigned different execution policies. Packing and Verification The packer does not blindly write files into an archive. It validates the manifest first: let report = validate_manifest(&manifest); if !report.is_ok() { bail!("manifest invalid:\n{}", report.errors.join("\n")); } Then every page declared in the manifest must exist and match its declared size: if bytes.len() as u64 != page.size { bail!("page declared size does not match file size"); } It also verifies the page checksum: let checksum = blake3::hash(&bytes); if checksum.as_bytes().as_slice() != expected.as_slice() { bail!("page checksum does not match manifest"); } Only after validation does the writer emit the archive: write_header(&mut file, &header)?; file.write_all(&manifest_bytes)?; for record in &records { write_page_table_record(&mut file, record)?; } for page in pages { write_page_source(&mut file, page)?; } So the final file is structured as: [ header ] [ manifest JSON ] [ page table records ] [ raw page blobs ]
Js got to know that devlogs longer than 10hrs are stripped to 10 😭, i cant have more than 4k char so bear with me theres a LOT to tell that im not able to fit, but ill try my best anyways Dev Log #2 — Converting SafeTensors Into .thin (had to cut so much explaination bcs i HATE THE CHAR LIMIT, id add them in another devlog) The main conversion flow is: pub fn convert_hf ( options : ConvertHfOptions ) -> Result < ConvertHfResult > { let config : Value = serde_json :: from_reader ( File :: open ( options .hf_dir .join ( "config.json" )) ? ) ? ; let safetensor_paths = collect_safetensors ( & options .hf_dir ) ? ; let tensors = collect_tensors ( & safetensor_paths ) ? ; let layers = required_u32 ( & config , "num_hidden_layers" ) ? ; let model = build_model_spec ( & config , layers , & tensors , & options , & mut warnings ) ? ; let pages = build_pages ( & tensors , & config ) ? ; let execution_tape = build_execution_tape ( layers , & tensors , & mut warnings ) ? ; let manifest = Manifest { format : FORMAT_NAME .to_string (), version : FORMAT_VERSION , model , execution_tape , pages , memory_plan : build_memory_plan ( & config , & tensors ), }; write_archive_pages ( & options .out_path , & manifest , & archive_pages ) ? ; let archive = Archive :: open ( & options .out_path ) ? ; verify_archive ( & archive ) ? ; Ok ( ConvertHfResult { archive , warnings }) } The converter memory-maps each SafeTensors file read-only: let mmap = unsafe { Mmap :: map ( & file ) ? }; let safetensors = SafeTensors :: deserialize ( & mmap ) ? ; let base = mmap .as_ptr () as usize ; Then every tensor becomes a page candidate. The converter records where the tensor bytes live inside the mapped file: let data = tensor .data (); let offset = ( data .as_ptr () as usize ) .checked_sub ( base ) ? ; and stores: struct TensorPage { id : String , path : PathBuf , offset : u64 , size : u64 , checksum : [ u8 ; 32 ], dtype : String , shape : Vec < u64 > , } This avoids rebuilding every tensor in memory. The archive can later copy the original byte range directly: ArchivePageSource :: FileRange { path : tensor .path .clone (), offset : tensor .offset , } After collecting raw tensor data, the converter builds the model spec. It extracts or infers things like hidden size, layer count, attention heads, KV heads, head dimension, RoPE settings, vocab size, activation type, quantization config, and required runtime operators. One important field is attention type: let attention_kind = if kv_heads == heads { "mha" } else if kv_heads == 1 { "mqa" } else { "gqa" }; This matters because many modern decoder models use grouped-query attention. If the runtime only sees shapes but does not understand Q heads vs KV heads, causal attention can be wrong while still looking structurally valid. The converter also records required operators: let mut required_operators = vec! [ "embedding" .to_string (), "rms_norm" .to_string (), "qkv_projection" .to_string (), "rope" .to_string (), format! ( "{attention_kind}_attention" ), "o_projection" .to_string (), "lm_head" .to_string (), ]; For dense MLPs it adds: gated_activation down_projection For MoE models it records router and expert stages instead. the rest would be explained in another devlog, i hate the char limit (had to re-write like 10 times btw)
Dev Log #3 — SmolLM3-3B Results SmolLM3-3B was the first real test of ThinTensor as an inference runtime. The baseline was Hugging Face BF16 on my RTX 5050 laptop GPU: HF BF16: ~17.8 tok/s ThinTensor BF16 reached: ThinTensor BF16: ~32–33 tok/s with cosine around 0.999 , meaning the logits stayed extremely close to the original SafeTensors/HF path. That matters because a storage/runtime format should not make the model noticeably worse. Then came the quality FP8 profile: ThinTensor quality FP8: ~46–48 tok/s This was not “quantize everything.” The profile was selective: gate/up projections: FP8 middle down projections: FP8 attention path: BF16 O-proj: BF16 LM head: BF16 KV cache: BF16 ThinTensor can do this because the .thin manifest and execution tape know tensor roles: Q, K, V, O, gate, up, down, norm, embedding, LM head, etc. The runtime can then lower precision only where the model tolerates it, while keeping sensitive paths in BF16. The kernel side reflects this. Attention uses single-token GQA and maps each query head to the right KV head: head = tl . program_id ( 0 ) kv_head = head // ( heads // kv_heads ) scores = tl . sum ( key * q [ None , :], axis = 1 ) * scale The FP8 MLP path uses scaled matvecs: w = tl . load ( weight + offs_m [:, None ] * stride_wm + offs_n [ None , :]) xv = tl . load ( x + offs_n ). to ( tl . float32 ) scale = tl . load ( scales + offs_m ). to ( tl . float32 ) acc = tl . sum ( w * xv [ None , :], axis = 1 ) * scale In one full-vocab centered-logit comparison: GGUF Q8_0 min cosine: 0.952666 ThinTensor BF16 min cosine: 0.999596 ThinTensor quality FP8 min cosine: 0.995366 So ThinTensor quality FP8 stayed much closer to BF16 than the measured Q8 path, while staying in the same speed class. Final speed table: HF BF16: ~17.8 tok/s ThinTensor BF16: ~32–33 tok/s ThinTensor quality FP8: ~46–48 tok/s Ollama / GGUF Q8_0: ~44.1 tok/s Headline: ThinTensor BF16 was ~1.8x faster than HF BF16. ThinTensor quality FP8 was ~2.6x faster than HF BF16. ThinTensor quality FP8 was faster than the measured Q8 baseline while preserving much better logit fidelity. This is where ThinTensor stopped being just an archive experiment and started looking like a real inference runtime :D
Initial benchmarks based on some testing on a 3B model Why response similarity? Because we are making a storage format not “just” a runtime, so we need to ensure the model we are optimizing using thintensor runtime it HAS to be replying with the same responses like the original model! So with casual Kv implemented these are the benchmarks i gathered, if you wanna learn what quality fp8 is read my last devlog :D PS- the vram usage on our ThinTensor quality FP8 is just 500 mb more than the q8 even though there is a HUGE difference in the response similarity
Just hit 91tk/s with “cosine_similarity”: 0.9994624257087708 its actually crazy its like 5x faster the hf full devlog comming soon! ITS LIKE 0.054% away from perfect!!! The selective MXFP4 gate/up profile reached ~96 tok/s while preserving top-1 on the tested SmolLM3-3B through my thintensor runtimeeeee Full DevLogs gonna be crazy
Dev Log #4 — 91–96 tok/s with Selective MXFP4 This was the first ThinTensor run that felt genuinely fast. On SmolLM3-3B, the selective MXFP4 gate/up profile reached around: ~91–96 tok/s and on the strong tested record it still preserved: cosine_similarity: 0.9994624257087708 top1_same: true top5_overlap: 0.8 generated_token_match_rate: 0.875 KV retention: full BF16 That cosine is extremely close to the HF BF16 reference: 1.0 - 0.9994624257087708 = 0.0005375742912292 So the run was only about 0.054% away from perfect cosine on that tested checkpoint. Why this was not just normal quantization The profile was selective: MXFP4 gate/up layers: 0:24 MXFP4 row postscale: enabled LM head: FP8 guarded path KV cache: full BF16 attention path: causal KV QKV/O/down: not blindly pushed into MXFP4 A full MXFP4 sweep over QKV, O, down, and gate/up was fast, but it destroyed the logits. That proved the obvious thing: fewer bytes alone is not enough. ThinTensor’s win comes from being role-aware. The runtime knows what each tensor does: Q / K / V O projection gate projection up projection down projection norm embedding LM head KV cache That means the runtime can apply aggressive precision only to the parts that tolerate it. For this result, the safe target was the MLP gate/up path. Why gate/up was the right target Single-token decoding is mostly a weight-read problem. Tthe goal became: reduce gate/up bytes keep attention stable keep KV exact keep LM head guarded preserve token ranking That is exactly what the selective MXFP4 profile does. It uses MXFP4 on the gate/up projections for layers 0:24 , but it does not blindly lower every sensitive path. Where Blackwell helps The test GPU is an RTX 5050 laptop GPU, which is Blackwell. That matters because Blackwell has native low-precision paths for FP4/MXFP4-style execution. ThinTensor uses this through Triton kernels that treat MXFP4 as an execution format, not just a smaller storage format. The idea is: store/read fewer bytes use block scales multiply against BF16 activations accumulate safely then apply row postscale The goal is to make each token cheaper to decode while keeping the output distribution close to HF BF16. The code side The relevant code is built around these ideas: 1. Honest quantization descriptors The QuantizationDescriptor describes the source format: method storage_dtype bits group_size scale_dtype zero_point modules_to_not_convert source_config For example: INT4 != FP4 Q8 != FP8 MXFP4 != generic Q4 The precision_ladder() function makes that explicit. It lists safe choices, opt-in choices, and lossy choices. So instead of silently lowering precision, the runtime can say: preserve native format fallback to BF16 or require explicit validation before requantization 2. Execution planning plan_quantization() decides what should happen at runtime. It can choose: preserve source storage use native kernel dequantize to BF16 or reject unsupported requantization The important flag is this: exact_storage_preserved If this is true, the runtime is using the source encoding directly. Whats next I would have to implement all mainstream model archs manually because all are diff, and like right now you can see, there are a lot of models that are heavily un-optimized Also im messaging stardance team on slack these devlogs too smol for me
Finished benchmarking a few more models Hitting really really good tk/s when compared to hf that even fails to load the models on my 8gb vram, so its a HUGE improvement for gpu poor ppl like me 😭 Reason a lot less improvement for many models is that, each model has a different structure and i havent been able to make a generalized algorithm that would work for all, so for now, we are working with just a simple implementation Benchmark Methodology and Metrics Calculation To ensure accurate, robust, and reproducible results, the benchmarking and correctness scoring flow is executed as follows: 1. Benchmark Execution Workflow Benchmarks are run in isolated, dedicated Python processes for each engine (ThinTensor vs. Hugging Face Transformers) to prevent memory leakage or process interference: ThinTensor Baseline : The model is loaded via the thin_runtime.py engine. Weight Fit Planning : The runtime runs _automatic_fit_plan to estimate weight size. If the model’s weights do not fit within the available GPU VRAM (accounting for system/display manager overhead), it dynamically configures streaming weight residency ( --weight-residency stream ) and streams layers/experts block-by-block from CPU/RAM to the GPU. If the weights fit, it uses fully resident weights ( --weight-residency all ). Timing : Prefills the prompt (default “Hello”), decodes a number of warmup tokens (default 10) to initialize caches and compile/warm up Triton kernels, and then times the next decode steps (default 200) using wall-clock time ( time.perf_counter() ). Transformers (Hugging Face) Baseline : The model is loaded via a dedicated script bench_hf_transformers_decode.py in BF16 precision. RAM/CPU Offloading : For larger models (e.g. Gemma-4-E2B, OLMoE), loading the model fully on memory-constrained GPUs (like the RTX 5050 Laptop GPU with 7.57 GiB VRAM) causes CUDA OOM. To prevent OOM, RAM offloading is enabled via device_map="auto" . Weights that exceed VRAM capacity are kept in CPU system RAM and loaded/swapped as needed. Timing : Like ThinTensor, it pre-runs a prompt prefill, decodes warmup tokens (default 10), and then times steps (default 200) decode steps. The decode loop avoids GPU-to-CPU synchronization (e.g. calling .item() inside the timed loop) to measure pure GPU decoding speed. 2. Metrics & Scores Calculation Thin/HF Peak GiB (Peak GPU Memory) : Tracks peak allocated VRAM in GiB using torch.cuda.max_memory_allocated() . This measures active tensors allocated by PyTorch’s allocator during the decode phase (excluding unallocated cache reserve or general display server memory). Min Cosine (Cosine Similarity) : In compare_hf_thin_logits.py , the logits of the final linear projection layer are collected for both models. Cosine similarity is calculated for the target token index at each step. The minimum cosine similarity found across all decode steps (e.g., step 1 and step 10) and prefill lengths (e.g., 1 and 128) is reported. Top-1 Match : A boolean check indicating whether the token ID with the highest probability (highest logit value) is identical between ThinTensor and HF at all decode steps. Top-5 Set : A boolean check indicating whether the set of top-5 highest-probability token IDs is identical between the two models at all steps (ignoring their internal sorted order). Top-5 Order : A boolean check indicating whether the exact sorted order of the top-5 token IDs matches between ThinTensor and HF at all steps. KV Retention : Specifies the KV cache precision format (e.g. full BF16 ).
Final benchmarks Smaller models have lower cosine because there are like really small like 1B but, some archs are still not fully optimized to run at a good bit faster speed, ik, but i would want to do a ship before working on getting the speed up on those
Posted about this on reddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1uqr1o3/i_made_a_llm_storage_format_that_makes_llms_run/ Got a lot of feedback, gonna try to work over it over the next few weeks
Devlog: Resolving GPU Memory Corruption & CUDA Assertions on Wide Matvecs 1. The Symptoms When running inference/benchmarks on unquantized models (like Qwen3.5-9B) using the Triton backend on laptop GPUs (e.g., RTX 5050), the runtime encountered two asynchronous CUDA faults: • cudaErrorIllegalAddress (Illegal memory access) during cache eviction. • device-side assert triggered ( indexSelectSmallIndex assertion failed) during embedding vocabulary lookups. 2. The Root Cause (Resource Starvation & Memory Corruption) Wide Layer Geometries: In Qwen3.5, the projection matrices (Query, Key, Value) have a columns dimension of cols = 3584 . Triton Padded Tiling: Triton pads non-power-of-two shapes to the next power of two ( BLOCK_N = 4096 ). Static Tile Size: The default Triton config mapping uses BLOCK_M = 64 for wide matrices. This instructs Triton to compile a kernel loading a massive static tile size of 64 × 4096 = 262,144 elements. Register & Shared Memory Overflow: In FP32 accumulation, this tile requires 1 MB of memory per thread block. However, laptop GPU streaming multiprocessors (SMs) have a physical hardware limit of 96KB–100KB of shared memory/register files. The Failure Cascade: The compiler failed to allocate resources cleanly, resulting in severe register spills and memory read violations. Triton silently returned corrupted/NaN outputs. The subsequent argmax logit lookup generated a garbage token index (out of bounds), which triggered the PyTorch device-side assertion on the next step. 3. The Fix (Dynamic Chunked Looping) To prevent resource starvation, we modified Triton’s launching configuration in triton_kernels.py: Wide Column Routing: Added a check to detect if cols > 2048 . Looped Execution: Instead of loading the entire 4096 columns block statically, we force the kernel to execute _matvec_looped_kernel using a chunk size of BLOCK_N = 512 . Memory Optimization: The kernel loops through the columns sequentially in chunks of 512. This drops the tile size memory requirement per block to under 64 KB, which safely fits inside any laptop GPU’s physical SM limits. 4. Results I am currently running the final profiles ( max-performance and max-max-perf ). Let me check on the status!
Worked over a LOT of stuff, like doing apples to apples comparisions of models such as LLama 11b vision instruct, So over time I fixed a lot of stuff added a new profile, that quants and quants and quants all layers till the model fits your VRAM, it doesnt care if the model is 20gb in weigths and you have a 8gb vram, it will quant and make it fit So testing this autofit profile on LLama 11b vision instruct, heres what i found it hit a cosine of 0.939758 and around 24tk/s on a 200 token test Similarly i tested ollama Llama 11b vision instruct with q4_k_m quant, it got a cosine close to 0.720495 i would say it would be more closer to 0.8 because this cosine was for only top 20 logprobes that ollama exposes This was done on 8gb vram rtx 5050 laptop 32gb ddr 5 ryzen 7 250 arch linux and the comparision is apples to apples because the thinruntime also quanted the model aggressively
ThinRuntime GPT-OSS-20B now achieves: 50.3445 tok/s median across three explicit 200-token runs. llama.cpp b9964 Q4_K_M: 40.3631 tok/s mean. ThinRuntime is 24.73% faster. Exact embedding and LM head; Q1/Q2 applies only to experts. Zero expert transfers during decode. Top-1 unchanged through step 4. Cosine: 0.987376 step 1, 0.983299 step 4. Accepted one-step configuration: 0.991415 cosine. llama.cpp Q4_K_M source-relative cosine: 0.792350.
This devlog retains the apples-to-apples GPT-OSS control plus fresh Qwen3.5-9B, Llama 3.2 11B text-path, OpenReasoning-Nemotron-14B, and Phi-4 A LOT of optimizations were done to achive this results and 100s of benchmarks in different profiles and stuff, to get to this final table
Final devlog: I would be moving from this project to other cool stuff i have in mind, the final benchmarks i got and everything, is pushed, had to do a lot of improvements to get bigger models running just as good as small ones I know there can be a lot of other optmizations, but maybe a few months later ill come back to this, but for now, its gonna stay as is.
Devlog-idk atp Well i said that i would stop working on this project last devlog, butttt, i just saw this https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor/issues/1 Someone tried thintensor on a 128gb unified ram DGX spark, ANDDDDD now i wanna make it good enough like so its a finished thing
Implemented a huge list of fixes Lazy page-ID tensor resolution after quantization Storage-alias-aware VRAM accounting Correct affine INT4 partial-group quantization KV sequence continuity checks Free-page geometry invalidation Canonical LM-head bias and final-softcap handling Certified shortlist logic with exact fallback Gemma-style attention scaling/softcap fixes Removal of hot-path CUDA scalar tensor allocations Device normalization for “cuda”, “cuda:N”, and torch.device Profile separation has been reconnected and different profiles select different kernels. Paged KV storage exists through SlabbedKVCache. A prior paged-attention slowdown was caused by GPU synchronization from .item() calls in SlabbedKVCache.append(), not by paged addressing itself. Logical page ownership is now tracked CPU-side to avoid those synchronizations. Paged attention has measured approximately: Materialized: 55.1 tok/s Paged: 57.5 tok/s on a relevant smaller models
What I’ve Done: Fixed KV Cache Indexing in Graph Mode: The previous cudaErrorStreamCaptureUnsupported error and out-of-bounds access were caused by assigning python integers dynamically during capture, and failing to respect block sizing. I modified the KV cache’s _in_graph_mode behavior to compute the tensor-based slot offset dynamically ((slot % block_size).view(1)) directly inside the graph capture. This worked successfully and fully restored the model’s coherent output without breaking graph logic. Experimented with MLP Block Sizing: I attempted to increase block_m and num_warps in the 1-bit Triton kernel (mxfp_lowbit_selected_swiglu) to reduce redundant memory loads of the intermediate x tensor. Unfortunately, register limits and memory layout meant it actually resulted in worse throughput, so I reverted those changes. Experimented with Attention Loop Early Exit: The single_token_gqa_attention_kernel is statically unrolled up to token_bucket (256). I tried adding a dynamic while loop to break early for short context sizes, but Triton’s compiler handles static for loops much better. reached around 65tk/s on gpt-oss-20b, constantly improvising MoE performance, next ima lock in for dense models but for now on MoE
what I did to fix the numerical drift & get some speedups: The Root Cause of the Drift (The Cosine Fix): I discovered that in triton_kernels.py , the tl.dot_scaled call inside _mxfp_lowbit_selected_tensorcore_matvec_kernel (and the mxfp4 variant) had fast_math=True . The fast_math option drops critical precision bits during accumulator addition which was causing the MoE kernels to completely obliterate the trajectory. I disabled it globally using fast_math=False , and this instantly restored our cosine similarity to a perfect 1.000000 over the entire benchmark trajectory. The VRAM Bottleneck: When relying purely on MXFP4 experts, they required over 9.5 GB, breaking the 6.6 GiB budget and forcing the runtime to stream them via PCIe (which tanks performance down to ~5-10tok/s). The Q2 and Q1 low-bit expert decoding kernels actually achieve identical numerical accuracy to the baseline while aggressively packing the weights. The 97.87 tok/s Optimization: I configured bench.py and check_baseline_cosine.py to use: packed_expert_q1_layers="0:24" : All 24 layers of MoE experts are now tightly packed into 1-bit Q1 structures, shrinking the expert memory footprint down to just 2.38 GB (from 9.52 GB). dense_int4_layers="all" : Shrunk the non-expert dense projection weights (Q, K, V, O) into INT4, dropping their footprint from ~1.1 GB to ~0.27 GB. Since the entire model now takes 5.29 GiB (fitting entirely within the 6.6 GiB budget), all layers are pinned directly to VRAM. Because zero layers are streamed (any_streamed=False), the runtime successfully builds the fully fused cuda_graphs execution path, accelerating generation from a crawl to 97.87 tok/s ON gpt-oss-20b. I believe ill be moving to dense models just about now All these issues took SOOO many tests to find
I ammmm tierdd i tried a billionn things over the last 8 hours i just cant seem to understand why gemma4 doesnt want to workkkkk I dont have much to write in this devlog, other than, i am not gonna implement gemma arch for now
ThinTensor Improvements Universal semantic-IR runtime for mixed attention, dense and MoE architectures. Per-tensor precision, kernel and residency planning instead of layer-wide quantization. Production FP8, INT4, MXFP4, Q2 and Q1 quantizers with calibration-aware scoring. Hard ≥0.995 cosine certification with exact routing, greedy-token and KV checks. Qwen3.5 hybrid linear-attention, shared-expert and packed rank-3 MoE support. Durable grouped-INT4 expert sidecars with bounded-RAM, mmap-based construction. Fixed four-matrix Triton projection, cuda / cuda:0 , layer-zero and converter-role bugs. Improved fused kernels, KV caching, expert routing and decode hot paths. Strict cache identity across model, tokenizer, GPU, CUDA, kernels and calibration. Remaining goal: prove ≥30 tok/s on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at certified ≥0.995 cosine. Getting way better speed on 27B dense models at a cosine that is also way better
Hitting 100hrs and final ship Didnt get time to work on this idea, since quite the while. And it has js about reached the state i can probably get it to MoE arch works, dense models work, cpu/gpu streaming works well, context/kv cache is also dynamically quanted lm_head quants are also there now The motivation really died out because of this project not getting reviewed its been over a month, leaving this as is, tho its not perfect, but it js about has enough features that i wanted Here are the final results after a ton of benchmarking- Phi-4: ThinTensor 28.21 tok/s vs llama.cpp 17.50 tok/s — 1.61× faster (+61.2%). Quality: 0.999949 cosine vs 0.997281. OpenReasoning-Nemotron-14B: ThinTensor 23.79 tok/s vs llama.cpp 19.79 tok/s — 1.20× faster (+20.2%). Quality: 0.999533 vs 0.967140. Llama 3.2 11B: ThinTensor 41.02 tok/s vs llama.cpp 39.82 tok/s — 1.03× faster (+3.0%). Quality: 0.995095 vs 0.991938. Qwen3.5-9B: ThinTensor 43.28 tok/s vs llama.cpp 42.83 tok/s — 1.01× faster (+1.1%). Quality: 0.973334 vs 0.894908. GPT-OSS-20B: ThinTensor 50.34 tok/s vs llama.cpp 40.36 tok/s — 1.25× faster (+24.7%). Quality: 0.983299 vs 0.792350. *all are apples to apples btw Overall: ThinTensor beats llama.cpp Q4 throughput on 5/5 tested architectures , with a geometric-mean speedup of approximately 1.203× . Probably gonna take a break, and learn before comming back to this, after the ship-2 on stardance!
Fixed a few Dense path issues, because the MoE path somehow made the dense path completely usable, fixed a few small one line bugs i got to know from the last ship’s reviews, read to for ship 2!!
Ships:
I made ThinTensor, a runtime-aware LLM archive and inference runtime. Instead of only storing tensor bytes, it stores tensor roles, memory pages, quant metadata, and execution hints so the runtime can choose faster kernels and precision paths. The hardest part was keeping speed gains honest with HF correctness checks. So far it reaches up to ~94 tok/s on SmolLM3-3B with full BF16 KV retention and high logit similarity. After being tested on multiple models, you can get a avg 2x performance increase on most LLM archs, all archs are still not implemented, ik but this is workable with qwen, gemma, some MoE models, and SmolLM and a most others, but it wont be as optimized for all the model types Follow the guide at https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor#fast-path-setting-up-on-a-new-laptop To install thintensor runtime and use this guide to get a sample qwen model up and running https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor#quickstart-downloading--running-a-sample-model-qwen-08b
Its a runtime-aware LLM archive format built for fast, efficient inference, This ship basically integrates MoE model paths, that allows you to run models like gpt-oss-20B on speeds and quality faster and better than llama.cpp!! (at q4) its not just the storage format that allows for the improvements, its a combination of different selective layers being quantized with the better storage format, allowing to run inference with higher speed and quality than just simple q8,q4 etc quants. the storage format only gain is only like 10%, but combined with middle out fp8 quants, and even int4 for some performance profiles, it can reach better speeds than the other ways to run inference This does not beat TRT / TRT LM, it does allow for quicker inference, and a more portable solution because for TRT you need to compile the plan (one time) for a few mins before being able to run the model, and it has to be compiled on every machine you run the model on, thintensor allows you to directly have the .thin file and run it on any machine with similar results! and it takes just a few seconds compared to about 30 mins on trt and trt lm reddit post for this project- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1uqr1o3/i_made_a_llm_storage_format_that_makes_llms_run/ independent tester’s view- https://github.com/random-unknown-username/Thintensor/issues/1 Let me know if u find any issues, tried a lot of other models here too, as u can see in the graphs :D let me know of any bugs on slack...
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-27T22:09:45Z", "hours": 95.0, "multiplier": 18.99, "payout": 1802, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Hi! I’m really happy to introduce you to my biggest project so far. It’s called Cirkuit, and it’s a logic circuit sandbox simulator… but with pixel art! That means you can basically build anything using just pixels. Why pixels? You may ask. Well, many logic simulators already exist, but the issue is that most of them aren’t very accessible to the average user. That’s why I wanted Cirkuit to be as easy to use as possible. I’m already quite familiar with TypeScript and React, which I used for this project. So the most difficult part was actually figuring out how to implement features without having 100 nested loops :D I had a hard time figuring out how to build the core engine (obviously), as well as the annotation system. I’m quite proud of how it looks and how well it works. This project was a perfect opportunity for me to improve my design skills. I worked hard to reduce friction between the interface and the user (aka you, dear shipwriters). One piece of advice: try it on a computer with a mouse. Phones and trackpads are supported, but it’s not the best experience. Hope you’ll like this project!", "repo": "https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit", "demo": "https://nafo44.github.io/Cirkuit/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 81890, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 81890, "ts": "2026-10-22T21:14:45Z", "hours": 1.7631, "text": "Devlog #38 : Integrated circuits Some of you have requested this, so I’m working on it! It’s not out yet, as it’s a pretty big feature. Integrated circuits will basically be custom components (most likely rectangles) with multiple inputs and outputs, all defined by the user. It’s literally a footprint, kinda like what you’d find in KiCad. I’ve started modifying the engine’s internals so it can handle these new types of connections (alongside the classic 1-pixel components). The real challenge here is keeping everything simple on the UX side, even though this feature targets more advanced users. The image below only shows what it might look like, this will probably change over time. As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: keep working on this feature, polish the UI/UX, ship it, and sadly… the end of stardance :("}, {"post_id": 80656, "ts": "2026-10-18T12:34:55Z", "hours": 0.6414, "text": "Devlog #37 : Probe tool is out! You can now inspect your circuits with this new tool. It highlights equipotential wires. I also added small circles to every connected ports. Next steps: UI polish, and maybe a “challenge” or “community circuits” tab."}, {"post_id": 80469, "ts": "2026-10-17T19:03:13Z", "hours": 1.3664, "text": "Devlog #36 : Probe tool and 4-bit calculator. While I was working on improving my 7-segment display, I had quite a hard time simplifying the circuit. Then I thought it could be really useful to have a tool that shows all the equipotential wires. So I’m currently working on it! It’s working, but I still have to improve its style before publishing it. Aside from that, I actually spent way too many hours improving the 4-bit calculator. And it’s now finished! It’s available in the demo circuit if you want to try it. I’ll see if I can build a keyboard later so users don’t have to enter numbers in binary. As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: finish the Probe tool, polish the UI, add a “challenge” tab."}, {"post_id": 79615, "ts": "2026-10-14T18:37:38Z", "hours": 1.4939, "text": "Devlog #35 : UI cleanup and (another) demo circuit The sidebar was getting a bit too crowded, so I added a small button to show/hide the more advanced components. The idea is to make things a little less overwhelming for new users, instead of throwing everything at them right away. I also worked on a 4-bit adder and wired it up to my 7-segment decoder! I’m going to try making it a 4-bit decoder instead of a 3-bit one, but things are going to get a lot more complicated (more numbers = more logic gates). One small issue with the adder for now: the most significant bit is on the right, so the input is basically reversed. I’ll fix that soon. In the meantime, you can already try it out in the live demo project! As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: more UI/UX improvements, adding challenges, and continuing to waste way too much of my time messing around with circuits xd"}, {"post_id": 79427, "ts": "2026-10-13T22:49:03Z", "hours": 0.4678, "text": "Devlog #34 : New component: Memory! This is one step up in difficulty! It has two inputs: a clock input (at the top) and a signal input (on the left). The output signal is provided on the right. This component can store a 1-bit value, which is updated on every rising edge of the clock signal. You can basically build anything with the component available: calculator, more advanced display (e.g. a 7-segment decoder that can go from 0 to 9). I added a 3-bit binary counter that I wired up to my 7-segment decoder! (demo bellow). It’s also included in the demo project file. Next steps: cleanup UI and improve UX (the sidebar is really really crowded right now)"}, {"post_id": 79113, "ts": "2026-10-12T18:33:18Z", "hours": 1.6869, "text": "Devlog #33 : Docs update and 1-bit memory! I added the clock to the docs page, along with some new tests for it. I’m also almost done with the 1-bit memory (basically a simplified D flip-flop). I’ll share it in the next devlog! Also, if you like this project, you can leave a star on the project’s GitHub page if you wish! Next steps: finish the 1-bit memory and clean up the UI/UX"}, {"post_id": 77284, "ts": "2026-10-06T12:57:02Z", "hours": 1.4464, "text": "Devlog #32 : New component: CLOCK (finally) This one was relatively easy to implement! The tick system was already there, but it was only triggered by user interactions. Now, your circuits run at 10 ticks/s, and the clock has a constant 1 Hz square signal (the recording below is choppy, but yes it is indeed a 1 Hz periodic signal) This component only has one output. I thought it would make building complex circuits easier if the other sides were isolated. Next steps: 1-bit memory, and then a lot of UX/UI improvements!"}, {"post_id": 76710, "ts": "2026-10-04T11:58:04Z", "hours": 1.9281, "text": "Devlog #31 : UI improvement! I replaced the old “main shortcuts” section in the sidebar with simple links. It frees up some space, makes the interface feel cleaner, and should make it much easier to add a proper “Challenge” tab later. Next steps: add a clock and a 1-bit memory."}, {"post_id": 76242, "ts": "2026-10-02T20:30:28Z", "hours": 2.1839, "text": "Devlog #30 : Component documentation! I’ve added a new page in the sidebar that shows a description and preview image for every component. A few people asked for this in the reviews of my first ship, so it felt like a good addition. Also, if you have any idea of how I could integrate the new more advanced features without overwhelming new users, I’m all ears! The sidebar is starting to get pretty crowded, so I need to find a cleaner way to organize everything and keep navigation smooth. Also, huge thanks to the Stardance staff for awarding this project Superstar ❤️ Next steps: code cleanup, UX improvements, 1-bit memory support, and FINALLY the clock."}, {"post_id": 75958, "ts": "2026-10-01T18:50:05Z", "hours": 4.13, "text": "Devlog #29 : New feature: Multi-layer! You can now build circuits across two layers! I added vias, so you can connect the two layers together (obviously). When you place a via, it’s added on both layers, it basically works like a wire. I also finished the 7-segment decoder: 3bit input, supporting only 0-4 for now. The other values are just don’t-cares. Next steps: polish the code and UI, then add some documentation."}, {"post_id": 75590, "ts": "2026-09-30T14:38:26Z", "hours": 2.4681, "text": "Devlog #28 : Multi-layer (and thank you!!) First of all, thank you so much for all the support on this project! The Stardancers who reviewed my first ship got some really great advices. I’ll be following up on a lot of it. So, I’m planning to add: a simple component documentation some challenges (e.g. 7-segment decoder, XOR gate) more advanced features (clock, 1-bit memory) and what I’m working on right now: a second layer! (currently, wires can’t cross each other, which becomes a real issue with more complex circuits) and, if I have enough time, a place where people can share circuit snippets and showcase their projects! The real challenge will be integrating all of this while keeping the UI clean and the UX intuitive. The screenshot below shows what the circuit viewport could look like with the second layer."}, {"post_id": 74661, "ts": "2026-09-27T21:50:30Z", "hours": 1.2256, "text": "Devlog #27 : Some optimization, code cleanup, and brand new readme! That’s the last devlog for this project before I ship!"}, {"post_id": 74620, "ts": "2026-09-27T19:48:58Z", "hours": 2.7119, "text": "Devlog #26 : I’ve done many small improvements, such as: ability to move annotations undo/redo buttons custom favicon Next step: SHIP!"}, {"post_id": 74207, "ts": "2026-09-26T22:21:43Z", "hours": 2.4531, "text": "Devlog #25 : UI/UX improvements! I improved the component selection outline. Now the outline is around the whole selected group of pixels, instead of around each individual pixel. You can also now delete selected components by pressing Del on your keyboard. And I added a little preview showing the pixel currently targeted by the cursor. Next steps: keep working on the UI/UX, and ship!"}, {"post_id": 74006, "ts": "2026-09-26T14:48:02Z", "hours": 2.2353, "text": "Devlog #24 : New feature (kinda): the camera position and zoom are now stored in the project file, and loaded when you open the project. That means you can setup any point of view in your project, and the viewport will be right where you left it when you open it again! I also fixed a bunch of UI inconsistencies: the hover label position is now responsive to the workspace sidebar (before, it was getting hidden behind it) unified border colors fixed the phone workspace responsiveness made the sidebar on the right a little bit smaller I also continued working on the 7-segment display, but ran into some issues since wires can’t cross each other. So I thought about having circuits on two different layers. What do you think about this? Next steps: I’ll probably polish the UX a little bit more, and then ship the project. But I’m planning to keep working on it!"}, {"post_id": 73755, "ts": "2026-09-25T21:20:35Z", "hours": 5.3378, "text": "Devlog #23 : New feature: Undo/Redo! You can now undo and redo things you’ve done in the editor. This works with both components and annotations. I had to implement a project history system. Basically, every time an action modifies the project, the previous project state is added to the past history stack. When you undo, the latest state from past becomes the current state, while the previous current state is moved to the future stack. When you redo, the next state from future becomes the current state and the previous current state is moved back to past. Yeah it’s messy 😂 I’m also still working on the 7-segment decoder. I switched to a 3-bit one, I’ll probably include it in the demo. Next steps: mostly UI and code improvements, and then I’ll probably ship it. I’ll keep working on it!"}, {"post_id": 73252, "ts": "2026-09-24T17:56:14Z", "hours": 4.5872, "text": "Devlog #22 : New feature: selection and copy/paste! You just have to press “S” and drag your mouse/pad while holding the left click. You can then copy, paste, or move the selected pixels around. Probably the most difficult feature I’ve worked on so far. I had to get some help from ChatGPT :’) I think this will be my last devlog before shipping, since one of my other projects has been pending for 18 days now, so yeah… I’ll still keep working on this project though!"}, {"post_id": 72869, "ts": "2026-09-23T21:59:41Z", "hours": 4.2722, "text": "Devlog #21 : Some UI/UX improvements and started working on selection! I’m currently working on the selection system. It works like this: Press S, then while holding it, drag the selection area with the left click. Once selected, you can copy, paste or move the selected block of pixels. It’s not committed yet! It still requires some work. Next steps: finish the selection feature, then add the clock. I also want to improve the UX as much as possible."}, {"post_id": 72417, "ts": "2026-09-22T21:44:45Z", "hours": 3.6344, "text": "Devlog #20 : demo project and UI/UX update! I added a demo project with a basic light/switch circuit, an OR and XOR gate, and a few annotations. I also (and mostly) removed the old “Quick start” section. It was becoming kinda useless since pretty much everything was already covered by the demo project. So I replaced it with a little intro to the project, along with a table of the shortcuts. I also added a little decoration to the bottom-left corner of the sidebar. I think it looks pretty dope! Next steps: copy/paste and selection, THEN add a clock."}, {"post_id": 71977, "ts": "2026-09-21T21:47:46Z", "hours": 2.3336, "text": "Devlog #19 : A little code cleanup! I refactored the App.tsx file because it was handling too many different things. Now each hook has its own dedicated file. Small refactor, but definitely a needed one! Next steps: add a demo project, improve the UI/UX and laptop pad support, add copy/paste and selection, and finally add a clock (eventually, at this point 😂)"}, {"post_id": 71454, "ts": "2026-09-20T21:12:46Z", "hours": 7.6194, "text": "Devlog #18 : You can save your work now! There are now two buttons in the bottom-left corner: Open and Save. Your projects are downloaded as .cirkuit files. This part was actually quite challenging, mostly because of the file format validation and all the tests around it. Next steps: clean up the code, cleanup the UI (it feels a bit messy right now), add a demo project, add copy/paste and selection, and add a clock"}, {"post_id": 70868, "ts": "2026-09-19T21:55:45Z", "hours": 4.9169, "text": "Devlog #17 : New feature: Annotations! You can now add labels, lines and rectangles to your circuits! I developed this feature so I can better explain what’s going on in the demo project when I’ll ship this project. But you can also use it to explain your craziest circuits! Next step: upload/download projects."}, {"post_id": 70240, "ts": "2026-09-18T19:31:51Z", "hours": 4.5228, "text": "Devlog #16 : Annotation feature (WIP) It’s not finished yet, but I’m currently working on a new annotation feature. Why? Because I’ll need it to explain the circuits in the demo! I’m adding this before the project download/upload system, because otherwise I’d have to refactor quite a bit of the system later. Also, I’m starting to build a 4-bit 7-segment decoder in Cirkuit! (I started with the two easier segments lmao) Next steps: continue working on the annotation system, then implement project download/upload."}, {"post_id": 69732, "ts": "2026-09-17T17:45:12Z", "hours": 4.5497, "text": "Devlog #15 : I added a little guide! The goal of this small guide is to explain a few things that might not be obvious to new users. You can close and reopen it whenever you want, so it doesn’t get in the way while you’re playing. It’s still available on the GitHub page if you want to give it a try! Next step: add a minimal circuit loading system (so I can add a default demo circuit), and THEN I’ll add the clock 😂😭"}, {"post_id": 69345, "ts": "2026-09-16T21:00:55Z", "hours": 4.0622, "text": "Devlog #14 : New component: AND gate! Now the two main gates are available (NOT & AND), so you can basically build anything with them! In the screenshot below, I built a working XOR logic gate, both in a large and a condensed version. A few changes since last time, apart from the new component: The old NOT gate wasn’t working properly because the circuit actually handles 3 states (low, floating, high), while the NOT component only supported low and high. So now, “floating” is considered as “low”. Also, there’s no longer real-time simulation, sadly. I had some issues with the logic gates: if you built them the wrong way, it could crash the entire webpage. So now you have to click on “Run simulation” to see the magic happen. It’s a bit less cool than real-time simulation, but at least it doesn’t nuke the whole page anymore lol. Next steps: UI/UX improvements, clock, and 1-bit memory later on"}, {"post_id": 68867, "ts": "2026-09-15T22:24:51Z", "hours": 5.5678, "text": "Devlog #13 : New component: NOT gate! This component returns the opposite signal you give it: low becomes high, high becomes low. I also improved the UI/UX. There’s now a new label in the bottom-left corner of the page that shows which component you’re hovering over with your mouse, and what its current state is. For example: “Wire | Low”, “Switch | Open”. I also fixed the pixel rendering, because before there were some really thin lines between them. And now the sidebar is responsive! Next steps: code cleanup, AND gate, clock"}, {"post_id": 68303, "ts": "2026-09-14T21:50:03Z", "hours": 2.3831, "text": "Devlog #12 : Wire states are now visually apparent! In the example below, on the first circuit, the first segment is high because it is powered by the source, while the second segment (connected to the lamp) is floating because the switch is open. I’ve also fixed a whole bunch of UI issues. You can try out this project on my GitHub page! Next step (for real this time): adding a NOT gate (the clock will come later)"}, {"post_id": 67690, "ts": "2026-09-13T21:26:19Z", "hours": 0.8703, "text": "Devlog #11 : I did some UI improvements, but before I commit, I’d like to have your opinion for the light component; which glow do you prefere?"}, {"post_id": 67626, "ts": "2026-09-13T19:32:41Z", "hours": 0.7378, "text": "Devlog #10: I added some tooltips so it’s easier to understand for you guys! Next steps: Start writting an actual documentation, add new components"}, {"post_id": 67547, "ts": "2026-09-13T17:58:10Z", "hours": 4.0528, "text": "Devlog #9 : New component: Switch This new component come with a new “simulation” mode, where you can interact with the components. Next step: add small tooltips to the sidebar elements, add new components (clock, memory…) It’s deployed so you can try it (see the project page)! I’d love to get some feedbacks."}, {"post_id": 67325, "ts": "2026-09-13T12:07:15Z", "hours": 0.7281, "text": "Devlog #8 : UI update! Changes: checkerboard background texture instead of the old grid custom selector on the component palette pixel art icons Next step: new components (switch, clock, memory…)"}, {"post_id": 67277, "ts": "2026-09-13T10:52:18Z", "hours": 2.2756, "text": "Devlog #7 : Now power and light can be connected from all sides! Also, since the old arrows are no longer necessary (at least for these components), I improved the UX by displaying the actual component icon instead. The icons on the circuit are also hidden by default now, and only appear when you hover over them. Oh and there’s an eraser now. I also deployed the website: nafo44.github.io/Cirkuit/ Next step: add new components (switch, clock, logic gates, memory)"}, {"post_id": 66878, "ts": "2026-09-12T20:32:38Z", "hours": 3.0808, "text": "Devlog #6: I wired up the simulation engine to the UI! It’s working really well, even tho there’s only 3 components right now (source, wire, light). I added arrows so you can easily rotate the components. I want this project to be really intuitive, so if you guys have some ideas to simplify this, I’m all ears! Next step: let a source and light to power/be powered through all sides, add new components (switch, clock, memory)"}, {"post_id": 66549, "ts": "2026-09-12T12:01:35Z", "hours": 4.5847, "text": "Devlog #5 : Now the component placement UI side is wired to our circuit layout! It probably don’t make much sens for you right now. Next step: modify visually the component grid according to the simulation."}, {"post_id": 65649, "ts": "2026-09-10T22:37:33Z", "hours": 5.8197, "text": "Devlog #4: The other half of the engine is done! It can now compute components state (low, high, floating, conflict) based on the connections between each other. Next step: wiring the engine to the UI."}, {"post_id": 65057, "ts": "2026-09-09T21:57:21Z", "hours": 6.5794, "text": "Devlog #3: I’ve finished half of the engine of my website, made to let you create circuits using pixel art. It wasn’t easy! I came up with a simplified netlist algorithm, to represent how a component (pixel) is oriented, how many are wired, to what, and through which side of the pixel. Components states aren’t handled yet, but that’s what I’m going to work on next."}, {"post_id": 64452, "ts": "2026-09-08T20:55:25Z", "hours": 2.1144, "text": "Devlog #2: I improved the UI, added mouse wheel support (to zoom and move the map). Now it’s time to work on the actual engine."}, {"post_id": 64381, "ts": "2026-09-08T18:22:49Z", "hours": 1.6267, "text": "Devlog #1: Hi! I just started making a website where you will be able to create circuits… with pixel art! The idea is to add different pixels: wire (gray), power (green), light (yellow), logic gates (AND, OR, …), memory (simple true/false state storage). I want to keep this as simple as possible to use."}]...
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Title: Cirkuit by @spectra | Stardance
Devlogs:
D Title: Cirkuit by @spectra | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog #1: Hi! I just started making a website where you will be able to create circuits… with pixel art! The idea is to add different pixels: wire (gray), power (green), light (yellow), logic gates (AND, OR, …), memory (simple true/false state storage). I want to keep this as simple as possible to use.
Devlog #2: I improved the UI, added mouse wheel support (to zoom and move the map). Now it’s time to work on the actual engine.
Devlog #3: I’ve finished half of the engine of my website, made to let you create circuits using pixel art. It wasn’t easy! I came up with a simplified netlist algorithm, to represent how a component (pixel) is oriented, how many are wired, to what, and through which side of the pixel. Components states aren’t handled yet, but that’s what I’m going to work on next.
Devlog #4: The other half of the engine is done! It can now compute components state (low, high, floating, conflict) based on the connections between each other. Next step: wiring the engine to the UI.
Devlog #5 : Now the component placement UI side is wired to our circuit layout! It probably don’t make much sens for you right now. Next step: modify visually the component grid according to the simulation.
Devlog #6: I wired up the simulation engine to the UI! It’s working really well, even tho there’s only 3 components right now (source, wire, light). I added arrows so you can easily rotate the components. I want this project to be really intuitive, so if you guys have some ideas to simplify this, I’m all ears! Next step: let a source and light to power/be powered through all sides, add new components (switch, clock, memory)
Devlog #7 : Now power and light can be connected from all sides! Also, since the old arrows are no longer necessary (at least for these components), I improved the UX by displaying the actual component icon instead. The icons on the circuit are also hidden by default now, and only appear when you hover over them. Oh and there’s an eraser now. I also deployed the website: nafo44.github.io/Cirkuit/ Next step: add new components (switch, clock, logic gates, memory)
Devlog #8 : UI update! Changes: checkerboard background texture instead of the old grid custom selector on the component palette pixel art icons Next step: new components (switch, clock, memory…)
Devlog #9 : New component: Switch This new component come with a new “simulation” mode, where you can interact with the components. Next step: add small tooltips to the sidebar elements, add new components (clock, memory…) It’s deployed so you can try it (see the project page)! I’d love to get some feedbacks.
Devlog #10: I added some tooltips so it’s easier to understand for you guys! Next steps: Start writting an actual documentation, add new components
Devlog #11 : I did some UI improvements, but before I commit, I’d like to have your opinion for the light component; which glow do you prefere?
Devlog #12 : Wire states are now visually apparent! In the example below, on the first circuit, the first segment is high because it is powered by the source, while the second segment (connected to the lamp) is floating because the switch is open. I’ve also fixed a whole bunch of UI issues. You can try out this project on my GitHub page! Next step (for real this time): adding a NOT gate (the clock will come later)
Devlog #13 : New component: NOT gate! This component returns the opposite signal you give it: low becomes high, high becomes low. I also improved the UI/UX. There’s now a new label in the bottom-left corner of the page that shows which component you’re hovering over with your mouse, and what its current state is. For example: “Wire | Low”, “Switch | Open”. I also fixed the pixel rendering, because before there were some really thin lines between them. And now the sidebar is responsive! Next steps: code cleanup, AND gate, clock
Devlog #14 : New component: AND gate! Now the two main gates are available (NOT & AND), so you can basically build anything with them! In the screenshot below, I built a working XOR logic gate, both in a large and a condensed version. A few changes since last time, apart from the new component: The old NOT gate wasn’t working properly because the circuit actually handles 3 states (low, floating, high), while the NOT component only supported low and high. So now, “floating” is considered as “low”. Also, there’s no longer real-time simulation, sadly. I had some issues with the logic gates: if you built them the wrong way, it could crash the entire webpage. So now you have to click on “Run simulation” to see the magic happen. It’s a bit less cool than real-time simulation, but at least it doesn’t nuke the whole page anymore lol. Next steps: UI/UX improvements, clock, and 1-bit memory later on
Devlog #15 : I added a little guide! The goal of this small guide is to explain a few things that might not be obvious to new users. You can close and reopen it whenever you want, so it doesn’t get in the way while you’re playing. It’s still available on the GitHub page if you want to give it a try! Next step: add a minimal circuit loading system (so I can add a default demo circuit), and THEN I’ll add the clock 😂😭
Devlog #16 : Annotation feature (WIP) It’s not finished yet, but I’m currently working on a new annotation feature. Why? Because I’ll need it to explain the circuits in the demo! I’m adding this before the project download/upload system, because otherwise I’d have to refactor quite a bit of the system later. Also, I’m starting to build a 4-bit 7-segment decoder in Cirkuit! (I started with the two easier segments lmao) Next steps: continue working on the annotation system, then implement project download/upload.
Devlog #17 : New feature: Annotations! You can now add labels, lines and rectangles to your circuits! I developed this feature so I can better explain what’s going on in the demo project when I’ll ship this project. But you can also use it to explain your craziest circuits! Next step: upload/download projects.
Devlog #18 : You can save your work now! There are now two buttons in the bottom-left corner: Open and Save. Your projects are downloaded as .cirkuit files. This part was actually quite challenging, mostly because of the file format validation and all the tests around it. Next steps: clean up the code, cleanup the UI (it feels a bit messy right now), add a demo project, add copy/paste and selection, and add a clock
Devlog #19 : A little code cleanup! I refactored the App.tsx file because it was handling too many different things. Now each hook has its own dedicated file. Small refactor, but definitely a needed one! Next steps: add a demo project, improve the UI/UX and laptop pad support, add copy/paste and selection, and finally add a clock (eventually, at this point 😂)
Devlog #20 : demo project and UI/UX update! I added a demo project with a basic light/switch circuit, an OR and XOR gate, and a few annotations. I also (and mostly) removed the old “Quick start” section. It was becoming kinda useless since pretty much everything was already covered by the demo project. So I replaced it with a little intro to the project, along with a table of the shortcuts. I also added a little decoration to the bottom-left corner of the sidebar. I think it looks pretty dope! Next steps: copy/paste and selection, THEN add a clock.
Devlog #21 : Some UI/UX improvements and started working on selection! I’m currently working on the selection system. It works like this: Press S, then while holding it, drag the selection area with the left click. Once selected, you can copy, paste or move the selected block of pixels. It’s not committed yet! It still requires some work. Next steps: finish the selection feature, then add the clock. I also want to improve the UX as much as possible.
Devlog #22 : New feature: selection and copy/paste! You just have to press “S” and drag your mouse/pad while holding the left click. You can then copy, paste, or move the selected pixels around. Probably the most difficult feature I’ve worked on so far. I had to get some help from ChatGPT :’) I think this will be my last devlog before shipping, since one of my other projects has been pending for 18 days now, so yeah… I’ll still keep working on this project though!
Devlog #23 : New feature: Undo/Redo! You can now undo and redo things you’ve done in the editor. This works with both components and annotations. I had to implement a project history system. Basically, every time an action modifies the project, the previous project state is added to the past history stack. When you undo, the latest state from past becomes the current state, while the previous current state is moved to the future stack. When you redo, the next state from future becomes the current state and the previous current state is moved back to past. Yeah it’s messy 😂 I’m also still working on the 7-segment decoder. I switched to a 3-bit one, I’ll probably include it in the demo. Next steps: mostly UI and code improvements, and then I’ll probably ship it. I’ll keep working on it!
Devlog #24 : New feature (kinda): the camera position and zoom are now stored in the project file, and loaded when you open the project. That means you can setup any point of view in your project, and the viewport will be right where you left it when you open it again! I also fixed a bunch of UI inconsistencies: the hover label position is now responsive to the workspace sidebar (before, it was getting hidden behind it) unified border colors fixed the phone workspace responsiveness made the sidebar on the right a little bit smaller I also continued working on the 7-segment display, but ran into some issues since wires can’t cross each other. So I thought about having circuits on two different layers. What do you think about this? Next steps: I’ll probably polish the UX a little bit more, and then ship the project. But I’m planning to keep working on it!
Devlog #25 : UI/UX improvements! I improved the component selection outline. Now the outline is around the whole selected group of pixels, instead of around each individual pixel. You can also now delete selected components by pressing Del on your keyboard. And I added a little preview showing the pixel currently targeted by the cursor. Next steps: keep working on the UI/UX, and ship!
Devlog #26 : I’ve done many small improvements, such as: ability to move annotations undo/redo buttons custom favicon Next step: SHIP!
Devlog #27 : Some optimization, code cleanup, and brand new readme! That’s the last devlog for this project before I ship!
Devlog #28 : Multi-layer (and thank you!!) First of all, thank you so much for all the support on this project! The Stardancers who reviewed my first ship got some really great advices. I’ll be following up on a lot of it. So, I’m planning to add: a simple component documentation some challenges (e.g. 7-segment decoder, XOR gate) more advanced features (clock, 1-bit memory) and what I’m working on right now: a second layer! (currently, wires can’t cross each other, which becomes a real issue with more complex circuits) and, if I have enough time, a place where people can share circuit snippets and showcase their projects! The real challenge will be integrating all of this while keeping the UI clean and the UX intuitive. The screenshot below shows what the circuit viewport could look like with the second layer.
Devlog #29 : New feature: Multi-layer! You can now build circuits across two layers! I added vias, so you can connect the two layers together (obviously). When you place a via, it’s added on both layers, it basically works like a wire. I also finished the 7-segment decoder: 3bit input, supporting only 0-4 for now. The other values are just don’t-cares. Next steps: polish the code and UI, then add some documentation.
Devlog #30 : Component documentation! I’ve added a new page in the sidebar that shows a description and preview image for every component. A few people asked for this in the reviews of my first ship, so it felt like a good addition. Also, if you have any idea of how I could integrate the new more advanced features without overwhelming new users, I’m all ears! The sidebar is starting to get pretty crowded, so I need to find a cleaner way to organize everything and keep navigation smooth. Also, huge thanks to the Stardance staff for awarding this project Superstar ❤️ Next steps: code cleanup, UX improvements, 1-bit memory support, and FINALLY the clock.
Devlog #31 : UI improvement! I replaced the old “main shortcuts” section in the sidebar with simple links. It frees up some space, makes the interface feel cleaner, and should make it much easier to add a proper “Challenge” tab later. Next steps: add a clock and a 1-bit memory.
Devlog #32 : New component: CLOCK (finally) This one was relatively easy to implement! The tick system was already there, but it was only triggered by user interactions. Now, your circuits run at 10 ticks/s, and the clock has a constant 1 Hz square signal (the recording below is choppy, but yes it is indeed a 1 Hz periodic signal) This component only has one output. I thought it would make building complex circuits easier if the other sides were isolated. Next steps: 1-bit memory, and then a lot of UX/UI improvements!
Devlog #33 : Docs update and 1-bit memory! I added the clock to the docs page, along with some new tests for it. I’m also almost done with the 1-bit memory (basically a simplified D flip-flop). I’ll share it in the next devlog! Also, if you like this project, you can leave a star on the project’s GitHub page if you wish! Next steps: finish the 1-bit memory and clean up the UI/UX
Devlog #34 : New component: Memory! This is one step up in difficulty! It has two inputs: a clock input (at the top) and a signal input (on the left). The output signal is provided on the right. This component can store a 1-bit value, which is updated on every rising edge of the clock signal. You can basically build anything with the component available: calculator, more advanced display (e.g. a 7-segment decoder that can go from 0 to 9). I added a 3-bit binary counter that I wired up to my 7-segment decoder! (demo bellow). It’s also included in the demo project file. Next steps: cleanup UI and improve UX (the sidebar is really really crowded right now)
Devlog #35 : UI cleanup and (another) demo circuit The sidebar was getting a bit too crowded, so I added a small button to show/hide the more advanced components. The idea is to make things a little less overwhelming for new users, instead of throwing everything at them right away. I also worked on a 4-bit adder and wired it up to my 7-segment decoder! I’m going to try making it a 4-bit decoder instead of a 3-bit one, but things are going to get a lot more complicated (more numbers = more logic gates). One small issue with the adder for now: the most significant bit is on the right, so the input is basically reversed. I’ll fix that soon. In the meantime, you can already try it out in the live demo project! As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: more UI/UX improvements, adding challenges, and continuing to waste way too much of my time messing around with circuits xd
Devlog #36 : Probe tool and 4-bit calculator. While I was working on improving my 7-segment display, I had quite a hard time simplifying the circuit. Then I thought it could be really useful to have a tool that shows all the equipotential wires. So I’m currently working on it! It’s working, but I still have to improve its style before publishing it. Aside from that, I actually spent way too many hours improving the 4-bit calculator. And it’s now finished! It’s available in the demo circuit if you want to try it. I’ll see if I can build a keyboard later so users don’t have to enter numbers in binary. As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: finish the Probe tool, polish the UI, add a “challenge” tab.
Devlog #37 : Probe tool is out! You can now inspect your circuits with this new tool. It highlights equipotential wires. I also added small circles to every connected ports. Next steps: UI polish, and maybe a “challenge” or “community circuits” tab.
Devlog #38 : Integrated circuits Some of you have requested this, so I’m working on it! It’s not out yet, as it’s a pretty big feature. Integrated circuits will basically be custom components (most likely rectangles) with multiple inputs and outputs, all defined by the user. It’s literally a footprint, kinda like what you’d find in KiCad. I’ve started modifying the engine’s internals so it can handle these new types of connections (alongside the classic 1-pixel components). The real challenge here is keeping everything simple on the UX side, even though this feature targets more advanced users. The image below only shows what it might look like, this will probably change over time. As always, if you enjoy the project, feel free to leave a star on GitHub! Repo: https://github.com/NaFo44/Cirkuit Next steps: keep working on this feature, polish the UI/UX, ship it, and sadly… the end of stardance :(
Ships:
Hi! I’m really happy to introduce you to my biggest project so far. It’s called Cirkuit, and it’s a logic circuit sandbox simulator… but with pixel art! That means you can basically build anything using just pixels. Why pixels? You may ask. Well, many logic simulators already exist, but the issue is that most of them aren’t very accessible to the average user. That’s why I wanted Cirkuit to be as easy to use as possible. I’m already quite familiar with TypeScript and React, which I used for this project. So the most difficult part was actually figuring out how to implement features without having 100 nested loops :D I had a hard time figuring out how to build the core engine (obviously), as well as the annotation system. I’m quite proud of how it looks and how well it works. This project was a perfect opportunity for me to improve my design skills. I worked hard to reduce friction between the interface and the user (aka you, dear shipwriters). One piece of advice: try it on a computer with a mouse. Phones and trackpads are supported, but it’s not the best experience. Hope you’ll like this project!...
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Tempo by @evanssidhu | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-07T05:07:17Z", "hours": 4.0, "multiplier": 11.52, "payout": 50, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is the second ship of the project. This is a pretty small ship aimed at addressing some feedback posted during my last ship. Originally I planned to do a complete UI overhaul, but I decided to just focus on minor improvements now since I have to balance projects with school and don’t know if I am going to have time to work on projects as much. I also want to take a little break from projects to focus on my mental health as well since I have been dedicating multiple hours almost every day purely on making projects. Anyways, enough about that and back to the project. If you want to see the changes from the previous ship, I have them outlined in the devlog below. If you want to see the main features added in the first ship, I have it posted as well shortly below to read. Thank you and I hope you like using my project, if you have any more feedback please outline it in your vote message as I love hearing how I can make my projects better. If you do not want to scroll down to the previous ship message or the readme, here is it posted below. Previous Ship Message Tempo is finally complete. It took way too many hours to finish, mostly through self inflicted pain of using hooks instead of asynchronous functions for the engine. I know that this might not be the greatest project for how long it took, but I am proud to say that it’s finally been shipped even after the many times I wanted to quit. I made this project because I play a little bit of chess and after getting limited to only 1 game review per day I thought it would be a good idea to make my own game review (yes I know other sites exist but wheres the fun in that). Anyways enough about that, here are the project features (definetly not copied from the readme) Features Game Review: Check how well you played in your previous games by simply entering your chess.com username or by manually loading a pgn file. Move Feedback: Instant updates on how well the engine thinks your move is. Move Classifications: How well the engine evaluates your moves. Classifications such as Miss, Great, or Brilliant are also included. Engine Lines: What the engine thinks is the best line to play in a position. Accuracies: How accurate you played relative to the best moves Graph: A visual and interactive graph on how much your expected win percentage changed throughout a game Classification Report: A total summary of how many of each type of move you played History Tree: View the total game history and easily branch off the main path. Play: Play against a friend in person, or play against the engine. Custom positions can be used as well. Custom Positions: Set up a custom position to load later. Settings: Change the app or board theme. If you are still reading this, thank you and I hope you enjoy using my site.", "repo": "https://github.com/es1228/Tempo", "demo": "https://es1228.github.io/Tempo/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-08-16T22:48:34Z", "hours": 93.0, "multiplier": 18.77, "payout": 1755, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Ship Message Tempo is finally complete. It took way too many hours to finish, mostly through self inflicted pain of using hooks instead of asynchronous functions for the engine. I know that this might not be the greatest project for how long it took, but I am proud to say that it’s finally been shipped even after the many times I wanted to quit. I made this project because I play a little bit of chess and after getting limited to only 1 game review per day I thought it would be a good idea to make my own game review (yes I know other sites exist but wheres the fun in that). Anyways enough about that, here are the project features (definetly not copied from the readme) Features Game Review: Check how well you played in your previous games by simply entering your chess.com username or by manually loading a pgn file. Move Feedback: Instant updates on how well the engine thinks your move is. Move Classifications: How well the engine evaluates your moves. Classifications such as Miss, Great, or Brilliant are also included. Engine Lines: What the engine thinks is the best line to play in a position. Accuracies: How accurate you played relative to the best moves Graph: A visual and interactive graph on how much your expected win percentage changed throughout a game Classification Report: A total summary of how many of each type of move you played History Tree: View the total game history and easily branch off the main path. Play: Play against a friend in person, or play against the engine. Custom positions can be used as well. Custom Positions: Set up a custom position to load later. Settings: Change the app or board theme. If you are still reading this, thank you and I hope you enjoy using my site.", "repo": "https://github.com/es1228/Tempo", "demo": "https://es1228.github.io/Tempo/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 63372, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 63372, "ts": "2026-09-07T04:54:05Z", "hours": 0.6231, "text": "Devlog 24 Small devlog, I was about to do another ship after addressing the feedback from last time, but I noticed a small bug where brilliant moves did not show sometimes. It turns out the issue was much simpler than I was testing for and it was due to a small multiplication sign error when converting the mate evaluation to centipawns to check if a move was winning."}, {"post_id": 63350, "ts": "2026-09-07T03:58:57Z", "hours": 3.7075, "text": "Devlog 23 Hello again everybody! I know its been a long time since I last worked on this project, but I read the feedback on this project and addressed your suggestions. Most of the feedback was on ui/ux improvements, so as a result I removed all mentions of infinity/nan on the site, as it looks rather unpolished and unprofessional. I also changed the modal dialogs from the built in alert function to a less intrusive custom toast notification. Lastly, a couple people said the engine took slightly long to make moves, so I slightly lowered the engine depth for games and also removed another delay I originally added to make the engine feel more human like in its thinking time. In terms of the game review engine I decided to keep it the same as it works pretty quickly due to a worker pool being used, but I did change the dialog slightly to make it feel like something is happening in the background, which suprisingly actually makes it feel faster. Anyways, to everyone that tried this project and gave feedback, thank you as it was much appreciated."}, {"post_id": 48501, "ts": "2026-08-16T21:30:43Z", "hours": 1.5022, "text": "Devlog 22 The site is now live. I actually had a lot of issues in deploying this site for some reason (mainly due to the large stockfish binaries stored in git lfs and the coi serviceworker) and my deployments just kept failing. I eventually got it straightened out now and I am ready to ship the project."}, {"post_id": 47758, "ts": "2026-08-15T21:57:35Z", "hours": 2.4678, "text": "Devlog 21 The history view has finally been properly migrated to a tree structure. Now since that is finally complete, I know it has been long overdue but it is finally time to ship this project."}, {"post_id": 47293, "ts": "2026-08-15T04:37:46Z", "hours": 6.0658, "text": "Devlog 20 Another devlog here focusing on bug fixes, and I am happy to say that almost everything is pretty much complete. I’ve fixed pretty much every out of sync issue, and even got game reviews to load pretty much instantly. It literally took only around 5 seconds to load a 65 move game, so that is finally optimized. I think the issue was some web workers were not terminating properly and taking up too much memory. Anyways I hope to finally have this project out very soon, and the only thing I might to is try to get the history tree working. Today I actually did kind of get it to work but it caused massive performance degradations for some reason and was causing some conflicts with other components as well."}, {"post_id": 47078, "ts": "2026-08-14T18:24:08Z", "hours": 4.785, "text": "Devlog 19 More progress has been made adding features and fixing bugs. I’ll highlight the changes below. Features Game Chart The game chart has been updated to include custom dots and lines showing the move classifications and key points during the game (brilliant moves, great moves, mistake, blunder, and miss). You can also click on the chart to go to that move. History View The history view has now been updated to show the classification icons next to the move, which should make it easier to find moves you are looking for Fixes/Optimizations Memoization Data in the game chart has now been memoized. This prevents the chart from crashing the page due to trying to process data many times per second. Stockfish evaluations Game review evaluations now use an active worker pool to run multiple evaluations at once rather than just one at a time. Positions are also cached now so all evaluations share 1 chess instance. In practice, this has reduced the game review time for a 20 move game from over 1 minute to around 7 seconds, which is around a 90% decrease."}, {"post_id": 46601, "ts": "2026-08-13T23:14:42Z", "hours": 2.3281, "text": "Devlog 18 A few things in this devlog, I separated the game review panel into 2 sections containing the review report and engine analysis. I’ve also refined the classifications for great and brilliant. Brilliant Move Changes The sacrifice can now be anywhere on the board, not just for the piece that moved Trading a lower value piece for a higher value piece (ex: taking a knight but losing a pawn) no longer counts as brilliant Illegal moves (pins, checks, etc.,) no longer contribute to the attacking piece values Great Move Changes Taking a hanging piece or trading lower value pieces for higher value pieces (ex: capturing a hanging queen or recapturing during a trade) no longer count as great moves."}, {"post_id": 46134, "ts": "2026-08-13T04:37:45Z", "hours": 1.8517, "text": "Devlog 17 After a long time, I’ve finally added brilliant moves. This was done by comparing a squares attackers and defenders to determine if the piece is hanging. If a move results in that piece being hanging/sacrificed, and is the top engine move, then the classification will return brilliant. I’ve attached an example below in a game where GothamChess does what he does best and sacrifices both his rooks."}, {"post_id": 46084, "ts": "2026-08-13T01:13:20Z", "hours": 3.2308, "text": "Devlog 16 I’ve added the last 2 features related to game review, accuracies and the eval chart. The last thing I plan to to is add some polish, brilliant moves, and maybe try working on the history/pgn tree again."}, {"post_id": 45932, "ts": "2026-08-12T18:35:37Z", "hours": 2.4761, "text": "Devlog 15 I’ve added a few more features related to game review in this devlog. First, I added a section to view the top 2 engine lines on each move. I’ve also added a table to view classifications for the entire game."}, {"post_id": 45416, "ts": "2026-08-11T20:58:03Z", "hours": 0.9417, "text": "Devlog 14 I’m going to post more frequently as this project gets wrapped up, and I’ve just finished caching the game review data so feedback is instant if you load in game to review. I also decided to add colors to the start and end squares based on classification because it looks nice. I’ve attached a video below, I don’t know why my screen recorder records very laggy but I promise it’s not actually that laggy."}, {"post_id": 45004, "ts": "2026-08-11T04:20:50Z", "hours": 4.3753, "text": "Devlog 13 I’ve been working on the game review stats, and i’ve implemented a function to classify an entire game and tally up the classifications (which was actually harder than it looked, since i needed to rewrite my hooks since hooks cannot be called within functions). It now works pretty decently, but I do want to optimize performance a bit since it takes a while. Funnily enough there was an issue where if the worker resolved too early it would not terminate and create a memory leak and eat your entire system memory, but thats fixed now."}, {"post_id": 44308, "ts": "2026-08-09T23:45:35Z", "hours": 7.9586, "text": "Devlog 12 I really don’t like going this long without posting a devlog, but debugging move classifications was really painful. I encountered an issue where if you went through many moves very quickly, it resulted in classifications not working properly since stockfish could only give evaluations for the current move. This is not ideal since most classifications require checking the evaluation drop, which requires 2+ points of evaluation. I tried many things, first I tried running 3 different stockfish web workers inside the stockfish hook, which caused a couple issues and was not very performant. Next I tried using a single worker and passing in 3 positions, however since the web worker is single threaded it didn’t really work all that well. I also tried using a queue to run each instance one at a time, but that got complex quickly and still did not work. I also wanted to merge the classification and evaluation hooks, which created a 500 line mess of a file which was a nightmare to maintain. Finally, I decided to revert all my changes and keep the hooks separate and simple, and created 3 instances of evaluation hooks within my classification hook. This was much cleaner and actually worked really well, so I wasted 8 hours making things too complex.# Devlog 12 I really don’t like going this long without posting a devlog, but debugging move classifications was really painful. I encountered an issue where if you went through many moves very quickly, it resulted in classifications not working properly since stockfish could only give evaluations for the current move. This is not ideal since most classifications require checking the evaluation drop, which requires 2+ points of evaluation. I tried many things, first I tried running 3 different stockfish web workers inside the stockfish hook, which caused a couple issues and was not very performant. Next I tried using a single worker and passing in 3 positions, however since the web worker is single threaded it didn’t really work all that well. I also tried using a queue to run each instance one at a time, but that got complex quickly and still did not work. I also wanted to merge the classification and evaluation hooks, which created a 500 line mess of a file which was a nightmare to maintain. Finally, I decided to revert all my changes and keep the hooks separate and simple, and created 3 instances of evaluation hooks within my classification hook. This was much cleaner and actually worked really well, so I wasted 8 hours making things too complex."}, {"post_id": 41619, "ts": "2026-08-05T22:47:45Z", "hours": 2.9967, "text": "Devlog 11 I am finally back to this project, and this time did not wait 8 hours to post a devlog. Anyways, I added two major features today, custom position imports (which I forgot to do last time) and engine play. Features Custom Position Imports You can now import a position into the custom position editor, which is great for things like loading puzzles and endgames to practice against the engine. You can also export positions by pressing the copy button to copy the position fen to the clipboard. Play Against Engine You can now play games against stockfish, and choose a difficulty level from 0-20. As mentioned above I believe this is a quite useful feature for things like just playing by yourself or practicing different endgames against the computer. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View Play In Person Custom Position Setup Play Against Engine Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Brilliant Moves"}, {"post_id": 37328, "ts": "2026-07-29T23:27:39Z", "hours": 8.7039, "text": "Devlog 10 I finished work on in-person gameplay and custom position setups, all that is left now is to finish adding engine play, polish game review, and add brilliant moves. Promotions You can now choose the piece you would like to promote to (no longer auto queen). In Person Play You can now create a game to be played in person between 2 people. Time controls are also availible. Custom Positions You can now load custom positions via drag and drop, which is useful for practicing endgames or creating puzzles. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View Play In Person Custom Position Setup [] Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play Against Engine (In Progress) Brilliant Moves"}, {"post_id": 36679, "ts": "2026-07-28T21:54:34Z", "hours": 8.5064, "text": "Devlog 9 I tried to convert the history from a linear array into a tree, and it did not go well. I spent literal hours trying to get it to work and look at tutorials, but it just did not want to work. So for now i’ve decided to stop working on that feature, and just focus on the last few remaining tasks. I do have to fix a couple of things since a lot of features are currently in progress, but I will post another devlog later showing the updated features."}, {"post_id": 34189, "ts": "2026-07-24T18:26:16Z", "hours": 7.4164, "text": "Devlog 8 Sorry again for the long devlog, some things took a bit longer than I expected. Anyways, icons/glyphs have been added in this devlog. I’ve also fixed some issues with move backtracking. Additional classifications such as miss and great have been added, which took a while since I had to do a lot of refactors to store all the data in cache, and I also didn’t realize I sometimes was tracking the evaluations for the next moves, not the ones just played, which took a while New classifications Miss : Miss is when the previous player makes a bad move, but the next player fails to capitalize on it causing the evaluation to drop back to near where it was before. Great : Great moves are the only moves in the position that work, provided that the outcome is drawn or winning and you are not already winning had you not played the move. It compares 2 lines of stockfish to evaluate the evaluation difference and check for the conditions outlined above. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View (In Progress) Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Brilliant Moves"}, {"post_id": 33467, "ts": "2026-07-23T13:22:55Z", "hours": 2.5939, "text": "Devlog 7 Lots of QOL features and fixes added today, i’ve added a basic view of move history, and added a settings page where you can change the theme of the website or board. Next, I do want to work on features that do not involve the game review, such as pass and play or engine play. Move History You can now properly go through a game’s moves and view all played moves in the side pane. Themes Website theming has been added, alongside being able to choose the colors you would like the board to be. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles History View (In Progress) Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)"}, {"post_id": 32763, "ts": "2026-07-22T03:57:08Z", "hours": 3.5231, "text": "Devlog 6 Second devlog today, this is more of an extension of the previous devlog since a lot of features were not fully polished yet. Since then move playback has been added and I also added a game review container. Most of the logic has now been implemented, all thats left now is a little polish and styling. The only logic thats left is trying to find a way to add proper move history and advanced classifications. I also attached a demo video this time since I forgot to last devlog. Move Playback It is now possible to use arrows to traverse forwards and backwards if a PGN file is imported. Game Review Container I added a little side container which will be used to show the stats of the game review. Currently it only shows the opening and move feedback, but it will be expanded to show accuracies and a full breakdown of the analysis and position similar to chess.com. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls History View Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant) Changelog 0e4db3c e2552b0"}, {"post_id": 32610, "ts": "2026-07-21T21:52:00Z", "hours": 8.4406, "text": "Devlog 5 Sorry for the long devlog, some things took longer than expected. First I decided to waste time trying to improve the UI until I remembered I suck at design and just decided to revert to the original design. Then I spent forever wondering why my input textbox would not work properly just for me to change e.target.value to e.currentTarget.value. Although I guess where would the fun be if there was no struggle. Anyways, here are the features I added. Board Controls It is now possible to flip the board and go forwards and backwards through moves. Importing from other sources This one took a bit of time, but now you can import games from Chess.com, or provide your own PGN/FEN. Later on I’ll probably also add Lichess as an import source as well. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, Lichess, etc.,) (In Progress) Playback/History Controls (In Progress) Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)"}, {"post_id": 31026, "ts": "2026-07-19T02:37:20Z", "hours": 3.3967, "text": "Devlog 4 Site Styling Site styling has been added in this commit, and it also comes with light/dark mode. The evaluation bar has also been added, and is responsive based on the win probability formula. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Playback/History Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, Lichess, etc.,) Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)"}, {"post_id": 30437, "ts": "2026-07-17T23:52:15Z", "hours": 4.6394, "text": "Devlog 3 Move Classifications Move classifications have finally been added. I thought it wouldn’t take this long but instead I spent hours trying to deal with react asynchronous state and trying to coordinate different hooks to play along nicely. Thankfully it works properly now (hopefully). The classifications added are best, excellent, good, inaccuracy, mistake, blunder, and theory. Opening names have also been added as well. Next Steps Next, I’ll work on making the site actually look pretty and have functionality. Importing games should also come next after that. Towards the end i’ll add other classifications as well such as miss, great, and brilliant, however, I expect them to be more difficult as they have slightly stricter classifications."}, {"post_id": 29258, "ts": "2026-07-16T01:54:05Z", "hours": 3.6022, "text": "Devlog 2 Playable Chess! There is now a playable UI to play Chess games. This was done using a mix of chess.js for the logic and react-chessboard for the UI. Most of the logic was handled by the board, however click/drag to move took some time to add. There is also positional evaluations and engine feedback now. Next Steps Next, I plan on creating the actual site design and controls. I also want to add a way to import games from sites like chess.com, and have the ability to load a full game rather than just a position. Move classification is also something that should be implemented soon. Demo Video"}, {"post_id": 28068, "ts": "2026-07-14T02:54:31Z", "hours": 1.6744, "text": "Devlog 1 I started work on Tempo, a chess analysis site to review your games. Chess engines such as Stockfish are easily self-hostable anyways, so there is no reason for sites like chess.com to limit game analysis to 1 per day. What’s New Added move analysis using Stockfish, which is fully selfhosted. Figuring out web workers and UCI was pretty time consuming, but eventually I got the hang of it and figured it out. Next Steps Next, I plan to work on creating the chessboard and site UI. Later I’ll add move classifications such as “Blunder”, “Mistake”, “Excellent”, etc. Maybe i’ll add “Brilliant” moves, but there seems to be no clear definition of one other than “a good sacrifice”."}]...
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Title: Tempo by @evanssidhu | Stardance
Devlogs:
Title: Tempo by @evanssidhu | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog 1 I started work on Tempo, a chess analysis site to review your games. Chess engines such as Stockfish are easily self-hostable anyways, so there is no reason for sites like chess.com to limit game analysis to 1 per day. What’s New Added move analysis using Stockfish, which is fully selfhosted. Figuring out web workers and UCI was pretty time consuming, but eventually I got the hang of it and figured it out. Next Steps Next, I plan to work on creating the chessboard and site UI. Later I’ll add move classifications such as “Blunder”, “Mistake”, “Excellent”, etc. Maybe i’ll add “Brilliant” moves, but there seems to be no clear definition of one other than “a good sacrifice”.
Devlog 2 Playable Chess! There is now a playable UI to play Chess games. This was done using a mix of chess.js for the logic and react-chessboard for the UI. Most of the logic was handled by the board, however click/drag to move took some time to add. There is also positional evaluations and engine feedback now. Next Steps Next, I plan on creating the actual site design and controls. I also want to add a way to import games from sites like chess.com, and have the ability to load a full game rather than just a position. Move classification is also something that should be implemented soon. Demo Video
Devlog 3 Move Classifications Move classifications have finally been added. I thought it wouldn’t take this long but instead I spent hours trying to deal with react asynchronous state and trying to coordinate different hooks to play along nicely. Thankfully it works properly now (hopefully). The classifications added are best, excellent, good, inaccuracy, mistake, blunder, and theory. Opening names have also been added as well. Next Steps Next, I’ll work on making the site actually look pretty and have functionality. Importing games should also come next after that. Towards the end i’ll add other classifications as well such as miss, great, and brilliant, however, I expect them to be more difficult as they have slightly stricter classifications.
Devlog 4 Site Styling Site styling has been added in this commit, and it also comes with light/dark mode. The evaluation bar has also been added, and is responsive based on the win probability formula. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Playback/History Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, Lichess, etc.,) Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)
Devlog 5 Sorry for the long devlog, some things took longer than expected. First I decided to waste time trying to improve the UI until I remembered I suck at design and just decided to revert to the original design. Then I spent forever wondering why my input textbox would not work properly just for me to change e.target.value to e.currentTarget.value. Although I guess where would the fun be if there was no struggle. Anyways, here are the features I added. Board Controls It is now possible to flip the board and go forwards and backwards through moves. Importing from other sources This one took a bit of time, but now you can import games from Chess.com, or provide your own PGN/FEN. Later on I’ll probably also add Lichess as an import source as well. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, Lichess, etc.,) (In Progress) Playback/History Controls (In Progress) Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)
Devlog 6 Second devlog today, this is more of an extension of the previous devlog since a lot of features were not fully polished yet. Since then move playback has been added and I also added a game review container. Most of the logic has now been implemented, all thats left now is a little polish and styling. The only logic thats left is trying to find a way to add proper move history and advanced classifications. I also attached a demo video this time since I forgot to last devlog. Move Playback It is now possible to use arrows to traverse forwards and backwards if a PGN file is imported. Game Review Container I added a little side container which will be used to show the stats of the game review. Currently it only shows the opening and move feedback, but it will be expanded to show accuracies and a full breakdown of the analysis and position similar to chess.com. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls History View Board Themes/Styles Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant) Changelog 0e4db3c e2552b0
Devlog 7 Lots of QOL features and fixes added today, i’ve added a basic view of move history, and added a settings page where you can change the theme of the website or board. Next, I do want to work on features that do not involve the game review, such as pass and play or engine play. Move History You can now properly go through a game’s moves and view all played moves in the side pane. Themes Website theming has been added, alongside being able to choose the colors you would like the board to be. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles History View (In Progress) Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Advanced Classifications (Miss, Great, Brilliant)
Devlog 8 Sorry again for the long devlog, some things took a bit longer than I expected. Anyways, icons/glyphs have been added in this devlog. I’ve also fixed some issues with move backtracking. Additional classifications such as miss and great have been added, which took a while since I had to do a lot of refactors to store all the data in cache, and I also didn’t realize I sometimes was tracking the evaluations for the next moves, not the ones just played, which took a while New classifications Miss : Miss is when the previous player makes a bad move, but the next player fails to capitalize on it causing the evaluation to drop back to near where it was before. Great : Great moves are the only moves in the position that work, provided that the outcome is drawn or winning and you are not already winning had you not played the move. It compares 2 lines of stockfish to evaluate the evaluation difference and check for the conditions outlined above. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View (In Progress) Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play In Person Play Against Engine Custom Position Setup Brilliant Moves
Devlog 9 I tried to convert the history from a linear array into a tree, and it did not go well. I spent literal hours trying to get it to work and look at tutorials, but it just did not want to work. So for now i’ve decided to stop working on that feature, and just focus on the last few remaining tasks. I do have to fix a couple of things since a lot of features are currently in progress, but I will post another devlog later showing the updated features.
Devlog 10 I finished work on in-person gameplay and custom position setups, all that is left now is to finish adding engine play, polish game review, and add brilliant moves. Promotions You can now choose the piece you would like to promote to (no longer auto queen). In Person Play You can now create a game to be played in person between 2 people. Time controls are also availible. Custom Positions You can now load custom positions via drag and drop, which is useful for practicing endgames or creating puzzles. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View Play In Person Custom Position Setup [] Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Play Against Engine (In Progress) Brilliant Moves
Devlog 11 I am finally back to this project, and this time did not wait 8 hours to post a devlog. Anyways, I added two major features today, custom position imports (which I forgot to do last time) and engine play. Features Custom Position Imports You can now import a position into the custom position editor, which is great for things like loading puzzles and endgames to practice against the engine. You can also export positions by pressing the copy button to copy the position fen to the clipboard. Play Against Engine You can now play games against stockfish, and choose a difficulty level from 0-20. As mentioned above I believe this is a quite useful feature for things like just playing by yourself or practicing different endgames against the computer. Roadmap Stockfish Web Worker Chessboard/Gameplay Basic Classifications Opening Names Evaluation Bar Site Styling Board Controls Importing from other sources (FEN, PGN, Chess.com, etc.,) Playback Controls Board Themes/Styles Miss and Great moves History View Play In Person Custom Position Setup Play Against Engine Full Game Review/Engine Analysis (In Progress) Brilliant Moves
Devlog 12 I really don’t like going this long without posting a devlog, but debugging move classifications was really painful. I encountered an issue where if you went through many moves very quickly, it resulted in classifications not working properly since stockfish could only give evaluations for the current move. This is not ideal since most classifications require checking the evaluation drop, which requires 2+ points of evaluation. I tried many things, first I tried running 3 different stockfish web workers inside the stockfish hook, which caused a couple issues and was not very performant. Next I tried using a single worker and passing in 3 positions, however since the web worker is single threaded it didn’t really work all that well. I also tried using a queue to run each instance one at a time, but that got complex quickly and still did not work. I also wanted to merge the classification and evaluation hooks, which created a 500 line mess of a file which was a nightmare to maintain. Finally, I decided to revert all my changes and keep the hooks separate and simple, and created 3 instances of evaluation hooks within my classification hook. This was much cleaner and actually worked really well, so I wasted 8 hours making things too complex.# Devlog 12 I really don’t like going this long without posting a devlog, but debugging move classifications was really painful. I encountered an issue where if you went through many moves very quickly, it resulted in classifications not working properly since stockfish could only give evaluations for the current move. This is not ideal since most classifications require checking the evaluation drop, which requires 2+ points of evaluation. I tried many things, first I tried running 3 different stockfish web workers inside the stockfish hook, which caused a couple issues and was not very performant. Next I tried using a single worker and passing in 3 positions, however since the web worker is single threaded it didn’t really work all that well. I also tried using a queue to run each instance one at a time, but that got complex quickly and still did not work. I also wanted to merge the classification and evaluation hooks, which created a 500 line mess of a file which was a nightmare to maintain. Finally, I decided to revert all my changes and keep the hooks separate and simple, and created 3 instances of evaluation hooks within my classification hook. This was much cleaner and actually worked really well, so I wasted 8 hours making things too complex.
Devlog 13 I’ve been working on the game review stats, and i’ve implemented a function to classify an entire game and tally up the classifications (which was actually harder than it looked, since i needed to rewrite my hooks since hooks cannot be called within functions). It now works pretty decently, but I do want to optimize performance a bit since it takes a while. Funnily enough there was an issue where if the worker resolved too early it would not terminate and create a memory leak and eat your entire system memory, but thats fixed now.
Devlog 14 I’m going to post more frequently as this project gets wrapped up, and I’ve just finished caching the game review data so feedback is instant if you load in game to review. I also decided to add colors to the start and end squares based on classification because it looks nice. I’ve attached a video below, I don’t know why my screen recorder records very laggy but I promise it’s not actually that laggy.
Devlog 15 I’ve added a few more features related to game review in this devlog. First, I added a section to view the top 2 engine lines on each move. I’ve also added a table to view classifications for the entire game.
Devlog 16 I’ve added the last 2 features related to game review, accuracies and the eval chart. The last thing I plan to to is add some polish, brilliant moves, and maybe try working on the history/pgn tree again.
Devlog 17 After a long time, I’ve finally added brilliant moves. This was done by comparing a squares attackers and defenders to determine if the piece is hanging. If a move results in that piece being hanging/sacrificed, and is the top engine move, then the classification will return brilliant. I’ve attached an example below in a game where GothamChess does what he does best and sacrifices both his rooks.
Devlog 18 A few things in this devlog, I separated the game review panel into 2 sections containing the review report and engine analysis. I’ve also refined the classifications for great and brilliant. Brilliant Move Changes The sacrifice can now be anywhere on the board, not just for the piece that moved Trading a lower value piece for a higher value piece (ex: taking a knight but losing a pawn) no longer counts as brilliant Illegal moves (pins, checks, etc.,) no longer contribute to the attacking piece values Great Move Changes Taking a hanging piece or trading lower value pieces for higher value pieces (ex: capturing a hanging queen or recapturing during a trade) no longer count as great moves.
Devlog 19 More progress has been made adding features and fixing bugs. I’ll highlight the changes below. Features Game Chart The game chart has been updated to include custom dots and lines showing the move classifications and key points during the game (brilliant moves, great moves, mistake, blunder, and miss). You can also click on the chart to go to that move. History View The history view has now been updated to show the classification icons next to the move, which should make it easier to find moves you are looking for Fixes/Optimizations Memoization Data in the game chart has now been memoized. This prevents the chart from crashing the page due to trying to process data many times per second. Stockfish evaluations Game review evaluations now use an active worker pool to run multiple evaluations at once rather than just one at a time. Positions are also cached now so all evaluations share 1 chess instance. In practice, this has reduced the game review time for a 20 move game from over 1 minute to around 7 seconds, which is around a 90% decrease.
Devlog 20 Another devlog here focusing on bug fixes, and I am happy to say that almost everything is pretty much complete. I’ve fixed pretty much every out of sync issue, and even got game reviews to load pretty much instantly. It literally took only around 5 seconds to load a 65 move game, so that is finally optimized. I think the issue was some web workers were not terminating properly and taking up too much memory. Anyways I hope to finally have this project out very soon, and the only thing I might to is try to get the history tree working. Today I actually did kind of get it to work but it caused massive performance degradations for some reason and was causing some conflicts with other components as well.
Devlog 21 The history view has finally been properly migrated to a tree structure. Now since that is finally complete, I know it has been long overdue but it is finally time to ship this project.
Devlog 22 The site is now live. I actually had a lot of issues in deploying this site for some reason (mainly due to the large stockfish binaries stored in git lfs and the coi serviceworker) and my deployments just kept failing. I eventually got it straightened out now and I am ready to ship the project.
Devlog 23 Hello again everybody! I know its been a long time since I last worked on this project, but I read the feedback on this project and addressed your suggestions. Most of the feedback was on ui/ux improvements, so as a result I removed all mentions of infinity/nan on the site, as it looks rather unpolished and unprofessional. I also changed the modal dialogs from the built in alert function to a less intrusive custom toast notification. Lastly, a couple people said the engine took slightly long to make moves, so I slightly lowered the engine depth for games and also removed another delay I originally added to make the engine feel more human like in its thinking time. In terms of the game review engine I decided to keep it the same as it works pretty quickly due to a worker pool being used, but I did change the dialog slightly to make it feel like something is happening in the background, which suprisingly actually makes it feel faster. Anyways, to everyone that tried this project and gave feedback, thank you as it was much appreciated.
Devlog 24 Small devlog, I was about to do another ship after addressing the feedback from last time, but I noticed a small bug where brilliant moves did not show sometimes. It turns out the issue was much simpler than I was testing for and it was due to a small multiplication sign error when converting the mate evaluation to centipawns to check if a move was winning.
Ships:
Ship Message Tempo is finally complete. It took way too many hours to finish, mostly through self inflicted pain of using hooks instead of asynchronous functions for the engine. I know that this might not be the greatest project for how long it took, but I am proud to say that it’s finally been shipped even after the many times I wanted to quit. I made this project because I play a little bit of chess and after getting limited to only 1 game review per day I thought it would be a good idea to make my own game review (yes I know other sites exist but wheres the fun in that). Anyways enough about that, here are the project features (definetly not copied from the readme) Features Game Review: Check how well you played in your previous games by simply entering your chess.com username or by manually loading a pgn file. Move Feedback: Instant updates on how well the engine thinks your move is. Move Classifications: How well the engine evaluates your moves. Classifications such as Miss, Great, or Brilliant are also included. Engine Lines: What the engine thinks is the best line to play in a position. Accuracies: How accurate you played relative to the best moves Graph: A visual and interactive graph on how much your expected win percentage changed throughout a game Classification Report: A total summary of how many of each type of move you played History Tree: View the total game history and easily branch off the main path. Play: Play against a friend in person, or play against the engine. Custom positions can be used as well. Custom Positions: Set up a custom position to load later. Settings: Change the app or board theme. If you are still reading this, thank you and I hope you enjoy using my site.
This is the second ship of the project. This is a pretty small ship aimed at addressing some feedback posted during my last ship. Originally I planned to do a complete UI overhaul, but I decided to just focus on minor improvements now since I have to balance projects with school and don’t know if I am going to have time to work on projects as much. I also want to take a little break from projects to focus on my mental health as well since I have been dedicating multiple hours almost every day purely on making projects. Anyways, enough about that and back to the project. If you want to see the changes from the previous ship, I have them outlined in the devlog below. If you want to see the main features added in the first ship, I have it posted as well shortly below to read. Thank you and I hope you like using my project, if you have any more feedback please outline it in your vote message as I love hearing how I can make my projects better. If you do not want to scroll down to the previous ship message or the readme, here is it posted below. Previous Ship Message Tempo is finally complete. It took way too many hours to finish, mostly through self inflicted pain of using hooks instead of asynchronous functions for the engine. I know that this might not be the greatest project for how long it took, but I am proud to say that it’s finally been shipped even after the many times I wanted to quit. I made this project because I play a little bit of chess and after getting limited to only 1 game review per day I thought it would be a good idea to make my own game review (yes I know other sites exist but wheres the fun in that). Anyways enough about that, here are the project features (definetly not copied from the readme) Features Game Review: Check how well you played in your previous games by simply entering your chess.com username or by manually loading a pgn file. Move Feedback: Instant updates on how well the engine thinks your move is. Move Classifications: How well the engine evaluates your moves. Classifications such as Miss, Great, or Brilliant are also included. Engine Lines: What the engine thinks is the best line to play in a position. Accuracies: How accurate you played relative to the best moves Graph: A visual and interactive graph on how much your expected win percentage changed throughout a game Classification Report: A total summary of how many of each type of move you played History Tree: View the total game history and easily branch off the main path. Play: Play against a friend in person, or play against the engine. Custom positions can be used as well. Custom Positions: Set up a custom position to load later. Settings: Change the app or board theme. If you are still reading this, thank you and I hope you enjoy using my site....
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mocha by @Glitchy | Stardance
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Glitchy
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101.0
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1806
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-13T18:57:02Z", "hours": 101.0, "multiplier": 17.94, "payout": 1806, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I made a package manager for Windows, which is somewhat backwards compatible with scoop packages. To be honest there’s still a lot of work that I want to do, but I have exams and college application coming up soon so I can’t. That’s not to say I’m not happy with the state of the ship. At the very least it has all the core features that a package manager should have, but there are still a lot of bugs which is why this is only v0.0.1. The biggest challenge by far was trying to figure out how Scoop does things internally. A lot of stuff just doesn’t have documentation, so you have to dig through the really messy PowerShell source code.", "repo": "https://github.com/Protract-123/mocha", "demo": "https://github.com/Protract-123/mocha/releases/latest"}]...
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[{"post_id": 67579, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 67579, "ts": "2026-09-13T18:33:17Z", "hours": 1.7761, "text": "So I wrote a README, added a license (MIT of course) and setup CI/CD so that releases are automatically built and deployed. Honestly I forgot how hard it is to write a good README. You need to get a lot of information through without it looking like a wall of text."}, {"post_id": 67267, "ts": "2026-09-13T10:36:48Z", "hours": 5.8047, "text": "I forgot to make a devlog in between so this will be like 2 bigger devlogs. I parallelized bucket updates, which speeds it up quite a bit. This also allowed me to try out parallelism even more, which I plan to apply throughout the CLI later on. I also added configuration options for the runners which mocha shim will use to run certain file types. For example, you can set the python-runner to select the python version that’ll be used to run python scripts that are shimmed. Downloads now have a progress bar, so you don’t need to wonder whether something is happening or not during a long download. Finally env_set is fully supported since I added the relevant variable parsing. This was pretty much just me cleaning out the TODO list before I ship. I also did a lot of smaller bug fixes and refactors as seen below. fix(commands): prevent app installation if already installed (cb27d07) fix(commands): fix config opening with “start” (74f3679) fix(commands): correctly handle non-apps when upgrading (f7419f6) fix: make LogOutput go to Stdout not Stderr (bc10357) fix: handle empty versions correctly (2287da9) fix(pkg): remove correct temp dir (33189b6) fix(shim): warn for unknown shim extension (622c2b4) fix: skip downloads with no hash by default (69d4e35) fix: use correct timeout for downloads (44e527b) fix: drop unnecessary return value from GetExecutableEntries (9fd845c) fix(config): remove unused option (1339971) fix(commands): don’t error for valid results (87c4d6c) refactor(config): rename variables/functions (f253d9d) fix: use unique temp directories (a159e23) refactor: use fmt.Fprintln directly (d2d54bf)"}, {"post_id": 65401, "ts": "2026-09-10T14:55:22Z", "hours": 2.5386, "text": "Lots of small bug fixes and changes, I’ll just list them out: feat(cmd): allow removal of multiple shims in one execution (f2fae3f) fix(manifest): correctly ignore invalid shortcut entries (6a08478) fix(fileops): use correct registry type (5d5d796) fix(config): seed config with defaults (9dfaaff) fix(cmd): use correct release sources (a2a9ba1) fix(cmd): use bucket from install info (5a9109b) I also added support for more file types being shimmed, which helps a lot with compatibility. The file types are .py , .bat , .cmd , .jar and .ps1 ."}, {"post_id": 52474, "ts": "2026-08-22T16:37:15Z", "hours": 4.6758, "text": "Lot of time going into this devlog, but it makes sense since I did do a lot. I did this sweeping refactor of the entire commands module which moved around a lot of code. Essentially each command now gets it’s own directory under the commands module that represents it’s children/parents. For example commands/shim/remove/cmd.go contains code for the mocha shim remove command. Each cmd.go contains a Command struct that has the relevant fields and functions attached to it. This structure just makes things more organized and also means adding test files will be a bit easier since functionality is now isolated. I also sorted out the shim binary. So essentially https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Shim offers different version of the shim binary which can be installed. Previously I hard coded the code to install cpp v0.1.0 but now users can run mocha shim binary releases to see the options and mocha shim binary setup to install their chosen binary. This also means we actually get the latest releases from GitHub."}, {"post_id": 51141, "ts": "2026-08-20T17:11:51Z", "hours": 3.6722, "text": "Finally got a bit of time to do a bit of development. First thing I did was remove a field from install.json to match scoop . This means that mocha should be a drop in replacement for existing scoop installs. Then I added partial support for env_set and env_add_path . The main thing I need to do to complete the feature is parse variables and replace them with the appropriate paths. These 2 fields are some of the last manifest fields I need to support besides pre/post (un)install hooks."}, {"post_id": 34596, "ts": "2026-07-25T13:39:02Z", "hours": 2.5778, "text": "My summer break has ended so development is going to be a lot slower from now. I added mocha outdated so you can list outdated apps before upgrading them to a newer version. Besides that I tweaked a lot of stuff related to CLI output. For example I changed search to output one table, and simply outputting exact matches at the top of that table. I also changed a lot of messages which were using LogOutput to LogInfo so they use the correct color and output to stderr and not stdout ."}, {"post_id": 31801, "ts": "2026-07-20T14:04:04Z", "hours": 1.5481, "text": "Not sure why I didn’t do this earlier, but I’ve added success messages to commands where it makes sense. Also added a success color to the config so you can change what the success color is. I do still need to improve CLI output quite a bit, but it’s slowly getting there."}, {"post_id": 30693, "ts": "2026-07-18T14:02:54Z", "hours": 2.1922, "text": "I’m writing this one right before F1 Qualifying at Spa! Continuing with the trend of some of my recent work, I improved what table outputs look like to be a little bit more readable. We now use proper separators in the form of Unicode Box Drawing Characters . I also made column alignment configurable, which improves legibility for some commands like mocha bucket list and mocha cache show . I’ve attached an image of the scoop and mocha versions of bucket list so you can compare for yourself."}, {"post_id": 30286, "ts": "2026-07-17T18:51:34Z", "hours": 3.4797, "text": "I love refactoring!!!! I’ll probably end up spending another 20 hours just on refactoring because it’s so fun!!!! This time around I wanted to refactor the code so that our commands orchestrate stuff instead of the helper functions. For example, pkg.Install would first download a package, then install it, and then link it through shims and shortcuts all by itself. This causes issues because it means error messages become slightly worse, and it creates a class of bugs due to edge cases where we don’t necessarily want this order of orchestration. Hence I did a lot of refactoring in the pkg module. I also ended up adding a way to skip verification of downloads when downloading, installing or updating a package through --skip-verify . It’s a useful option in situations where there is a malformed manifest or simply no hash to begin with."}, {"post_id": 30054, "ts": "2026-07-17T10:28:53Z", "hours": 4.6269, "text": "mocha now supports a user defined theme for output colors. In the process I ended up doing a lot of stuff related to the config. First thing I did was swap to fatih/color for colored output, since it handles stuff like colors in command prompt and removing color when output is piped. Then I refactored the config module. Earlier I would pass around a MochaConfiguration object through every function. Now I use a config singleton that’s accessible from any function. Why? Because it means I don’t need to pass the object every time I want to log information. Also means I don’t need to pass mochaDir through almost every function in the codebase. Getting user defined themes was a bit complicated because I needed a good way to handle a default theme so output doesn’t look bad if parsing fails. I handled this by only using the configured theme if every color resolves properly. Otherwise output falls back to the already loaded default theme. Due to this you still get colored output even if there are errors or warning before the configuration and theme is loaded."}, {"post_id": 29066, "ts": "2026-07-15T18:30:47Z", "hours": 4.7214, "text": "So I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring, a bit of bug fixing and a bit of optimization. Essentially just polishing mocha before I work on the next feature. Here’s some of the stuff I did: created tests for ParseRefString to validate behavior cache manifest json between info calls since I/O is really slow bumped dependency versions refactored manifest/info.go Besides that I fixed the uninstall flow since it was really bugged after the latest changes. Essentially mocha would uninstall apps with incorrect info. It would also try to remove shims/shortcuts for apps which don’t have any active shims/shortcuts. I then added a bit of logging since the uninstall command didn’t give any user output for whatever reason (i forgot to earlier)."}, {"post_id": 27086, "ts": "2026-07-12T10:29:45Z", "hours": 6.4975, "text": "This is going to be the equivalent of 2 devlogs since I thought I made one earlier for persists but I didn’t. New feature! We now handle persist items in order to store data between versions. These are files which are persisted between versions of an app. Lets take git as an example to explain why persist exists. Say you want to make sure your git config isn’t deleted every time you update. The issue with this is that the config file is saved in the version specfic directory. To resolve this we can keep the config in $MOCHA_DIR/persist and then symlink the config to where it needs to be, which is essentially what persist tells us to do. Since we handled persist items last time we can now implement mocha upgrade to update apps. The way scoop handles updates is by first removing anything that references the app, like shortcuts or shims . Then we just follow the install process from scratch. This leaves the old version available in case a user wants to revert versions due to a bug, while also updating to the latest available version. This can be seen in the video below, which shows me updating llama.cpp-hip-radeon ."}, {"post_id": 23572, "ts": "2026-07-06T16:39:13Z", "hours": 3.53, "text": "We now create shortcuts! This means any GUI apps should show up properly in the start menu, just like they do when you install with scoop . All I really had to do was a bit of orchestration since I decided to vendor in an implementation from https://github.com/jxeng/shortcut Besides that I expanded the number of apps that are supported by implementing a bit of code that handle architecture specific bin fields, along with bin fields which store 2D arrays. I also cleared up some of the TODO items. I swapped the junction implementation to an implementation from https://github.com/nyaosorg/go-windows-junction since we were previously shelling out to CLI. That and I added a bit more zip bomb protection For the purposes of the video below I changed the location which shortcuts get put to my desktop. It’ll probably be configurable, and match scoop by putting shortcuts in the startup menu by default"}, {"post_id": 22839, "ts": "2026-07-05T13:36:18Z", "hours": 3.3089, "text": "As I mentioned in the previous devlog I added good help information to every bit of the CLI. It’s surprisingly difficult to write good help messages which explains everything to users in a few words I also changed the behaviour of the mocha cache clear command to not clear all cache by default. That’s now gated behind the --all flag in order to match scoop a bit more"}, {"post_id": 21420, "ts": "2026-07-03T11:02:24Z", "hours": 1.0722, "text": "Typically I don’t want to make devlogs for small stuff like this, but this is something I found really cool. So I was working on help messages for all the commands when I realized that mocha bucket list felt a bit slower than pretty much every other command. This is because we need to shell out to git 2 times per bucket, and I had 4 buckets added. While 8 git commands might not sound like a lot, it was enough to make mocha bucket list feel slow. So what I did is I parallelized the metadata fetching through an errgroup . Instead of fetching the metadata for each bucket in order, we fetch the metadata for all 4 buckets simultaneously. This led to a big performance uplift. About 3 times faster than the old version of mocha , and just over 12 times faster than scoop for this operation. See the video below."}, {"post_id": 21386, "ts": "2026-07-03T09:17:07Z", "hours": 2.2464, "text": "I finished up mocha uninstall and mocha list , which means you can actually manage installed apps instead of manually deleting them. There’s not much that goes into mocha uninstall . You just need to remove the relevant shims and app directories since the apps that mocha supports are all portable. mocha list is similarly simple. It’s just loops over the directories in $MOCHA_DIR/apps and looks for apps along with the versions installed for each app."}, {"post_id": 19910, "ts": "2026-07-01T10:53:02Z", "hours": 5.4625, "text": "So I added support for more apps by implementing more extractors. This means in theory any apps which don’t need a pre-install or post-install should work. To be more specific, I handle a few more properties on manifests. Those being extract_dir and innosetup , which inform how an app needs to be installed. I also implement 7zip and innounp as extractors to support more file formats which applications are distributed in. Of course there’s still a lot of work before I consider this ready for public use. I need to create commands for some basic operations like uninstalling, updating and listing apps. I also need to handle shortcuts otherwise GUI apps can’t be accessed from the start menu. Besides that I need to improve the user experience. As you can see in the video below mocha just sort of dumps everything to the console even if it’s not relevant. Help menus are also critical to get working properly."}, {"post_id": 18238, "ts": "2026-06-29T09:51:16Z", "hours": 3.7839, "text": "Finished up the code cleanup in commands , fileops and manifests . I did catch a few edge cases and some incorrect behavior in the process, which is why I always spend so much time reviewing code. I did use AI to assist with code review because I think it’s an area where AI shines. AI is really good at finding small errors or inconsistencies in the codebase which I probably wouldn’t notice. For example, it identified that the ManifestReferences argument was not a required argument for the download command, which meant no help message was displayed on incorrect usage like the other commands. One big thing I will work on eventually is console output. Right now errors are well formatted but a lot of the time commands just run stuff without providing a lot of insight into what actions they are taking which isn’t great. Even the help menu is pretty useless right now (see the image below). Extra context: A manifest reference is a pointer to an app (e.g. main/ [email protected] )"}, {"post_id": 17027, "ts": "2026-06-27T17:10:53Z", "hours": 5.3025, "text": "Before working on more features and expanding the amount of apps mocha actually supports I wanted to go through the codebase and do a lot of cleanup since the codebase is quite messy. There are silly mistakes in some files and bad implementations in others. Hence the time I spent during this period was focused on moving code to where it should be and cleaning up some edge cases, specifically related to the bucket , config and shim modules. A good example of this is moving the code to get the active config to the config module instead of leaving it in main.go . Next up will be refactoring the commands , fileops , and manifest modules. I don’t have much to show so I figured I would present a feature I added but didn’t show earlier: the ability to skip cache hits with the --force flag when installing or downloading an app. Some context I forgot to add initially: I renamed the app module to manifest since I felt it was more accurate to what it actually handles scope wise."}, {"post_id": 15814, "ts": "2026-06-25T18:17:50Z", "hours": 2.5558, "text": "Huge milestone!!! I’ve gotten mocha install working for very basic apps! This means the entire process of downloading a file, then extracting it, then creating a junction and finally creating a shim now works for basic pieces of software! So in terms of what I actually did this devlog, I added cache hits to the download command since it’s relevant to the install command. I then implemented the aforementioned .zip extraction and junction creation. Then all that was left was a bit of orchestration, getting everything to work together properly. See a working install of innounp using mocha install below!"}, {"post_id": 15668, "ts": "2026-06-25T14:03:10Z", "hours": 0.7572, "text": "mocha update is another command which does very little but is very important. All it does is update the known_buckets file, and run git pull on all added buckets to update them. It can also update just the buckets you specify if you pass in an argument. I do need to improve the output of the command since it outputs raw git right now, but at least it’s functional. See the demo below."}, {"post_id": 14392, "ts": "2026-06-23T14:41:51Z", "hours": 6.9436, "text": "Spent a bit longer between devlogs this time, but it was worth it. So I realized the error messages were really bad. I was pretty much just passing errors up the call stack without adding any context, which isn’t great since it means our error messages will be useless to people reading them I therefore went through every single file of the codebase and wrote good error messages which add a bit of context every time we pass it up the call stack. I also did a bit of refactoring where I thought it would be worth it. For example in the shim module I now set the PE subsystem of the shim binary while it’s in memory instead of writing to disk twice. A few good examples of what the new error messages look like can be seen in the video below."}, {"post_id": 13054, "ts": "2026-06-21T10:47:05Z", "hours": 3.4069, "text": "Shims are simple in concept, complicated in reality. So essentially a shim in mocha is just an executable which calls another executable. It’s similar to a shortcut in that sense, except it shows up in $PATH Thankfully the scoop project already has a repository with 4 different implementations for the shim binary, so I can just have mocha shim download one of those binaries. The complicated part was the PE Subsystem. The PE subsystem is basically a bit of info in each binary which tells Windows whether it’s a console application, or a GUI application. We need to set the PE subsystem of the shim exe to the PE subsystem of the binary we are calling for Windows to execute the binary properly. Hence I need to read and write raw binary data. All of this is just the implementation for exe shims. Scoop itself contains implementations for .bat/.cmd , .ps1 , .jar , .py and linux binaries , all of which have wildly different implementations compared to .exe shims. The video below shows the working set of mocha shim commands (those being add , remove and list )."}, {"post_id": 12032, "ts": "2026-06-19T16:57:37Z", "hours": 1.8778, "text": "mocha cache is a simple command. It shows you what files are currently in $MOCHA_DIR/cache directory and it clears them out. One thing I noticed was that scoop cache show actually displays raw bytes instead of human readable file sizes for each cache entry, which is a bit odd since the total they display is human readable. Therefore I made my implementation mocha cache list display human readable sizes since that’s a more reasonable default."}, {"post_id": 11234, "ts": "2026-06-18T11:50:44Z", "hours": 2.2589, "text": "Fuzzy search is really really good. While implementing mocha search I noticed the results returned by scoop search were in alphabetical order, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I do scoop search git the first result should probably be git As a result my implementation of search uses github.com/sahilm/fuzzy which is a small library which provides a fuzzy search implementation. Scoop also checks for binary name matches, e.g. package biodiff can provide a binary called git-biodiff and show up in search results. I decided to remove this for now, since I personally find it a bit unnecessary. scoop search also lists all search results, which is okay when results are sorted alphabetically but doesn’t make sense when searches are relevance based. Therefore, by default mocha search will list exact matches plus the 20 most relevant search results. This can be overridden by the --count argument, where setting it to 0 displays all results. A demonstration of mocha search vs scoop search can be seen in the video below."}, {"post_id": 10748, "ts": "2026-06-17T17:14:41Z", "hours": 2.1597, "text": "I finished up mocha download , which surprisingly does a bit more than simply downloading files. The first thing it does is well… download the file. This is a bit more complicated than it seems though, since we need to identify the right file to download based on cpu architecture. Hence the very cursed JSON parsing I had to create. After downloading a file, we also do a hash check. We support the 4 types of file hashes which scoop support, those being sha256 , sha512 , md5 and sha1 . Currently files get downloaded to the $MOCHA_DIR/cache directory like in scoop, however we don’t actually check if there’s anything cached which can lead to repeated downloads. That’s something I’ll need to fix later on"}, {"post_id": 10131, "ts": "2026-06-16T18:54:22Z", "hours": 1.4081, "text": "I was working on the mocha download command so I can sort out fetching files, and during it I realized my current app format makes things a bit weird. mocha cat previously took in a flag for bucket through -b and a name. Scoop on the other hand uses an application reference in the format bucket/name@version . Scoop’s format is really important for downloads and installs, so it didn’t make sense to not standardize it between mocha download and mocha cat . Hence this shorter devlog! See the video below for the new usage (version numbers are ignored for mocha cat )."}, {"post_id": 10004, "ts": "2026-06-16T15:21:57Z", "hours": 2.9753, "text": "I did a bit of refactoring to split the core functionality from the command files. This means that the code for downloading and deleting buckets is separated from the code for the various commands. I’m doing this primarily for better code organization, and also to prevent import cycles. I also finished up the config system I mentioned last time. It’ll be one of the bigger improvements over scoop, which has a basic set of configuration options. TOML was the obvious choice for the config format since it is really easy to read and write. I made sure that you can put it in any of the standard locations, such as %APPDATA% and .config or in $MOCHA_DIR . Running mocha config will open the configuration in your preferred app, and also generate the default config if a configuration hasn’t been detected in any of the valid locations. Currently the configuration can be used to make mocha cat run an external program for printing manifests to stdout . See the video below for an example using bat"}, {"post_id": 8826, "ts": "2026-06-14T17:52:54Z", "hours": 2.6147, "text": "So this is a spot where I think the improvements over scoop start becoming really apparent. The scoop cat command simply prints an app’s manifest to console. However due to the long startup time of PowerShell scripts (scoop is written in PowerShell) basic stuff like scoop cat takes a second. mocha cat on the other hand is nearly instantaneous since it’s a compiled binary with almost 0 startup time. You can see how this plays out in real usage in the video below. I also half baked a config system, but it’s not finished so I’ll talk about that in the next devlog."}, {"post_id": 8586, "ts": "2026-06-14T08:48:35Z", "hours": 2.85, "text": "I finished off the remaining mocha bucket subcommands, those being add , rm and list . These commands manage “buckets” which are pretty much just package sources. mocha bucket add uses git to clone the relevant bucket into the [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets directory. By default MOCHA_DIR is [USER]/mocha mocha bucket list simply loops over the [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets directory and gets relevant info for each bucket. mocha bucket rm removes a bucket by just deleting the folder containing the bucket. For example, removing the main bucket deletes [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets/main"}, {"post_id": 8208, "ts": "2026-06-13T17:32:25Z", "hours": 2.0261, "text": "I started off with something a bit simple: mocha bucket known The known bucket list in scoop is a list of buckets which are known by the package manager in advance. These buckets don’t require the full URL to be used when using scoop bucket sub-commands. For example instead of running scoop bucket add https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main you can instead run scoop bucket add main As seen in the video below, mocha bucket known doesn’t do much. First it downloads buckets.json if it doesn’t exist. Then it parses the json and outputs it to console."}]...
|
Title: mocha by @Glitchy | Stardance
Devlogs:
I s Title: mocha by @Glitchy | Stardance
Devlogs:
I started off with something a bit simple: mocha bucket known The known bucket list in scoop is a list of buckets which are known by the package manager in advance. These buckets don’t require the full URL to be used when using scoop bucket sub-commands. For example instead of running scoop bucket add https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main you can instead run scoop bucket add main As seen in the video below, mocha bucket known doesn’t do much. First it downloads buckets.json if it doesn’t exist. Then it parses the json and outputs it to console.
I finished off the remaining mocha bucket subcommands, those being add , rm and list . These commands manage “buckets” which are pretty much just package sources. mocha bucket add uses git to clone the relevant bucket into the [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets directory. By default MOCHA_DIR is [USER]/mocha mocha bucket list simply loops over the [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets directory and gets relevant info for each bucket. mocha bucket rm removes a bucket by just deleting the folder containing the bucket. For example, removing the main bucket deletes [MOCHA_DIR]/buckets/main
So this is a spot where I think the improvements over scoop start becoming really apparent. The scoop cat command simply prints an app’s manifest to console. However due to the long startup time of PowerShell scripts (scoop is written in PowerShell) basic stuff like scoop cat takes a second. mocha cat on the other hand is nearly instantaneous since it’s a compiled binary with almost 0 startup time. You can see how this plays out in real usage in the video below. I also half baked a config system, but it’s not finished so I’ll talk about that in the next devlog.
I did a bit of refactoring to split the core functionality from the command files. This means that the code for downloading and deleting buckets is separated from the code for the various commands. I’m doing this primarily for better code organization, and also to prevent import cycles. I also finished up the config system I mentioned last time. It’ll be one of the bigger improvements over scoop, which has a basic set of configuration options. TOML was the obvious choice for the config format since it is really easy to read and write. I made sure that you can put it in any of the standard locations, such as %APPDATA% and .config or in $MOCHA_DIR . Running mocha config will open the configuration in your preferred app, and also generate the default config if a configuration hasn’t been detected in any of the valid locations. Currently the configuration can be used to make mocha cat run an external program for printing manifests to stdout . See the video below for an example using bat
I was working on the mocha download command so I can sort out fetching files, and during it I realized my current app format makes things a bit weird. mocha cat previously took in a flag for bucket through -b and a name. Scoop on the other hand uses an application reference in the format bucket/name@version . Scoop’s format is really important for downloads and installs, so it didn’t make sense to not standardize it between mocha download and mocha cat . Hence this shorter devlog! See the video below for the new usage (version numbers are ignored for mocha cat ).
I finished up mocha download , which surprisingly does a bit more than simply downloading files. The first thing it does is well… download the file. This is a bit more complicated than it seems though, since we need to identify the right file to download based on cpu architecture. Hence the very cursed JSON parsing I had to create. After downloading a file, we also do a hash check. We support the 4 types of file hashes which scoop support, those being sha256 , sha512 , md5 and sha1 . Currently files get downloaded to the $MOCHA_DIR/cache directory like in scoop, however we don’t actually check if there’s anything cached which can lead to repeated downloads. That’s something I’ll need to fix later on
Fuzzy search is really really good. While implementing mocha search I noticed the results returned by scoop search were in alphabetical order, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. If I do scoop search git the first result should probably be git As a result my implementation of search uses github.com/sahilm/fuzzy which is a small library which provides a fuzzy search implementation. Scoop also checks for binary name matches, e.g. package biodiff can provide a binary called git-biodiff and show up in search results. I decided to remove this for now, since I personally find it a bit unnecessary. scoop search also lists all search results, which is okay when results are sorted alphabetically but doesn’t make sense when searches are relevance based. Therefore, by default mocha search will list exact matches plus the 20 most relevant search results. This can be overridden by the --count argument, where setting it to 0 displays all results. A demonstration of mocha search vs scoop search can be seen in the video below.
mocha cache is a simple command. It shows you what files are currently in $MOCHA_DIR/cache directory and it clears them out. One thing I noticed was that scoop cache show actually displays raw bytes instead of human readable file sizes for each cache entry, which is a bit odd since the total they display is human readable. Therefore I made my implementation mocha cache list display human readable sizes since that’s a more reasonable default.
Shims are simple in concept, complicated in reality. So essentially a shim in mocha is just an executable which calls another executable. It’s similar to a shortcut in that sense, except it shows up in $PATH Thankfully the scoop project already has a repository with 4 different implementations for the shim binary, so I can just have mocha shim download one of those binaries. The complicated part was the PE Subsystem. The PE subsystem is basically a bit of info in each binary which tells Windows whether it’s a console application, or a GUI application. We need to set the PE subsystem of the shim exe to the PE subsystem of the binary we are calling for Windows to execute the binary properly. Hence I need to read and write raw binary data. All of this is just the implementation for exe shims. Scoop itself contains implementations for .bat/.cmd , .ps1 , .jar , .py and linux binaries , all of which have wildly different implementations compared to .exe shims. The video below shows the working set of mocha shim commands (those being add , remove and list ).
Spent a bit longer between devlogs this time, but it was worth it. So I realized the error messages were really bad. I was pretty much just passing errors up the call stack without adding any context, which isn’t great since it means our error messages will be useless to people reading them I therefore went through every single file of the codebase and wrote good error messages which add a bit of context every time we pass it up the call stack. I also did a bit of refactoring where I thought it would be worth it. For example in the shim module I now set the PE subsystem of the shim binary while it’s in memory instead of writing to disk twice. A few good examples of what the new error messages look like can be seen in the video below.
mocha update is another command which does very little but is very important. All it does is update the known_buckets file, and run git pull on all added buckets to update them. It can also update just the buckets you specify if you pass in an argument. I do need to improve the output of the command since it outputs raw git right now, but at least it’s functional. See the demo below.
Huge milestone!!! I’ve gotten mocha install working for very basic apps! This means the entire process of downloading a file, then extracting it, then creating a junction and finally creating a shim now works for basic pieces of software! So in terms of what I actually did this devlog, I added cache hits to the download command since it’s relevant to the install command. I then implemented the aforementioned .zip extraction and junction creation. Then all that was left was a bit of orchestration, getting everything to work together properly. See a working install of innounp using mocha install below!
Before working on more features and expanding the amount of apps mocha actually supports I wanted to go through the codebase and do a lot of cleanup since the codebase is quite messy. There are silly mistakes in some files and bad implementations in others. Hence the time I spent during this period was focused on moving code to where it should be and cleaning up some edge cases, specifically related to the bucket , config and shim modules. A good example of this is moving the code to get the active config to the config module instead of leaving it in main.go . Next up will be refactoring the commands , fileops , and manifest modules. I don’t have much to show so I figured I would present a feature I added but didn’t show earlier: the ability to skip cache hits with the --force flag when installing or downloading an app. Some context I forgot to add initially: I renamed the app module to manifest since I felt it was more accurate to what it actually handles scope wise.
Finished up the code cleanup in commands , fileops and manifests . I did catch a few edge cases and some incorrect behavior in the process, which is why I always spend so much time reviewing code. I did use AI to assist with code review because I think it’s an area where AI shines. AI is really good at finding small errors or inconsistencies in the codebase which I probably wouldn’t notice. For example, it identified that the ManifestReferences argument was not a required argument for the download command, which meant no help message was displayed on incorrect usage like the other commands. One big thing I will work on eventually is console output. Right now errors are well formatted but a lot of the time commands just run stuff without providing a lot of insight into what actions they are taking which isn’t great. Even the help menu is pretty useless right now (see the image below). Extra context: A manifest reference is a pointer to an app (e.g. main/ [email protected] )
So I added support for more apps by implementing more extractors. This means in theory any apps which don’t need a pre-install or post-install should work. To be more specific, I handle a few more properties on manifests. Those being extract_dir and innosetup , which inform how an app needs to be installed. I also implement 7zip and innounp as extractors to support more file formats which applications are distributed in. Of course there’s still a lot of work before I consider this ready for public use. I need to create commands for some basic operations like uninstalling, updating and listing apps. I also need to handle shortcuts otherwise GUI apps can’t be accessed from the start menu. Besides that I need to improve the user experience. As you can see in the video below mocha just sort of dumps everything to the console even if it’s not relevant. Help menus are also critical to get working properly.
I finished up mocha uninstall and mocha list , which means you can actually manage installed apps instead of manually deleting them. There’s not much that goes into mocha uninstall . You just need to remove the relevant shims and app directories since the apps that mocha supports are all portable. mocha list is similarly simple. It’s just loops over the directories in $MOCHA_DIR/apps and looks for apps along with the versions installed for each app.
Typically I don’t want to make devlogs for small stuff like this, but this is something I found really cool. So I was working on help messages for all the commands when I realized that mocha bucket list felt a bit slower than pretty much every other command. This is because we need to shell out to git 2 times per bucket, and I had 4 buckets added. While 8 git commands might not sound like a lot, it was enough to make mocha bucket list feel slow. So what I did is I parallelized the metadata fetching through an errgroup . Instead of fetching the metadata for each bucket in order, we fetch the metadata for all 4 buckets simultaneously. This led to a big performance uplift. About 3 times faster than the old version of mocha , and just over 12 times faster than scoop for this operation. See the video below.
As I mentioned in the previous devlog I added good help information to every bit of the CLI. It’s surprisingly difficult to write good help messages which explains everything to users in a few words I also changed the behaviour of the mocha cache clear command to not clear all cache by default. That’s now gated behind the --all flag in order to match scoop a bit more
We now create shortcuts! This means any GUI apps should show up properly in the start menu, just like they do when you install with scoop . All I really had to do was a bit of orchestration since I decided to vendor in an implementation from https://github.com/jxeng/shortcut Besides that I expanded the number of apps that are supported by implementing a bit of code that handle architecture specific bin fields, along with bin fields which store 2D arrays. I also cleared up some of the TODO items. I swapped the junction implementation to an implementation from https://github.com/nyaosorg/go-windows-junction since we were previously shelling out to CLI. That and I added a bit more zip bomb protection For the purposes of the video below I changed the location which shortcuts get put to my desktop. It’ll probably be configurable, and match scoop by putting shortcuts in the startup menu by default
This is going to be the equivalent of 2 devlogs since I thought I made one earlier for persists but I didn’t. New feature! We now handle persist items in order to store data between versions. These are files which are persisted between versions of an app. Lets take git as an example to explain why persist exists. Say you want to make sure your git config isn’t deleted every time you update. The issue with this is that the config file is saved in the version specfic directory. To resolve this we can keep the config in $MOCHA_DIR/persist and then symlink the config to where it needs to be, which is essentially what persist tells us to do. Since we handled persist items last time we can now implement mocha upgrade to update apps. The way scoop handles updates is by first removing anything that references the app, like shortcuts or shims . Then we just follow the install process from scratch. This leaves the old version available in case a user wants to revert versions due to a bug, while also updating to the latest available version. This can be seen in the video below, which shows me updating llama.cpp-hip-radeon .
So I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring, a bit of bug fixing and a bit of optimization. Essentially just polishing mocha before I work on the next feature. Here’s some of the stuff I did: created tests for ParseRefString to validate behavior cache manifest json between info calls since I/O is really slow bumped dependency versions refactored manifest/info.go Besides that I fixed the uninstall flow since it was really bugged after the latest changes. Essentially mocha would uninstall apps with incorrect info. It would also try to remove shims/shortcuts for apps which don’t have any active shims/shortcuts. I then added a bit of logging since the uninstall command didn’t give any user output for whatever reason (i forgot to earlier).
mocha now supports a user defined theme for output colors. In the process I ended up doing a lot of stuff related to the config. First thing I did was swap to fatih/color for colored output, since it handles stuff like colors in command prompt and removing color when output is piped. Then I refactored the config module. Earlier I would pass around a MochaConfiguration object through every function. Now I use a config singleton that’s accessible from any function. Why? Because it means I don’t need to pass the object every time I want to log information. Also means I don’t need to pass mochaDir through almost every function in the codebase. Getting user defined themes was a bit complicated because I needed a good way to handle a default theme so output doesn’t look bad if parsing fails. I handled this by only using the configured theme if every color resolves properly. Otherwise output falls back to the already loaded default theme. Due to this you still get colored output even if there are errors or warning before the configuration and theme is loaded.
I love refactoring!!!! I’ll probably end up spending another 20 hours just on refactoring because it’s so fun!!!! This time around I wanted to refactor the code so that our commands orchestrate stuff instead of the helper functions. For example, pkg.Install would first download a package, then install it, and then link it through shims and shortcuts all by itself. This causes issues because it means error messages become slightly worse, and it creates a class of bugs due to edge cases where we don’t necessarily want this order of orchestration. Hence I did a lot of refactoring in the pkg module. I also ended up adding a way to skip verification of downloads when downloading, installing or updating a package through --skip-verify . It’s a useful option in situations where there is a malformed manifest or simply no hash to begin with.
I’m writing this one right before F1 Qualifying at Spa! Continuing with the trend of some of my recent work, I improved what table outputs look like to be a little bit more readable. We now use proper separators in the form of Unicode Box Drawing Characters . I also made column alignment configurable, which improves legibility for some commands like mocha bucket list and mocha cache show . I’ve attached an image of the scoop and mocha versions of bucket list so you can compare for yourself.
Not sure why I didn’t do this earlier, but I’ve added success messages to commands where it makes sense. Also added a success color to the config so you can change what the success color is. I do still need to improve CLI output quite a bit, but it’s slowly getting there.
My summer break has ended so development is going to be a lot slower from now. I added mocha outdated so you can list outdated apps before upgrading them to a newer version. Besides that I tweaked a lot of stuff related to CLI output. For example I changed search to output one table, and simply outputting exact matches at the top of that table. I also changed a lot of messages which were using LogOutput to LogInfo so they use the correct color and output to stderr and not stdout .
Finally got a bit of time to do a bit of development. First thing I did was remove a field from install.json to match scoop . This means that mocha should be a drop in replacement for existing scoop installs. Then I added partial support for env_set and env_add_path . The main thing I need to do to complete the feature is parse variables and replace them with the appropriate paths. These 2 fields are some of the last manifest fields I need to support besides pre/post (un)install hooks.
Lot of time going into this devlog, but it makes sense since I did do a lot. I did this sweeping refactor of the entire commands module which moved around a lot of code. Essentially each command now gets it’s own directory under the commands module that represents it’s children/parents. For example commands/shim/remove/cmd.go contains code for the mocha shim remove command. Each cmd.go contains a Command struct that has the relevant fields and functions attached to it. This structure just makes things more organized and also means adding test files will be a bit easier since functionality is now isolated. I also sorted out the shim binary. So essentially https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Shim offers different version of the shim binary which can be installed. Previously I hard coded the code to install cpp v0.1.0 but now users can run mocha shim binary releases to see the options and mocha shim binary setup to install their chosen binary. This also means we actually get the latest releases from GitHub.
Lots of small bug fixes and changes, I’ll just list them out: feat(cmd): allow removal of multiple shims in one execution (f2fae3f) fix(manifest): correctly ignore invalid shortcut entries (6a08478) fix(fileops): use correct registry type (5d5d796) fix(config): seed config with defaults (9dfaaff) fix(cmd): use correct release sources (a2a9ba1) fix(cmd): use bucket from install info (5a9109b) I also added support for more file types being shimmed, which helps a lot with compatibility. The file types are .py , .bat , .cmd , .jar and .ps1 .
I forgot to make a devlog in between so this will be like 2 bigger devlogs. I parallelized bucket updates, which speeds it up quite a bit. This also allowed me to try out parallelism even more, which I plan to apply throughout the CLI later on. I also added configuration options for the runners which mocha shim will use to run certain file types. For example, you can set the python-runner to select the python version that’ll be used to run python scripts that are shimmed. Downloads now have a progress bar, so you don’t need to wonder whether something is happening or not during a long download. Finally env_set is fully supported since I added the relevant variable parsing. This was pretty much just me cleaning out the TODO list before I ship. I also did a lot of smaller bug fixes and refactors as seen below. fix(commands): prevent app installation if already installed (cb27d07) fix(commands): fix config opening with “start” (74f3679) fix(commands): correctly handle non-apps when upgrading (f7419f6) fix: make LogOutput go to Stdout not Stderr (bc10357) fix: handle empty versions correctly (2287da9) fix(pkg): remove correct temp dir (33189b6) fix(shim): warn for unknown shim extension (622c2b4) fix: skip downloads with no hash by default (69d4e35) fix: use correct timeout for downloads (44e527b) fix: drop unnecessary return value from GetExecutableEntries (9fd845c) fix(config): remove unused option (1339971) fix(commands): don’t error for valid results (87c4d6c) refactor(config): rename variables/functions (f253d9d) fix: use unique temp directories (a159e23) refactor: use fmt.Fprintln directly (d2d54bf)
So I wrote a README, added a license (MIT of course) and setup CI/CD so that releases are automatically built and deployed. Honestly I forgot how hard it is to write a good README. You need to get a lot of information through without it looking like a wall of text.
Ships:
I made a package manager for Windows, which is somewhat backwards compatible with scoop packages. To be honest there’s still a lot of work that I want to do, but I have exams and college application coming up soon so I can’t. That’s not to say I’m not happy with the state of the ship. At the very least it has all the core features that a package manager should have, but there are still a lot of bugs which is why this is only v0.0.1. The biggest challenge by far was trying to figure out how Scoop does things internally. A lot of stuff just doesn’t have documentation, so you have to dig through the really messy PowerShell source code....
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20008
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SpaceGuessr by @Jaron | Stardance
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Jaron
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3
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99.0
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1811
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-19T18:20:49Z", "hours": 39.0, "multiplier": 19.83, "payout": 780, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "SpaceGuessr is a small browser game where you have to guess real space objects from NASA images. It works kinda like GeoGuessr, but instead of places on Earth you get planets, moons, nebulae, galaxies and other space stuff. The game has different modes like Classic, Timed, Blind Reveal, Learn and Reverse Learn, so you can either play for score or just practice. Technically the project is built with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, without any big framework. index.html contains the screens and buttons, style.css handles the layout, animations and responsive design, and script.js contains the main game logic like loading questions, checking answers, calculating score, streaks, timers, hints, leaderboards and local profile stats. The questions are stored in game-data.js, while mode settings like rounds, hints and timers are stored in game-config.js. The game also uses localStorage to save local stats, recent runs and fallback scores in the browser. For online scores it can use Supabase, but if that does not work the game still runs normally. Overall, SpaceGuessr is a space guessing game made with simple web technologys, real NASA images and a few extra features.", "repo": "https://github.com/Blizz606/SpaceGuessr", "demo": "https://blizz606.github.io/SpaceGuessr"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-05T20:02:26Z", "hours": 58.0, "multiplier": 17.26, "payout": 1009, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "SpaceGuessr is basically my version of “GeoGuessr, but in space” — a browser game where you guess planets, moons, nebulae, galaxies, and other space objects from real NASA-based images. At first, I thought this would just be a simple guessing game, but it quickly turned into a much bigger project. I kept adding more modes, more polish, better UI, scoring, animations, and content until it started to feel like an actual game instead of just a small prototype. Right now, SpaceGuessr has multiple game modes like Quick, Classic, Timed, Daily, Infinite, and Blind Reveal. Blind Reveal is one of my favorite parts: the image slowly uncovers itself while your possible score drops over time, so you have to decide whether to guess early or wait for more information. I also added a full scoring system with streak bonuses, animated feedback, end screens, keyboard controls, responsive design, leaderboard support, local fallback saving, confetti, reveal effects, round transitions, and a lot of small game-feel details. I spent a lot of time on these small things because they make the game feel much more satisfying to play. A big part of the work was also the content. The game uses a curated pool of 70+ NASA-based images, with correct answers, wrong answers, facts, and difficulty balancing. I kept improving the image pool so the game doesn’t feel repetitive, and I added logic so the same image won’t repeat during one run. Technically, the whole project is built with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, without using a big framework. That meant a lot of the animations, UI states, game logic, scoring, and mode handling had to be built manually. I also added Supabase for global leaderboards and deployed everything with GitHub Pages so anyone can just open it and play instantly. I’m really proud of SpaceGuessr because it started as a simple idea and became one of my most complete projects so far. It’s playable, replayable, polished, and actually fun to come back to. I put a lot of time into making it feel smooth, finished, and cared for — and I think that shows in the final game. Thanks to everyone who is supporting this project <3", "repo": "https://github.com/Blizz606/SpaceGuessr", "demo": "https://blizz606.github.io/SpaceGuessr"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-06-16T17:53:36Z", "hours": 2.0, "multiplier": 9.65, "payout": 22, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "SpaceGuessr is like GeoGuessr, but in space. Explore planets, galaxies, nebulae, and more using real images provided by the NASA API. Guess where each image was taken or what it shows, compete for high scores, and climb the global leaderboard powered by Supabase.", "repo": "https://github.com/Blizz606/SpaceGuessr", "demo": "https://blizz606.github.io/SpaceGuessr"}]...
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[{"post_id": 31367, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 31367, "ts": "2026-07-19T18:08:17Z", "hours": 3.8328, "text": "Devlog #1.7 I added the recent Runs to the Profile Menu and redesigned it, because it didn’t looked special. I think it has a smooth animation now. When there are bugs it would be cool if you could tell me. <3"}, {"post_id": 30775, "ts": "2026-07-18T17:23:00Z", "hours": 4.1169, "text": "Devlog #1.6 Today I added a small profile in the right bottom. You can see your best scores and more. Everything is safed in localStorage, so no Account or smth. like that is needed.- I had to find an elegant way to save all the stats in localStorage, but I think it turned out well. I will have more time in the following days cause summer break started yesterday."}, {"post_id": 30577, "ts": "2026-07-18T08:37:38Z", "hours": 1.7933, "text": "Devlog #1.5 Added a small local best score system to the main menu. It now checks saved leaderboard data in localStorage and shows the best score for the currently selected mode in a subtle way under the mode description. I also made sure it updates automatically when switching modes and after saving a run, while Daily , Learn , and Reverse Learn show a muted status message instead of a score because they are not normal saved score modes."}, {"post_id": 30173, "ts": "2026-07-17T15:16:05Z", "hours": 9.9933, "text": "Devlog #1.4 Today I worked more on polishing SpaceGuessr and making the special modes feel better. The biggest change was adding Reverse Learn , it’s a mode where the clue shows up in the middle of the screen first and then you have to guess the answer. I also improved the popup for missed images, polished some UI details like panels, spacing, and animations, and updated the README so it matches the current version better. Overall the game just feels cleaner and more finished now. And fun fact: I hit the stardance limit with this change, I saw just now that I could only commit 10h max. But I squeezed everything into the 10h. I will fix some stuff later like the loading times of the modes."}, {"post_id": 28442, "ts": "2026-07-14T18:05:48Z", "hours": 5.1764, "text": "Devlog #1.3 Today I polished the game UI again and cleaned up some smaller details. I improved the help menu, made the top progress bar more visible, and changed the end screen so the leaderboard does not show up immediately. I also adjusted the main menu layout a little so the background has more space and the screen feels cleaner. Nothing huge today, but the game feels nicer and more polished now. The Help Button is a bit weird but I will fix it later."}, {"post_id": 27151, "ts": "2026-07-12T13:29:59Z", "hours": 7.6275, "text": "Devlog #1.2 Today I expanded SpaceGuessr with selectable learn packs and improved the learning flow. I also added a much larger centralized content file with many new space questions, plus UI updates like new backgrounds, smoother image loading, and an end-of-session review for learn mode. The project now feels more polished, more scalable, and better suited for replayability. Main Goal was just making the code easier to understand and implementing the Feedback. You can try it now . I would love to here some more feedback. <3"}, {"post_id": 26735, "ts": "2026-07-11T18:14:20Z", "hours": 6.7786, "text": "Devlog #1.1 In the last GitHub commit, I cleaned up the game structure. I added Learn Mode , moved the mode settings into game-config.js , and moved the space questions into game-data.js . I also improved some animations, mobile styling, and Blind Reveal. In the newest commit, I updated the main menu with Casual and Special sections. Special mode now has a smooth background change with the new image (The Image is generated by AI). I also updated the README and added a few small CSS improvements. PS: Thanks to all of u. My last Ship was rated awesome. Thanks to everybody who played it and especially rated it. <3"}, {"post_id": 23047, "ts": "2026-07-05T19:38:41Z", "hours": 6.6544, "text": "Devlog #21 This is a kinda long devlog so thanks to everyone who is really reding it all the way. This update was a bigger gameplay and polish pass focused on turning SpaceGuessr into a more complete and shippable version. New game mode and scoring changes Replaced the old Infinite mode with a new Blind Reveal mode because it’s more fun Added countdown support for Blind Reveal Reworked scoring so Blind Reveal starts at higher points and drops with each reveal step Added streak bonus scoring, so longer streaks now reward extra points Updated leaderboard handling so score-chasing modes save automatically after a run Gameplay and UX improvements Added confetti for correct answers (discourse.webflow.com) Added a stronger streak animation when a streak continues Added danger styling for the countdown when time is low (red) Improved answer feedback presentation and round transition Added subtle round motion polish plus small audio cues for hints, correct answers, wrong answers, streaks, and end-of-run results Menu and endscreen polish Added a help button in the main menu that opens a smooth animated help panel Added scoring explanations directly into the help panel Removed the visible dark/light mode toggle and kept the game in the default light theme Reworked the endscreen so score saving is more compact Removed the large manual “save your best run” panel and switched to automatic score saving when possible Added a run summary/final run text on the endscreen so the result feels more personal and less like raw stats only Cleaned up feedback so success toasts are gone and only errors appear as top toasts Leaderboard and save flow Added local-first score saving with global leaderboard sync afterward Improved fallback behavior when global leaderboard writes fail Simplified the save-name experience so the player is only asked for a leaderboard name when needed Improved leaderboard modal behavior in the menu Content expansion Added 30 new NASA image entries to the question pool ChatGPT helped research and pick these new images from the official NASA Image and Video Library Added matching answer sets, facts, and difficulty tags for the new entries New content includes objects and scenes like: Venus Io Deimos Mimas Tethys Hyperion Oberon Umbriel Titania Sun Helix Nebula Carina Nebula Trifid Nebula Flame Nebula Butterfly Nebula Triangulum Galaxy Pinwheel Galaxy Cartwheel Galaxy Centaurus A Sculptor Galaxy Antennae Galaxies M81 Galaxy M82 Galaxy Stephan Quintet Pillars of Creation Charon Nix Hydra Phoebe Olympus Mons Current state At this point the project feels much more release-ready than before, with the biggest remaining work being final balancing, QA across all modes, and a last pass on leaderboard edge cases."}, {"post_id": 22681, "ts": "2026-07-05T07:30:11Z", "hours": 6.2978, "text": "Devlog #20 This DL was mostly about cleaning up and tightening the project without changing its core. A big part of the work went into reorganizing the css so it is much easier to maintain. I also moved more of the repeated colors, borders, and shadow values into variables, which makes the system feel more consistent. On top of that, button states and status states were cleaned up so things like hover, disabled, correct, and wrong feel more unified across the game. The mobile version also got a proper polish pass while keeping the desktop version untouched. The start screen was tightened up so it uses space better, the logo and card proportions feel more balanced, and the Daily Mode button sits more naturally in the layout. Besides that, there was some general UI polish throughout the game. Answer feedback feels more intentional now, the HUD relies more on shared styling tokens, and the whole thing is internally a lot cleaner even though the overall look stays very close to what it was before. Thanks for the support from all of U"}, {"post_id": 20982, "ts": "2026-07-02T18:37:45Z", "hours": 2.1589, "text": "Devlog #19 UI polish and bug fixes I Improved the mobile flow by replacing the mode button row with a dropdown and simplifying the mobile start screen. Extended the round progress animation so it stays visible longer and can continue while the next image is already shown. Added small no-sound interaction feedback such as answer animations, panel flashes, and a ready pulse on the next button. Fixed stale feedback content so old round text does not linger after moving to the next round. Polished the dark mode with better contrast, deeper panel styling, and more consistent button states."}, {"post_id": 20107, "ts": "2026-07-01T17:07:17Z", "hours": 3.2425, "text": "Devlog #18 SpaceGuessr started with a simple idea: GeoGuessr, but in space. Instead of streets and cities, players guess real NASA images showing planets, moons, nebulae, and galaxies. The game is now fully playable with modes like Quick , Classic , Timed , Daily , and Infinite , plus score tracking, facts after rounds, a polished responsive UI, and leaderboard features. The feedback so far has been very positive. People like the concept, the visual style, and the replay value. The biggest next steps are making the game more educational and more competitive. Next, I want to improve: a Learn Mode or better info/fact screens stronger leaderboard and competition features better feedback for low or negative scores more mobile polish better devlogs and project storytelling I am really happy with the current state. The core idea works, and now the goal is to make it deeper, smarter, and even more replayable. PS: It’s awesome that I got so much good feedback, so I can improve SpaceGuessr. Thanks to all of u (:"}, {"post_id": 19375, "ts": "2026-06-30T17:43:59Z", "hours": 2.7389, "text": "Devlog #17 Today I polished the SpaceGuessr UI a lot and also cleaned up how small animation states work in the game. What I improved Reworked the start menu so the main card feels bigger and more like a real game menu Made the game mode area clearer with better spacing and stronger visual focus Updated the mode descriptions so they sound cleaner and more professional Made the start button larger and more important visually Removed the small line/gloss artifact from the selected game mode tab Improved the dark mode styling so the in-game UI feels less weird and more consistent Reworked the final report card so it matches the rest of the project style better Cleaned up the light mode end screen because it looked too washed out before Improved the theme toggle so it fits the glass / space design better JS improvements I also added small UI animation states in JavaScript instead of only relying on random class toggles. New state classes now include things like: is-transitioning is-answering is-feedback-open is-round-complete is-results-view That makes the UI feel more stable and gives smoother transitions between: loading a round answering opening feedback showing the end screen Small code example function setUiState ( stateKey , isActive ) { const stateClassName = uiStateClassMap [ stateKey ]; if ( ! stateClassName ) { return ; } uiStateTargets . forEach (( element ) => { element . classList . toggle ( stateClassName , isActive ); }); }"}, {"post_id": 18580, "ts": "2026-06-29T19:29:38Z", "hours": 1.7408, "text": "Devlog #16 Today I cleaned up the HTML structure of SpaceGuessr to make it easier to understand and closer to how I would actually explain the project. I cleaned up a few small text details in the HTML, fixed some weird special characters, and made the structure more readable overall. Also I revamped some of the In-Game UI. The functionality stayed the same, but the file is now much easier to follow."}, {"post_id": 17823, "ts": "2026-06-28T19:14:39Z", "hours": 4.6086, "text": "Devlog #15 Today I focused on polishing the visual consistency of SpaceGuessr. I cleaned up the theme system in the CSS by introducing more shared variables for light mode, dark mode, navigation elements, and the theme toggle. I also unified several animation timings so that screen transitions, menu interactions, answer cards, and UI panels feel more consistent. After that, I reworked the end screen so it matches the rest of the interface better. The result card, stat tiles, leaderboard section, and share popup now use the same general visual language as the menu and in-game UI. I also updated the end screen to use the same background image as the main menu, which makes the whole app feel more connected. I wasn’t able to do so much the past days, because here in germany it’s like 40 degree Celsius."}, {"post_id": 16797, "ts": "2026-06-27T08:40:37Z", "hours": 1.66, "text": "Devlog #14 I refined the main menu of SpaceGuessr to make the game mode selection feel cleaner and more polished. I reworked the central menu card so it looks larger, more focused, and closer to a real browser game menu. I also improved the visual hierarchy by giving the mode area a clearer title and better spacing between the mode tabs, the description, and the start button. Also, I polished the game mode tabs themselves. The active tab is now more clearly highlighted, while the inactive tabs are slightly toned down so the selected mode stands out better without making the UI feel too busy."}, {"post_id": 15833, "ts": "2026-06-25T19:02:15Z", "hours": 1.3828, "text": "Devlog #13 Today I added two small but useful gameplay improvements to SpaceGuessr. First, I removed hints from Daily Mode. The daily challenge is now a bit fairer because every player gets the same image without extra help. I handled this directly in the JavaScript by setting Daily Mode hints to 0 , hiding the hint UI in that mode, and blocking the hint function there as a backup. Second, I added keyboard controls for smoother gameplay. You can now press 1 , 2 , 3 , or 4 to choose an answer and use Enter to continue to the next round after answering. I hand’t much time the previous days, so I’m glad I could improve something today."}, {"post_id": 13741, "ts": "2026-06-22T15:06:42Z", "hours": 3.1017, "text": "Devlog #12 (UI-Redeign) Today I spent a good amount of time polishing the actual game UI so it feels more like a real browser game instead of a random prototype screen on top of an image. The biggest change was the in-game layout. I reworked the top navigation so it feels cleaner and more structured, with Home , Round , Streak , Time , and Score behaving more like proper game UI elements. I also kept improving the answer area at the bottom, so the feedback card, answer buttons, and action button feel more connected and easier to read. Another bigger feature was the new dark/light mode toggle in the bottom-right corner. It now actually changes the game UI theme and stores the selected mode in localStorage , so the theme stays the same after reloading the page. Theme Toggle Example function applyGameTheme ( themeName ) { const isDarkTheme = themeName === \" dark \" ; document . body . classList . toggle ( \" game-ui-dark \" , isDarkTheme ); localStorage . setItem ( gameThemeStorageKey , isDarkTheme ? \" dark \" : \" light \" ); } I will redesign the Summary Page as fast as I can. Today was really productive actually, only thing I had problems with, is some of the CSS and especially some of the animations, so I used some AI there."}, {"post_id": 13249, "ts": "2026-06-21T18:10:20Z", "hours": 1.7842, "text": "Devlog #11 Today I cleaned up the main menu UI to make it feel calmer and more polished. I moved the Daily Mode button out from inside the main panel and placed it below as its own extra action, which makes the menu structure easier to understand. Also I redesigned the Logo to catch the vibe more. Today was my most productive day with crazy 8h tracked, since it was weekend here in Germany. I’m long not done with the project, I have so many things that I want to add."}, {"post_id": 13104, "ts": "2026-06-21T13:15:53Z", "hours": 2.5442, "text": "Devlog #10 Worked on the final mission report screen and the share popup polish. I improved the result screen spacing, pushed the score section lower for a cleaner layout, and added clearer stat colors so correct answers stand out in green and wrong answers in red. I also added the share popup to the main end-screen. Copy function in the Share Pop-Up const shareText = getShareText(); try { await navigator.clipboard.writeText(shareText); clearTimeout(copyButtonResetTimer); copyShareButton.classList.add(\"copied\"); copyButtonResetTimer = setTimeout(() => { copyShareButton.classList.remove(\"copied\"); }, 1200); } catch {} } Try it now"}, {"post_id": 13020, "ts": "2026-06-21T09:16:53Z", "hours": 1.805, "text": "Devlog #9 I reworked the hint system in SpaceGuessr and improved how it fits into the gameplay. The hint feature is now more compact in the UI and is designed to feel like a natural part of the round instead of a separate text block."}, {"post_id": 12983, "ts": "2026-06-21T07:24:04Z", "hours": 3.2494, "text": "Devlog #8 Today I improved the overall game flow and polished some things. I added a hint system with different hint counts depending on the game mode, refined the answer feedback timing, and cleaned up the spacing in the in-game detail panel. I also shortened the fact text for the space images."}, {"post_id": 12607, "ts": "2026-06-20T16:24:35Z", "hours": 1.5767, "text": "Devlog #7 Try it now Today I refined the answer flow in SpaceGuessr to make each guess feel smoother and more deliberate. I adjusted the feedback timing, improved the reveal flow after selecting an answer, and gave the feedback area better spacing so the UI feels cleaner. I also shortened the fact text for each space image so the information is easier to scan and fits the layout more consistently without feeling overcrowded."}, {"post_id": 12433, "ts": "2026-06-20T09:10:03Z", "hours": 4.4494, "text": "Devlog #6 Today I kept improving SpaceGuessr as a small playable web game and focused mostly on polish, flow, and presentation. I added a streak system, refined the end screen, improved the loading and background preloading behavior and more so it feels smoother and more complete. I also reworked the help section in the main menu, simplified parts of the HTML structure, and cleaned up the overall interface so the project feels more understandable and closer to a finished mini product. I had some problems with the Streak system, but AI helped me solve it quickly."}, {"post_id": 12106, "ts": "2026-06-19T19:28:24Z", "hours": 1.5339, "text": "Built a new help panel for SpaceGuessr today. There’s now a small ? button in the main menu that opens a smooth in-game guide with mode explanations and a direct link to the GitHub docs. Small feature, but it makes the whole project feel a lot more polished and beginner-friendly."}, {"post_id": 12049, "ts": "2026-06-19T17:29:09Z", "hours": 3.5011, "text": "Devlog #4 I just added a new Daily Mode to the game and connected it with Supabase . Try it now You can now guess one image per day and compete with others through the daily challenge. I had some problems while integrating the feature, so I used ChatGPT a bit for debugging. In the end, the error was actually pretty obvious, but that’s just how debugging goes sometimes I guess."}, {"post_id": 11507, "ts": "2026-06-18T20:00:20Z", "hours": 4.0894, "text": "Devlog #3 I just recoded a major part of the game and finally fixed some important bugs in Infinite Mode. Hopefully everything is working smoothly now. Stay tuned for future updates on SpaceGuesrr !"}, {"post_id": 10129, "ts": "2026-06-16T18:48:28Z", "hours": 0.3333, "text": "Just revamped the scoring system"}, {"post_id": 10075, "ts": "2026-06-16T17:34:26Z", "hours": 1.9494, "text": "GeoGuesser just in Space (v1.0)"}, {"post_id": 9991, "ts": "2026-06-16T15:00:48Z", "hours": 0.3003, "text": "Currently working on SpaceGuessr"}]...
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Title: SpaceGuessr by @Jaron | Stardance
Devlogs: Title: SpaceGuessr by @Jaron | Stardance
Devlogs:
Currently working on SpaceGuessr
GeoGuesser just in Space (v1.0)
Just revamped the scoring system
Devlog #3 I just recoded a major part of the game and finally fixed some important bugs in Infinite Mode. Hopefully everything is working smoothly now. Stay tuned for future updates on SpaceGuesrr !
Devlog #4 I just added a new Daily Mode to the game and connected it with Supabase . Try it now You can now guess one image per day and compete with others through the daily challenge. I had some problems while integrating the feature, so I used ChatGPT a bit for debugging. In the end, the error was actually pretty obvious, but that’s just how debugging goes sometimes I guess.
Built a new help panel for SpaceGuessr today. There’s now a small ? button in the main menu that opens a smooth in-game guide with mode explanations and a direct link to the GitHub docs. Small feature, but it makes the whole project feel a lot more polished and beginner-friendly.
Devlog #6 Today I kept improving SpaceGuessr as a small playable web game and focused mostly on polish, flow, and presentation. I added a streak system, refined the end screen, improved the loading and background preloading behavior and more so it feels smoother and more complete. I also reworked the help section in the main menu, simplified parts of the HTML structure, and cleaned up the overall interface so the project feels more understandable and closer to a finished mini product. I had some problems with the Streak system, but AI helped me solve it quickly.
Devlog #7 Try it now Today I refined the answer flow in SpaceGuessr to make each guess feel smoother and more deliberate. I adjusted the feedback timing, improved the reveal flow after selecting an answer, and gave the feedback area better spacing so the UI feels cleaner. I also shortened the fact text for each space image so the information is easier to scan and fits the layout more consistently without feeling overcrowded.
Devlog #8 Today I improved the overall game flow and polished some things. I added a hint system with different hint counts depending on the game mode, refined the answer feedback timing, and cleaned up the spacing in the in-game detail panel. I also shortened the fact text for the space images.
Devlog #9 I reworked the hint system in SpaceGuessr and improved how it fits into the gameplay. The hint feature is now more compact in the UI and is designed to feel like a natural part of the round instead of a separate text block.
Devlog #10 Worked on the final mission report screen and the share popup polish. I improved the result screen spacing, pushed the score section lower for a cleaner layout, and added clearer stat colors so correct answers stand out in green and wrong answers in red. I also added the share popup to the main end-screen. Copy function in the Share Pop-Up const shareText = getShareText(); try { await navigator.clipboard.writeText(shareText); clearTimeout(copyButtonResetTimer); copyShareButton.classList.add("copied"); copyButtonResetTimer = setTimeout(() => { copyShareButton.classList.remove("copied"); }, 1200); } catch {} } Try it now
Devlog #11 Today I cleaned up the main menu UI to make it feel calmer and more polished. I moved the Daily Mode button out from inside the main panel and placed it below as its own extra action, which makes the menu structure easier to understand. Also I redesigned the Logo to catch the vibe more. Today was my most productive day with crazy 8h tracked, since it was weekend here in Germany. I’m long not done with the project, I have so many things that I want to add.
Devlog #12 (UI-Redeign) Today I spent a good amount of time polishing the actual game UI so it feels more like a real browser game instead of a random prototype screen on top of an image. The biggest change was the in-game layout. I reworked the top navigation so it feels cleaner and more structured, with Home , Round , Streak , Time , and Score behaving more like proper game UI elements. I also kept improving the answer area at the bottom, so the feedback card, answer buttons, and action button feel more connected and easier to read. Another bigger feature was the new dark/light mode toggle in the bottom-right corner. It now actually changes the game UI theme and stores the selected mode in localStorage , so the theme stays the same after reloading the page. Theme Toggle Example function applyGameTheme ( themeName ) { const isDarkTheme = themeName === " dark " ; document . body . classList . toggle ( " game-ui-dark " , isDarkTheme ); localStorage . setItem ( gameThemeStorageKey , isDarkTheme ? " dark " : " light " ); } I will redesign the Summary Page as fast as I can. Today was really productive actually, only thing I had problems with, is some of the CSS and especially some of the animations, so I used some AI there.
Devlog #13 Today I added two small but useful gameplay improvements to SpaceGuessr. First, I removed hints from Daily Mode. The daily challenge is now a bit fairer because every player gets the same image without extra help. I handled this directly in the JavaScript by setting Daily Mode hints to 0 , hiding the hint UI in that mode, and blocking the hint function there as a backup. Second, I added keyboard controls for smoother gameplay. You can now press 1 , 2 , 3 , or 4 to choose an answer and use Enter to continue to the next round after answering. I hand’t much time the previous days, so I’m glad I could improve something today.
Devlog #14 I refined the main menu of SpaceGuessr to make the game mode selection feel cleaner and more polished. I reworked the central menu card so it looks larger, more focused, and closer to a real browser game menu. I also improved the visual hierarchy by giving the mode area a clearer title and better spacing between the mode tabs, the description, and the start button. Also, I polished the game mode tabs themselves. The active tab is now more clearly highlighted, while the inactive tabs are slightly toned down so the selected mode stands out better without making the UI feel too busy.
Devlog #15 Today I focused on polishing the visual consistency of SpaceGuessr. I cleaned up the theme system in the CSS by introducing more shared variables for light mode, dark mode, navigation elements, and the theme toggle. I also unified several animation timings so that screen transitions, menu interactions, answer cards, and UI panels feel more consistent. After that, I reworked the end screen so it matches the rest of the interface better. The result card, stat tiles, leaderboard section, and share popup now use the same general visual language as the menu and in-game UI. I also updated the end screen to use the same background image as the main menu, which makes the whole app feel more connected. I wasn’t able to do so much the past days, because here in germany it’s like 40 degree Celsius.
Devlog #16 Today I cleaned up the HTML structure of SpaceGuessr to make it easier to understand and closer to how I would actually explain the project. I cleaned up a few small text details in the HTML, fixed some weird special characters, and made the structure more readable overall. Also I revamped some of the In-Game UI. The functionality stayed the same, but the file is now much easier to follow.
Devlog #17 Today I polished the SpaceGuessr UI a lot and also cleaned up how small animation states work in the game. What I improved Reworked the start menu so the main card feels bigger and more like a real game menu Made the game mode area clearer with better spacing and stronger visual focus Updated the mode descriptions so they sound cleaner and more professional Made the start button larger and more important visually Removed the small line/gloss artifact from the selected game mode tab Improved the dark mode styling so the in-game UI feels less weird and more consistent Reworked the final report card so it matches the rest of the project style better Cleaned up the light mode end screen because it looked too washed out before Improved the theme toggle so it fits the glass / space design better JS improvements I also added small UI animation states in JavaScript instead of only relying on random class toggles. New state classes now include things like: is-transitioning is-answering is-feedback-open is-round-complete is-results-view That makes the UI feel more stable and gives smoother transitions between: loading a round answering opening feedback showing the end screen Small code example function setUiState ( stateKey , isActive ) { const stateClassName = uiStateClassMap [ stateKey ]; if ( ! stateClassName ) { return ; } uiStateTargets . forEach (( element ) => { element . classList . toggle ( stateClassName , isActive ); }); }
Devlog #18 SpaceGuessr started with a simple idea: GeoGuessr, but in space. Instead of streets and cities, players guess real NASA images showing planets, moons, nebulae, and galaxies. The game is now fully playable with modes like Quick , Classic , Timed , Daily , and Infinite , plus score tracking, facts after rounds, a polished responsive UI, and leaderboard features. The feedback so far has been very positive. People like the concept, the visual style, and the replay value. The biggest next steps are making the game more educational and more competitive. Next, I want to improve: a Learn Mode or better info/fact screens stronger leaderboard and competition features better feedback for low or negative scores more mobile polish better devlogs and project storytelling I am really happy with the current state. The core idea works, and now the goal is to make it deeper, smarter, and even more replayable. PS: It’s awesome that I got so much good feedback, so I can improve SpaceGuessr. Thanks to all of u (:
Devlog #19 UI polish and bug fixes I Improved the mobile flow by replacing the mode button row with a dropdown and simplifying the mobile start screen. Extended the round progress animation so it stays visible longer and can continue while the next image is already shown. Added small no-sound interaction feedback such as answer animations, panel flashes, and a ready pulse on the next button. Fixed stale feedback content so old round text does not linger after moving to the next round. Polished the dark mode with better contrast, deeper panel styling, and more consistent button states.
Devlog #20 This DL was mostly about cleaning up and tightening the project without changing its core. A big part of the work went into reorganizing the css so it is much easier to maintain. I also moved more of the repeated colors, borders, and shadow values into variables, which makes the system feel more consistent. On top of that, button states and status states were cleaned up so things like hover, disabled, correct, and wrong feel more unified across the game. The mobile version also got a proper polish pass while keeping the desktop version untouched. The start screen was tightened up so it uses space better, the logo and card proportions feel more balanced, and the Daily Mode button sits more naturally in the layout. Besides that, there was some general UI polish throughout the game. Answer feedback feels more intentional now, the HUD relies more on shared styling tokens, and the whole thing is internally a lot cleaner even though the overall look stays very close to what it was before. Thanks for the support from all of U
Devlog #21 This is a kinda long devlog so thanks to everyone who is really reding it all the way. This update was a bigger gameplay and polish pass focused on turning SpaceGuessr into a more complete and shippable version. New game mode and scoring changes Replaced the old Infinite mode with a new Blind Reveal mode because it’s more fun Added countdown support for Blind Reveal Reworked scoring so Blind Reveal starts at higher points and drops with each reveal step Added streak bonus scoring, so longer streaks now reward extra points Updated leaderboard handling so score-chasing modes save automatically after a run Gameplay and UX improvements Added confetti for correct answers (discourse.webflow.com) Added a stronger streak animation when a streak continues Added danger styling for the countdown when time is low (red) Improved answer feedback presentation and round transition Added subtle round motion polish plus small audio cues for hints, correct answers, wrong answers, streaks, and end-of-run results Menu and endscreen polish Added a help button in the main menu that opens a smooth animated help panel Added scoring explanations directly into the help panel Removed the visible dark/light mode toggle and kept the game in the default light theme Reworked the endscreen so score saving is more compact Removed the large manual “save your best run” panel and switched to automatic score saving when possible Added a run summary/final run text on the endscreen so the result feels more personal and less like raw stats only Cleaned up feedback so success toasts are gone and only errors appear as top toasts Leaderboard and save flow Added local-first score saving with global leaderboard sync afterward Improved fallback behavior when global leaderboard writes fail Simplified the save-name experience so the player is only asked for a leaderboard name when needed Improved leaderboard modal behavior in the menu Content expansion Added 30 new NASA image entries to the question pool ChatGPT helped research and pick these new images from the official NASA Image and Video Library Added matching answer sets, facts, and difficulty tags for the new entries New content includes objects and scenes like: Venus Io Deimos Mimas Tethys Hyperion Oberon Umbriel Titania Sun Helix Nebula Carina Nebula Trifid Nebula Flame Nebula Butterfly Nebula Triangulum Galaxy Pinwheel Galaxy Cartwheel Galaxy Centaurus A Sculptor Galaxy Antennae Galaxies M81 Galaxy M82 Galaxy Stephan Quintet Pillars of Creation Charon Nix Hydra Phoebe Olympus Mons Current state At this point the project feels much more release-ready than before, with the biggest remaining work being final balancing, QA across all modes, and a last pass on leaderboard edge cases.
Devlog #1.1 In the last GitHub commit, I cleaned up the game structure. I added Learn Mode , moved the mode settings into game-config.js , and moved the space questions into game-data.js . I also improved some animations, mobile styling, and Blind Reveal. In the newest commit, I updated the main menu with Casual and Special sections. Special mode now has a smooth background change with the new image (The Image is generated by AI). I also updated the README and added a few small CSS improvements. PS: Thanks to all of u. My last Ship was rated awesome. Thanks to everybody who played it and especially rated it. <3
Devlog #1.2 Today I expanded SpaceGuessr with selectable learn packs and improved the learning flow. I also added a much larger centralized content file with many new space questions, plus UI updates like new backgrounds, smoother image loading, and an end-of-session review for learn mode. The project now feels more polished, more scalable, and better suited for replayability. Main Goal was just making the code easier to understand and implementing the Feedback. You can try it now . I would love to here some more feedback. <3
Devlog #1.3 Today I polished the game UI again and cleaned up some smaller details. I improved the help menu, made the top progress bar more visible, and changed the end screen so the leaderboard does not show up immediately. I also adjusted the main menu layout a little so the background has more space and the screen feels cleaner. Nothing huge today, but the game feels nicer and more polished now. The Help Button is a bit weird but I will fix it later.
Devlog #1.4 Today I worked more on polishing SpaceGuessr and making the special modes feel better. The biggest change was adding Reverse Learn , it’s a mode where the clue shows up in the middle of the screen first and then you have to guess the answer. I also improved the popup for missed images, polished some UI details like panels, spacing, and animations, and updated the README so it matches the current version better. Overall the game just feels cleaner and more finished now. And fun fact: I hit the stardance limit with this change, I saw just now that I could only commit 10h max. But I squeezed everything into the 10h. I will fix some stuff later like the loading times of the modes.
Devlog #1.5 Added a small local best score system to the main menu. It now checks saved leaderboard data in localStorage and shows the best score for the currently selected mode in a subtle way under the mode description. I also made sure it updates automatically when switching modes and after saving a run, while Daily , Learn , and Reverse Learn show a muted status message instead of a score because they are not normal saved score modes.
Devlog #1.6 Today I added a small profile in the right bottom. You can see your best scores and more. Everything is safed in localStorage, so no Account or smth. like that is needed.- I had to find an elegant way to save all the stats in localStorage, but I think it turned out well. I will have more time in the following days cause summer break started yesterday.
Devlog #1.7 I added the recent Runs to the Profile Menu and redesigned it, because it didn’t looked special. I think it has a smooth animation now. When there are bugs it would be cool if you could tell me. <3
Ships:
SpaceGuessr is like GeoGuessr, but in space. Explore planets, galaxies, nebulae, and more using real images provided by the NASA API. Guess where each image was taken or what it shows, compete for high scores, and climb the global leaderboard powered by Supabase.
SpaceGuessr is basically my version of “GeoGuessr, but in space” — a browser game where you guess planets, moons, nebulae, galaxies, and other space objects from real NASA-based images. At first, I thought this would just be a simple guessing game, but it quickly turned into a much bigger project. I kept adding more modes, more polish, better UI, scoring, animations, and content until it started to feel like an actual game instead of just a small prototype. Right now, SpaceGuessr has multiple game modes like Quick, Classic, Timed, Daily, Infinite, and Blind Reveal. Blind Reveal is one of my favorite parts: the image slowly uncovers itself while your possible score drops over time, so you have to decide whether to guess early or wait for more information. I also added a full scoring system with streak bonuses, animated feedback, end screens, keyboard controls, responsive design, leaderboard support, local fallback saving, confetti, reveal effects, round transitions, and a lot of small game-feel details. I spent a lot of time on these small things because they make the game feel much more satisfying to play. A big part of the work was also the content. The game uses a curated pool of 70+ NASA-based images, with correct answers, wrong answers, facts, and difficulty balancing. I kept improving the image pool so the game doesn’t feel repetitive, and I added logic so the same image won’t repeat during one run. Technically, the whole project is built with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, without using a big framework. That meant a lot of the animations, UI states, game logic, scoring, and mode handling had to be built manually. I also added Supabase for global leaderboards and deployed everything with GitHub Pages so anyone can just open it and play instantly. I’m really proud of SpaceGuessr because it started as a simple idea and became one of my most complete projects so far. It’s playable, replayable, polished, and actually fun to come back to. I put a lot of time into making it feel smooth, finished, and cared for — and I think that shows in the final game. Thanks to everyone who is supporting this project <3
SpaceGuessr is a small browser game where you have to guess real space objects from NASA images. It works kinda like GeoGuessr, but instead of places on Earth you get planets, moons, nebulae, galaxies and other space stuff. The game has different modes like Classic, Timed, Blind Reveal, Learn and Reverse Learn, so you can either play for score or just practice. Technically the project is built with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, without any big framework. index.html contains the screens and buttons, style.css handles the layout, animations and responsive design, and script.js contains the main game logic like loading questions, checking answers, calculating score, streaks, timers, hints, leaderboards and local profile stats. The questions are stored in game-data.js, while mode settings like rounds, hints and timers are stored in game-config.js. The game also uses localStorage to save local stats, recent runs and fallback scores in the browser. For online scores it can use Supabase, but if that does not work the game still runs normally. Overall, SpaceGuessr is a space guessing game made with simple web technologys, real NASA images and a few extra features....
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AniSuffle by @PAPER_01 | Stardance
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118.0
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1811
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-14T11:29:39Z", "hours": 77.0, "multiplier": 19.59, "payout": 1811, "blessing": "blessed", "text": "# Welcome to the shipping devlog (I guess , I don't know what its called) (≧▽≦) Hey um.. In this section I will be giving the overview of my entire project , I will try to keep things simple and short. *(please read github as i m facing limit issue here)* (╥﹏╥) Ok, so my project **\"AniSuffle\"** is a webpage where you can get random Anime/Manga recommendations. But there is way more things I worked on , please let me explain. ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ ## Features ### Generate Random Anime/Manga I have integrated **4 APIs** (**Jikan, Anilist, Kitsu And MangaDex**) for fetching Anime/Manga recommendations. Jikan, Anilist and Kitsu can fetch both Anime and Manga while MangaDex fetches Manga only. They all work together as a fallback system, so if one API fails, another will handle it , you (solving the rate limit issue). =) ### Authentication (Login/SignUP) Logging in or signing in is **NOT COMPULSORY**. I repeat , as I can understand that its such a pain, I had to add it so that you could access the list anywhere in any device . **Make sure to enter unique username in the signup page** The only thing it gives you is access to your saved list across different devices. If you don't want to use your personal email while reviewing, you can use a temporary email. I have also uploaded a video in **Devlog #12** showing how to do it Just in case you dont know how to do that =) ### LocalStorage & Database * Not signed in → saves are stored in **LocalStorage**. * Signed in → saves are stored in the **Database**. * Existing LocalStorage saves are automatically transferred to the database after login to avoid duplication. ### Genre Selection You can generate recommendations based on your selected genre. Some APIs name genres differently, so in a few cases you may receive a closely related genre instead. ### Other Features * Embedded YouTube trailers (when available) * Switch between Anime & Manga * High Rated First (7+ rating) * Double click the poster to save * External links to Crunchyroll, Netflix, AnimeSuge, MangaDex, Viz, BookWalker and YouTube (if available on the API) --- ## Detailed Explanation Please read the **README** on the GitHub repository if you'd like the detailed explanation of how everything works. I had to shorten this because I'm exceeding the character limit. (＞﹏＜) --- Thank you so so so much. I really really really hope you will like this project. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ", "repo": "https://github.com/sudipstha-01/AniSuffle", "demo": "https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com"}]...
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[{"post_id": 35576, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 35576, "ts": "2026-07-27T03:30:46Z", "hours": 3.0, "text": "Devlog #23 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #23 of AniSuffle ! Update One more bug ,fixed and found . So, till now the username stored would only be saved if someone entered the name in the intro and played the guess rating game. And now its fixed and Now the username is stored in the database immediately after the username name is submitted in the intro username section. Also One more thing , if someone took the username as “PAPER” and later if someone tries “paper” then the name will not be allowed. I did it just to be safe and later no any confusion or bug to occur just becase of the case of the entered word . I will add a screenshot of username is taken below(As I dont know what screenshot to add on this devlog :p ). I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!"}, {"post_id": 35163, "ts": "2026-07-26T12:39:55Z", "hours": 4.0, "text": "Devlog #22 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #22 of AniSuffle ! Update Ok , so This time I was working on the intro side and I realized that before I changed some data structure while storing the username and i am now COOKED (╥﹏╥). Also I was searching for the error in my backend becuase of which the skip btn never appeared and even after asking ai , It was not able to help me ,and after giving it a tons of screenshots of the project , console and networks , It told me to remove a comment - - . And even more annoying or good thing (i dont even know what to call it anymore) was that the code worked after removing the comment. It made no sense to me , and honestly I still dont know why even that comment was causing the issue . Trust me I stared that code for more than an hour only to remove the comment at the end. Anyway , the code is now working (but i know there are still bunch of more bug to fix), so the main addition i would say rn is the live checking of the username . The username entered will be checked at the live time (every 400ms to be more precise). I guess thats all. I know it might sound like not much addition but it was more debug i did this time - -. I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!"}, {"post_id": 34550, "ts": "2026-07-25T11:03:49Z", "hours": 2.0, "text": "Devlog #21 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #21 of AniSuffle ! Update I made a rough templete or a rough design on what the guess highest rating might look like , I mean the structure only , I will change the design and animation later on . Nothing much to explain but I will keep the design image below . Also I am still building the functionality . Right now they only fetch 4 differenct anime poster name and score . I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!"}, {"post_id": 34441, "ts": "2026-07-25T04:49:42Z", "hours": 0.0, "text": "Devlog #20 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #20 of AniSuffle ! Update Hey everyone , a quick update . I again changed my plan and I have now decided to use the intro username as the unique username which will be used everwhere , like in the database and the leaderboard. I apologize for creating the confusion but I felt like asking multiple username might be even more confusing (ó﹏ò｡). So i planned to stick with the single username to maintain consistency and to avoid confusion. I would not expand the devlog anymore unnecessarily and waste your time. And I hope I made everything clear If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!"}, {"post_id": 34014, "ts": "2026-07-24T12:40:39Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #19 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #19 of AniSuffle ! First , Our project got SuperStar title and I thank you all,Without ya all my this project would not have got that level of attention. Thanks to all of you and the reviewer for marking it as a SuperStar Project . It made me so happy. Thank you so much (˶>⩊<˶) Update After creating and deleting the same table , the same database many times . I have finally decided to remove the username from the signin option and kept it on the rate game page , which means while signing in you wont have to use username , rather you will sign up using only gmail . Also , I am thinking of linking the gmail with the username automatically after the user has signed in so the progress is stored in the connected account. I am currently working on the backend so there is nothing intresting to show but i will keep the site image for now … I would not expand the devlog anymore. If you have any question please comment ,though I am myself not so sure about the username thing, I mean… I might change the data structure if things go wrong,so if you ask me rn about how i will be storing data exactly then my answer might not be that clear but I will still try , thank you so much . Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!"}, {"post_id": 33487, "ts": "2026-07-23T14:04:01Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #18 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #18 of AniSuffle ! I know it has been a while , but to be honest , i dont really have much to show for this devlog . Even though I have been working on something fun to be added in this site. Update I the last devlog I told that I will be working on the treding section ,but while making that I dont know for some reason I wanted to make a game like thing in this site. Lemme give a brief description . so I was thinking of making a Rating Guess game , where you will be shown any 4 anime poster and its name and you would have to choose a anime and you will be given a score and I am also planning to make a leaderboard so that the game feels even more competetive, but the problem is that I dont want to make sign in compulsory and I would need a username for that . So I have been working on the game but still am unsure about the usernames , as asking multiple usernames might be confusing so, I am still thinking on what to do about this. I would not expand the devlog anymore. If you have any question please comment , I will try to explaing things there , thank you so much . Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)"}, {"post_id": 32840, "ts": "2026-07-22T07:51:31Z", "hours": 5.0, "text": "Devlog #17 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #17 of AniSuffle ! Update I have changed the background of the intro page and added a video as a background instead (i will provide the link below)(as the old one was AI made, not a copy paste though).There is a skip button in the intro incase its boring for you . Also on one of the feedback , I saw one reviewer was not able to access the for some reason i really dont know why, so now i have moved the site to https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com this url, even though the old site will be active , the new updates will be availble on this site only . I might update this link on old devlogs as well. Currently I am working on the trending section , where you will be able to see the trending anime list or in card form, but i will try to make it intresting somehow =) Also , both sites share same database so if you have logged in before then , you can still use that id to login in both site. Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L7mzyGhXCA (there are few edits/cuts i did) I would not expand the devlog anymore Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)"}, {"post_id": 32164, "ts": "2026-07-21T04:15:25Z", "hours": 1.0, "text": "Devlog #16 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #16 of AniSuffle ! Update I have made few changes , I changed the Hover Trailer text from Hover Trailer On / Off to a checkbox ,as I found a cool looking (i guess it is) checkbox on a site and also a mute and unmute btn . So I changed them . I will keep a clip below rather then explaining with words . ##Credit Mute Btn (when hover trailer is on) : https://uiverse.io/catraco/dry-robin-61CheckBox Animation (On hover trailer) : https://uiverse.io/00Kubi/hot-dragonfly-56 I would not expand the devlog anymore Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)"}, {"post_id": 31842, "ts": "2026-07-20T15:25:21Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #15 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #15 of AniSuffle ! So first, I have a few announcements. I got some more feedback, and in respect of those, I will now be making the devlogs shorter and use limited/less kaomoji (ó﹏ò｡), so that you can read the devlogs more clearly. Update So, I have finally finished working on the Hover to Play Trailer feature. I just have a mute and unmute button which will be displayed on the trailer when hovered. When hovering, for a few seconds, it will also show titles, the YouTube logo, and other YouTube things. I tried to hide those but was unable to. When I asked AI, it told me that it was not possible. Rather, it gave me alternative ways, which I thought would not be a great user experience, so I left it as default. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) I had a hard time fixing the overlapping of the hover and click animations, but those are finally gone. Now I guess that’s it for this devlog. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)"}, {"post_id": 31216, "ts": "2026-07-19T13:11:07Z", "hours": 8.0, "text": "Devlog #14 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #14 of AniSuffle ! (≧▽≦) Okay, so this is the first devlog after I have shipped the project. And yes… I’m still working on the project. (￣▽￣)ゞ Thanks to @Gideonthegreat for the feedbacks! Yeah, I mean, I got some awesome feedback, and I really wanted to add more and make more changes. (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ After thinking and looking around the code for a while… (and staring at it for way longer than I should have) I finally decided to integrate the Hover to Play Trailer feature first . I did not want to just replace the click ripple animation. That’s why I decided to add it as an option ,you can click on the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner), where you can turn the Hover to Play Trailer option on and off. ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ. [I will update the live site later on, as i am still working on it (ó﹏ò｡)] It is still not complete. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) I’m still working on it! So I’ll show you a demo video[My laptop is potato so the video is abit laggy, plz dont mind that], but please don’t take it as the final version. I’m still thinking of making more changes to it… hehehe. (,,¬﹏¬,,) I accept that I still need to optimize this feature, and the clip was short as my laptop was lagging alot 😭 (see the CPU usage ( top blue bars)) Maybe I’ll end up changing something again before the next devlog. Who knows? (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ I guess that’s it for this devlog! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ I will still love feedback if you have any =) Thank you so much for reading! <(_ _)> See you in the next one Thank you again and have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 28210, "ts": "2026-07-14T11:04:07Z", "hours": 0.0, "text": "We are finally shiping!!!!⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ Here is the link https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com"}, {"post_id": 28114, "ts": "2026-07-14T05:45:33Z", "hours": 1.0, "text": "Hello everyone I was late for class while deployign the site so I M WRITING IT IN CLASS RN (・–・;)ゞ(teacher might come anytime now)But I wanted to share this project so bad . Thank you Here is the link : https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com Bye"}, {"post_id": 28041, "ts": "2026-07-14T01:59:46Z", "hours": 3.0, "text": "Devlog #13 Hello everyone!! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ Welcome to Devlog #13 of Anime Shuffle ! (≧▽≦) Hope you all are doing well! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ This will probably be one of the shortest devlogs before the release, but I wanted to share one last little update. (ᵔᗜᵔ) ** Font Updates** I made a few typography changes to make the site feel a little cleaner and more unique. The Anime Shuffle title on the top-left now uses the Godber font. The titles of the anime/manga cards, along with the “High Rated First” label, now use the Morien font. They’re small changes, but I think they give the site a much nicer personality. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ ** Responsiveness** I totally forgot to mention, I also added Responsiveness, even though it’s not best as the site is optimized mainly for laptop/PC screen but…. Umm it’s not worst (๑•﹏•) ** Shipping Today…?** If everything goes well on the server side, I’ll be shipping Anime Shuffle today! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hopefully there won’t be any last-minute bugs deciding to appear out of nowhere… (╥﹏╥) Fingers crossed! (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ Any questions , please let me know Thank you all so much for being part of this journey. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ It has genuinely meant a lot to me, and I really appreciate everyone who took the time to read the devlogs, give feedback, and support the project along the way. Thank you so much! (´꒳`)♡ Have a wonderful day! (｡♥‿♥｡)"}, {"post_id": 27673, "ts": "2026-07-13T13:28:43Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #12 Hello everyone!! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ Welcome to Devlog #12 of Anime Shuffle ! (≧▽≦) Hope you all are doing great! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ This devlog will be a bit shorter (Hopefully….) , but I wanted to share the final updates before the release because… ** Yep… we’re shipping soon!!** (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hopefully within the next two days! (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Intro Animation The first thing I added is a small intro screen (around 7–8 seconds long) where you’ll be asked to enter a username. (ᵔᗜᵔ) Don’t worry, I’m not checking whether the username is already taken or not (just yet). You can type anything you want here. The purpose of this intro is simply to make the experience feel a bit more personal and fun. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ I hope you’ll like it! =) When you eventually sign up, you’ll enter your username again, and that one will need to be unique. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) After entering your name, a short animated intro will play before taking you into the site. (✧ω✧) And yes… I used AI to help create this animation. Not completely, but it definitely helped speed things up. (￣▽￣)ゞ I also changed the background of the site because the previous one made some buttons a little difficult to see. I received that as feedback, so thank you very much! The site now uses a live wallpaper instead, which should make everything much clearer. I hope you will like that (ó﹏ò｡) ** Double Tap = Save** Just like on social media apps, you can now double-tap (or double-click) an anime or manga poster to save it instantly. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ When you do, a small star animation appears , yeyyy…. ** Email Verification Improvements** I also made a few improvements to the email verification system. (｡•ᴗ•｡) The verification email has been redesigned slightly so that the verification code is much easier to spot and copy. (´꒳`) ** Shipping Soon…** That’s pretty much it for this devlog! (ﾉ´ヮ`)ﾉ*:･ﾟ Right now I’m focusing on making the site fully responsive across different screen sizes. ૮₍ ˃ ⤙ ˂ ₎ა Also, the email shown in the disposable-email demo video isn’t the actual email theme used by AniShuffle. The disposable email website simply couldn’t render the HTML email correctly. (╥﹏╥) After that’s done, I might write one final devlog before releasing it… or maybe I’ll just ship it immediately. (¬‿¬) My goal is to release Anime Shuffle within the next two days , so stay tuned! (๑>◡<๑) ** Note for Reviewers** If you’re reviewing Anime Shuffle and don’t want to use your personal email address , don’t worry! I’ll also include a short guide video showing **how to get a free disposable (dummy) email,just in case you dont know ** so you can test the authentication system without using your own email. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ Of course, anyone is welcome to use it—not just reviewers. =) Thank you so much for reading and for following the development journey. It really means a lot! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ See you all in the next devlog… or maybe in the release post! (ᵔᗜᵔ) If anything was unclear, please let me know. I’d really appreciate the feedback! Have a wonderful day! (｡♥‿♥｡)"}, {"post_id": 27177, "ts": "2026-07-12T14:35:42Z", "hours": 9.0, "text": "Devlog #11 Hello everyone (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Welcome to Devlog #11 of AniSuffle . Hope you all are doing great. (≧▽≦) In this devlog, I’ll be sharing the recent changes and improvement i have mad on the site. Ummm.. This devlog will be abit longer, but I want to make sure I explain everything correctly. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Soooo lets start~ SVG Animation The first update is the addition of SVG animation beside the title. I have also replaced the placehodler (those book and video like emoji) that was displayed on the poster card with the same svg (but the animation will be different). (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ Also about the source of the svg, For the “anime” svg, I got it from AnimeJs and i asked AI to make another svg “manga” , honestly it was quite difficult to make AI understand what I really wanted on the svg, and its still not perfect but ummm its fine and I hope you like those. (￣▽￣*) LocalStorage Also I have now integrated localStorage so, now you wont have to be logged in to save anime and manga anymore. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ It works in this way, lemme explain in simple: If you are logged out and you saved few anime/mangas and then you signned in, then all your localStorage saves will be automatically be transfered to the database (and your localStorage will be empty, I had to do this so that There is no duplicate data). ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Email Verification And the most time consuming, I have integrated email verification which means now, the email you signup with should be a valied email (you can nomore login/signup with [email protected] ). And currently i have used brevo for sending emails and i m on free trial so it has the limit of 300 emails per day , And I assume its more than enough for me right now,also the code expires in 1 hour. (╹◡╹) . [I had to keep authorizing my ip address while setting it up and i thought it was error on my code and I was searching it for hours (╥﹏╥)] I will tell you how you can get a dummy email (just in case you dont know how to get one) if you want to check the authentication system without using your personal email [especially if you are a reviewer reading this.] but anyone willing to test it, you can use that method. But I will be doing that in the next devlog… probably, as In this devlog i might upload the video of showing current updates. (=￣ω￣=) I guess I will keep this much for this devlog. I hope I made things clear. [You might have seen manga on the save list even though i didnt add that in this video , and lemme make things clear, it was imported from the localstorage , which i have saved while checking my project =] If anything was unclear then please do tell me. (◕‿◕)♡ Helper tools SVG : https://animejs.com/documentation/svg/createdrawable SMTP : https://www.brevo.com/ Thank you so much for reading. (≧▽≦)♡ Have a nice day! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ"}, {"post_id": 26508, "ts": "2026-07-11T10:50:48Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #10 Hello everyone (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Hope you all are doing great. Welcome to Devlog #10 of AniSuffle . Ok this time I will keep the devlog abit shorter maybe… (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Lets start The first and main change for this devlog is the Ripple like animation when you click the image. (Its just like the circle expanding from a point when you throw a stone on a still lake or pound.) Hope you like it! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ . Also a little bit change in brightness near the cursor ;) I will keep a video of the clip. As I told in previous devlog, I have finally seperated the Anime and Manga section in the save list, and also I kept the Sign In and Login option in the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines). (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ A small optimization, I have added the APIs in the head section of HTML with rel=\"preconnect\" , so that the connection is established as soon as the site loads. (Just keeping APIs ready for fetching data from them.) ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Also just to avoid confusion , you will not need to signin to save the anime/manga when i finally ship the project , I am still working on it . (ó﹏ò｡)It is just a sample and doesnt represent the final product =) Also the save button on Manga section didnt worked before refreshing the site , and I will be transparent , that it was fault of my site and I am still trying to figure it out (ó﹏ò｡) In the video I have wrote a random email , they might not work when I ship it, its just a dummy after all. (￣▽￣*) I will like to end the devlog now. (ᵔᗜᵔ) If anything was unclear please comment, I will try to explain again there. (╹◡╹) Thank you for reading! Have a nice day! (≧▽≦)ﾉ"}, {"post_id": 25971, "ts": "2026-07-10T14:45:19Z", "hours": 7.0, "text": "Devlog #09 Hello everyone(˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Hope you all are doing great. Welcome to Devlog #09 of AniSuffle . In this devlog I will be sharing you all the recent changes I made on my site. Okay… lemme explain. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ Auth(Login & SignUp) is finally working Soooo… Finally the Auth(Login and SignUp) feature is working. (≧▽≦) You can now login and save your info on the database and you would be able to login into another device and access your list / saves. I am planning to work on the email verification system as well, but dont worry I will be explaining you all how you can get a disposable email if you dont want to use your personal email, (I respect your Privacy(ᵔᵕᵔ)). Save Feature Also the save feature is now working just like I mentioned earlier. But for now you would have to login to use it. But dont worry. Before I ship this site, I will integrate the localstorage feature , to make the save feature work even without the signing in. I know signing up is kind of annoying sometimes… at least to me it is. (￣▽￣) So I wanted everyone to still be able to use the save feature even without making an account. Saved Anime & Manga Currently the stored anime and manga are stored in the same place[To be more specific they will be displayed on the same save list ]. But I guess I will make a seperate list for them. I will update in the upcoming devlog about it if I do make that change. (•̀ᴗ•́)و UI Changes Becuase of the sign up and login option the Anime and Manga buttons are on the center for now. I dont really like how it looks either. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) So I am planning to move those buttons back to the right side again. And also add a Hamburger menu (just in case you dont know… It’s The three horizontal line menu, actually i didnt know either before googling it just before writing this devlog (╹ڡ╹ )) . That menu will probably contain more features as I continue working on the site. Backend Debugging Most of my time actually went into debugging. (ó﹏ò｡) For some reason I just couldnt figure out why my data wasnt being stored correctly. Sometimes it would save. Sometimes it wouldnt. Sometimes the stored data just refused to show itself in the list (probably it was abit shy (´꒳`)) . So… that took quite a bit longer than I thought. (・–・;)ゞ But yeah, finally things seems to be working [At least for now (・–・;)ゞ] Oh… The last devlog went incredibly long even though I thought it would be shorter… Looks like this one also became longer than I expected. (ㅅ •᷄ ₃•᷅ ) . (My apologies) I dont want to bore ya all. (´▽`) But still I hope I was able to make everything clear. If not, please do comment below and I will try my best to explain it there as well. ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ Thank You all so much for reading. Have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 25135, "ts": "2026-07-09T04:56:00Z", "hours": 6.0, "text": "Devlog #08 Hello everyone(˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Welcome to Devlog #08 of AniSuffle . Hope you all are doing great. Okay, now let me explain quickly of my recent changes or update on the site. I am not sure but maybe this will be abit shorter devlog, maybeeee(ᵕ—ᴗ—)…. since most of the work is about backend (so nothing flashy to explain) also I will try to not bore anyone reading this.[also i try keeping the devlogs raw and unfiltered] Okay now lemme explain. Save Button & Auth Feature Sooo, the feature I have recently added to my site, actually not added, am still working on it is the save button and also adding a auth feature (the login and signup feature to be more simple =)) . Its not complete though. And one more thing, you definitely dont need to login or signup to use any of the features and tools I have made so far beacuse I understand that signing up is such a pain, I mean at least to me it isss. But there is one feature I want to add, and for this I think the signup is necessary. Now let me expalin how the save feature is going to work. It might be abit different as I am still working on it, I will just tell what I am planning to do. ** Why am I writing this devlog now?** And before that If you ask why am I writing a devlog if I have not done the job, then ummm…∘ ∘ ∘ ( °ヮ° ) Actually I am working on the backend and I am scared I might mess anything up, as I am not too confident on backend and storing user data safely is my top priority( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ whenever I am dealing with the backend and while doing this I didnt realize that I have already 5 or maybe 6 hours I am not sure but maybe its around 6 hours of time logged already so I thought of updating the devlog, even though I am in the middle of the function (I mean the development process(ᵕ ó ᴗ ò)). I feel like I sound abit unclear (ó﹏ò｡)ummm, lemme just explain properly how the save feature is going to (or supposed to) work. So there are two scenerios . ** When not signed in** When you are not signed it, you will still be able to access all the feature of the site, even the save button. But there is a catch. All your saved animes/mangas will be stored on the localstorage . Just a small explaination just in case you have no idea of what localstorage is, ummm… In simple terms you can think it as the browser’s storage area, its typically around 4 MB or 5 MB i assume, but they should be more than enough to us as we are just storing the anime/manga url, source, id and stuff.. lets not go too deep into itദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧. So you will still be able to save animes/mangas but you would need to be on the same browser with same browser profile to access those info. When signed in When you are signed in, your saved infos will be stored on the database of the server and you will be able to access them from any device and any browser . and This is the reason I am adding the Singup feature Oh… The devlog doesnt seems small any more. I’m i’m i’m sorry for that(ㅅ •᷄ ₃•᷅ ) Lemme wrap up quick umm but wait I will drop the screenshot of the site by pointing at the save button. Currently its with no css, but dont worry I will update that ugly default button design (and maybe position as well) as soon as i finish my backed(・–・;)ゞ I guess thats it for this devlog , If I forget to mention anything , I will surely update it in the next devlog. If you didnt understand any of the point , please do comment and I will try to explain you there ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ Thank You all so much for reading. Have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 24613, "ts": "2026-07-08T10:14:54Z", "hours": 5.0, "text": "Devlog #07 Hello Everyone (•◡•) / , Welcome to Devlog #07 of AniSuffle . In this devlog I will be sharing the latest updates and improvements I’ve made to the site. ** Back and Forward History** I have finally added the Back and Forward (a sort of histroy) like feature . Lemme explain it in simple : If you generate a recommendation and another and another and again another and suddenly you feel like going back then you can press the Back button (just beside the Recommend Btn [to left]) and you will be able to review that anime or even manga. And then you can come back to your current one or just click on Recommend Me on the very same point and the new anime will be recommeded to you. Note: Though the anime ahead of you will be cleared out. ** Watch Anime** I have linked Crunchyroll Netflix AnimeSuge (¬‿¬) to my site. Which means when a anime is recommended to you, you will get these options: Crunchyroll Netflix AnimeSuge Watch Trailer Watch trailer on Youtube, it will be displayed only if the trailer link is available on the APIs I used (Jikan,Anilist,Kitsu) for anime. You can click on them and it will open a new tab and will automaticly search the title of the anime on the corresponding platform. [YouTube trailer is embeded on the site so you wont be redirected just to watch the trailer =)] Also Credit to the creator for the hover animation of Netflix Button : https://www.educrush.in/projects/netflix-button-animation And one more thing, Even though clicking on that link wont pinpoint the exact anime all the time since it is sending data on the search box of that corresponding site and redirecting you to that link, but still it should work for most of the anime, if the anime is available on that particular site. ** Read Manga** I have linked MangaDex Viz BookWalker to my site and the working of it also same as that of the manga. One thing I must say （ゝ。∂） This website is made entirely for entertainment, educational and learning purposes only , and it doesnt support any sort of piracy . That’s it for this Devlog I guess thats it for this devlog and if you have any suggestions or question that you think I didnt explain well or enough (always sucked at explaining others but i do try😅) then plz comment below, I will reply as soon as possible. Thank you everyone for reading. Have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 24056, "ts": "2026-07-07T11:21:11Z", "hours": 4.0, "text": "Hello Everyone, Welcome to Devlog #06 of AniSuffle. I am very excited (*≧▽≦) to share what I was working on and also what I will be working after this devlog. The biggest milestone for this devlog might be that I have finally integrated all four APIs I mentioned in the early devlogs. (i.e. Jikan, anilistGenreList, mangadexTagId, Kitsu). All four of them are backing up eachother ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ. This took quite a while because ya know different APIs has different structure and some return data in so weird format as well. Anyway, the next change I made is background poster change, lemme explain. Before, I had a backgorund of some live color gradient (actually thats a ovel with diffetent color on it and is rotating and has blur effect applied on it though ⊙﹏⊙). But now its changed, at first untill any image from either anime or manga is loaded the backgroundImage remains as the old one but as soon as user clicks on Recommend Me button and image is loaded, the backgorund image changes to the poster image and it looks kinda cool (at least to me ●﹏●). Also it has some blur effect on it as the direct plane image looked kinda weired without blur and a little bit of brightness lowered. And The last update for this devlog which I am really exited to share is Trailerssss!!!! . Now You can also watch the anime trailers, you get the option of Watch Trailer, and when you click the button, it will play the trailer from the YouTube and more importantly you would not even have to leave the site to watch the trailer, which means you wont be redireted to any site, you will stay and watch the trailer on the VERY same site ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪♬. (only used Jikan and Anilist as the source of anime Trailer link). and if any Anime doent have trailer integrated then the Watch Trailer button will not appear, it will stay hidden. So, thats not a bug ok =). I will leave a screenshot below =) I guess thats it for this Devlog. If I forget to mention anything, I will defenitiely update you all in the next Devlog. Also, Next I am planning to work on adding forward and backward option, if you dont get it right now, please dont worry I will be explaining it once I have successfully added it. and I am thinging of adding favourite or watch later like section. I guess thats it for this devlog. Thank you so much for reading. Have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 23504, "ts": "2026-07-06T14:59:47Z", "hours": 5.0, "text": "Hello Everyone , Welcome to Devlog #05 of AniSuffle Finally some good news to share (>‿◠)✌. Jikan API Ban Recovery While working on the site, I ended up sending too many request on the jikan API and it temporarily got my IP address banned and thankfully thats over now \\0-0/ and I was still able to make some good progress during that time , as i worked with another API (i.e anilist) and guess what it worksssss!!!! (the structures of different APIs are so different so its kindaa abit ….. you know..) Poster Improvement One of the imporvement is the poster display of the anime. Now the poster can resize itself as the size of the image changes, with a small transition between them (it looks kinda cool to me) Also the information is displayed in quite orgainzed way as well (though i removed the scroll on the description as that seemed abit off) currently it displays title, ratings , released date , status (like its onging or finished releasing ). Screenshot I will drop the image below \\0_0/ High Rated First I have also made a little change on how the High reated first feature work , before it used to compare among the few fetched and now it displays the anime/manga with ratings higher than 7 and if not found among currently fetched then it fetches or requests for more data . I also decided to add a name at the bottom right of the API to see which one is fetched from which (i mean the info) . Notch Change Also I forgot to mention one thing that the notch (apple like degin will disapear when the image is loaded as that looked abit kind of starnge wit the image but still it will appear while the image is in loading state(or when its not totally laoded). If I didnt forget to mention anything then thats it for this devlog . If I didnt make anything clear then please consider commenting , I will Try again to expalin =) Thank you so much for reading . Have a nice day =)"}, {"post_id": 23207, "ts": "2026-07-06T00:58:11Z", "hours": 5.0, "text": "Devlog #04 Hello everyone , Welcome to the devlog #04 of AniSuffle, (A site which recommends you random anime or manga , you can also choose genre of your choice). Recently , I have been facing an issue with the Posters. Actually the size of posters of different for different anime (some are potrait , some are landscape , some are square and some are soooo huge and if i compress them to one size the quality of the image is lost and it looks sooo bad (╥﹏╥)) . But I still plan to keep on working on it (I will try…). A new feature A new feature , I have added a feature “ High rated First ” . Its going to recommend you some of the High rated anime. (Not the highest of all time ,or else if i call for the highest rated anime/manga only then only one might repeat , so i tried making the feature work for high rated animes or mangas). I hope I was able to make you clear , if not plz do comment and I will try again to explain =) **Info about the API ** Currently I am fetching the data from Jikan API . I will leave the API link below if anyone wants to check it out . also, since its a free API , it has a few limitations. Its abit slow and request limit is also low , and thats why I will be trying to fetch APIs from few more other free APIs , I will provide there link below as well . I guess thats it for this devlog . If I get any update to share , I will definitely write another Devlog . Thank You so much for reading. //planning to fetch info from them jikanBaseUrl = https://api.jikan.moe/v4 anilistUrl = https://graphql.anilist.co mangadexUrl = https://api.mangadex.org kitsuUrl = https://kitsu.io/api/edge Have a nice day (ง︡’-’︠)ง **Also here is a quick shot of what my site looks right now (╥﹏╥) **"}, {"post_id": 22618, "ts": "2026-07-05T05:15:09Z", "hours": 4.0, "text": "Hello everyone , Welcome to the **Devlog #03 ** of AniSuffle Here’s a quick update on what i’ve been working on .Till now I wasnt able to make much progress on the JavaScript side , especially the API integration part . Instead , I spent most of my time improving the design of the card (in which anime/manga poster will be displayed). I worked on adding some borders and tried to make the card look abit cooler by adding the apple notch (the top part, i am not sure but i guess its called notch,maybeeee…..) . I might still make more changes on it , i m done totally satisfied with it (╥﹏╥). On the top of that , I added almost every anime/manga genre that I could find online , and the users will also be able to genre on the basis of genre selected . Thats pretty much everything , for this devlog . Thank You so much . Have a nice day (˶ˆᗜˆ˵) Here is a quick shot of the project :"}, {"post_id": 22164, "ts": "2026-07-04T14:16:22Z", "hours": 4.0, "text": "Hello everyone , Welcome to another Devlog #02 of AniSuffle! I just changed the look of the website (had to write whole html and css as my new design was conflicting with the old one (╥ ᴗ ╥) ) But I am satisfied with the new look (atleast for now (ᵕ—ᴗ—)). [I might see new design on Insta (｡ŏ﹏ŏ)] And more importantly I made a seperate section for** Manga** as well which means Not only anime but AniSuffle will be recommending Manga as well (i mean i’ll try). I am currently working on the functionality of the site . Thank you so much , here is the latest screen shot . Have a nice day"}, {"post_id": 19650, "ts": "2026-07-01T00:59:35Z", "hours": 4.0, "text": "Devlog #01 Hello, Everyone ! I started working on a project “AniSuffle”. Let me tell you about what I did so far and what I will be doing ahead . I am planing to make a website where you can get anime any random anime recommendation . I would try to integrate multiple APIs on the same site as one API get exhausted pretty quickly . Till now , I have learned to make a live gradient like effect for the background and also made animation for the cards and text , whenever the site loads. Will report again soon . Thank You ! Have a nice day =)"}]...
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Title: AniSuffle by @PAPER_01 | Stardance
Devlogs Title: AniSuffle by @PAPER_01 | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog #01 Hello, Everyone ! I started working on a project “AniSuffle”. Let me tell you about what I did so far and what I will be doing ahead . I am planing to make a website where you can get anime any random anime recommendation . I would try to integrate multiple APIs on the same site as one API get exhausted pretty quickly . Till now , I have learned to make a live gradient like effect for the background and also made animation for the cards and text , whenever the site loads. Will report again soon . Thank You ! Have a nice day =)
Hello everyone , Welcome to another Devlog #02 of AniSuffle! I just changed the look of the website (had to write whole html and css as my new design was conflicting with the old one (╥ ᴗ ╥) ) But I am satisfied with the new look (atleast for now (ᵕ—ᴗ—)). [I might see new design on Insta (｡ŏ﹏ŏ)] And more importantly I made a seperate section for** Manga** as well which means Not only anime but AniSuffle will be recommending Manga as well (i mean i’ll try). I am currently working on the functionality of the site . Thank you so much , here is the latest screen shot . Have a nice day
Hello everyone , Welcome to the **Devlog #03 ** of AniSuffle Here’s a quick update on what i’ve been working on .Till now I wasnt able to make much progress on the JavaScript side , especially the API integration part . Instead , I spent most of my time improving the design of the card (in which anime/manga poster will be displayed). I worked on adding some borders and tried to make the card look abit cooler by adding the apple notch (the top part, i am not sure but i guess its called notch,maybeeee…..) . I might still make more changes on it , i m done totally satisfied with it (╥﹏╥). On the top of that , I added almost every anime/manga genre that I could find online , and the users will also be able to genre on the basis of genre selected . Thats pretty much everything , for this devlog . Thank You so much . Have a nice day (˶ˆᗜˆ˵) Here is a quick shot of the project :
Devlog #04 Hello everyone , Welcome to the devlog #04 of AniSuffle, (A site which recommends you random anime or manga , you can also choose genre of your choice). Recently , I have been facing an issue with the Posters. Actually the size of posters of different for different anime (some are potrait , some are landscape , some are square and some are soooo huge and if i compress them to one size the quality of the image is lost and it looks sooo bad (╥﹏╥)) . But I still plan to keep on working on it (I will try…). A new feature A new feature , I have added a feature “ High rated First ” . Its going to recommend you some of the High rated anime. (Not the highest of all time ,or else if i call for the highest rated anime/manga only then only one might repeat , so i tried making the feature work for high rated animes or mangas). I hope I was able to make you clear , if not plz do comment and I will try again to explain =) **Info about the API ** Currently I am fetching the data from Jikan API . I will leave the API link below if anyone wants to check it out . also, since its a free API , it has a few limitations. Its abit slow and request limit is also low , and thats why I will be trying to fetch APIs from few more other free APIs , I will provide there link below as well . I guess thats it for this devlog . If I get any update to share , I will definitely write another Devlog . Thank You so much for reading. //planning to fetch info from them jikanBaseUrl = https://api.jikan.moe/v4 anilistUrl = https://graphql.anilist.co mangadexUrl = https://api.mangadex.org kitsuUrl = https://kitsu.io/api/edge Have a nice day (ง︡’-’︠)ง **Also here is a quick shot of what my site looks right now (╥﹏╥) **
Hello Everyone , Welcome to Devlog #05 of AniSuffle Finally some good news to share (>‿◠)✌. Jikan API Ban Recovery While working on the site, I ended up sending too many request on the jikan API and it temporarily got my IP address banned and thankfully thats over now \0-0/ and I was still able to make some good progress during that time , as i worked with another API (i.e anilist) and guess what it worksssss!!!! (the structures of different APIs are so different so its kindaa abit ….. you know..) Poster Improvement One of the imporvement is the poster display of the anime. Now the poster can resize itself as the size of the image changes, with a small transition between them (it looks kinda cool to me) Also the information is displayed in quite orgainzed way as well (though i removed the scroll on the description as that seemed abit off) currently it displays title, ratings , released date , status (like its onging or finished releasing ). Screenshot I will drop the image below \0_0/ High Rated First I have also made a little change on how the High reated first feature work , before it used to compare among the few fetched and now it displays the anime/manga with ratings higher than 7 and if not found among currently fetched then it fetches or requests for more data . I also decided to add a name at the bottom right of the API to see which one is fetched from which (i mean the info) . Notch Change Also I forgot to mention one thing that the notch (apple like degin will disapear when the image is loaded as that looked abit kind of starnge wit the image but still it will appear while the image is in loading state(or when its not totally laoded). If I didnt forget to mention anything then thats it for this devlog . If I didnt make anything clear then please consider commenting , I will Try again to expalin =) Thank you so much for reading . Have a nice day =)
Hello Everyone, Welcome to Devlog #06 of AniSuffle. I am very excited (*≧▽≦) to share what I was working on and also what I will be working after this devlog. The biggest milestone for this devlog might be that I have finally integrated all four APIs I mentioned in the early devlogs. (i.e. Jikan, anilistGenreList, mangadexTagId, Kitsu). All four of them are backing up eachother ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ. This took quite a while because ya know different APIs has different structure and some return data in so weird format as well. Anyway, the next change I made is background poster change, lemme explain. Before, I had a backgorund of some live color gradient (actually thats a ovel with diffetent color on it and is rotating and has blur effect applied on it though ⊙﹏⊙). But now its changed, at first untill any image from either anime or manga is loaded the backgroundImage remains as the old one but as soon as user clicks on Recommend Me button and image is loaded, the backgorund image changes to the poster image and it looks kinda cool (at least to me ●﹏●). Also it has some blur effect on it as the direct plane image looked kinda weired without blur and a little bit of brightness lowered. And The last update for this devlog which I am really exited to share is Trailerssss!!!! . Now You can also watch the anime trailers, you get the option of Watch Trailer, and when you click the button, it will play the trailer from the YouTube and more importantly you would not even have to leave the site to watch the trailer, which means you wont be redireted to any site, you will stay and watch the trailer on the VERY same site ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪♬. (only used Jikan and Anilist as the source of anime Trailer link). and if any Anime doent have trailer integrated then the Watch Trailer button will not appear, it will stay hidden. So, thats not a bug ok =). I will leave a screenshot below =) I guess thats it for this Devlog. If I forget to mention anything, I will defenitiely update you all in the next Devlog. Also, Next I am planning to work on adding forward and backward option, if you dont get it right now, please dont worry I will be explaining it once I have successfully added it. and I am thinging of adding favourite or watch later like section. I guess thats it for this devlog. Thank you so much for reading. Have a nice day =)
Devlog #07 Hello Everyone (•◡•) / , Welcome to Devlog #07 of AniSuffle . In this devlog I will be sharing the latest updates and improvements I’ve made to the site. ** Back and Forward History** I have finally added the Back and Forward (a sort of histroy) like feature . Lemme explain it in simple : If you generate a recommendation and another and another and again another and suddenly you feel like going back then you can press the Back button (just beside the Recommend Btn [to left]) and you will be able to review that anime or even manga. And then you can come back to your current one or just click on Recommend Me on the very same point and the new anime will be recommeded to you. Note: Though the anime ahead of you will be cleared out. ** Watch Anime** I have linked Crunchyroll Netflix AnimeSuge (¬‿¬) to my site. Which means when a anime is recommended to you, you will get these options: Crunchyroll Netflix AnimeSuge Watch Trailer Watch trailer on Youtube, it will be displayed only if the trailer link is available on the APIs I used (Jikan,Anilist,Kitsu) for anime. You can click on them and it will open a new tab and will automaticly search the title of the anime on the corresponding platform. [YouTube trailer is embeded on the site so you wont be redirected just to watch the trailer =)] Also Credit to the creator for the hover animation of Netflix Button : https://www.educrush.in/projects/netflix-button-animation And one more thing, Even though clicking on that link wont pinpoint the exact anime all the time since it is sending data on the search box of that corresponding site and redirecting you to that link, but still it should work for most of the anime, if the anime is available on that particular site. ** Read Manga** I have linked MangaDex Viz BookWalker to my site and the working of it also same as that of the manga. One thing I must say （ゝ。∂） This website is made entirely for entertainment, educational and learning purposes only , and it doesnt support any sort of piracy . That’s it for this Devlog I guess thats it for this devlog and if you have any suggestions or question that you think I didnt explain well or enough (always sucked at explaining others but i do try😅) then plz comment below, I will reply as soon as possible. Thank you everyone for reading. Have a nice day =)
Devlog #08 Hello everyone(˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Welcome to Devlog #08 of AniSuffle . Hope you all are doing great. Okay, now let me explain quickly of my recent changes or update on the site. I am not sure but maybe this will be abit shorter devlog, maybeeee(ᵕ—ᴗ—)…. since most of the work is about backend (so nothing flashy to explain) also I will try to not bore anyone reading this.[also i try keeping the devlogs raw and unfiltered] Okay now lemme explain. Save Button & Auth Feature Sooo, the feature I have recently added to my site, actually not added, am still working on it is the save button and also adding a auth feature (the login and signup feature to be more simple =)) . Its not complete though. And one more thing, you definitely dont need to login or signup to use any of the features and tools I have made so far beacuse I understand that signing up is such a pain, I mean at least to me it isss. But there is one feature I want to add, and for this I think the signup is necessary. Now let me expalin how the save feature is going to work. It might be abit different as I am still working on it, I will just tell what I am planning to do. ** Why am I writing this devlog now?** And before that If you ask why am I writing a devlog if I have not done the job, then ummm…∘ ∘ ∘ ( °ヮ° ) Actually I am working on the backend and I am scared I might mess anything up, as I am not too confident on backend and storing user data safely is my top priority( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ whenever I am dealing with the backend and while doing this I didnt realize that I have already 5 or maybe 6 hours I am not sure but maybe its around 6 hours of time logged already so I thought of updating the devlog, even though I am in the middle of the function (I mean the development process(ᵕ ó ᴗ ò)). I feel like I sound abit unclear (ó﹏ò｡)ummm, lemme just explain properly how the save feature is going to (or supposed to) work. So there are two scenerios . ** When not signed in** When you are not signed it, you will still be able to access all the feature of the site, even the save button. But there is a catch. All your saved animes/mangas will be stored on the localstorage . Just a small explaination just in case you have no idea of what localstorage is, ummm… In simple terms you can think it as the browser’s storage area, its typically around 4 MB or 5 MB i assume, but they should be more than enough to us as we are just storing the anime/manga url, source, id and stuff.. lets not go too deep into itദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧. So you will still be able to save animes/mangas but you would need to be on the same browser with same browser profile to access those info. When signed in When you are signed in, your saved infos will be stored on the database of the server and you will be able to access them from any device and any browser . and This is the reason I am adding the Singup feature Oh… The devlog doesnt seems small any more. I’m i’m i’m sorry for that(ㅅ •᷄ ₃•᷅ ) Lemme wrap up quick umm but wait I will drop the screenshot of the site by pointing at the save button. Currently its with no css, but dont worry I will update that ugly default button design (and maybe position as well) as soon as i finish my backed(・–・;)ゞ I guess thats it for this devlog , If I forget to mention anything , I will surely update it in the next devlog. If you didnt understand any of the point , please do comment and I will try to explain you there ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ Thank You all so much for reading. Have a nice day =)
Devlog #09 Hello everyone(˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Hope you all are doing great. Welcome to Devlog #09 of AniSuffle . In this devlog I will be sharing you all the recent changes I made on my site. Okay… lemme explain. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ Auth(Login & SignUp) is finally working Soooo… Finally the Auth(Login and SignUp) feature is working. (≧▽≦) You can now login and save your info on the database and you would be able to login into another device and access your list / saves. I am planning to work on the email verification system as well, but dont worry I will be explaining you all how you can get a disposable email if you dont want to use your personal email, (I respect your Privacy(ᵔᵕᵔ)). Save Feature Also the save feature is now working just like I mentioned earlier. But for now you would have to login to use it. But dont worry. Before I ship this site, I will integrate the localstorage feature , to make the save feature work even without the signing in. I know signing up is kind of annoying sometimes… at least to me it is. (￣▽￣) So I wanted everyone to still be able to use the save feature even without making an account. Saved Anime & Manga Currently the stored anime and manga are stored in the same place[To be more specific they will be displayed on the same save list ]. But I guess I will make a seperate list for them. I will update in the upcoming devlog about it if I do make that change. (•̀ᴗ•́)و UI Changes Becuase of the sign up and login option the Anime and Manga buttons are on the center for now. I dont really like how it looks either. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) So I am planning to move those buttons back to the right side again. And also add a Hamburger menu (just in case you dont know… It’s The three horizontal line menu, actually i didnt know either before googling it just before writing this devlog (╹ڡ╹ )) . That menu will probably contain more features as I continue working on the site. Backend Debugging Most of my time actually went into debugging. (ó﹏ò｡) For some reason I just couldnt figure out why my data wasnt being stored correctly. Sometimes it would save. Sometimes it wouldnt. Sometimes the stored data just refused to show itself in the list (probably it was abit shy (´꒳`)) . So… that took quite a bit longer than I thought. (・–・;)ゞ But yeah, finally things seems to be working [At least for now (・–・;)ゞ] Oh… The last devlog went incredibly long even though I thought it would be shorter… Looks like this one also became longer than I expected. (ㅅ •᷄ ₃•᷅ ) . (My apologies) I dont want to bore ya all. (´▽`) But still I hope I was able to make everything clear. If not, please do comment below and I will try my best to explain it there as well. ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ Thank You all so much for reading. Have a nice day =)
Devlog #10 Hello everyone (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Hope you all are doing great. Welcome to Devlog #10 of AniSuffle . Ok this time I will keep the devlog abit shorter maybe… (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Lets start The first and main change for this devlog is the Ripple like animation when you click the image. (Its just like the circle expanding from a point when you throw a stone on a still lake or pound.) Hope you like it! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ . Also a little bit change in brightness near the cursor ;) I will keep a video of the clip. As I told in previous devlog, I have finally seperated the Anime and Manga section in the save list, and also I kept the Sign In and Login option in the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines). (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ A small optimization, I have added the APIs in the head section of HTML with rel="preconnect" , so that the connection is established as soon as the site loads. (Just keeping APIs ready for fetching data from them.) ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Also just to avoid confusion , you will not need to signin to save the anime/manga when i finally ship the project , I am still working on it . (ó﹏ò｡)It is just a sample and doesnt represent the final product =) Also the save button on Manga section didnt worked before refreshing the site , and I will be transparent , that it was fault of my site and I am still trying to figure it out (ó﹏ò｡) In the video I have wrote a random email , they might not work when I ship it, its just a dummy after all. (￣▽￣*) I will like to end the devlog now. (ᵔᗜᵔ) If anything was unclear please comment, I will try to explain again there. (╹◡╹) Thank you for reading! Have a nice day! (≧▽≦)ﾉ
Devlog #11 Hello everyone (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ, Welcome to Devlog #11 of AniSuffle . Hope you all are doing great. (≧▽≦) In this devlog, I’ll be sharing the recent changes and improvement i have mad on the site. Ummm.. This devlog will be abit longer, but I want to make sure I explain everything correctly. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Soooo lets start~ SVG Animation The first update is the addition of SVG animation beside the title. I have also replaced the placehodler (those book and video like emoji) that was displayed on the poster card with the same svg (but the animation will be different). (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ Also about the source of the svg, For the “anime” svg, I got it from AnimeJs and i asked AI to make another svg “manga” , honestly it was quite difficult to make AI understand what I really wanted on the svg, and its still not perfect but ummm its fine and I hope you like those. (￣▽￣*) LocalStorage Also I have now integrated localStorage so, now you wont have to be logged in to save anime and manga anymore. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ It works in this way, lemme explain in simple: If you are logged out and you saved few anime/mangas and then you signned in, then all your localStorage saves will be automatically be transfered to the database (and your localStorage will be empty, I had to do this so that There is no duplicate data). ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Email Verification And the most time consuming, I have integrated email verification which means now, the email you signup with should be a valied email (you can nomore login/signup with [email protected] ). And currently i have used brevo for sending emails and i m on free trial so it has the limit of 300 emails per day , And I assume its more than enough for me right now,also the code expires in 1 hour. (╹◡╹) . [I had to keep authorizing my ip address while setting it up and i thought it was error on my code and I was searching it for hours (╥﹏╥)] I will tell you how you can get a dummy email (just in case you dont know how to get one) if you want to check the authentication system without using your personal email [especially if you are a reviewer reading this.] but anyone willing to test it, you can use that method. But I will be doing that in the next devlog… probably, as In this devlog i might upload the video of showing current updates. (=￣ω￣=) I guess I will keep this much for this devlog. I hope I made things clear. [You might have seen manga on the save list even though i didnt add that in this video , and lemme make things clear, it was imported from the localstorage , which i have saved while checking my project =] If anything was unclear then please do tell me. (◕‿◕)♡ Helper tools SVG : https://animejs.com/documentation/svg/createdrawable SMTP : https://www.brevo.com/ Thank you so much for reading. (≧▽≦)♡ Have a nice day! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ
Devlog #12 Hello everyone!! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ Welcome to Devlog #12 of Anime Shuffle ! (≧▽≦) Hope you all are doing great! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ This devlog will be a bit shorter (Hopefully….) , but I wanted to share the final updates before the release because… ** Yep… we’re shipping soon!!** (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hopefully within the next two days! (ᵕ—ᴗ—) Intro Animation The first thing I added is a small intro screen (around 7–8 seconds long) where you’ll be asked to enter a username. (ᵔᗜᵔ) Don’t worry, I’m not checking whether the username is already taken or not (just yet). You can type anything you want here. The purpose of this intro is simply to make the experience feel a bit more personal and fun. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ I hope you’ll like it! =) When you eventually sign up, you’ll enter your username again, and that one will need to be unique. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) After entering your name, a short animated intro will play before taking you into the site. (✧ω✧) And yes… I used AI to help create this animation. Not completely, but it definitely helped speed things up. (￣▽￣)ゞ I also changed the background of the site because the previous one made some buttons a little difficult to see. I received that as feedback, so thank you very much! The site now uses a live wallpaper instead, which should make everything much clearer. I hope you will like that (ó﹏ò｡) ** Double Tap = Save** Just like on social media apps, you can now double-tap (or double-click) an anime or manga poster to save it instantly. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ When you do, a small star animation appears , yeyyy…. ** Email Verification Improvements** I also made a few improvements to the email verification system. (｡•ᴗ•｡) The verification email has been redesigned slightly so that the verification code is much easier to spot and copy. (´꒳`) ** Shipping Soon…** That’s pretty much it for this devlog! (ﾉ´ヮ`)ﾉ*:･ﾟ Right now I’m focusing on making the site fully responsive across different screen sizes. ૮₍ ˃ ⤙ ˂ ₎ა Also, the email shown in the disposable-email demo video isn’t the actual email theme used by AniShuffle. The disposable email website simply couldn’t render the HTML email correctly. (╥﹏╥) After that’s done, I might write one final devlog before releasing it… or maybe I’ll just ship it immediately. (¬‿¬) My goal is to release Anime Shuffle within the next two days , so stay tuned! (๑>◡<๑) ** Note for Reviewers** If you’re reviewing Anime Shuffle and don’t want to use your personal email address , don’t worry! I’ll also include a short guide video showing **how to get a free disposable (dummy) email,just in case you dont know ** so you can test the authentication system without using your own email. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ Of course, anyone is welcome to use it—not just reviewers. =) Thank you so much for reading and for following the development journey. It really means a lot! (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ See you all in the next devlog… or maybe in the release post! (ᵔᗜᵔ) If anything was unclear, please let me know. I’d really appreciate the feedback! Have a wonderful day! (｡♥‿♥｡)
Devlog #13 Hello everyone!! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ Welcome to Devlog #13 of Anime Shuffle ! (≧▽≦) Hope you all are doing well! (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ This will probably be one of the shortest devlogs before the release, but I wanted to share one last little update. (ᵔᗜᵔ) ** Font Updates** I made a few typography changes to make the site feel a little cleaner and more unique. The Anime Shuffle title on the top-left now uses the Godber font. The titles of the anime/manga cards, along with the “High Rated First” label, now use the Morien font. They’re small changes, but I think they give the site a much nicer personality. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ ** Responsiveness** I totally forgot to mention, I also added Responsiveness, even though it’s not best as the site is optimized mainly for laptop/PC screen but…. Umm it’s not worst (๑•﹏•) ** Shipping Today…?** If everything goes well on the server side, I’ll be shipping Anime Shuffle today! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Hopefully there won’t be any last-minute bugs deciding to appear out of nowhere… (╥﹏╥) Fingers crossed! (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ Any questions , please let me know Thank you all so much for being part of this journey. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ It has genuinely meant a lot to me, and I really appreciate everyone who took the time to read the devlogs, give feedback, and support the project along the way. Thank you so much! (´꒳`)♡ Have a wonderful day! (｡♥‿♥｡)
Hello everyone I was late for class while deployign the site so I M WRITING IT IN CLASS RN (・–・;)ゞ(teacher might come anytime now)But I wanted to share this project so bad . Thank you Here is the link : https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com Bye
We are finally shiping!!!!⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡ Here is the link https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com
Devlog #14 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #14 of AniSuffle ! (≧▽≦) Okay, so this is the first devlog after I have shipped the project. And yes… I’m still working on the project. (￣▽￣)ゞ Thanks to @Gideonthegreat for the feedbacks! Yeah, I mean, I got some awesome feedback, and I really wanted to add more and make more changes. (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧ After thinking and looking around the code for a while… (and staring at it for way longer than I should have) I finally decided to integrate the Hover to Play Trailer feature first . I did not want to just replace the click ripple animation. That’s why I decided to add it as an option ,you can click on the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines in the top-right corner), where you can turn the Hover to Play Trailer option on and off. ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ. [I will update the live site later on, as i am still working on it (ó﹏ò｡)] It is still not complete. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) I’m still working on it! So I’ll show you a demo video[My laptop is potato so the video is abit laggy, plz dont mind that], but please don’t take it as the final version. I’m still thinking of making more changes to it… hehehe. (,,¬﹏¬,,) I accept that I still need to optimize this feature, and the clip was short as my laptop was lagging alot 😭 (see the CPU usage ( top blue bars)) Maybe I’ll end up changing something again before the next devlog. Who knows? (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ I guess that’s it for this devlog! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ I will still love feedback if you have any =) Thank you so much for reading! <(_ _)> See you in the next one Thank you again and have a nice day =)
Devlog #15 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #15 of AniSuffle ! So first, I have a few announcements. I got some more feedback, and in respect of those, I will now be making the devlogs shorter and use limited/less kaomoji (ó﹏ò｡), so that you can read the devlogs more clearly. Update So, I have finally finished working on the Hover to Play Trailer feature. I just have a mute and unmute button which will be displayed on the trailer when hovered. When hovering, for a few seconds, it will also show titles, the YouTube logo, and other YouTube things. I tried to hide those but was unable to. When I asked AI, it told me that it was not possible. Rather, it gave me alternative ways, which I thought would not be a great user experience, so I left it as default. (ᵕ—ᴗ—) I had a hard time fixing the overlapping of the hover and click animations, but those are finally gone. Now I guess that’s it for this devlog. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)
Devlog #16 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #16 of AniSuffle ! Update I have made few changes , I changed the Hover Trailer text from Hover Trailer On / Off to a checkbox ,as I found a cool looking (i guess it is) checkbox on a site and also a mute and unmute btn . So I changed them . I will keep a clip below rather then explaining with words . ##Credit Mute Btn (when hover trailer is on) : https://uiverse.io/catraco/dry-robin-61CheckBox Animation (On hover trailer) : https://uiverse.io/00Kubi/hot-dragonfly-56 I would not expand the devlog anymore Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)
Devlog #17 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #17 of AniSuffle ! Update I have changed the background of the intro page and added a video as a background instead (i will provide the link below)(as the old one was AI made, not a copy paste though).There is a skip button in the intro incase its boring for you . Also on one of the feedback , I saw one reviewer was not able to access the for some reason i really dont know why, so now i have moved the site to https://shrestha-project-07.wuaze.com this url, even though the old site will be active , the new updates will be availble on this site only . I might update this link on old devlogs as well. Currently I am working on the trending section , where you will be able to see the trending anime list or in card form, but i will try to make it intresting somehow =) Also , both sites share same database so if you have logged in before then , you can still use that id to login in both site. Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L7mzyGhXCA (there are few edits/cuts i did) I would not expand the devlog anymore Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)
Devlog #18 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #18 of AniSuffle ! I know it has been a while , but to be honest , i dont really have much to show for this devlog . Even though I have been working on something fun to be added in this site. Update I the last devlog I told that I will be working on the treding section ,but while making that I dont know for some reason I wanted to make a game like thing in this site. Lemme give a brief description . so I was thinking of making a Rating Guess game , where you will be shown any 4 anime poster and its name and you would have to choose a anime and you will be given a score and I am also planning to make a leaderboard so that the game feels even more competetive, but the problem is that I dont want to make sign in compulsory and I would need a username for that . So I have been working on the game but still am unsure about the usernames , as asking multiple usernames might be confusing so, I am still thinking on what to do about this. I would not expand the devlog anymore. If you have any question please comment , I will try to explaing things there , thank you so much . Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day! =)
Devlog #19 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #19 of AniSuffle ! First , Our project got SuperStar title and I thank you all,Without ya all my this project would not have got that level of attention. Thanks to all of you and the reviewer for marking it as a SuperStar Project . It made me so happy. Thank you so much (˶>⩊<˶) Update After creating and deleting the same table , the same database many times . I have finally decided to remove the username from the signin option and kept it on the rate game page , which means while signing in you wont have to use username , rather you will sign up using only gmail . Also , I am thinking of linking the gmail with the username automatically after the user has signed in so the progress is stored in the connected account. I am currently working on the backend so there is nothing intresting to show but i will keep the site image for now … I would not expand the devlog anymore. If you have any question please comment ,though I am myself not so sure about the username thing, I mean… I might change the data structure if things go wrong,so if you ask me rn about how i will be storing data exactly then my answer might not be that clear but I will still try , thank you so much . Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!
Devlog #20 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #20 of AniSuffle ! Update Hey everyone , a quick update . I again changed my plan and I have now decided to use the intro username as the unique username which will be used everwhere , like in the database and the leaderboard. I apologize for creating the confusion but I felt like asking multiple username might be even more confusing (ó﹏ò｡). So i planned to stick with the single username to maintain consistency and to avoid confusion. I would not expand the devlog anymore unnecessarily and waste your time. And I hope I made everything clear If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!
Devlog #21 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #21 of AniSuffle ! Update I made a rough templete or a rough design on what the guess highest rating might look like , I mean the structure only , I will change the design and animation later on . Nothing much to explain but I will keep the design image below . Also I am still building the functionality . Right now they only fetch 4 differenct anime poster name and score . I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!
Devlog #22 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #22 of AniSuffle ! Update Ok , so This time I was working on the intro side and I realized that before I changed some data structure while storing the username and i am now COOKED (╥﹏╥). Also I was searching for the error in my backend becuase of which the skip btn never appeared and even after asking ai , It was not able to help me ,and after giving it a tons of screenshots of the project , console and networks , It told me to remove a comment - - . And even more annoying or good thing (i dont even know what to call it anymore) was that the code worked after removing the comment. It made no sense to me , and honestly I still dont know why even that comment was causing the issue . Trust me I stared that code for more than an hour only to remove the comment at the end. Anyway , the code is now working (but i know there are still bunch of more bug to fix), so the main addition i would say rn is the live checking of the username . The username entered will be checked at the live time (every 400ms to be more precise). I guess thats all. I know it might sound like not much addition but it was more debug i did this time - -. I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!
Devlog #23 Hello everyone, Welcome to Devlog #23 of AniSuffle ! Update One more bug ,fixed and found . So, till now the username stored would only be saved if someone entered the name in the intro and played the guess rating game. And now its fixed and Now the username is stored in the database immediately after the username name is submitted in the intro username section. Also One more thing , if someone took the username as “PAPER” and later if someone tries “paper” then the name will not be allowed. I did it just to be safe and later no any confusion or bug to occur just becase of the case of the entered word . I will add a screenshot of username is taken below(As I dont know what screenshot to add on this devlog :p ). I hope I made things clear. If any question or If you feel like I didnt made something clear please do ask me in the comments , I will try my best to clear things up there as well. Thanks for reading! <(_ _)> Have a nice day!
Ships:
# Welcome to the shipping devlog (I guess , I don't know what its called) (≧▽≦) Hey um.. In this section I will be giving the overview of my entire project , I will try to keep things simple and short. *(please read github as i m facing limit issue here)* (╥﹏╥) Ok, so my project **"AniSuffle"** is a webpage where you can get random Anime/Manga recommendations. But there is way more things I worked on , please let me explain. ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ ## Features ### Generate Random Anime/Manga I have integrated **4 APIs** (**Jikan, Anilist, Kitsu And MangaDex**) for fetching Anime/Manga recommendations. Jikan, Anilist and Kitsu can fetch both Anime and Manga while MangaDex fetches Manga only. They all work together as a fallback system, so if one API fails, another will handle it , you (solving the rate limit issue). =) ### Authentication (Login/SignUP) Logging in or signing in is **NOT COMPULSORY**. I repeat , as I can understand that its such a pain, I had to add it so that you could access the list anywhere in any device . **Make sure to enter unique username in the signup page** The only thing it gives you is access to your saved list across different devices. If you don't want to use your personal email while reviewing, you can use a temporary email. I have also uploaded a video in **Devlog #12** showing how to do it Just in case you dont know how to do that =) ### LocalStorage & Database * Not signed in → saves are stored in **LocalStorage**. * Signed in → saves are stored in the **Database**. * Existing LocalStorage saves are automatically transferred to the database after login to avoid duplication. ### Genre Selection You can generate recommendations based on your selected genre. Some APIs name genres differently, so in a few cases you may receive a closely related genre instead. ### Other Features * Embedded YouTube trailers (when available) * Switch between Anime & Manga * High Rated First (7+ rating) * Double click the poster to save * External links to Crunchyroll, Netflix, AnimeSuge, MangaDex, Viz, BookWalker and YouTube (if available on the API) --- ## Detailed Explanation Please read the **README** on the GitHub repository if you'd like the detailed explanation of how everything works. I had to shorten this because I'm exceeding the character limit. (＞﹏＜) --- Thank you so so so much. I really really really hope you will like this project. (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ...
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le-fat-chaton by @unknown_lizzard | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-20T09:10:04Z", "hours": 172.0, "multiplier": 14.88, "payout": 1818, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "at first I wanted to make a normal text model to try and learn more about llms, but I wanted to go further, agentic coding is a big thing so what better way to learn about llms than trying to make an agentic coding ai model. So thats how le gros chaton was born, the name originated from a joke on x about a fake huge mistral model coming out. to train this model I used already made datasets on hugging face, like fable5 traces, I also used kimi k3 as a teacher model to teach my smaller model to be good at coding and running commands, it kind of worked? but i’m not completely satisfied with the result, but at least i have learned some things and soon enough I will trying making an even better model! I dont have a demo url for you guys to try the model out since it was too expensive to run on a gpu so you’ll need to run it yourself, check it out on hugging face, follow the instructions and have fun.", "repo": "https://github.com/Mateooo93/le-gros-chaton", "demo": "https://mateooo93.github.io/le-gros-chaton/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 50841, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 50841, "ts": "2026-08-20T08:57:48Z", "hours": 3.2394, "text": "devlog #17 MI300X vLLM serving The old GPU box got destroyed, so I spun up a new MI300X with the same SSH key. ROCm 6.2 and Torch 2.5.1 were already set up, so getting the machine ready was easy. The hard part was vLLM. The pip version is CUDA only, and the ROCm Docker image only supported the multimodal version of Qwen3.5. Our model is text-only, so I had to patch the image. I added Qwen3_5ForCausalLM, fixed the hybrid KV-cache setup, added the missing Mamba state methods, and mapped the weight names so the text-only safetensors loaded correctly. I also patched the merged config to remove the M-RoPE and dtype fields. After that, the model served normally. I ran a one-task test with fix-git. The pipeline worked, but the model got stuck repeating git show until it ran out of turns. ##Shipped The merged model is now public on Hugging Face as mateo0093/le-gros-chaton under Apache-2.0. The 5×5 Terminal-Bench pilot finished at 3/25 (25%). All three successes were on fix-git, which shows that the SFT data was too focused on git tasks. I also tested RLVR with GRPO and a novelty bonus. The reward had almost no variance, so the training signal was basically useless. I saved the step-10 adapter but didn’t merge it. The GPU used about 12 hours of the 50 hour budget. All the vLLM patches and harness changes are in the repo. Main lesson: Qwen3.5’s hybrid model is a bit annoying to serve as text-only on ROCm. The model works but i think this was more of a learning opportunity, i know what i’ve done wrong and what i would have done differently, I will be working on a new model in a few weeks once I do a bit more research."}, {"post_id": 49761, "ts": "2026-08-18T18:01:12Z", "hours": 0.7992, "text": "Devlog #16, t4gpu The T4 16GB fought us the whole way. BF16 was baked into a pre quantized checkpoint, which made each step take 668 seconds because it had to use FP32 emulation. 2K context ran out of memory, the 248K logits ran out of memory too, FP16 started producing NaNs, Kaggle session limits locked us out, and the paged optimizer crashed last. Every fix seemed to create another problem. We eventually got it working with FP16 compute, chunked assistant token loss, autocast, and plain AdamW. Then we got access to an AMD MI300X with 192GB of memory. No quantization, 16K context, and enough memory to train full traces instead of cutting them off halfway through a message. Right now the 16K BF16 SFT run is training on the MI300X. Next up is merging the model, running Terminal Bench, and then RLVR."}, {"post_id": 49140, "ts": "2026-08-17T19:31:53Z", "hours": 16.24, "text": "Devlog 15 Traces are done The trace generator finally hit the target and went past it. We got 474 verified trajectories, zero malformed, zero duplicates, 19 templates, and a 95 percent self review pass rate. We were aiming for 450, so we ended up with 474. The dataset is synced to Hugging Face in two versions: raw and normalized. That part is finally done. It was the longest part of the project, and the model is only going to be as good as the traces, so getting this right was important The Kimi endpoint also stopped working. The old teacher account started returning 503 errors during generation and eventually died completely. We switched to a second Kimi account, which needed an extra header that we did not have at first. After figuring that out, generation resumed without losing any progress For GPUs, the 2070 still cannot realistically train the 9B. Kaggle hours are back, so we have 30 hours on a T4. The 4090 from my dad should arrive next week. The plan is to use the T4 for trajectory SFT, then the 4090 for merging, Terminal Bench evaluation, and RLVR. Status: 474 out of 474 traces done,"}, {"post_id": 42823, "ts": "2026-08-07T19:01:50Z", "hours": 8.9192, "text": "Devlog #14 worked a lot, still not done we worked a lot this week. honestly the main takeaway is that the fable5 sft was good but its traces alone weren’t enough the model needs way more verified agent trajectories, so we’ve been grinding those out (target is 450). we also ran out of credits mid-generation (the modal endpoint started failing with 503s) and had to switch to a second kimi account. took a minute to get the auth right the new endpoint wanted an extra header we didn’t have. after that the generator resumed fine and it’s been adding verified traces since (~340/450 now). biggest scare: we found out peft 0.20 silently drops the second adapter when you merge two at once. tested it and yeah, the outputs were identical with one or two adapters so our trajectory sft would have been lost in the merge. fixed it by merging sequentially (base first, then the second adapter). checked against the live model and it matches, so we’re good. my 2070 couldn’t fit the 9b model for real training, so we’re waiting on a 4090 (my dad’s) next week. all the scripts are ready sft, merge, rlvr, eval, even a setup script for the gpu box. just need the hardware. status: 340/450 traces, everything ready, waiting on the 4090. we’ve worked a lot, but the real run hasn’t happened yet :/."}, {"post_id": 41470, "ts": "2026-08-05T18:10:35Z", "hours": 18.5394, "text": "Devlog #13 we worked ALOT so this was the grind day. 18 hours of training babysitting and honestly it felt like 40. the modal training kept dying every hour. the client would crash and take the whole run with it. we restarted like 3 times before figuring out modal run -d (detached) keeps it alive on their servers even if our computer shits the bed. tested it by literally killing the process and it kept going. ez fix but we worked ALOT to get there. then we ran out of credits at 93% and switched accounts, but the other account “finished” the run in 6 MILLISECONDS which was sus af. turns out it just re-uploaded the old checkpoint and trained nothing. the resume logic had a bug where it thought 6200 >= 3799 meant done. patched it. another lesson learned. also we made the model creative lol. added diversity sampling to the trajectory generator (5 solutions per task, keep the novel ones), a novelty bonus reward for RLVR, and a creativity rule in the self-awareness prompt. so the fat cat will be innovative, not just memorize. current state: SFT is done at 91% (good enough), resume bug fixed, phase 2 (trajectory SFT with creativity + self-awareness baked in) is up next. 18 hours. we worked ALOT. the fat cat will be worth it 😼"}, {"post_id": 40883, "ts": "2026-08-04T18:02:57Z", "hours": 10.0019, "text": "Devlog #12 training kept dying for the last 10 hours the training kept crashing. not the model, not the gp but the modal client. every hour or so it would lose connection and take the whole run down with it. we’d restart, it’d run an hour, crash again. three times. the fix was simple: modal run -d runs detached, so the training lives on modal’s servers and doesn’t care if our local process dies. killed the client on purpose to test — training kept going. that’s it, that’s the fix. also worried the loss wasn’t moving but it was fine. lr had wound down on the crashed run, looked scary, re-warmed fine after restart. loss is 0.668 now and dropping. status: 72% through the fable5 sft. checkpoints safe on hf. after this: trajectory sft with the self-awareness stuff baked in, then rlvr, then real numbers."}, {"post_id": 40601, "ts": "2026-08-04T08:01:50Z", "hours": 11.4342, "text": "** Devlog #11 half way there! ** the training is going pretty well, I fixed a few bugs with the code and added documentation training is at 50%!"}, {"post_id": 40369, "ts": "2026-08-03T20:35:48Z", "hours": 8.8192, "text": "** Devlog #10 the full training is finally running ** ok so phase 1 full training is officially going. 160k rows of fable5 data on modal, resuming from the 12.8k rows we got on kaggle before the session cap killed us. we’re at ~27% and it should take like a day and a half total. big stuff that happened since last time: fast kernels actually work now. the model has hybrid linear-attention layers and transformers kept falling back to a slow torch path. the fix was: nvidia cuda-devel base image (needs nvcc to compile), installing flash-linear-attention[cuda] + causal-conv1d , and pinning torch 2.10. took a couple tries but now training is like 4x faster than it would be without them. had to split across two modal accounts. first account ran out of credits, so we set up a second profile and the script auto-resumes from the huggingface checkpoints when it dies. it’s been rock solid, it happens every 20% plus every hour it saves and uploads. lost zero progress to the account switch. we gave the model a personality. it’s called Le Gros Chaton (the fat cat) and we’re training self-awareness into it, not as a system prompt but baked into the weights. state-sheets ([STATE] goal/known/tried/failed/next), metacognition lines, and self-review at the end of tasks. the trajectory sft masks out the system prompt so the model learns to track its own state as behavior, not as a script it repeats. did some benchmark research too. base qwen3.5-9b scores 9.2% on terminal-bench 2.0. comparable 9b fine-tunes hit 24-28%. that’s our realistic target which is 2.5-3x the baseline. honestly at this point it’s just… waiting. the pipeline works, the checkpoints work, the account switching works. now the model just needs to finish cooking. then trajectory sft, then rlvr, then we actually see the benchmark numbers."}, {"post_id": 40029, "ts": "2026-08-03T11:45:18Z", "hours": 13.3375, "text": "# Devlog #9 — finally training, and now with checkpoints! so last time i was stuck debugging phase 1/2 on kaggle. well, still debugging lol, but we actually got somewhere. the first issue was transformers not knowing what the qwen3.5 model was, had to pin transformers 5.14.1. then tokenizers kept fighting with it (0.22.0 wants old huggingface-hub, 0.22.1 is fine). then torch on kaggle kept giving a p100 which modern pytorch just refuses to run on, so we had to tell it to give us a t4 instead. then the fun one: out of memory on the very first step. batch 2 was too big for the gpu they gave us, so batch 1 it is. also i learned the hard way that kaggle kills your session after 12 hours. the first long run got cancelled at 80% done and i had nothing saved. so now the training script saves a checkpoint every 20% + every hour and uploads it to huggingface, so if it dies we just resume. it actually saved us, the run got cut and we picked right back up from the checkpoint. right now the full 160k sft is running on modal (paying for gpus now, kaggle time ran out). it’s at like 9% and should take a couple days. we’ll see how it goes, and then rlvr after that. the end of the errors… might actually be in sight this time."}, {"post_id": 38292, "ts": "2026-07-31T16:38:26Z", "hours": 5.4886, "text": "Devlog #8 — phase 2 fixes I’ve been getting a lot of issues with the first two for this model. I’ve gotten a lot of errors in Kaggle and Colab. I’ve tried everything, and I’m still fixing the code. It’s taking a good amount of time, but I think I’m almost there. I’ve gone through a lot of errors, and I’m probably right at the end of the errors. I might be able to start actually training it tomorrow, but for now I’ll stop."}, {"post_id": 38079, "ts": "2026-07-31T09:21:05Z", "hours": 10.3872, "text": "Devlog #7 — phase 2 running phase 1 (sft) is done and phase 2 (rlvr) is running now on kaggle. this is the part where the model actually gets trained on solving coding problems with our verifier giving rewards, not just imitating fable data. honestly this is the part i care about more. sft just makes it mimic. rlvr is where it learns to actually fix code. grpo with proportional rewards = the model gets partial credit for getting some tests passing, which is way better than all-or-nothing. while it runs im just waiting tbh. not much to build. the pipeline works, the eval works, the agent works. next after this: full benchmark run. humaneval, swebench, agentic eval. we’ll see if all this actually made the model good at coding or if i just spent a week on a worse qwen lol."}, {"post_id": 37100, "ts": "2026-07-29T16:05:47Z", "hours": 8.4747, "text": "Devlog #6 — training done (phase 1) finally got the qwen finetune to actually run with 625 steps, took like 8 hours on kaggle. it finished. havent run full benchmarks yet cause i was busy building other stuff while it trained. but it trained. thats the main thing. I also built a swebench agent that can actually navigate repos and edit files and make patches. not just the basic agent loop that runs commands. this one actually works for real se tasks. also added swebench eval so we can measure if the model is actually good at fixing bugs and coding then i’ll run the benchmarks on the trained model and see if its actually any good lol."}, {"post_id": 36367, "ts": "2026-07-28T13:16:16Z", "hours": 13.6447, "text": "Devlog #5 — ok so I’m not building a 10B MoE anymore So last time I had this whole plan. 10B MoE, from scratch, SwiGLU, GQA, all that. And I actually built it. Like 60 Python files, tests passing, RL pipeline, self-play data gen, the whole thing. It was kinda sick ngl. But then I was like… wait. I’m building an ENGINE that TRAINS coding agents. Not the agent. And the engine is cool but training a 10B model from zero on $30 of Modal credits is not how you beat GLM-5.2. You know what beats GLM-5.2? Fine-tuning a model that already knows how to code. the pivot (again) Qwen3.5-9B came out. 9B params. Fits on a Kaggle T4 with 4-bit QLoRA. And Kaggle gives me 30 HOURS of free GPU. 2× T4. That’s literally free training. So I had to adapt the entire codebase to work with HuggingFace models instead of my custom GPT. Made like 5 new files. All the verifier/agent/reward stuff I built for the MoE? Now works with Qwen too. Didn’t have to rewrite everything — just slapped a Qwen adapter on top. the dataset Found this dataset on HF: Nexlab/fable5-agentic-coding-sft . 160K rows of Claude Fable 5 output. Like actual coding traces — building games, fixing bugs, writing shell scripts. Not just “write a function that passes a test.” Real agentic stuff. Training right now actually. Qwen3.5-9B on 10K rows. Should take like 8 hours on 2× T4. We’ll see if it doesn’t OOM again lol. While waiting for training I read papers: Routing-Free MoE — what if experts just decide for themselves when to activate? No router, no top-k. Already implemented it in model.py. GLM-5.2 has this IndexShare thing that reuses computation across layers. 2.9× cheaper at 1M context. Maybe later. DeepSWE trained Qwen3-32B with RL only and got 42% SWE-Bench. So our approach is valid. the first phase of training is going on right now, i’ll post another devlog once it’s done!"}, {"post_id": 20759, "ts": "2026-07-02T13:35:48Z", "hours": 5.6175, "text": "Devlog #4 — wait, why am I training on Wikipedia? Last week I got le gros chaton (my from-scratch transformer) to actually train. Ran it on wikitext-103 in a Colab notebook on a free T4, 12k steps, val loss hit 3.73. Felt insane for something I wrote myself from PyTorch primitives. But then I looked at what it generated. It could do English-ish. It knew about Singapore and stuff. The moment I asked it to write code? Total garbage. Fair enough. It has never seen a single line of code. the pivot I thought about what I actually want this thing to do. Answer: a coding agent. Something that mogs on terminal-bench, that you give a task and it runs commands, fixes its own bugs, gets it done. Qwen-coder territory. Wikitext won’t get me there. You can’t learn Python from Wikipedia articles about the snake. So the plan changed. The big project is now le fat chaton, the bigger sibling. And it’s a coder. the architecture stuff I went down a rabbit hole on what frontier coding models do. They’re basically all mixture-of-experts (MoE) now. Qwen3-coder is 480B params / 35B active. Deepseek-coder-v2-lite is 16B / 2.4B active. The trick: big total params (knows a lot) small active params per token (runs fast and cheap) Runs like a small model, knows like a big one. Exactly what I want for a snappy terminal agent. So I rewrote the model. Added an MoE class. A gate routes each token to its top-2 experts out of 8, with a load-balance loss so the router doesn’t pick the same expert every time. Also threw in: SwiGLU — gated MLP, basically free quality, every Llama uses it GQA — smaller KV cache, faster long-context decoding (the agent harness needs this) Shared expert — DeepSeek-style, one always-on expert for common knowledge Fat config math: ~10.25B total / ~3.65B active. Not building that locally, it would crash my PC again. the data question Wikitext was a fine proof. For the coder I need code. Options: smollm-corpus python-edu — 7.6M educational Python files, high quality, but gated behind S3 (slow pull) starcoderdata python — ~50GB Python, streams fast from HF, the Codellama workhorse the-stack-v2 — 900B tokens, overkill for my budget Going with starcoderdata Python, blended with ~15-20% cosmopedia (prose) so it has general knowledge. That blend is the Qwen-coder recipe. am I warm-starting from wikitext? No. Different architecture entirely (17M dense vs 10B MoE, weights don’t fit). Even if they did, warm-starting a coder from prose wastes compute unlearning prose. Fresh random init on the mixed corpus. Clean slate. This went from “lets make a little model that talks” to “lets build a coding agent that mogs the big labs” real fast. Ambitious for a solo student with a 2070 and $30 of Modal credits? Absolutely. Doing it anyway? Yeah. Next: the eval harness so I can measure if this is making the model better at code (pass@1, pass@5 on HumanEval). Val loss going down means nothing if it still can’t write a"}, {"post_id": 20019, "ts": "2026-07-01T14:54:30Z", "hours": 0.3917, "text": "DEVLOG #3: teaching it to talk (fine-tuning) the base model was a completer. ask it “what is 2+2?” and it just continues the sentence. fine-tuning is what makes it actually answer: same model, more training, but on prompt/response pairs. i wrote ~48 Q&A pairs by hand. trivia, math, jokes, hellos. all in the same rigid Q: …\\nA: format. new trick: loss masking. only the response counts toward the loss, not the prompt, so i set prompt targets to -100 (pytorch’s cross_entropy ignores that automatically, zero model changes). tested the mask boundary in isolation first. wrong mask = 400 steps of training the wrong thing. the run: load base weights, 400 steps, lower lr. loss went 12.3 to 0.02.then the reality check. it nails everything in the set. capitals, math, jokes, “who are you,” verbatim. but something NOT in the set? slop. 17M params + 48 examples is a lookup table, not a reasoner. real chat models are billions of params. not a bug, just the scale.but it’s finally coherent. the first base model was word salad. now you type a question and get a real answer back that makes sense. it’s tiny and dumb and can’t generalize, but it actually talks. that’s the win. full pipeline done: tokenizer, model from scratch, pretrain on wikipedia, fine-tune, chat. mine, it talks, i understand every piece."}, {"post_id": 20006, "ts": "2026-07-01T14:16:25Z", "hours": 0.4139, "text": "DEVLOG #2: real data, real loss, and a lesson about memorizing split my data into 90% train / 10% val. before i only had one number, training loss, and it lies to you. you can’t tell learning from memorizing with just that. now i check both every 200 steps. rule: both go down = learning. train down but val up = memorizing = useless.also made the model bigger, 7M -> 17.7M params. immediately ran out of gpu memory lol. dropped batch size to 32 to fit my 8GB card.training: 3000 steps. loss started at 158 (should be ~10 for random , my first pass blew up and made garbage). recovered fast though, didn’t ruin the run. right now the llm is spitting out gibberish and random words but after finetuning it should sound more coherent"}, {"post_id": 19989, "ts": "2026-07-01T13:48:37Z", "hours": 36.31, "text": "DEVLOG #1: wiki text training so i finally got the model to train on actual data instead of that one paragraph about singapore nature reserves lol. before this the whole thing was basically a joke, i trained a 7M parameter transformer on like 134 tokens and it just spat out jumbled fragments of the same sentence over and over. cool proof it worked but definitely not a “language model” in any real sense.anyway. the big move this week was swapping out the tiny json file for wikitext-2. that’s a huggingface dataset of wikipedia text, about 2.4 million tokens once you filter out the empty lines. that’s… a lot more than 134 lol. encoding it took maybe half a minute with tiktoken and the whole tensor fits on my gpu no problem (it’s only like 8MB of ints)."}]...
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Title: le-fat-chaton by @unknown_lizzard | Stardan Title: le-fat-chaton by @unknown_lizzard | Stardance
Devlogs:
DEVLOG #1: wiki text training so i finally got the model to train on actual data instead of that one paragraph about singapore nature reserves lol. before this the whole thing was basically a joke, i trained a 7M parameter transformer on like 134 tokens and it just spat out jumbled fragments of the same sentence over and over. cool proof it worked but definitely not a “language model” in any real sense.anyway. the big move this week was swapping out the tiny json file for wikitext-2. that’s a huggingface dataset of wikipedia text, about 2.4 million tokens once you filter out the empty lines. that’s… a lot more than 134 lol. encoding it took maybe half a minute with tiktoken and the whole tensor fits on my gpu no problem (it’s only like 8MB of ints).
DEVLOG #2: real data, real loss, and a lesson about memorizing split my data into 90% train / 10% val. before i only had one number, training loss, and it lies to you. you can’t tell learning from memorizing with just that. now i check both every 200 steps. rule: both go down = learning. train down but val up = memorizing = useless.also made the model bigger, 7M -> 17.7M params. immediately ran out of gpu memory lol. dropped batch size to 32 to fit my 8GB card.training: 3000 steps. loss started at 158 (should be ~10 for random , my first pass blew up and made garbage). recovered fast though, didn’t ruin the run. right now the llm is spitting out gibberish and random words but after finetuning it should sound more coherent
DEVLOG #3: teaching it to talk (fine-tuning) the base model was a completer. ask it “what is 2+2?” and it just continues the sentence. fine-tuning is what makes it actually answer: same model, more training, but on prompt/response pairs. i wrote ~48 Q&A pairs by hand. trivia, math, jokes, hellos. all in the same rigid Q: …\nA: format. new trick: loss masking. only the response counts toward the loss, not the prompt, so i set prompt targets to -100 (pytorch’s cross_entropy ignores that automatically, zero model changes). tested the mask boundary in isolation first. wrong mask = 400 steps of training the wrong thing. the run: load base weights, 400 steps, lower lr. loss went 12.3 to 0.02.then the reality check. it nails everything in the set. capitals, math, jokes, “who are you,” verbatim. but something NOT in the set? slop. 17M params + 48 examples is a lookup table, not a reasoner. real chat models are billions of params. not a bug, just the scale.but it’s finally coherent. the first base model was word salad. now you type a question and get a real answer back that makes sense. it’s tiny and dumb and can’t generalize, but it actually talks. that’s the win. full pipeline done: tokenizer, model from scratch, pretrain on wikipedia, fine-tune, chat. mine, it talks, i understand every piece.
Devlog #4 — wait, why am I training on Wikipedia? Last week I got le gros chaton (my from-scratch transformer) to actually train. Ran it on wikitext-103 in a Colab notebook on a free T4, 12k steps, val loss hit 3.73. Felt insane for something I wrote myself from PyTorch primitives. But then I looked at what it generated. It could do English-ish. It knew about Singapore and stuff. The moment I asked it to write code? Total garbage. Fair enough. It has never seen a single line of code. the pivot I thought about what I actually want this thing to do. Answer: a coding agent. Something that mogs on terminal-bench, that you give a task and it runs commands, fixes its own bugs, gets it done. Qwen-coder territory. Wikitext won’t get me there. You can’t learn Python from Wikipedia articles about the snake. So the plan changed. The big project is now le fat chaton, the bigger sibling. And it’s a coder. the architecture stuff I went down a rabbit hole on what frontier coding models do. They’re basically all mixture-of-experts (MoE) now. Qwen3-coder is 480B params / 35B active. Deepseek-coder-v2-lite is 16B / 2.4B active. The trick: big total params (knows a lot) small active params per token (runs fast and cheap) Runs like a small model, knows like a big one. Exactly what I want for a snappy terminal agent. So I rewrote the model. Added an MoE class. A gate routes each token to its top-2 experts out of 8, with a load-balance loss so the router doesn’t pick the same expert every time. Also threw in: SwiGLU — gated MLP, basically free quality, every Llama uses it GQA — smaller KV cache, faster long-context decoding (the agent harness needs this) Shared expert — DeepSeek-style, one always-on expert for common knowledge Fat config math: ~10.25B total / ~3.65B active. Not building that locally, it would crash my PC again. the data question Wikitext was a fine proof. For the coder I need code. Options: smollm-corpus python-edu — 7.6M educational Python files, high quality, but gated behind S3 (slow pull) starcoderdata python — ~50GB Python, streams fast from HF, the Codellama workhorse the-stack-v2 — 900B tokens, overkill for my budget Going with starcoderdata Python, blended with ~15-20% cosmopedia (prose) so it has general knowledge. That blend is the Qwen-coder recipe. am I warm-starting from wikitext? No. Different architecture entirely (17M dense vs 10B MoE, weights don’t fit). Even if they did, warm-starting a coder from prose wastes compute unlearning prose. Fresh random init on the mixed corpus. Clean slate. This went from “lets make a little model that talks” to “lets build a coding agent that mogs the big labs” real fast. Ambitious for a solo student with a 2070 and $30 of Modal credits? Absolutely. Doing it anyway? Yeah. Next: the eval harness so I can measure if this is making the model better at code (pass@1, pass@5 on HumanEval). Val loss going down means nothing if it still can’t write a
Devlog #5 — ok so I’m not building a 10B MoE anymore So last time I had this whole plan. 10B MoE, from scratch, SwiGLU, GQA, all that. And I actually built it. Like 60 Python files, tests passing, RL pipeline, self-play data gen, the whole thing. It was kinda sick ngl. But then I was like… wait. I’m building an ENGINE that TRAINS coding agents. Not the agent. And the engine is cool but training a 10B model from zero on $30 of Modal credits is not how you beat GLM-5.2. You know what beats GLM-5.2? Fine-tuning a model that already knows how to code. the pivot (again) Qwen3.5-9B came out. 9B params. Fits on a Kaggle T4 with 4-bit QLoRA. And Kaggle gives me 30 HOURS of free GPU. 2× T4. That’s literally free training. So I had to adapt the entire codebase to work with HuggingFace models instead of my custom GPT. Made like 5 new files. All the verifier/agent/reward stuff I built for the MoE? Now works with Qwen too. Didn’t have to rewrite everything — just slapped a Qwen adapter on top. the dataset Found this dataset on HF: Nexlab/fable5-agentic-coding-sft . 160K rows of Claude Fable 5 output. Like actual coding traces — building games, fixing bugs, writing shell scripts. Not just “write a function that passes a test.” Real agentic stuff. Training right now actually. Qwen3.5-9B on 10K rows. Should take like 8 hours on 2× T4. We’ll see if it doesn’t OOM again lol. While waiting for training I read papers: Routing-Free MoE — what if experts just decide for themselves when to activate? No router, no top-k. Already implemented it in model.py. GLM-5.2 has this IndexShare thing that reuses computation across layers. 2.9× cheaper at 1M context. Maybe later. DeepSWE trained Qwen3-32B with RL only and got 42% SWE-Bench. So our approach is valid. the first phase of training is going on right now, i’ll post another devlog once it’s done!
Devlog #6 — training done (phase 1) finally got the qwen finetune to actually run with 625 steps, took like 8 hours on kaggle. it finished. havent run full benchmarks yet cause i was busy building other stuff while it trained. but it trained. thats the main thing. I also built a swebench agent that can actually navigate repos and edit files and make patches. not just the basic agent loop that runs commands. this one actually works for real se tasks. also added swebench eval so we can measure if the model is actually good at fixing bugs and coding then i’ll run the benchmarks on the trained model and see if its actually any good lol.
Devlog #7 — phase 2 running phase 1 (sft) is done and phase 2 (rlvr) is running now on kaggle. this is the part where the model actually gets trained on solving coding problems with our verifier giving rewards, not just imitating fable data. honestly this is the part i care about more. sft just makes it mimic. rlvr is where it learns to actually fix code. grpo with proportional rewards = the model gets partial credit for getting some tests passing, which is way better than all-or-nothing. while it runs im just waiting tbh. not much to build. the pipeline works, the eval works, the agent works. next after this: full benchmark run. humaneval, swebench, agentic eval. we’ll see if all this actually made the model good at coding or if i just spent a week on a worse qwen lol.
Devlog #8 — phase 2 fixes I’ve been getting a lot of issues with the first two for this model. I’ve gotten a lot of errors in Kaggle and Colab. I’ve tried everything, and I’m still fixing the code. It’s taking a good amount of time, but I think I’m almost there. I’ve gone through a lot of errors, and I’m probably right at the end of the errors. I might be able to start actually training it tomorrow, but for now I’ll stop.
# Devlog #9 — finally training, and now with checkpoints! so last time i was stuck debugging phase 1/2 on kaggle. well, still debugging lol, but we actually got somewhere. the first issue was transformers not knowing what the qwen3.5 model was, had to pin transformers 5.14.1. then tokenizers kept fighting with it (0.22.0 wants old huggingface-hub, 0.22.1 is fine). then torch on kaggle kept giving a p100 which modern pytorch just refuses to run on, so we had to tell it to give us a t4 instead. then the fun one: out of memory on the very first step. batch 2 was too big for the gpu they gave us, so batch 1 it is. also i learned the hard way that kaggle kills your session after 12 hours. the first long run got cancelled at 80% done and i had nothing saved. so now the training script saves a checkpoint every 20% + every hour and uploads it to huggingface, so if it dies we just resume. it actually saved us, the run got cut and we picked right back up from the checkpoint. right now the full 160k sft is running on modal (paying for gpus now, kaggle time ran out). it’s at like 9% and should take a couple days. we’ll see how it goes, and then rlvr after that. the end of the errors… might actually be in sight this time.
** Devlog #10 the full training is finally running ** ok so phase 1 full training is officially going. 160k rows of fable5 data on modal, resuming from the 12.8k rows we got on kaggle before the session cap killed us. we’re at ~27% and it should take like a day and a half total. big stuff that happened since last time: fast kernels actually work now. the model has hybrid linear-attention layers and transformers kept falling back to a slow torch path. the fix was: nvidia cuda-devel base image (needs nvcc to compile), installing flash-linear-attention[cuda] + causal-conv1d , and pinning torch 2.10. took a couple tries but now training is like 4x faster than it would be without them. had to split across two modal accounts. first account ran out of credits, so we set up a second profile and the script auto-resumes from the huggingface checkpoints when it dies. it’s been rock solid, it happens every 20% plus every hour it saves and uploads. lost zero progress to the account switch. we gave the model a personality. it’s called Le Gros Chaton (the fat cat) and we’re training self-awareness into it, not as a system prompt but baked into the weights. state-sheets ([STATE] goal/known/tried/failed/next), metacognition lines, and self-review at the end of tasks. the trajectory sft masks out the system prompt so the model learns to track its own state as behavior, not as a script it repeats. did some benchmark research too. base qwen3.5-9b scores 9.2% on terminal-bench 2.0. comparable 9b fine-tunes hit 24-28%. that’s our realistic target which is 2.5-3x the baseline. honestly at this point it’s just… waiting. the pipeline works, the checkpoints work, the account switching works. now the model just needs to finish cooking. then trajectory sft, then rlvr, then we actually see the benchmark numbers.
** Devlog #11 half way there! ** the training is going pretty well, I fixed a few bugs with the code and added documentation training is at 50%!
Devlog #12 training kept dying for the last 10 hours the training kept crashing. not the model, not the gp but the modal client. every hour or so it would lose connection and take the whole run down with it. we’d restart, it’d run an hour, crash again. three times. the fix was simple: modal run -d runs detached, so the training lives on modal’s servers and doesn’t care if our local process dies. killed the client on purpose to test — training kept going. that’s it, that’s the fix. also worried the loss wasn’t moving but it was fine. lr had wound down on the crashed run, looked scary, re-warmed fine after restart. loss is 0.668 now and dropping. status: 72% through the fable5 sft. checkpoints safe on hf. after this: trajectory sft with the self-awareness stuff baked in, then rlvr, then real numbers.
Devlog #13 we worked ALOT so this was the grind day. 18 hours of training babysitting and honestly it felt like 40. the modal training kept dying every hour. the client would crash and take the whole run with it. we restarted like 3 times before figuring out modal run -d (detached) keeps it alive on their servers even if our computer shits the bed. tested it by literally killing the process and it kept going. ez fix but we worked ALOT to get there. then we ran out of credits at 93% and switched accounts, but the other account “finished” the run in 6 MILLISECONDS which was sus af. turns out it just re-uploaded the old checkpoint and trained nothing. the resume logic had a bug where it thought 6200 >= 3799 meant done. patched it. another lesson learned. also we made the model creative lol. added diversity sampling to the trajectory generator (5 solutions per task, keep the novel ones), a novelty bonus reward for RLVR, and a creativity rule in the self-awareness prompt. so the fat cat will be innovative, not just memorize. current state: SFT is done at 91% (good enough), resume bug fixed, phase 2 (trajectory SFT with creativity + self-awareness baked in) is up next. 18 hours. we worked ALOT. the fat cat will be worth it 😼
Devlog #14 worked a lot, still not done we worked a lot this week. honestly the main takeaway is that the fable5 sft was good but its traces alone weren’t enough the model needs way more verified agent trajectories, so we’ve been grinding those out (target is 450). we also ran out of credits mid-generation (the modal endpoint started failing with 503s) and had to switch to a second kimi account. took a minute to get the auth right the new endpoint wanted an extra header we didn’t have. after that the generator resumed fine and it’s been adding verified traces since (~340/450 now). biggest scare: we found out peft 0.20 silently drops the second adapter when you merge two at once. tested it and yeah, the outputs were identical with one or two adapters so our trajectory sft would have been lost in the merge. fixed it by merging sequentially (base first, then the second adapter). checked against the live model and it matches, so we’re good. my 2070 couldn’t fit the 9b model for real training, so we’re waiting on a 4090 (my dad’s) next week. all the scripts are ready sft, merge, rlvr, eval, even a setup script for the gpu box. just need the hardware. status: 340/450 traces, everything ready, waiting on the 4090. we’ve worked a lot, but the real run hasn’t happened yet :/.
Devlog 15 Traces are done The trace generator finally hit the target and went past it. We got 474 verified trajectories, zero malformed, zero duplicates, 19 templates, and a 95 percent self review pass rate. We were aiming for 450, so we ended up with 474. The dataset is synced to Hugging Face in two versions: raw and normalized. That part is finally done. It was the longest part of the project, and the model is only going to be as good as the traces, so getting this right was important The Kimi endpoint also stopped working. The old teacher account started returning 503 errors during generation and eventually died completely. We switched to a second Kimi account, which needed an extra header that we did not have at first. After figuring that out, generation resumed without losing any progress For GPUs, the 2070 still cannot realistically train the 9B. Kaggle hours are back, so we have 30 hours on a T4. The 4090 from my dad should arrive next week. The plan is to use the T4 for trajectory SFT, then the 4090 for merging, Terminal Bench evaluation, and RLVR. Status: 474 out of 474 traces done,
Devlog #16, t4gpu The T4 16GB fought us the whole way. BF16 was baked into a pre quantized checkpoint, which made each step take 668 seconds because it had to use FP32 emulation. 2K context ran out of memory, the 248K logits ran out of memory too, FP16 started producing NaNs, Kaggle session limits locked us out, and the paged optimizer crashed last. Every fix seemed to create another problem. We eventually got it working with FP16 compute, chunked assistant token loss, autocast, and plain AdamW. Then we got access to an AMD MI300X with 192GB of memory. No quantization, 16K context, and enough memory to train full traces instead of cutting them off halfway through a message. Right now the 16K BF16 SFT run is training on the MI300X. Next up is merging the model, running Terminal Bench, and then RLVR.
devlog #17 MI300X vLLM serving The old GPU box got destroyed, so I spun up a new MI300X with the same SSH key. ROCm 6.2 and Torch 2.5.1 were already set up, so getting the machine ready was easy. The hard part was vLLM. The pip version is CUDA only, and the ROCm Docker image only supported the multimodal version of Qwen3.5. Our model is text-only, so I had to patch the image. I added Qwen3_5ForCausalLM, fixed the hybrid KV-cache setup, added the missing Mamba state methods, and mapped the weight names so the text-only safetensors loaded correctly. I also patched the merged config to remove the M-RoPE and dtype fields. After that, the model served normally. I ran a one-task test with fix-git. The pipeline worked, but the model got stuck repeating git show until it ran out of turns. ##Shipped The merged model is now public on Hugging Face as mateo0093/le-gros-chaton under Apache-2.0. The 5×5 Terminal-Bench pilot finished at 3/25 (25%). All three successes were on fix-git, which shows that the SFT data was too focused on git tasks. I also tested RLVR with GRPO and a novelty bonus. The reward had almost no variance, so the training signal was basically useless. I saved the step-10 adapter but didn’t merge it. The GPU used about 12 hours of the 50 hour budget. All the vLLM patches and harness changes are in the repo. Main lesson: Qwen3.5’s hybrid model is a bit annoying to serve as text-only on ROCm. The model works but i think this was more of a learning opportunity, i know what i’ve done wrong and what i would have done differently, I will be working on a new model in a few weeks once I do a bit more research.
Ships:
at first I wanted to make a normal text model to try and learn more about llms, but I wanted to go further, agentic coding is a big thing so what better way to learn about llms than trying to make an agentic coding ai model. So thats how le gros chaton was born, the name originated from a joke on x about a fake huge mistral model coming out. to train this model I used already made datasets on hugging face, like fable5 traces, I also used kimi k3 as a teacher model to teach my smaller model to be good at coding and running commands, it kind of worked? but i’m not completely satisfied with the result, but at least i have learned some things and soon enough I will trying making an even better model! I dont have a demo url for you guys to try the model out since it was too expensive to run on a gpu so you’ll need to run it yourself, check it out on hugging face, follow the instructions and have fun....
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FPEeee by @Duck | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-1 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-10-24T04:30:31Z", "hours": 58.0, "multiplier": null, "payout": 0, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is an updated version of my physics engine, using a new simulation method called XPBD! It was a bit challenging learning the basics of vector calculus, but it was worth it for the added flexibility of XPBD constraints and integration. I’m also really proud of getting OpenGL rendering working for some of the demos, because making an 3D renderer could be a project in and of itself! (Not this renderer though, it’s pretty barebones.) I’m especially happy with the cloth demo, with the best 3D rendering and (in my opinion) the best showcase of the engine’s features! (Also the least laggy of them all? I know why but it’s still kinda weird, being the most complex demo.) Writing it in C was a probably a bit harder than using a higher level language like C++, but being able to compile the entire project from source in less than two seconds on my machine was a big plus! I hope you enjoy playing with the physics demos! I worked really hard on this project!!", "repo": "https://github.com/duckdood/fpeeee", "demo": "https://duckdood.github.io/physics_demo"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-09-06T04:53:48Z", "hours": 133.0, "multiplier": 16.74, "payout": 1850, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is a position-based physics engine made all in C for portability and versatility. It had many challenging moments when making it, such as triangle collisions, spatial partitioning, performance optimization, and more, but I had a lot of fun building it, showing it off to my friends and family, and learning more about physics.", "repo": "https://github.com/duckdood/fpeeee", "demo": "https://duckdood.github.io/physics_demo"}]...
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[{"post_id": 80800, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 80800, "ts": "2026-10-18T20:26:33Z", "hours": 1.6025, "text": "Devlog #22 (I just realized that I accidentally did two devlog #15s but it’s too late now) Getting ready for another ship I edited some constraints to be more stable, edited the website to be a bit more clear of where the controls are if your screen is too small to fit them, and had a NIGHTMARE fiddling with ffmpeg to try and replace the video on the README to not be too laggy or low quality but also not too big. I also tried to do some performance optimizations for phones, but I couldn’t figure it out. This is the mp4 version animated WebP that I eventually got ffmpeg to spit out. For some reason animated WebPs don’t work in devlogs."}, {"post_id": 79264, "ts": "2026-10-13T08:10:35Z", "hours": 2.3019, "text": "Devlog #21 MERGING I’ve been rewriting a lot of the physics engine for XPBD (eXtended Position Based Dynamics) since the last ship, but on a separate branch so that if I broke anything too bad it wouldn’t show up on the website, but today I finally merged the xpbd branch into main. Sadly, it is a fair bit slower than the previous verlet integration (at least for my simple demos), but it’s a far more flexible integration and constraint scheme and I think the tradeoff is worth it. (I am a bit disappointed with the performance on the website though, I swear it was faster before I merged it! It’s a lot faster natively!)"}, {"post_id": 78023, "ts": "2026-10-09T07:13:56Z", "hours": 4.0489, "text": "Devlog #20 Another constraint, and another failed side project. Boundary constraint I added a constraint that I named a “boundary constraint”, that confines a particle to being on the specific side of a line e.g. making four lines around the edges of the screen and making sure the particle is on the side which is visible on screen. This is different from a wall because walls have two sides (and also zero thickness) which can cause a particle that’s going super fast to completely pass through to the other side of the wall in a single physics step, whereas with a boundary it will always snap it back to the correct side of the line. (If this was a bad explanation, I’m sorry). Failed lua integration I suppose the word ‘failed’ is a bit harsh in this scenario, I was just dipping my toes into integrating a little lua shell into the demos that would let you spawn particles and stuff programatically, but I decided it wasn’t worth it for small demos that aren’t meant to be super duper flexible anyway because they’re just meant to show off cool features the engine can do. throwing balls very quickly at the wall, which don’t clip through VVV"}, {"post_id": 75992, "ts": "2026-10-01T22:09:53Z", "hours": 10.0394, "text": "Devlog #19 Optimization and Interaction I’ve optimized the triangle collision code to use the spatial partitioning I implemented before for collisions. It goes through each triangle and checks what balls are in its bounding box with the collision grid, and completely skips any balls that aren’t close. This allows for about a thousand balls in a scene (at least on my computer), which is a lot better than the hundred or so you’d get with just bounding box checks and the tens or so you would get with a naive approach. Sadly, this change is only on the XPBD branch for now, meaning it won’t reflect on the website, but you’d still probably have to be spawning balls for a while for that to slow down, depending on the computer. I’ve also added far better interaction to the cloth, using some matrix multiplication and some raycast tests, you can now drag the cloth around with your mouse! This change was on the main branch too, so this is right on the website , right now! I did try to implement a system for having the cloth tear when it was under stress, but it would have required me to rework a lot of stuff and it didn’t quite work out. :("}, {"post_id": 74317, "ts": "2026-09-27T05:22:56Z", "hours": 11.4481, "text": "Devlog #18 Fluid simulation For a couple days I’ve been researching and trying to implement a PBF (position based fluid) fluid simulation, but there are barely any resources on the topic that I’ve been able to find, and the ones I have found are very math oriented with evil cryptic symbols that take a while to wrap my head around. The fluid simulation does work, but it’s much laggier, a lot finickier, and not a lot better (if at all better) than just chucking a couple thousand balls together and having them collide normally."}, {"post_id": 72994, "ts": "2026-09-24T05:51:47Z", "hours": 9.7506, "text": "Devlog #17 OpenGL integration I spend the last couple days integrating OpenGL rendering into a couple of the projects, meaning the graphics will be a lot better and rendered on the GPU instead of being rendered on the CPU, as well as speeding up the demos because even with the added visual complexity, the GPU is just so much faster at rendering! I made these changes of the main branch so that they would reflect on the website sooner, but git’s merge system is actually super good and it took no more than 15 minutes to merge the OpenGL rendering to the XPBD branch. I’ve only migrated over the cloth and fluid demos, but they’re the ones that needed it the most, and it’s not too hard to add it to more demos after I’ve had most of the OpenGL boilerplate implemented."}, {"post_id": 70439, "ts": "2026-09-19T06:17:10Z", "hours": 8.4, "text": "Devlog #16 I migrated the XPBD stuff to 3D and moved all the demos to work with it as well, not much interesting to talk about though. Here’s a demo of it working though"}, {"post_id": 66409, "ts": "2026-09-12T07:11:52Z", "hours": 10.2822, "text": "Devlog #15: Rebuilding because why not A bit before shipping, I heard about another physics method called XPBD (extended position based dynamics) that’s a lot more powerful and flexible, and I decided, after I would ship, I would try to convert my engine to that. I kinda have to remake almost all of the physics stuff I already made, but I can recycle a lot of the older code, just making it fit the new framework, and being a lot more educated about physics simulation stuff than when I started this project, it wasn’t too hard to rewrite some new stuff. Right now I have ported over my ball pit thingy, not a lot to show that’s different from old devlogs, but hey, it’s the inside that counts, right?"}, {"post_id": 62664, "ts": "2026-09-06T04:32:53Z", "hours": 6.1839, "text": "Devlog #15: shipping! Super small devlog, just editing the website and the README and stuff like that, really want to ship now! It just took a while to add messages to all the different demos and I may have tried a little bit of engine stuff but it just didn’t work out."}, {"post_id": 59457, "ts": "2026-09-01T10:01:32Z", "hours": 10.425, "text": "Devlog #14 I added edge detection for 3D triangles and other miscellaneous stuff, like improving the website, adding VSync to the demos, but that stuff’s boring so I’m just going to show off the new demo! It might be the coolest one so far, but it was one of the easiest to make. I’m planning on shipping real soon though, just wanna add a few things to the website and readme!"}, {"post_id": 56613, "ts": "2026-08-28T13:09:26Z", "hours": 10.6511, "text": "Devlog #13 I added triangle-walls which vertices are 3 dynamic spheres, which can collide with other particles and have all 4 particles update with their own velocities! This makes the engine a lot more flexible, so you don’t have to make big grids of spheres if you want to be able to have walls that can move, instead of being static. And it makes rigidbodies (probably) possible! (Press enter to spawn balls) Demo! This devlog is a bit long, sorry! I didn’t want to go too far over 10 hours like a did a couple devlogs ago. 2D 2D is, of course, simpler than 3D, and the length of the function for these walls definitely show that (~40 lines). I used the same algorithm to find the closest position on a line to another position as I used for detecting collisions on the edges of the static 3D walls a while ago. It gives you a lerpable value from from the first point to the second point of the line, and you can use that to find the point you are looking for. Comparing it to the circle you’re checking against, will give the distance and the normal of the collision. You can use that information to move the circle out of the wall, and push the wall away, using the value to lerp between as the ratio to push each of the points that the wall is made of away. 3D This function is a bit more complicated, being about 80 lines long, but a lot of the information in the 2D version is applicable here too. Here, instead of trying to find the closest point, we are trying to find the barycentric coordinates of the point, which is similar to the value to lerp between the two points in 2D, but for 3D (It’s basically just 3 numbers which tell you how close you are to each vertex of a triangle, and can describe any point on the triangle). This involves find the triangle’s area that you are checking against using the cross product, getting the distance of the point inward to the triangle for each edge, and calculating some inverse areas, which magically (not really) give you the barycentric coordinates. We then use these coordinates, as long as the distance to the triangle face using the dot product, to figure out whether the ball is colliding with the face, and if so, moving the ball outside of the triangle and moving the 3 vertices away as well, of course using each barycentric coordinate as a weight for how much to move each individual vertex. I haven’t implemented detections with the edges of the triangles exactly yet though, only the faces, but I will try to implement it soon!"}, {"post_id": 50030, "ts": "2026-08-19T01:48:43Z", "hours": 11.2506, "text": "Devlog #12 I improved the website to include multiple demos, and I made a couple improvements to the performance of the spatial partitioning detection, but I’ve mostly just been doing tinkering and testing with the engine some more."}, {"post_id": 31654, "ts": "2026-07-20T07:22:53Z", "hours": 7.2706, "text": "Devlog #11: Not a huge devlog, I’ve mostly been having fun with this little parachute demo I made! I definitely spent too much time just playing with it. I’ve also been experimenting a bit with multithreading, but it’s not in a stable or performant enough state right now to showcase. mp4 compression will hate this"}, {"post_id": 27421, "ts": "2026-07-12T23:48:38Z", "hours": 6.1297, "text": "Devlog #10: I ported the spatial partitioning to 3D! It’s definitely a lot laggier in the 3D environment, because it needs to check 3x the partitions per ball, but it’s still a lot better than having no spatial partitioning at all. One of the problems I encountered when transitioning to 3D was lag, but not in the expected “It’s going to be laggy when you have a lot of balls” way. For some strange reason, the framerate was still below 60 even when there were no balls in the world! It turned out to be an issue with needing to calloc a big region of memory everytime it would sort the balls into their partitions, but I was able to fix it by keeping the allocation throughout the lifetime of the partition grid. I also fixed it in the 2D version, even though it wasn’t really a problem there, it also wasn’t really a problem to fix either. (In the video you will notice the balls disappearing, the sample I whipped up for the devlog just automatically despawns balls when they leave the partitioning grid. Also some balls fly off when spawning, because sometimes the balls spawn inside one another) I’m getting a bit burnt out from this project though, I might ship after maybe adding multithreading, creating the README, and maybe making some more demos. I’ve been watching some videos on real rigidbody physics, and I want to try that out too!"}, {"post_id": 24090, "ts": "2026-07-07T13:02:59Z", "hours": 25.6289, "text": "Devlog #9: Intro I added spatial partitioning to the engine to speed up collisions when you have a lot of balls in a scene. Partitioning explanation Spatial partitioning is an optimization that divides the world into a grid, so balls only check other balls that are in close cells, instead of every ball checking all others, which is O(n^2). It seems pretty simple, but I tried 4 different ways before getting a good result. Judging by the time logged, I struggled. First Attempt (Dense grid) I first tried a naive implementation, which was making a big grid, with each cell having a list of pointers to balls that are in it. The problem is, each cell needs to have the total amount of balls that could be in it allocated. For the best performance, each grid cell should be the same size as a ball, and for the size I use here, you need the grid dimensions to be in the 100s. with 1000 balls, and with 64 bit pointers, you could have 1000 * 8 * 300 * 300 bytes allocated total, ~720 MB. You can get away with a lot less pointers, but that still wasn’t satisfying, or flexible. Second Attempt (Sparse grid) My second try was a grid, but you only store cells which have balls in them. This doesn’t solve the high number of pointers per cell, but it uses less cells overall. It should’ve been easier, but C doesn’t have any built in hashmaps. The physics code doesn’t use many libraries, and I didn’t want to rely on more, so I had the bright idea to make my own hashmap. It didn’t work and I gave up, and that was the end of the sparse grid. Third Attempt (Resizable arrays) The third attempt was like the first, but I decided to try allocating the memory on the fly, when balls moved around, but it didn’t work out. Working Attempt!! (Sorting) The most successful attempt was a grid, every cell is allocated, and yet, uses the least memory. Instead of storing pointers, each cell only stores two things: An offset and a length. Just indices into the ball array, which sounds easy, but then you realize - the balls are in a random order. To fix this, when updating the grid, you sort the balls into the cell they’re in. You may think that going into the dark cave of sorting is a bad idea, but here, it’s just a counting sort. Then it sets each cell’s fields, and you have your partitions. Detecting Collisions Collisions are easier than constructing the grid, you just check every ball, find its cell, check balls in close cells, then you’re done. Struggles There was a lot of friction with memory errors. To fix them, I learned GDB, and learnt about sanitizers, which detect lots of hard to catch memory errors. One time the program would randomly crash, and it was really hard to fix, but a sanitizer detected an easy out of bounds error when rendering. Not even a physics thing. :( Sorry!! Sorry for the long post, and the time it took me to post it, The devlog guide says to keep it short and post often, but I fell down a rabbit hole with optimizing, and was putting off writing as I knew it would be unwieldy in length. I haven’t implemented partitioning in 3d yet, but it should be easy to transfer over. It’s hard to see the balls in the video, but I want to keep the video smaller. It gets laggy in the video as well, but there are 7000 balls in the scene at the end, and I check collisions 15 times per frame, I am also recording too. Try it out If you read all the way down here, you might want to try the engine. I have a build on my pages , but it’s kinda slow on web. Click to attract P to set where the balls shoot to when spawned Enter to spawn balls Scroll to change spawn speed (at least until I change the demo). On some screens the simulation doesn’t show up until you click fullscreen. Sorry for weird wording, max devlog size is 4k characters."}, {"post_id": 13602, "ts": "2026-06-22T09:10:49Z", "hours": 9.5267, "text": "Devlog #8: I added a function that generates wheels (kinda lame), but I also added a GitHub action that automatically compiles and pushes my commits to my GitHub pages so now theres a web demo also i did just like a ton of testing and playing and stuff which is what pushed it to 9 hours"}, {"post_id": 11197, "ts": "2026-06-18T10:07:28Z", "hours": 12.275, "text": "Devlog 7: Finally added mass to the engine! Before now all the particles had the same mass (just implicitly, so basically all of them had a mass of 1), making the small ones super dense. Took so long because I had to migrate back to 2d in order to make sure the mass was working in 2d (everything was in 3d already so I actually added mass to 3d first), and had to update the 2d rendering for it to be able to render in 3d, but now everything (especially springs), is a lot cooler!"}, {"post_id": 7804, "ts": "2026-06-13T00:51:39Z", "hours": 3.5253, "text": "I added the shape generators back for 3d, now we have ✨ 3D cloth ✨!"}, {"post_id": 7351, "ts": "2026-06-12T08:09:41Z", "hours": 12.0594, "text": "Trying to move to 3D, finally got triangle-sphere collisions working the edges were by far the hardest part, the sphere-face collision actually wasn’t too hard the engine wasn’t built for walls to be able to move, but it can handle it semi fine (I’m just having rotating walls for the cool 3d showcase)"}, {"post_id": 3300, "ts": "2026-06-06T04:57:51Z", "hours": 5.0347, "text": "Added some functions that generate shapes for you, for example, cloth!"}, {"post_id": 2633, "ts": "2026-06-05T08:26:08Z", "hours": 1.5244, "text": "not that big but i migrated to the sdl callback system, so it works on emscripten now (can run in browser) ignore my screen recorder quality"}, {"post_id": 2039, "ts": "2026-06-04T10:12:11Z", "hours": 5.5597, "text": "got circle-circle collision working and with a lot of balls its a bit like a fluid cleaned up main.c as well too"}, {"post_id": 721, "ts": "2026-06-02T09:46:29Z", "hours": 5.7058, "text": "includes double pendulum for clout not actually accurate but looks fine it uses verlet integration and supports springs as well"}]...
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Title: FPEeee by @Duck | Stardance
Devlogs:
inclu Title: FPEeee by @Duck | Stardance
Devlogs:
includes double pendulum for clout not actually accurate but looks fine it uses verlet integration and supports springs as well
got circle-circle collision working and with a lot of balls its a bit like a fluid cleaned up main.c as well too
not that big but i migrated to the sdl callback system, so it works on emscripten now (can run in browser) ignore my screen recorder quality
Added some functions that generate shapes for you, for example, cloth!
Trying to move to 3D, finally got triangle-sphere collisions working the edges were by far the hardest part, the sphere-face collision actually wasn’t too hard the engine wasn’t built for walls to be able to move, but it can handle it semi fine (I’m just having rotating walls for the cool 3d showcase)
I added the shape generators back for 3d, now we have ✨ 3D cloth ✨!
Devlog 7: Finally added mass to the engine! Before now all the particles had the same mass (just implicitly, so basically all of them had a mass of 1), making the small ones super dense. Took so long because I had to migrate back to 2d in order to make sure the mass was working in 2d (everything was in 3d already so I actually added mass to 3d first), and had to update the 2d rendering for it to be able to render in 3d, but now everything (especially springs), is a lot cooler!
Devlog #8: I added a function that generates wheels (kinda lame), but I also added a GitHub action that automatically compiles and pushes my commits to my GitHub pages so now theres a web demo also i did just like a ton of testing and playing and stuff which is what pushed it to 9 hours
Devlog #9: Intro I added spatial partitioning to the engine to speed up collisions when you have a lot of balls in a scene. Partitioning explanation Spatial partitioning is an optimization that divides the world into a grid, so balls only check other balls that are in close cells, instead of every ball checking all others, which is O(n^2). It seems pretty simple, but I tried 4 different ways before getting a good result. Judging by the time logged, I struggled. First Attempt (Dense grid) I first tried a naive implementation, which was making a big grid, with each cell having a list of pointers to balls that are in it. The problem is, each cell needs to have the total amount of balls that could be in it allocated. For the best performance, each grid cell should be the same size as a ball, and for the size I use here, you need the grid dimensions to be in the 100s. with 1000 balls, and with 64 bit pointers, you could have 1000 * 8 * 300 * 300 bytes allocated total, ~720 MB. You can get away with a lot less pointers, but that still wasn’t satisfying, or flexible. Second Attempt (Sparse grid) My second try was a grid, but you only store cells which have balls in them. This doesn’t solve the high number of pointers per cell, but it uses less cells overall. It should’ve been easier, but C doesn’t have any built in hashmaps. The physics code doesn’t use many libraries, and I didn’t want to rely on more, so I had the bright idea to make my own hashmap. It didn’t work and I gave up, and that was the end of the sparse grid. Third Attempt (Resizable arrays) The third attempt was like the first, but I decided to try allocating the memory on the fly, when balls moved around, but it didn’t work out. Working Attempt!! (Sorting) The most successful attempt was a grid, every cell is allocated, and yet, uses the least memory. Instead of storing pointers, each cell only stores two things: An offset and a length. Just indices into the ball array, which sounds easy, but then you realize - the balls are in a random order. To fix this, when updating the grid, you sort the balls into the cell they’re in. You may think that going into the dark cave of sorting is a bad idea, but here, it’s just a counting sort. Then it sets each cell’s fields, and you have your partitions. Detecting Collisions Collisions are easier than constructing the grid, you just check every ball, find its cell, check balls in close cells, then you’re done. Struggles There was a lot of friction with memory errors. To fix them, I learned GDB, and learnt about sanitizers, which detect lots of hard to catch memory errors. One time the program would randomly crash, and it was really hard to fix, but a sanitizer detected an easy out of bounds error when rendering. Not even a physics thing. :( Sorry!! Sorry for the long post, and the time it took me to post it, The devlog guide says to keep it short and post often, but I fell down a rabbit hole with optimizing, and was putting off writing as I knew it would be unwieldy in length. I haven’t implemented partitioning in 3d yet, but it should be easy to transfer over. It’s hard to see the balls in the video, but I want to keep the video smaller. It gets laggy in the video as well, but there are 7000 balls in the scene at the end, and I check collisions 15 times per frame, I am also recording too. Try it out If you read all the way down here, you might want to try the engine. I have a build on my pages , but it’s kinda slow on web. Click to attract P to set where the balls shoot to when spawned Enter to spawn balls Scroll to change spawn speed (at least until I change the demo). On some screens the simulation doesn’t show up until you click fullscreen. Sorry for weird wording, max devlog size is 4k characters.
Devlog #10: I ported the spatial partitioning to 3D! It’s definitely a lot laggier in the 3D environment, because it needs to check 3x the partitions per ball, but it’s still a lot better than having no spatial partitioning at all. One of the problems I encountered when transitioning to 3D was lag, but not in the expected “It’s going to be laggy when you have a lot of balls” way. For some strange reason, the framerate was still below 60 even when there were no balls in the world! It turned out to be an issue with needing to calloc a big region of memory everytime it would sort the balls into their partitions, but I was able to fix it by keeping the allocation throughout the lifetime of the partition grid. I also fixed it in the 2D version, even though it wasn’t really a problem there, it also wasn’t really a problem to fix either. (In the video you will notice the balls disappearing, the sample I whipped up for the devlog just automatically despawns balls when they leave the partitioning grid. Also some balls fly off when spawning, because sometimes the balls spawn inside one another) I’m getting a bit burnt out from this project though, I might ship after maybe adding multithreading, creating the README, and maybe making some more demos. I’ve been watching some videos on real rigidbody physics, and I want to try that out too!
Devlog #11: Not a huge devlog, I’ve mostly been having fun with this little parachute demo I made! I definitely spent too much time just playing with it. I’ve also been experimenting a bit with multithreading, but it’s not in a stable or performant enough state right now to showcase. mp4 compression will hate this
Devlog #12 I improved the website to include multiple demos, and I made a couple improvements to the performance of the spatial partitioning detection, but I’ve mostly just been doing tinkering and testing with the engine some more.
Devlog #13 I added triangle-walls which vertices are 3 dynamic spheres, which can collide with other particles and have all 4 particles update with their own velocities! This makes the engine a lot more flexible, so you don’t have to make big grids of spheres if you want to be able to have walls that can move, instead of being static. And it makes rigidbodies (probably) possible! (Press enter to spawn balls) Demo! This devlog is a bit long, sorry! I didn’t want to go too far over 10 hours like a did a couple devlogs ago. 2D 2D is, of course, simpler than 3D, and the length of the function for these walls definitely show that (~40 lines). I used the same algorithm to find the closest position on a line to another position as I used for detecting collisions on the edges of the static 3D walls a while ago. It gives you a lerpable value from from the first point to the second point of the line, and you can use that to find the point you are looking for. Comparing it to the circle you’re checking against, will give the distance and the normal of the collision. You can use that information to move the circle out of the wall, and push the wall away, using the value to lerp between as the ratio to push each of the points that the wall is made of away. 3D This function is a bit more complicated, being about 80 lines long, but a lot of the information in the 2D version is applicable here too. Here, instead of trying to find the closest point, we are trying to find the barycentric coordinates of the point, which is similar to the value to lerp between the two points in 2D, but for 3D (It’s basically just 3 numbers which tell you how close you are to each vertex of a triangle, and can describe any point on the triangle). This involves find the triangle’s area that you are checking against using the cross product, getting the distance of the point inward to the triangle for each edge, and calculating some inverse areas, which magically (not really) give you the barycentric coordinates. We then use these coordinates, as long as the distance to the triangle face using the dot product, to figure out whether the ball is colliding with the face, and if so, moving the ball outside of the triangle and moving the 3 vertices away as well, of course using each barycentric coordinate as a weight for how much to move each individual vertex. I haven’t implemented detections with the edges of the triangles exactly yet though, only the faces, but I will try to implement it soon!
Devlog #14 I added edge detection for 3D triangles and other miscellaneous stuff, like improving the website, adding VSync to the demos, but that stuff’s boring so I’m just going to show off the new demo! It might be the coolest one so far, but it was one of the easiest to make. I’m planning on shipping real soon though, just wanna add a few things to the website and readme!
Devlog #15: shipping! Super small devlog, just editing the website and the README and stuff like that, really want to ship now! It just took a while to add messages to all the different demos and I may have tried a little bit of engine stuff but it just didn’t work out.
Devlog #15: Rebuilding because why not A bit before shipping, I heard about another physics method called XPBD (extended position based dynamics) that’s a lot more powerful and flexible, and I decided, after I would ship, I would try to convert my engine to that. I kinda have to remake almost all of the physics stuff I already made, but I can recycle a lot of the older code, just making it fit the new framework, and being a lot more educated about physics simulation stuff than when I started this project, it wasn’t too hard to rewrite some new stuff. Right now I have ported over my ball pit thingy, not a lot to show that’s different from old devlogs, but hey, it’s the inside that counts, right?
Devlog #16 I migrated the XPBD stuff to 3D and moved all the demos to work with it as well, not much interesting to talk about though. Here’s a demo of it working though
Devlog #17 OpenGL integration I spend the last couple days integrating OpenGL rendering into a couple of the projects, meaning the graphics will be a lot better and rendered on the GPU instead of being rendered on the CPU, as well as speeding up the demos because even with the added visual complexity, the GPU is just so much faster at rendering! I made these changes of the main branch so that they would reflect on the website sooner, but git’s merge system is actually super good and it took no more than 15 minutes to merge the OpenGL rendering to the XPBD branch. I’ve only migrated over the cloth and fluid demos, but they’re the ones that needed it the most, and it’s not too hard to add it to more demos after I’ve had most of the OpenGL boilerplate implemented.
Devlog #18 Fluid simulation For a couple days I’ve been researching and trying to implement a PBF (position based fluid) fluid simulation, but there are barely any resources on the topic that I’ve been able to find, and the ones I have found are very math oriented with evil cryptic symbols that take a while to wrap my head around. The fluid simulation does work, but it’s much laggier, a lot finickier, and not a lot better (if at all better) than just chucking a couple thousand balls together and having them collide normally.
Devlog #19 Optimization and Interaction I’ve optimized the triangle collision code to use the spatial partitioning I implemented before for collisions. It goes through each triangle and checks what balls are in its bounding box with the collision grid, and completely skips any balls that aren’t close. This allows for about a thousand balls in a scene (at least on my computer), which is a lot better than the hundred or so you’d get with just bounding box checks and the tens or so you would get with a naive approach. Sadly, this change is only on the XPBD branch for now, meaning it won’t reflect on the website, but you’d still probably have to be spawning balls for a while for that to slow down, depending on the computer. I’ve also added far better interaction to the cloth, using some matrix multiplication and some raycast tests, you can now drag the cloth around with your mouse! This change was on the main branch too, so this is right on the website , right now! I did try to implement a system for having the cloth tear when it was under stress, but it would have required me to rework a lot of stuff and it didn’t quite work out. :(
Devlog #20 Another constraint, and another failed side project. Boundary constraint I added a constraint that I named a “boundary constraint”, that confines a particle to being on the specific side of a line e.g. making four lines around the edges of the screen and making sure the particle is on the side which is visible on screen. This is different from a wall because walls have two sides (and also zero thickness) which can cause a particle that’s going super fast to completely pass through to the other side of the wall in a single physics step, whereas with a boundary it will always snap it back to the correct side of the line. (If this was a bad explanation, I’m sorry). Failed lua integration I suppose the word ‘failed’ is a bit harsh in this scenario, I was just dipping my toes into integrating a little lua shell into the demos that would let you spawn particles and stuff programatically, but I decided it wasn’t worth it for small demos that aren’t meant to be super duper flexible anyway because they’re just meant to show off cool features the engine can do. throwing balls very quickly at the wall, which don’t clip through VVV
Devlog #21 MERGING I’ve been rewriting a lot of the physics engine for XPBD (eXtended Position Based Dynamics) since the last ship, but on a separate branch so that if I broke anything too bad it wouldn’t show up on the website, but today I finally merged the xpbd branch into main. Sadly, it is a fair bit slower than the previous verlet integration (at least for my simple demos), but it’s a far more flexible integration and constraint scheme and I think the tradeoff is worth it. (I am a bit disappointed with the performance on the website though, I swear it was faster before I merged it! It’s a lot faster natively!)
Devlog #22 (I just realized that I accidentally did two devlog #15s but it’s too late now) Getting ready for another ship I edited some constraints to be more stable, edited the website to be a bit more clear of where the controls are if your screen is too small to fit them, and had a NIGHTMARE fiddling with ffmpeg to try and replace the video on the README to not be too laggy or low quality but also not too big. I also tried to do some performance optimizations for phones, but I couldn’t figure it out. This is the mp4 version animated WebP that I eventually got ffmpeg to spit out. For some reason animated WebPs don’t work in devlogs.
Ships:
This is a position-based physics engine made all in C for portability and versatility. It had many challenging moments when making it, such as triangle collisions, spatial partitioning, performance optimization, and more, but I had a lot of fun building it, showing it off to my friends and family, and learning more about physics.
This is an updated version of my physics engine, using a new simulation method called XPBD! It was a bit challenging learning the basics of vector calculus, but it was worth it for the added flexibility of XPBD constraints and integration. I’m also really proud of getting OpenGL rendering working for some of the demos, because making an 3D renderer could be a project in and of itself! (Not this renderer though, it’s pretty barebones.) I’m especially happy with the cloth demo, with the best 3D rendering and (in my opinion) the best showcase of the engine’s features! (Also the least laggy of them all? I know why but it’s still kinda weird, being the most complex demo.) Writing it in C was a probably a bit harder than using a higher level language like C++, but being able to compile the entire project from source in less than two seconds on my machine was a big plus! I hope you enjoy playing with the physics demos! I worked really hard on this project!!...
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1792846081.7022202
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1792932481.7022202
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40567
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Complex CSH Tracker by @CoolDuck | Stardance
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CoolDuck
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1
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151.24
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1894
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-30T16:35:25Z", "hours": 140.0, "multiplier": 14.51, "payout": 1894, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Complex CSH Tracker My school runs on a very old tracking system for CSH (Community Service Hours) meaning it was hard for us students to see how much we have as well as see what happens to our CSH requests. I made this to solve this problem and decided to join stardance for the fun of it :O Please beware of the bugs Tester passwords are in the readme Unfortunely drive picker functionality doesn’t work cuz i didnt verify my google app :(", "repo": "https://github.com/coolduckmaster/ComplexCSHTracker", "demo": "https://complex-csh-tracker.vercel.app/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 79501, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 79501, "ts": "2026-10-14T10:18:26Z", "hours": 11.2411, "text": "They changed the deadline 💔💔 Fixed some bugs relating to CSH registering. Fixed loading screen bug. Fixed Welcome back appearing after clicking log out. Additionaly filter for Approvals. Export to PDF finally works. Split the Approval into different files."}, {"post_id": 75609, "ts": "2026-09-30T15:31:35Z", "hours": 11.1422, "text": "This is it vercel intergrated product ready to ship the time is currently 10:30 pm please let this ship go through :))))"}, {"post_id": 73643, "ts": "2026-09-25T15:56:06Z", "hours": 12.3236, "text": "And now, the end is near. Added first version of the history page with some filter edited backend intergration for said history small ui changes to Approval small ui changes to dashboard side bar. many other misc ui changes bug fixes (?)"}, {"post_id": 67461, "ts": "2026-09-13T15:57:54Z", "hours": 10.9419, "text": "GOOGLE DRIVE BACKEND INTERGRATION Title says it all Misc loading screens (so like it loads or smth) Bug fixes???? Some other random things (like placeholder images and stuff)."}, {"post_id": 60285, "ts": "2026-09-02T15:42:39Z", "hours": 10.4444, "text": "GOOGLE DRIVE INTERGRATION Yes google Oauth Yes upload section Yes multiple files (WITH FILE IMAGE) No teacher backend (yet) No personal infomation (i hope)"}, {"post_id": 52431, "ts": "2026-08-22T15:34:31Z", "hours": 13.3567, "text": "idk did smth? I did something i guess????? I dont rmb to much school work. btw the google frontend button is wip"}, {"post_id": 46093, "ts": "2026-08-13T01:50:16Z", "hours": 10.9692, "text": "10 hours in 2 days New teacher note tab for approval-deny New 404 page (easter egg hidden) Bugfixes (note: School has started, I do not have the free time to do manythings)"}, {"post_id": 44042, "ts": "2026-08-09T15:34:21Z", "hours": 5.4497, "text": "MongoServerError: E11000 duplicate key error collection: login.cshes index: userId_1 dup key: New functions have arrived! Approve and Deny have been fleshed out. Futhermore the description has a functioning backend to show it! Request pages has a new description box with a word limit! Dashboard has now show updates when your requests been approved or denied! Fixed backend bugs(?) Much more small UI changes!"}, {"post_id": 43358, "ts": "2026-08-08T15:49:56Z", "hours": 5.2531, "text": "[vite] Internal server error: Transform failed with 1 error: Added a new details screen for Approval page (missing approve-deny features). Frontend edits for pre-existing UI in “Approval” panel. Backend API edits for intergrating. Slept 4 hours."}, {"post_id": 42719, "ts": "2026-08-07T15:59:58Z", "hours": 7.2431, "text": "PENDING REQUEST! Pending request pages for all your pending request needs! (UI up to change). Authware updated to be more cool Intergrated Authware to the frontend (like, 60% intergrated) Burnt bugs (?) Much more!"}, {"post_id": 42022, "ts": "2026-08-06T15:51:51Z", "hours": 6.7397, "text": "REQUEST-FUNCTIONALITY The Request pages have gain functionality! All of the request now go to the “Pending Hours” and is automatically logged in the Backend Database! The Approval panel is still in the works however."}, {"post_id": 41375, "ts": "2026-08-05T15:30:06Z", "hours": 5.3767, "text": "Request Page in the work LACKS FUNCTIONALITY. Backend API fixes (?). Frontend Dashboard edits. Bugs? (Vouch doesn’t exist yet. still figuring out a image storage solution)"}, {"post_id": 40799, "ts": "2026-08-04T15:36:25Z", "hours": 7.1403, "text": "NAV MENU BUTTON! Frontend stuff for the “Request” pages Backend API for like request and stuff. Fixed MANY things(?)."}, {"post_id": 40167, "ts": "2026-08-03T15:55:16Z", "hours": 7.6592, "text": "7 and a half hours spend on doing what??? Bugs, loads, and loads, of bugs. Fixed code after spliting the dashboard side panel. Backend stuff. DASHBOARD LAYOUT (Spend a large amount of time styling)."}, {"post_id": 38979, "ts": "2026-08-01T16:26:58Z", "hours": 6.0889, "text": "OOGA BOOGA DASHBOARD IT TOOK ME 6 HOURS STRAIGHT TO GET THIS TO WORK, I HAD TO STEAL BORROW HACKATIME HTML CODE FOR THIS!"}, {"post_id": 38267, "ts": "2026-07-31T16:02:28Z", "hours": 5.05, "text": "What the hell is jsx?? Started work on the “Dashboard” screen. stole it from Hackatime dashboard Inspired by hack a time dashboard. Added a frontend router (?). Did some more stuff!"}, {"post_id": 37665, "ts": "2026-07-30T15:38:21Z", "hours": 4.1078, "text": "Log - 4: on boarding done (?), rename the project to “Complex CSH Tracker.”, started work on a dashboard. Beside from that, I might have to rework some of the log in UI with what I have in mind."}, {"post_id": 37072, "ts": "2026-07-29T15:34:59Z", "hours": 5.625, "text": "Added On boarding logic so users can pick their class and stuff. (this took longer then expected)"}, {"post_id": 36407, "ts": "2026-07-28T14:40:37Z", "hours": 3.25, "text": "ጮልጋቹ ነዐጮቹ ዪልክጋዐጮ “Login Page” የልፏቹ የረቹልነቹ ⶴቹረየ ጮቹ ጎ ፪ቹቹክ ልፕ ፕⶴጎነ ቻዐዪ ⶴዐ፱ዪነ"}, {"post_id": 35857, "ts": "2026-07-27T15:50:05Z", "hours": 1.5753, "text": "Started work on the full stack log in functionally of this tracker website (It’s no longer simple)."}]...
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Title: Complex CSH Tracker by @CoolDuck | Stardanc Title: Complex CSH Tracker by @CoolDuck | Stardance
Devlogs:
Started work on the full stack log in functionally of this tracker website (It’s no longer simple).
ጮልጋቹ ነዐጮቹ ዪልክጋዐጮ “Login Page” የልፏቹ የረቹልነቹ ⶴቹረየ ጮቹ ጎ ፪ቹቹክ ልፕ ፕⶴጎነ ቻዐዪ ⶴዐ፱ዪነ
Added On boarding logic so users can pick their class and stuff. (this took longer then expected)
Log - 4: on boarding done (?), rename the project to “Complex CSH Tracker.”, started work on a dashboard. Beside from that, I might have to rework some of the log in UI with what I have in mind.
What the hell is jsx?? Started work on the “Dashboard” screen. stole it from Hackatime dashboard Inspired by hack a time dashboard. Added a frontend router (?). Did some more stuff!
OOGA BOOGA DASHBOARD IT TOOK ME 6 HOURS STRAIGHT TO GET THIS TO WORK, I HAD TO STEAL BORROW HACKATIME HTML CODE FOR THIS!
7 and a half hours spend on doing what??? Bugs, loads, and loads, of bugs. Fixed code after spliting the dashboard side panel. Backend stuff. DASHBOARD LAYOUT (Spend a large amount of time styling).
NAV MENU BUTTON! Frontend stuff for the “Request” pages Backend API for like request and stuff. Fixed MANY things(?).
Request Page in the work LACKS FUNCTIONALITY. Backend API fixes (?). Frontend Dashboard edits. Bugs? (Vouch doesn’t exist yet. still figuring out a image storage solution)
REQUEST-FUNCTIONALITY The Request pages have gain functionality! All of the request now go to the “Pending Hours” and is automatically logged in the Backend Database! The Approval panel is still in the works however.
PENDING REQUEST! Pending request pages for all your pending request needs! (UI up to change). Authware updated to be more cool Intergrated Authware to the frontend (like, 60% intergrated) Burnt bugs (?) Much more!
[vite] Internal server error: Transform failed with 1 error: Added a new details screen for Approval page (missing approve-deny features). Frontend edits for pre-existing UI in “Approval” panel. Backend API edits for intergrating. Slept 4 hours.
MongoServerError: E11000 duplicate key error collection: login.cshes index: userId_1 dup key: New functions have arrived! Approve and Deny have been fleshed out. Futhermore the description has a functioning backend to show it! Request pages has a new description box with a word limit! Dashboard has now show updates when your requests been approved or denied! Fixed backend bugs(?) Much more small UI changes!
10 hours in 2 days New teacher note tab for approval-deny New 404 page (easter egg hidden) Bugfixes (note: School has started, I do not have the free time to do manythings)
idk did smth? I did something i guess????? I dont rmb to much school work. btw the google frontend button is wip
GOOGLE DRIVE INTERGRATION Yes google Oauth Yes upload section Yes multiple files (WITH FILE IMAGE) No teacher backend (yet) No personal infomation (i hope)
GOOGLE DRIVE BACKEND INTERGRATION Title says it all Misc loading screens (so like it loads or smth) Bug fixes???? Some other random things (like placeholder images and stuff).
And now, the end is near. Added first version of the history page with some filter edited backend intergration for said history small ui changes to Approval small ui changes to dashboard side bar. many other misc ui changes bug fixes (?)
This is it vercel intergrated product ready to ship the time is currently 10:30 pm please let this ship go through :))))
They changed the deadline 💔💔 Fixed some bugs relating to CSH registering. Fixed loading screen bug. Fixed Welcome back appearing after clicking log out. Additionaly filter for Approvals. Export to PDF finally works. Split the Approval into different files.
Ships:
Complex CSH Tracker My school runs on a very old tracking system for CSH (Community Service Hours) meaning it was hard for us students to see how much we have as well as see what happens to our CSH requests. I made this to solve this problem and decided to join stardance for the fun of it :O Please beware of the bugs Tester passwords are in the readme Unfortunely drive picker functionality doesn’t work cuz i didnt verify my google app :(...
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1792853543.167628
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1792939943.167628
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24955
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Fun Learning Game by @lilfox | Stardance
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lilfox
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1
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85.0
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1895
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-11T21:09:47Z", "hours": 85.0, "multiplier": 18.47, "payout": 1895, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "This is especially made for the Chinese students I tutor! I made a boss fight game that uses shooter and (possibly) rpg elements to help the player practice kindergarten level English spelling. Just formulating the idea and incorporating it was challenging, though. From changing the genre of my game from a platformer to a boss-fight, to painstakingly drawing and animating the pixel art of the game, to learning Godot as a beginner…it’s been a wild ride! I’m proud that I was able to create a coherent and (hopefully) fun game, while learning new things about Godot and Aseprite. Nodes, signals, layers, frames, all bunched up together. While this is my first time making a game, I hope that my time and effort makes this an enjoyable experience for you! The link to my project is over at https://english-spelling-lesson.netlify.app (unfortunately this game requires a keyboard). G’ day. :)", "repo": "https://github.com/Foxlil/Educational-Game", "demo": "https://english-spelling-lesson.netlify.app"}]...
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[{"post_id": 45410, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 45410, "ts": "2026-08-11T20:46:52Z", "hours": 2.2011, "text": "I finished the game! :D Added sound effects for: Clicking buttons Player attacks Phoenix attacks Phoenix caw (to signal to the player that a barrage of projectiles is coming if they are too busy with the attack button) Background music! The quiz I finally added real questions! I wanted to focus on spelling for this one, so I used emojis and asked the user how the words representing them were spelled. Text stuff Added text instruction at the beginning Changed fonts of the text nodes featuring emojis (more on that later) Web shenanigans I wanted to make sure that the game would be available on devices that did not support downloading .exe (like chromebooks, for example). But uh…that was harder than I was expecting! I used netlify to create a url after exporting the game for html5. The first issue in business was that the camera was zoomed out when the website was launched, showing the gray blank space of the Godot dimension. This took a bit to figure out, but apparently I had to adjust the stretch mode and aspect in project settings. The second issue was that the emojis were showing up as white-boxed hex codes in the web version (for some reason!! >:( ). Turns out that I needed a different dedicated font for the emojis so that they could be compatable on all devices. Oh well, haha. At least it’s more accessible! :D (PS. I’m sincerely sorry for the terrible audio quality in the video, I can’t screen record and the speakers on this computer are outrageous :’) )"}, {"post_id": 45100, "ts": "2026-08-11T11:27:01Z", "hours": 9.2092, "text": "I’m so close to finishing the game! First of all, I finished the attack system. Basically, you answer a certain number of questions under the “attack” button, filling up the bar next to it. When it fills up, you unlock a new weapon. After it cools down, you can use it; but on the first time of cycling through every weapon, only once! As you complete more cycles, though, that increases to twice, then three times, etc. I also added pixel art to the buttons. I took away the “attack” label of the attack button because the students I tutor don’t know that word yet. Instead, I used an animation in hopes of incentivising them to click it. The other buttons include: The arrow Two arrows Copper sword Diamond sword Which brings me to my next development––when you click those buttons, there’s an actual attack! An arrow animation, a two-arrow animation, a copper sword animation, etc were added to the mix. I hope to add music, SFX, and maybe simple instructions for the future. Finally, I implemented a losing and winning screen using the same node in the system, detecting player and enemy health."}, {"post_id": 44537, "ts": "2026-08-10T11:24:26Z", "hours": 7.1533, "text": "I added functionality to the attack system! Now it can: Show the question and input text box when the attack button is clicked Detect correct answers and wrong answers I also added: An attack bar that stores how many answers you got correct. Once you’ve answered a certain number of questions correctly, I plan for a button on the left to unlock You may already notice the buttons in the bottom left! When I filled the bar once, one of the buttons unlocked, a timer ran out (signified by the white bar), and I could click the button. For the future: The buttons you have to unlock are actually buttons that allow you attack! So I’ll add different attack functionalities to different buttons. The buttons look kinda bland. I’m planning to add some sprites in place of the buttons. I’m thinking of putting some transparent gray space behind the text to make it more readable. I really hope I can finish this game next devlog! Seeya there! :)"}, {"post_id": 43967, "ts": "2026-08-09T13:15:35Z", "hours": 7.4439, "text": "I’ve put some of the pixel art into the game, and it’s looking good! The thing about the prototype is that it didn’t consider scale or size, so I had to change: The placement and zoom of the camera The size and tween animations of the quiz questions The player and enemy sprite + hitbox size However, I also finished: Health bars for the player and boss Tweens that would smoothly adjust the health (which was why the red health and the bar were drawn separately) Areas where the projectiles would be slow or fast. Initially this was controlled by timers, but I found that this was too buggy for my mom’s computer, so I just used area detection instead to make everything more consistent. For the future, I added: An attack button A text input box (line edit node) An area for the text questions (label node) For now, there is no function yet, but this will be used for an attack system. How it will work is that, when you press attack, you are given a question requiring a typed answer. Answering it correctly would send a powerful attack to the enemy, while answering it wrong would decrease your health by a little bit. Looking forward to implementing this system! (Also don’t worry, I’ll def add pixel art for the player and the arrows trust :D )"}, {"post_id": 43265, "ts": "2026-08-08T12:57:16Z", "hours": 4.2119, "text": "Wowee, I finished the background! I mostly worked on the tiles and shadows, which I hope makes the environment more immersive and detailed. I also added in some of the complete assets into Godot! While I still have some pixel art to work on, such as: The player Arrows The projectiles exploding animation I think now is a good time to take a break from Aseprite and work in Godot. Since the pixel art is already way smaller than the original prototype, here’s what I need to work on: Adjusting the game code to the new screen size Slowing down projectiles and adjusting the time when they slow down Changing the question tweens so that the text doesn’t fly off the screen Changing player position Adding in the health bar sprites with functionality Implementing animation phases for the boss (play this animation when attacking, play this animation when idling, etc) VFX and SFX"}, {"post_id": 42775, "ts": "2026-08-07T17:34:46Z", "hours": 6.3053, "text": "Worked on the background environment. Added: Pillars Doorway Brick texture Shading The most difficult thing for me is to make every element fit together. I hope I can finish the background today and probably work on the player and arrows. I also just realized that I should probably work on the projectile dissipating animation, too. Off to work!"}, {"post_id": 41906, "ts": "2026-08-06T12:38:02Z", "hours": 8.2169, "text": "After completing the phoenix (finally), here’s what I finished: The projectiles emitted from the boss. I wondered what it should be—a rock? A magic orb? Before realizing that it was a phoenix we were talking about, and that flames were basically their signature! I also added frame-by-frame animation to add more life to it. The boss health bar! It’s noticeably larger than the player’s, with a similar flame animation as the projectiles. It doesn’t have that gold sheen, but I hope it has its own unique style that gives off phoenix vibes! What I’m working on: The background! I’ve only created two pillars, but I’m planning on an entrance to a temple. To make the colors blend more together, I actually used the jumble tool! (The enemy is there as a reference to the size proportions) What I plan to do after finishing the background: Besides more pixel art (player, arrows), I want to implement the art into the game! The game’s framework is basically done, though I’ll definitely add more features so that it isn’t so repetitive. I also need to work on the health bars, which is exciting! :)"}, {"post_id": 41293, "ts": "2026-08-05T12:54:54Z", "hours": 7.2842, "text": "I’ve finally finished the phoenix! After finishing shading, I separated the key elements—head, body, wings—into different layers so that I could animate easier. Then I used the select tool to move and rotate the parts before fixing up the pixels. Unfortunately the wing feathers look wonky, but I’m not too sure how to approach that. After implementing ease in and out, here’s what I’ve completed : An idle animation (first four frames, and then reverse) An attack animation A transition to glowing eyes! A sudden burst of flame What I’ll be working on : The background pixel art The projectiles The boss health bar (The video has a clideo.com watermark because I needed to compress the video :( )"}, {"post_id": 40778, "ts": "2026-08-04T15:05:43Z", "hours": 9.1675, "text": "Today, I worked more on the phoenix’s wings and legs. I haven’t finished yet, but hopefully I’m close! Here’s what I’ve done: Fleshed out the shading and made the wings bigger two times Shaded the foot Added tufts to the phoenix head This has all been to make the bird look more like a phoenix! I’ve gotten criticism that it looks like a chicken, so I tried to make the proportions more accurate, sharpened the feathers, and tried to make the features fancier. I am told that it still looks like a chicken! Unfortunately, I’ve decided not to add flames, or make the bird thinner, or make the wings bigger (again), because this has already taken far too long! I haven’t even started animating yet! XD That’s not to say that these aren’t valid criticisms. These are very good suggestions, but I’d like to move on to other game art, not just the boss. I plan on finishing the art and at least starting animation, so that I can work on projectiles, the player, the boss health bar, etc! :)"}, {"post_id": 39411, "ts": "2026-08-02T11:12:32Z", "hours": 8.7511, "text": "Worked on the beginning boss of the game! I aimed to draw a feng huang — or phoenix — in Aseprite, but whoa, that took a lot more energy from me than expected! I focused on the head and body. Issues: Being a beginner in using Aseprite (I usually use pixilart.com) I didn’t remember to save :( I worked for about an hour on the face, but after my break and returning, I found that my work hadn’t saved!! Lesson learned: save every few seconds :P Design: After pasting the player health bar inside for a size comparison, I first blocked out the shape of the phoenix using a large 3x3 or 4x4 brush, with the main color. I started using a darker color to block out the features of the bird—feathers, eyes, etc… Then I attacked the birdie with bands of shading and lighting for each section of feather or eye to give more depth I decided to split the workflow into two different parts: the head and the body. You can notice how the feathers on the body look very different (and probably more wonky) from the feathers on the head and neck. Later this will help me separate out sections for animation :D What I should work on: Making the wings bigger (I am told that the phoenix looks like a chicken. ) Finishing the details of the feet and wings ANIMATION! Including: Idle Attack Damage I wonder how long that will take…haha…"}, {"post_id": 38607, "ts": "2026-08-01T02:44:58Z", "hours": 2.0886, "text": "I finished the player health bar in Aseprite! Design choices : The main mascot? Character? Of this educational game is a tiger. I wanted to reflect that while also taking inspiration from Chinese traditional lions (like those door knockers!) so here is a weird mashup! Lion? Tiger? Liger? No one shall know >:) I made it gold because yellow would definitely pop on the screen, which I hope would make it easy for players to locate on the screen. Also, gold gives a more heroic vibe :D Animation I wanted the animation to be simple, so it wouldn’t distract from the main game, but easy for the viewer to locate when needed. So I created a shiny light that travels across the bar using easing in, easing out, and smear frames! The plan is for this animation to occur from time to time, reminding the player of their health while also not being too distracting. Where is the actual red health? The red health is in another file, separate from the health bar The plan is to be able to crop out the red health as the health decreases, while ignoring the background bar. This allows for stylized health bars but fluid health decreasing/increasing animations!"}, {"post_id": 37769, "ts": "2026-07-30T18:02:46Z", "hours": 2.835, "text": "Now I have implemented a sort of “quiz” system. Added features: Arrays containing questions, choices, and corresponding correct answers Randomly chosen questions featured one at a time Detecting whether the player has shot the projectile featuring the correct answer, in which all the projectiles will destroy themselves Playing these features in a perpetual loop Features needed to be added I definitely need to add health to add some risk into the game! Art will play a big part in making this game fun :) EFFECTS - Such as screen shake or particles!"}, {"post_id": 37632, "ts": "2026-07-30T14:40:45Z", "hours": 7.2144, "text": "After getting the gist of Godot from Brackey’s tutorial, I decided to switch gears to a boss-fight type of game! What I added: The player rotates to face the mouse, allowing for aiming Left-clicking, or just simply tapping on the mouse pad, for shooting An area node for the boss A question appears on screen before triggering projectiles Projectiles from the boss, the number of which can be adjusted, are designed to be distanced by the same angle (ex 180/n, n being declared) A system using timer nodes that slows the game for a certain amount of time—allowing for the player to carefully aim and shoot—before returning to normal Why these features? Here’s the plan: The boss idles for a random amount of allotted time The boss then attacks! A randomly selected question—asking about adjectives, nouns, spelling, etc—appears on the screen. After being given enough time to read the question, projectiles with the answer choices are shot towards the player. If the player shoots the correct answer, the explosion harms the boss! But if the player shoots the wrong answer, the projectiles hurt them. I hope this makes learning English fun, but slightly fast-paced. Clearly I still have a lot to add! :)"}, {"post_id": 17821, "ts": "2026-06-28T19:12:16Z", "hours": 3.4136, "text": "Learned how to use Godot from the classic Brackeys tutorial: adding player movement, idle animation, tile set (testing), one way platforms, and moving platforms. Also created little tiger character as player! Need to add death, walking animation, better physics, and collectibles. Was hard for me to understand scenes and nodes but very rewarding in the end! :) Also planning to add the educational elements soon…"}]...
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Title: Fun Learning Game by @lilfox | Stardance
D Title: Fun Learning Game by @lilfox | Stardance
Devlogs:
Learned how to use Godot from the classic Brackeys tutorial: adding player movement, idle animation, tile set (testing), one way platforms, and moving platforms. Also created little tiger character as player! Need to add death, walking animation, better physics, and collectibles. Was hard for me to understand scenes and nodes but very rewarding in the end! :) Also planning to add the educational elements soon…
After getting the gist of Godot from Brackey’s tutorial, I decided to switch gears to a boss-fight type of game! What I added: The player rotates to face the mouse, allowing for aiming Left-clicking, or just simply tapping on the mouse pad, for shooting An area node for the boss A question appears on screen before triggering projectiles Projectiles from the boss, the number of which can be adjusted, are designed to be distanced by the same angle (ex 180/n, n being declared) A system using timer nodes that slows the game for a certain amount of time—allowing for the player to carefully aim and shoot—before returning to normal Why these features? Here’s the plan: The boss idles for a random amount of allotted time The boss then attacks! A randomly selected question—asking about adjectives, nouns, spelling, etc—appears on the screen. After being given enough time to read the question, projectiles with the answer choices are shot towards the player. If the player shoots the correct answer, the explosion harms the boss! But if the player shoots the wrong answer, the projectiles hurt them. I hope this makes learning English fun, but slightly fast-paced. Clearly I still have a lot to add! :)
Now I have implemented a sort of “quiz” system. Added features: Arrays containing questions, choices, and corresponding correct answers Randomly chosen questions featured one at a time Detecting whether the player has shot the projectile featuring the correct answer, in which all the projectiles will destroy themselves Playing these features in a perpetual loop Features needed to be added I definitely need to add health to add some risk into the game! Art will play a big part in making this game fun :) EFFECTS - Such as screen shake or particles!
I finished the player health bar in Aseprite! Design choices : The main mascot? Character? Of this educational game is a tiger. I wanted to reflect that while also taking inspiration from Chinese traditional lions (like those door knockers!) so here is a weird mashup! Lion? Tiger? Liger? No one shall know >:) I made it gold because yellow would definitely pop on the screen, which I hope would make it easy for players to locate on the screen. Also, gold gives a more heroic vibe :D Animation I wanted the animation to be simple, so it wouldn’t distract from the main game, but easy for the viewer to locate when needed. So I created a shiny light that travels across the bar using easing in, easing out, and smear frames! The plan is for this animation to occur from time to time, reminding the player of their health while also not being too distracting. Where is the actual red health? The red health is in another file, separate from the health bar The plan is to be able to crop out the red health as the health decreases, while ignoring the background bar. This allows for stylized health bars but fluid health decreasing/increasing animations!
Worked on the beginning boss of the game! I aimed to draw a feng huang — or phoenix — in Aseprite, but whoa, that took a lot more energy from me than expected! I focused on the head and body. Issues: Being a beginner in using Aseprite (I usually use pixilart.com) I didn’t remember to save :( I worked for about an hour on the face, but after my break and returning, I found that my work hadn’t saved!! Lesson learned: save every few seconds :P Design: After pasting the player health bar inside for a size comparison, I first blocked out the shape of the phoenix using a large 3x3 or 4x4 brush, with the main color. I started using a darker color to block out the features of the bird—feathers, eyes, etc… Then I attacked the birdie with bands of shading and lighting for each section of feather or eye to give more depth I decided to split the workflow into two different parts: the head and the body. You can notice how the feathers on the body look very different (and probably more wonky) from the feathers on the head and neck. Later this will help me separate out sections for animation :D What I should work on: Making the wings bigger (I am told that the phoenix looks like a chicken. ) Finishing the details of the feet and wings ANIMATION! Including: Idle Attack Damage I wonder how long that will take…haha…
Today, I worked more on the phoenix’s wings and legs. I haven’t finished yet, but hopefully I’m close! Here’s what I’ve done: Fleshed out the shading and made the wings bigger two times Shaded the foot Added tufts to the phoenix head This has all been to make the bird look more like a phoenix! I’ve gotten criticism that it looks like a chicken, so I tried to make the proportions more accurate, sharpened the feathers, and tried to make the features fancier. I am told that it still looks like a chicken! Unfortunately, I’ve decided not to add flames, or make the bird thinner, or make the wings bigger (again), because this has already taken far too long! I haven’t even started animating yet! XD That’s not to say that these aren’t valid criticisms. These are very good suggestions, but I’d like to move on to other game art, not just the boss. I plan on finishing the art and at least starting animation, so that I can work on projectiles, the player, the boss health bar, etc! :)
I’ve finally finished the phoenix! After finishing shading, I separated the key elements—head, body, wings—into different layers so that I could animate easier. Then I used the select tool to move and rotate the parts before fixing up the pixels. Unfortunately the wing feathers look wonky, but I’m not too sure how to approach that. After implementing ease in and out, here’s what I’ve completed : An idle animation (first four frames, and then reverse) An attack animation A transition to glowing eyes! A sudden burst of flame What I’ll be working on : The background pixel art The projectiles The boss health bar (The video has a clideo.com watermark because I needed to compress the video :( )
After completing the phoenix (finally), here’s what I finished: The projectiles emitted from the boss. I wondered what it should be—a rock? A magic orb? Before realizing that it was a phoenix we were talking about, and that flames were basically their signature! I also added frame-by-frame animation to add more life to it. The boss health bar! It’s noticeably larger than the player’s, with a similar flame animation as the projectiles. It doesn’t have that gold sheen, but I hope it has its own unique style that gives off phoenix vibes! What I’m working on: The background! I’ve only created two pillars, but I’m planning on an entrance to a temple. To make the colors blend more together, I actually used the jumble tool! (The enemy is there as a reference to the size proportions) What I plan to do after finishing the background: Besides more pixel art (player, arrows), I want to implement the art into the game! The game’s framework is basically done, though I’ll definitely add more features so that it isn’t so repetitive. I also need to work on the health bars, which is exciting! :)
Worked on the background environment. Added: Pillars Doorway Brick texture Shading The most difficult thing for me is to make every element fit together. I hope I can finish the background today and probably work on the player and arrows. I also just realized that I should probably work on the projectile dissipating animation, too. Off to work!
Wowee, I finished the background! I mostly worked on the tiles and shadows, which I hope makes the environment more immersive and detailed. I also added in some of the complete assets into Godot! While I still have some pixel art to work on, such as: The player Arrows The projectiles exploding animation I think now is a good time to take a break from Aseprite and work in Godot. Since the pixel art is already way smaller than the original prototype, here’s what I need to work on: Adjusting the game code to the new screen size Slowing down projectiles and adjusting the time when they slow down Changing the question tweens so that the text doesn’t fly off the screen Changing player position Adding in the health bar sprites with functionality Implementing animation phases for the boss (play this animation when attacking, play this animation when idling, etc) VFX and SFX
I’ve put some of the pixel art into the game, and it’s looking good! The thing about the prototype is that it didn’t consider scale or size, so I had to change: The placement and zoom of the camera The size and tween animations of the quiz questions The player and enemy sprite + hitbox size However, I also finished: Health bars for the player and boss Tweens that would smoothly adjust the health (which was why the red health and the bar were drawn separately) Areas where the projectiles would be slow or fast. Initially this was controlled by timers, but I found that this was too buggy for my mom’s computer, so I just used area detection instead to make everything more consistent. For the future, I added: An attack button A text input box (line edit node) An area for the text questions (label node) For now, there is no function yet, but this will be used for an attack system. How it will work is that, when you press attack, you are given a question requiring a typed answer. Answering it correctly would send a powerful attack to the enemy, while answering it wrong would decrease your health by a little bit. Looking forward to implementing this system! (Also don’t worry, I’ll def add pixel art for the player and the arrows trust :D )
I added functionality to the attack system! Now it can: Show the question and input text box when the attack button is clicked Detect correct answers and wrong answers I also added: An attack bar that stores how many answers you got correct. Once you’ve answered a certain number of questions correctly, I plan for a button on the left to unlock You may already notice the buttons in the bottom left! When I filled the bar once, one of the buttons unlocked, a timer ran out (signified by the white bar), and I could click the button. For the future: The buttons you have to unlock are actually buttons that allow you attack! So I’ll add different attack functionalities to different buttons. The buttons look kinda bland. I’m planning to add some sprites in place of the buttons. I’m thinking of putting some transparent gray space behind the text to make it more readable. I really hope I can finish this game next devlog! Seeya there! :)
I’m so close to finishing the game! First of all, I finished the attack system. Basically, you answer a certain number of questions under the “attack” button, filling up the bar next to it. When it fills up, you unlock a new weapon. After it cools down, you can use it; but on the first time of cycling through every weapon, only once! As you complete more cycles, though, that increases to twice, then three times, etc. I also added pixel art to the buttons. I took away the “attack” label of the attack button because the students I tutor don’t know that word yet. Instead, I used an animation in hopes of incentivising them to click it. The other buttons include: The arrow Two arrows Copper sword Diamond sword Which brings me to my next development––when you click those buttons, there’s an actual attack! An arrow animation, a two-arrow animation, a copper sword animation, etc were added to the mix. I hope to add music, SFX, and maybe simple instructions for the future. Finally, I implemented a losing and winning screen using the same node in the system, detecting player and enemy health.
I finished the game! :D Added sound effects for: Clicking buttons Player attacks Phoenix attacks Phoenix caw (to signal to the player that a barrage of projectiles is coming if they are too busy with the attack button) Background music! The quiz I finally added real questions! I wanted to focus on spelling for this one, so I used emojis and asked the user how the words representing them were spelled. Text stuff Added text instruction at the beginning Changed fonts of the text nodes featuring emojis (more on that later) Web shenanigans I wanted to make sure that the game would be available on devices that did not support downloading .exe (like chromebooks, for example). But uh…that was harder than I was expecting! I used netlify to create a url after exporting the game for html5. The first issue in business was that the camera was zoomed out when the website was launched, showing the gray blank space of the Godot dimension. This took a bit to figure out, but apparently I had to adjust the stretch mode and aspect in project settings. The second issue was that the emojis were showing up as white-boxed hex codes in the web version (for some reason!! >:( ). Turns out that I needed a different dedicated font for the emojis so that they could be compatable on all devices. Oh well, haha. At least it’s more accessible! :D (PS. I’m sincerely sorry for the terrible audio quality in the video, I can’t screen record and the speakers on this computer are outrageous :’) )
Ships:
This is especially made for the Chinese students I tutor! I made a boss fight game that uses shooter and (possibly) rpg elements to help the player practice kindergarten level English spelling. Just formulating the idea and incorporating it was challenging, though. From changing the genre of my game from a platformer to a boss-fight, to painstakingly drawing and animating the pixel art of the game, to learning Godot as a beginner…it’s been a wild ride! I’m proud that I was able to create a coherent and (hopefully) fun game, while learning new things about Godot and Aseprite. Nodes, signals, layers, frames, all bunched up together. While this is my first time making a game, I hope that my time and effort makes this an enjoyable experience for you! The link to my project is over at https://english-spelling-lesson.netlify.app (unfortunately this game requires a keyboard). G’ day. :)...
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Minecraft Web by @TruthEntity | Stardance
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TruthEntity
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160.71
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1901
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-06T10:33:36Z", "hours": 73.0, "multiplier": 15.82, "payout": 1127, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "NOTE: Please Skip Voting, if it failed to run on your system please… Hi Friends, so, I have been working on Minecraft for a long time, and Virtually touching grass LOL.. AKA, Making Minecraft, it is quite challenging to say the least, you can check my devlogs.. Basically, I want to make a very very optimized version of minecraft, that you can see through far and far, and highly optimized. I want to add lighting and all, but the banner is a bit misleading.. I will continue to work on the project, but obviously, not Three.js, because What I have learnt is that.. You can use engines like Unity and Unreal, and make goated projects, the feel of making optimized content, and making it run even on a potato, is just on another level.. Seeing the entire generation moving towards fast making and prototyping, it is always a safe bet to try something new and interesting. This is one of the prototypes that taught me a lot, from How to deal with chunks, and manage chunks, to making biomes, which was actually new.. Chunks I have worked with AI before, and it helped me a ton, and I know about those, but not here.. Hope you love my project", "repo": "https://github.com/SatyamRaj67/Minecraft-with-Three", "demo": "https://satyamraj67.github.io/Minecraft-with-Three/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-06-15T05:58:35Z", "hours": 58.0, "multiplier": 14.37, "payout": 774, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Basically, What I have made is Minecraft Web, well Minecraft but on the Website, running on your Browser. Through the Power of Optimizations and knowing how to code, and also using AI for my shader building and debugging bugs like IDK, What I have done to my life. But Basically, I made my own Engine just to prove that You don’t always need THREE.js to do your heavy lifting, and honestly, it was not that hard. You can see the source code, just a few days ago, I refactored it. Hope you love and enjoy my project.", "repo": "https://github.com/SatyamRaj67/Minecraft-with-Three", "demo": "https://satyamraj67.github.io/Minecraft-with-Three/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 31749, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 31749, "ts": "2026-07-20T12:00:53Z", "hours": 0.5433, "text": "Hi Everyone, My Devlogs have been lacking a bit, and this another quick devlog, because, I am really not feeling good these days. I am having fever and not feeling great about anything. Currently, I was just searching and asking AI about chunk generation. One of the things, where AI is now needed, because I know noise generation, but I don’t really know, how to make it into reality, and specially when people want realistic chunk generation and all.. I will get into good and start fixing first of all, this light problem, and then just hope, I get well soon, because India’s heat waves are really no joke. My Indian Friends.. Please stay safe and inside house.. IDK, Why even schools are open.."}, {"post_id": 30259, "ts": "2026-07-17T18:05:03Z", "hours": 1.0661, "text": "I literally been sick for 2 days, and now that I come back, I somehow see worse.. Like, I wanted to implement meshing and all.. GUESS WHAT I DONE.. YES, MESHED THE ENTIRE WORLD TO DISAPPEAR.. BALLS… I AM GUAVA AND I WILL EAT MYSELF.. That’s enough coding for today as well, signing off.."}, {"post_id": 30030, "ts": "2026-07-17T08:56:17Z", "hours": 3.1806, "text": "67 Structure Implemented and running, and to those who recommended me this.. GUYS YOU REALLY NEED TO SEE A THERAPY OR SOMETHING.. LMAO.."}, {"post_id": 28175, "ts": "2026-07-14T09:36:33Z", "hours": 2.6172, "text": "Procedural Generation unlocked, now, you can move as much as you want, and play. Current, block placing and all won’t work, but yah.. Frustum Culling is working as you can see with the culled meter."}, {"post_id": 27634, "ts": "2026-07-13T12:05:35Z", "hours": 4.9944, "text": "Added some simple tests for the ECS system and the topological sort Kahn’s Algorithm system and the Event Bus, so as to 100% confirm the workings of what is intended and what is not.. Also there was a problem with connection of gbuffers into swap chain, so had to make a custom pass called, composite pass, that will intercept and then gives us the necessary output. This might add very minute delay, but it is very unnoticable so don’t worry.."}, {"post_id": 27195, "ts": "2026-07-12T15:17:58Z", "hours": 0.6597, "text": "Sorry, ANOTHER QUICK UPDATE I KNOW.. But trust me, this took me ages to implement, and yes, had to work from backwards, because and again found out, There was nothing being connected to the swapchain for some reason.. It’s actually really not that hard to find bugs when you are used to it, like when something isn’t rendering you know, something must be wrong with renderer and all.. and a quick side step, and you understand yah, swapchain being uninitialized is the key."}, {"post_id": 27162, "ts": "2026-07-12T14:03:45Z", "hours": 0.7392, "text": "LMAO, You know, you are at the pinnacle when you are going through forums and forums of actually big stuff, that very very few people ever talk about.. Literally.."}, {"post_id": 27117, "ts": "2026-07-12T11:58:08Z", "hours": 4.5569, "text": "Been some time, and the amount of Logs that I am going through is just.. LMAO.. Crazy Crazy.. For my 67 fans, just give me like a few more moments.. Because, Now, I just want to render one block, and I will just add a sky, which will be a simple color gradient, and then I will work on whatever you that 67 thing.. This was really hectic to implement.. Literally had to go through and implement Archetype.. Yes, even I don’t know what they are… But after like learning about it, here is my understanding.. Archetype is basically a central place to keep all the components and all. Remember, we are optimizing the sheesh out of this project.. Archetypes allow us to apply the same gravity and same systems like Physics, collisions and so on, while still giving you customizabilty on if you want to enable it or not.. It’s really cool, but the amount of things I had to implement.. That’s some brutal stuff… Imagine, you forgot to plug the input system, and you are crashing out on, HOW TO FAH THE POSITION IS NOT CHANGING?? LOL, YAH 2 HOURS OF DEBUGGING WENT THERE, only to realise, I forgot to add that.. LOL.."}, {"post_id": 26687, "ts": "2026-07-11T16:55:52Z", "hours": 5.4511, "text": "I am crashing out a lot over some assets, because first of all, why is the grass block not green and a colormap, I mean, it does look cool.. BUT COME ON, THAT’S A MENTAL TRAUMA AND NOW WHICH COLOR OF GRASS SHOULD I PICK.. Furthermore, this is also a problem with water and all.. I am trying to find better ways, and actually learn about how Minecraft renders these and turns out, they just.. well.. OVERLAY A GREEN MAP or BLUE MAP over the grass.. I mean, that sounds HORRIBLE TO IMPLEMENT, MY GOD, THIS GAME SU…. IS FINE.. AND FUN.. Furthermore, thank you so so so much for all the reviewers out there.. The fact you guys appreciated my project, and said it is Fine to be using AI.. It just blew my heart.. This is the reason why I am currently working, else, I had already blew my mind with so much complex debugging, such that, I had to make my own engine, and debugger.. As with the latest you can see.. Things are tough but yah.. Also, I see you @skhsmrn on my devlog and another reviewer.. Your demands for 67 WILL BE FULFILLED SOON TM.."}, {"post_id": 25348, "ts": "2026-07-09T16:07:34Z", "hours": 1.0511, "text": "I have connected my GPU now, and details are also loading nicely.. I will working on GPU Frames and all as well now."}, {"post_id": 24257, "ts": "2026-07-07T18:18:55Z", "hours": 4.8525, "text": "I almost crashed out today. It was a hectic of a job today for me.. Basically, Today I wanted to work on Debugging tools in my original minecraft version. Though, this was hectic of a job, but now I am confident enough to say that, if anything goes wrong, my error codes will instantly trigger and stop those bugs to ever reach me, specially, If I messed up something. This is specifically made to guard rail myself (as I am a newbie in the GPU optimization and just breaks stuff way too often for comfort during my learning steps..) Now, you might be working what is so special that I did that I am being too optimistic (Specially if you know my history of crashouts LOL…) So, Basically, This time, I researched about an algorithm for dependencies.. Basically, what npm uses to keep track of all the dependencies.. You never know where knowledge might reach you LOL.. So, Basically, now each file, or system like Player, Physics, and to add, Chunks and More, will have to implement system, and each system would have a dependency tree, and then by using Kahn’s Algorithm, we can literally turn that tree upside down, and go through the data and make it work.. It literally tells you, which files are Missing in your code, that is just too good.. The only one critic is that, each time you need to be assing a new attribute, which might be tedious, but the profits are way too big to ignore at all.."}, {"post_id": 23398, "ts": "2026-07-06T10:26:26Z", "hours": 2.1028, "text": "Final few fixes before shipping, added biome support, and now I will be ready to be trying to make a project, without following tutorial, trying to optimize it, because obviously, three.js, though sounds cool and all.. Uses WebGL, which is widely supported.. but I want to use your entire GPU.. because obviously.. I PAID FOR THE ENTIRE GPU.. (BTW, I don’t even have a GPU, I have what is called Shared GPU Memory with storage but anyways.. THAT IS NOT THE POINT..)"}, {"post_id": 23315, "ts": "2026-07-06T05:58:40Z", "hours": 2.9458, "text": "Added Water, Trees, Sand and polish to my project… Like the toolbar, you can see in the bottom. Clean and Elegant.. COMMENT 67 IF YOU WANT TO SEE A 67 STRUCTURE ADDED TO MY GAME… ;)"}, {"post_id": 22734, "ts": "2026-07-05T09:50:57Z", "hours": 4.8264, "text": "I want to ask, How do you literally add shadows, and fog, and everything and that so, all in just one line of code? That is just stupid to even think about.. But anyways, now I have made it so, you can break and place blocks and also, if you render out from the world, and come back in, the blocks will still be there.. BE READY FOR ANOTHER ROUND OF 67 … OH WAIT.. NEXT DEVLOG WILL BE 67.. OR WAIT, LET ME JUST.. LOL, 100% NOT A STRUCTURE IN GAME.. (ATLEAST FOR NOW.. HEHEHEHE)"}, {"post_id": 22082, "ts": "2026-07-04T10:32:13Z", "hours": 0.3108, "text": "Guys Just imagine a world, where the whole life is actually a simulation, and God is literally using his laptop like this, to see what you are doing.. (AND YES, YOU WERE BANGING YOUR HEAD, JUST NOT ON GRASS.. DON’T LIE TO ME.. I AM SEEING YOU..)"}, {"post_id": 22052, "ts": "2026-07-04T09:31:51Z", "hours": 1.9986, "text": "Collisions are now working, with this beautiful looking icosphere as an helper. I JUST WISH WEBGPU OFFERED SUCH CUSTOMIZABILITY.. BUT TRUST ME, I AM GOING TO ADD THESE INTO THE MAIN PROJECT AS WELL.. Three.JS is just so cool.. But again, my goal is to make it the most optimized stuff and see the Entire Earth, and not be happy with just collisions.. SO Let me just complete this tutorial, but I am having a blast."}, {"post_id": 21954, "ts": "2026-07-04T04:53:29Z", "hours": 0.4147, "text": "I hate to admit it, but did I just add, literal shadows, that would have taken me, so so much hours to be working on.. And THREE.JS SOMEHOW, LITERALLY HAS A FREAKING FUNCTION.. THAT DOES THAT AUTOMATICALLY?? EXCUSE ME??? THAT’S JUST CHEATING.."}, {"post_id": 21906, "ts": "2026-07-04T02:37:42Z", "hours": 0.9956, "text": "This really feels surreal.. I am editing parameters to a game, in which people will land their beautiful foot on, ad mine ores, and do stuff, and this is like a dev mode, where I and I choose how much coal and Iron I want in my life.. Damn.."}, {"post_id": 21629, "ts": "2026-07-03T17:47:52Z", "hours": 0.6967, "text": "Umm, Why is Three.js so easy?? HELLO?? JUST MADE A SIMPLE SLIDER THINGY, AND THIS IS SO DOPE GUYS.."}, {"post_id": 21428, "ts": "2026-07-03T11:35:56Z", "hours": 1.0111, "text": "I have started following a tutorial, and I have done so much research, but it a shame that I cannot log that time. I went through some of the best documents written about WebGPU and explaining stuff.. But anyways, I have started following a tutorial on Three.js for making minecraft. It has literally made me in ease, because now I can log some actual time now.. By writing code rather than researching and for now here is my plan Continue to do this project Phase: 1 Draw a Cube with Controls, Draw 2 Cubes with Controls DRAW 64000 CUBES WITH CONTROLS.. By controls they are Orbital Controls, and then we will move on to the second part which is Working on a Naive Mesher, which will just give all the blocks its own 12 triangles on 8 edges each, and then blow up my laptop because if you realise 64000 * 12 is some sheesh work.. SO MANY TRIANGLES, AND I COULD SEE HARDLY 100.. But atleast, it will be the start, then I will work on Instancing and get me fps back up Also utilize the FrameStats which I will make for myself, like the same which well.. THREE.JS USES BUT WITH MY AKA TRUTHENTITY STYLE.. YOOOOO Then perhaps start erasing triangles that are connected through a second mesher Yes I will have multiple types of Meshers and Multiple type of Camera.. And all should follow a common Camera and everything else should be an Implementation like last time, I gave Geometry Pass the implementation of the simpler Renderer Pass, because it effectively make me plug and play with multiple different ways. This is going to be my stuff for next few days of my life."}, {"post_id": 21275, "ts": "2026-07-03T03:33:09Z", "hours": 0.5992, "text": "Guys, My very first shader, completely written by me, and it looks so sick. All it does is feed into the fragment an attribute of space, and break that space with a checker.. And this is just fascinating.. I want to hug myself.."}, {"post_id": 20908, "ts": "2026-07-02T17:05:27Z", "hours": 1.1739, "text": "Guys I can see progress.."}, {"post_id": 20214, "ts": "2026-07-01T19:23:17Z", "hours": 2.3717, "text": "It was quite easy, I mean, I am finally writing shaders, and yes, you guys have seen me make a triangle before, but that was genuinely speaking, was just a normal little trinagle.. But this triangle.. NO NO.. I have structured it so nicely that dare you break this, and my FATAL ERROR systems start to panic and trigger alarms all around.. It was a chaotic mess, and yes I did rejuvanate some parts of my old project, but yah, It’s not like I don’t know what I am doing now.. Furthermore, Sorry for my mental issues, I GOT MY FIRST SHIP’S PAYOUT, and though I was not expecting it, I am more than happy, even if it was a 13x mult and yah, I got a lot of comments regarding Z-Fighting.. I don’t really know the source of this issue, so I will be making the stuff again anyways, in my ways this time.. And hopefully, it will be better than last time.. I am so happy that I literally broke a tear when I saw I got a payout.. Thanks to everyone for so so much support… I will not be working harder than ever towards this project."}, {"post_id": 19340, "ts": "2026-06-30T16:55:33Z", "hours": 1.5981, "text": "Sorry for all my mental breakdowns.. Here is some actual progress that I did by myself.. I learnt about Assert from my last code.. And why do we need assert.. And I made my own Logger.. What are these so let me explain.. A Logger is atmost just a console.log message, but why to make it a separate class? This offers a lot of usability, as first, you can just say, this is a warning type of stuff, or this is just verbose.. Or MAYBE STOP SOMETHING IF IT IS SOMETHING VERY FATAL, AND SHOULD BE FIXED ASAP.. Not only that, often you will encounter like specially if you link something like a canvas, it might always be that well, Either you will force it using “!” in the end, or you will just do a command that eliminated undefined.. Like if (canvas !== undefined), but assert says.. OK, LET ME HAVE A CONDITION, and not only that, my asserts are special, as I have rigged it, so it will never ever return or what Typescript called a never return.. So you don’t need to write those.. Loggers also have a special use, as if the messages are verbose, instead of removing and readding all the console logs in like a stupid way.. You can declare a class and say, if the level is below fatal, like for verbose or info type of stuff, just cancel those stuff.. Just don’t show it.. It is very nice tool tbh.. Oh yah, I forgot.. Well, as these are custom, so You can literally add another parameter like context, as to what might be the reason for the breaking of the code, so if you check that code later on in life.. You will still know, what broke and where.. It’s a really handy tool in my opinion and everyone should give it a shot."}, {"post_id": 18410, "ts": "2026-06-29T15:32:03Z", "hours": 4.3344, "text": "Yesterday, I was doing research, so I don’t disappoint any of you guys. I watched some matrices manipulation videos and all, and I made this small little copy for myself to store all the findings I have. I don’t really have a lot, but these are certainly my findings, and I don’t prefer making notes on laptop, because personal preference in that. Anyways Give this a read, it is not very hard, and you will learn something new about how the GPU works and specially if you always wondered, what is the actual use of “Matrices” because I am in high school, and I always thought Matrices were silly and all. For people, who have been since the start of this project. First of all, I wanted to talk to you guys.. I don’t really know, what to do to this project. And I feel like, I am going to get banned, because even after all those iterations, remember, the whole project is widely AI made.. Though I am currently research, and have been open. But I don’t really know, how to feel about it. My stupid little Autistic Brain is really panicing that all my 100 hours of work would be gone. Honestly, I won’t be sad or anything if I get banned, because, indeed I used AI, but I just wanted to write my best shot, that atleast, I had a point to say, and then whatever the friends at StarDance decide, I will be completely fine with it. My main goal for developing this project, came from watching a tutorial, and I wanted to try to make something like Minecraft but for the web, because I was fascinated by optimizations.. This optimization, that optimization.. And I was like, Wait, these youtubers are literally rendering trillions of vertexes, why not make it in the browser, and even if I am able to render in 100s.. I still would always find it fascinating.. I never really thought before I started, and I just wanted to talk to AI, about how everything worked, and all.. I did mostly the research about optimization, and I specifically chose Gemini Pro over Claude, because Claude really does the heavy lifting for everyone, whereas I was here to learn. That’s the reason, I had so many hours invested.. (and so many reiterations on my code LOL…). I wanted to learn, but not like the code, but like how to optimize, like, I used to think.. Wait, BITWISE MAPPING.. We can map this much bytes to this, and that, and let the AI write the code for that.. I was just so invested on this project, I forgot we had a rule of “NO MORE THAN 30% AI..” Ahh, I am stupid.. That’s why, I am trying to gain myself back a lot now.. Doing stuff without hours like writing on copy, because obviously I could have written through VSC or something.. but now, I have really given hope on this project as a Retired / Banned Project…. I literally am currently working on a different repo with the name Minecraft rather than this.. I am watching youtube videos and lectures about how WebGPU works and all.. And I want to gain myself back.. As in a good person, and not like an AI slop, who breaks rules.."}, {"post_id": 17378, "ts": "2026-06-28T04:25:03Z", "hours": 0.5958, "text": "If anyone wants to understand more about what a Graphics API is, and how is it meant to work, I would highly suggest watching “Making my own 3D engine” by Inkbox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJoZSRnU0is"}, {"post_id": 16728, "ts": "2026-06-27T05:24:19Z", "hours": 9.9878, "text": "IDK, How should I actually show my research in here but this is like, I have been working on, I have made 5 different notes, and as you can see by the time.. Yah, I have worked some hours on this bad boy.."}, {"post_id": 15580, "ts": "2026-06-25T10:41:26Z", "hours": 6.1003, "text": "Never in my life, I thought I would be so happy seeing a Red Triangle Render on my screen.. YAH, I WASTED LIKE 6 HOURS READING ARTICLES WRITING SHEESH, THEN ASKING AI, Obviously not to generate code, but about where to understand it better, and how to understand the concepts. And more. GUYS, STOP FOLLOWING ME.. It breaks my heart so much, that I am gonna disappoint you all, if I didn’t make this project, fully work.. Till I was trying to make stuff, and learn and sleep, and learn, I didn’t have so many followers, it was like, fine, if it broke for me, it’s completely fine with me, but now.. IT FEELS LIKE, IT IS NOT GOING TO BE FINE.. Thankfully, I am using a different repo, and that is accurately named as “Minecraft” rather than Puzzles to avoid confusion. As where did the Puzzle come from? Well, long story short, see my first ever devlog in here."}, {"post_id": 14225, "ts": "2026-06-23T07:27:20Z", "hours": 2.3678, "text": "Guys, I will be completely open, and I have said before as well, but seeing so many people keep following me. Thank you so much for following a project, that is though made by me, but it like I am owning a shop that is run by someone else. AKA, AI has helped me a ton, and so much that, I don’t know, anything afterwards, specially with Shaders, WebGPU and other creative stuff and optimizations, which let’s be honest, the optimizations like, GREEDY MESHING!!, OCCLUSION CULLING, BACK CULLING (Though it was just like a line as it was native to WebGPU), and while reading through other low level youtubers about optimizations such as, EXTREMITY BOUND CHECKING, BITWISE MANIPULATION,CACHE LOCALITY, NOISE UPSAMPLING, NOISE CASHING, RUN LENGTH ENCODING, RLE BASED RUNTIME. VOXEL DATALOOKUP TABLES, AoSoA and so on, like these just become buzz words that I ask my AI to help with, and that’s the recipe to make everything fall apart when you want to add something new. AI’s context windows are just not big enough to have a full fedged Minecraft. Seeing all you guys support, I have decided to ask AI to now teach me, and help me with the flow, and never the code, I will be coding every single word by myself. Read Papers, and try to implement it myself and so on.. This might be a big turning point for the project because, YAH, I AM WRITING THIS ENTIRE CODE ONCE AGAIN, But this time, I promise, I will be learning everything, and I will keep this as running, and make a second repo like minecraft or something, to enjoy. Sorry to everyone who thought, this is entirely made by me, because that is just not possible for such small 7 second attention span kids like us."}, {"post_id": 12912, "ts": "2026-06-21T04:32:28Z", "hours": 1.0956, "text": "Added leaves and foliage, this was arguable much easy, but I sure know, I again broke my optimizations or atleast something must be broken, because things cannot go this smooth.. AND FOR ONCE, I WROTE SOMETHING I CAN ALSO UNDERSTAND, and then AI was like Nuh Uh, SALTED TREE SIMULATOR!! USE SEED, AND FEED IT WITH SOME SALT, PUSH THAT UP A TREE, AND YOU HAVE BETTER TREES.. I am sometimes stunned that how much AI can really help you develop something, that can look this promising. I thought only top tier people, or people with tons and tons of money to burn on Claude can build this, but this is not that bad, if I am being honest. Obviously, I won’t reach the same level of achievements as that of something like Claude, but I think, I learnt so so much about Shaders, its types, like Vertex, Fragment and My fav, COMPUTE shaders.. And everything is just so cool. Still fixing some bugs here and there, because umm.. Yah, it still needs a lot, and A LOT OF OPTIMIZATIONS and polish, because my chunk generation worked better in my last attempt. Will be figuring everything out so stay tuned my dear friends.. NOTABLE MENTIONS:- YOUTUBERS Low Level Game Dev (He has some clever tricks up as well, which Vericidium didn’t) Vercidium (TRUE INSPIRATION AND GOATED, FOR MAKING MY PROJECT WORK) Frieends Rupnil (My cutiepie, NO QUESTIONS) Adamd (He helped me get funds for one of my hardware projects without asking anything in return. THANK YOU)"}, {"post_id": 12571, "ts": "2026-06-20T15:06:04Z", "hours": 3.2694, "text": "I have just added the option to save, so basically, if you make something funny like 67 on your world with water blocks, first of all, EWW… And second of all, yes it will persist and now I will hate you even more."}, {"post_id": 12374, "ts": "2026-06-20T06:15:52Z", "hours": 1.0867, "text": "Guys, I think, I broke something, but I really cannot point out, what is wrong in my minecraft? I mean.. There is something missing, but what can it be?"}, {"post_id": 12091, "ts": "2026-06-19T18:52:09Z", "hours": 2.1861, "text": "Current Lighting Rendering Engine, currently using the AO metrics that I used last time, but I never understood properly, but this time, this looks so so so cool.. This will be coming soon for you guys as well to enjoy. Stay tuned. This was a lot of trouble and back and forth. Because lighting engine, doesn’t one have to update one chunk, but four neighboring chunk as well, and idk why it took me so long to realise.."}, {"post_id": 11915, "ts": "2026-06-19T12:59:27Z", "hours": 1.8122, "text": "I am sorry, did I just get 60FPS?? I HAD TO PAUSE MY FRAME TO CAPTURE THIS MUCH OPTIMIZATION. I am not even at the peak of it. Furthermore, I was currently working on Sky Box, and I am tired to figuring out what’s wrong, so this is an early devlog of just about 2 hours. I want to rant about skyBox and what did I do to well, Make my game break.. So, what happened is that, the shaders that I am using, I was using vec3, which means sun’s direction is a vector of 3 floats, but somehow, vec3 must always start on a multiple of 16.. WHO DECIDED THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA.. WHO IS THAT MORON??? I WANT TO TAKE MY SHOTGUN OUT (TO FLEX) AND PUNCH HIM (BECAUSE WHO WASTES AMMO.. TOO EXPENSIVE LAH.) I GOT TIRED DEBUGGING THIS… Only for AI to tell me, you did everything right except everything.. I just uploaded everything. You guys might think this is a negative as no trees and grass, but TRUST THE PROCESS.. I KNOW YOU CAN, ELSE I WILL SHOW YOU MY SHOTGUN AND PUNCH YOU AS WELL!!"}, {"post_id": 11811, "ts": "2026-06-19T07:03:19Z", "hours": 1.8922, "text": "Quick Update on the progress.. I mean, FAH.. The render distance so high, and yet the FPS IS PLAYABLE, without even much optimizations. I know, the terrain has nothing for now. But don’t worry.. SOON TM.. Let me handle the optimizations first. AND DON’T YOU DARE CROSS QUESTION ME, ELSE I WILL CROSS YOUR QUESTION BACK TO YOU"}, {"post_id": 11216, "ts": "2026-06-18T11:10:03Z", "hours": 3.03, "text": "Playing Minecraft it was never meant to be LMAO.. On this, an important announcement to make here. I will not be able to add multiplayer into this build, because it adds extra complexity into the build, which I am not able to work it for now. It requires you to first have an server in the first place, and then work with streaming and all those. Latency can be a nightmare to tackle with. I am waiting for my last ship’s payout so I can push on github, all my updates. Till then, I am working on small things, like adding structures like trees, water and so on, because this is a new, and much more optimized build than the last one. You will also find it relatively pleasing to read my code, if you are nerdy enough, but isn’t that hard tbh."}, {"post_id": 11112, "ts": "2026-06-18T05:41:13Z", "hours": 4.0106, "text": "Better support for AO Voxels and lighting coming soon to this build. Stay Tunes or you might miss out. Here is a small working prototype of it. What is AO you may ask? AO means Ambient Occlusion, what it does is check in the four corners, and predict the shading based off of those corners. I mean, AO has much more, but this is like a basic and optimized version of it, that looks good, but also not performance heavy. Obviously, I am not using GAMING RTX 5090 for this.. Hell, My Laptop doesn’t even have a GPU, SO SHUT UP.. IT’S MY GAME AND I WILL DESIGN IT HOWEVER I WANT."}, {"post_id": 10666, "ts": "2026-06-17T15:05:23Z", "hours": 6.2597, "text": "Hate me as much as you want, because, I am rewriting my code once again for the idk, like 5th time, just to learn more, and finally I am able to structure my code properly. Go this was a bad plan. And I would not like to go to this hell ever again. Please god, forgive me for my sins.. But anyways, as you can see, I am currently, literally rewriting parts of the code, and organishing it, into much better folder structure, so I and you, and she who told you not to worry about his boy, can all understand this code and you don’t have to be a nerd to be changing parameters to buff yourself, to become the boy the girls needs.. IDK, I have been working too much on this project. I need therapy LMAO.."}, {"post_id": 9758, "ts": "2026-06-16T06:01:00Z", "hours": 3.4519, "text": "Currently working on WebRTC and understanding, why do I exist, but also why do computers exist, and how do computers know that my computer is not your computer and your computer is well, how is it your computer. And can they secretly interact and do goofy things with ultrasonic, and I mean, it’s technically the speed of light so.. YAH.."}, {"post_id": 9084, "ts": "2026-06-15T05:46:24Z", "hours": 5.6536, "text": "Final Finishing Touches, And I wanted to add much more, like better lighting support and all, but Now I am getting too much out of my comfort zone, and will have to work completely with AI, I have polished the UI, made an Inventory system and a bit more, but now, I am really tired, and cannot explain, how tedious it has become maintaining my own code. So I will have to halt my project now and ship it. Thanks to Stardance for giving me such a wonderful place to code at and work, and show my works and learn so so much cool stuff into the world of GPUs and Shaders."}, {"post_id": 8023, "ts": "2026-06-13T11:57:01Z", "hours": 3.1878, "text": "Umm.. Do cows have lawyers? Anyways, Today, i just worked on refactoring my code into different files, so it is easier to navigate and understand the code. Because it was getting a mess."}, {"post_id": 7405, "ts": "2026-06-12T10:32:33Z", "hours": 1.5669, "text": "Water Update with bouyancy and all.. And made everything look like Avatar.. BLUE TONED.. Because you know, Water is blue, and blue is blue, I have no clue, so make everything blue. Now, you are blue, and me is blue"}, {"post_id": 6967, "ts": "2026-06-11T18:00:49Z", "hours": 0.31, "text": "IDK, How do I show you but basically, As I have moved to a typescript focused base. So, I had to change my monorepo and all. So Now, the game is playable for anyone to enjoy."}, {"post_id": 6940, "ts": "2026-06-11T17:14:07Z", "hours": 11.7611, "text": "Guys it’s been about 12 hours and let me tell you. First of all. I am just too tired after all this. I wanted to use better optimized code like SSBOs but basically, I cannot use it due to the fact that it is not available in OpenGL ES 30 so I had to go all around and make the entire game in another GPU.. Making shaders was already hard. THIS MADE IT WORSE!! So, Currenly, my app supports two formats and if you are stupid enough that you don’t have WebGPU, so it will run normally like WebGL will get on and help. Further optimized my code and also, I will be optimizing it even further. I have added grass by then SO I CAN TOUCH IT, ATLEAST WHEN I AM SITTING AND LEARNING AND DOING THESE STUPID STUFF. Uff.. Also the I have also added moving Cows so you can see, but the texture is just stone so please don’t mind."}, {"post_id": 5711, "ts": "2026-06-09T16:39:15Z", "hours": 0.6553, "text": "Guys, I think, I found a friend.. Its not cute and all.. BUT IT’S LOVELY.. I LOVE HER SO MUCH.. YOU NAME IS WELL.. PET ROCK.. AWWWW.. YOU ARE SO LOVELY MS. PET ROCK.. Hope you don’t die the moment you fall.. 100% NOT FORESHADOWING.."}, {"post_id": 5685, "ts": "2026-06-09T15:47:02Z", "hours": 1.0764, "text": "Water is finally working and it is moving.. It is animated so you can enjoy the ambience. Furthermore, I have dialed up the variables for my night. So, the night isn’t like a horror movie. Took me a little too long then I would anticipate."}, {"post_id": 5566, "ts": "2026-06-09T12:09:32Z", "hours": 1.4347, "text": "Currently I am working on Implementing Water, and let’s just say, it’s not working out well for me."}, {"post_id": 5514, "ts": "2026-06-09T10:09:46Z", "hours": 2.4567, "text": "Guys, I think, When I meant Water, I meant to add Water not BEANS IN MINECRAFT.. LMAOO… BEANS!!!!!! BEANS MOD COMING SOON TM"}, {"post_id": 5058, "ts": "2026-06-08T18:38:13Z", "hours": 1.1131, "text": "ONLY 1% OF PEOPLE CAN FIND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY LODs LMAO XD… CAN YOU FIND THE 4 LEVELS OF LODS BECAUSE I CANNOT - DORA THE DRUG DEALER"}, {"post_id": 4955, "ts": "2026-06-08T16:20:44Z", "hours": 0.7411, "text": "Inventory Icon Update"}, {"post_id": 4933, "ts": "2026-06-08T15:19:58Z", "hours": 1.7539, "text": "Not to brag about anything, but I just rendered like over 4000 chunks with I know I know, 20 FPS, but you don’t realise, just see the CPU and GPU. It’s not even a proper GPU, Is uses VRAM from my storage no less.. For anyone wondering, Check Intel UHD Graphics, and my CPU is i3-1005G1, so it’s some antique peice, but yet, my algorithms held strong even in rendering 4000 fizzing chunks. Entities like cows coming soon."}, {"post_id": 4779, "ts": "2026-06-08T08:31:49Z", "hours": 4.2933, "text": "Rendering Pipeline Updated, to make it work with even more chunks Procedural Generation, and make it not suck. The main problem I was facing and is still facing is the fact that I am dumb, and also Lighting. Somehow, the Lighting Engine is not working out with so many parameters that I have tested with. I will probably just"}, {"post_id": 4357, "ts": "2026-06-07T17:26:03Z", "hours": 4.3622, "text": "Lighting Engine Update, And tons of optimizations added to make it work. I hope, it doesn’t crash on anyone, because, when I check the memory usage of this bad boy, it was just 56MB, I was like, FAH??? I MADE ALL OF THIS, IN 56 MB???? That’s some crazy shit. I will be working on the Menu and all next. Stay tuned."}, {"post_id": 4077, "ts": "2026-06-07T08:32:19Z", "hours": 6.5333, "text": "First of all, thanks to rufus.gordonheywood for his following, because, I forgot, I was doing star dance, I literally, went so deep into making Minecraft work. If you want, you can check, this minecraft literally has no external dependencies.. THAT IS SOME CRAZY SHIT. I recently made procedral generation, multithreading, and so much more. And I want to be brutally honest with everyone, yes I am using AI, because I just couldn’t make it work without it, the WEBGPU Shaders, the compiling languages, and so much more. I am sorry for anyone who is disappointed. BTW, Currently, I am seeing a bug, that if you fork my project and run it through live server, it is working fine, but not through github. IDK, What’s wrong, but I will get into it ASAP, and make everyone enjoy my shit."}, {"post_id": 3551, "ts": "2026-06-06T15:21:27Z", "hours": 6.1564, "text": "Don’t even ask, why I made a 32x32x32 Minecraft world, and hyperoptimized it to run on GPU and write compute shaders, and eat myself multiple times in the process.. Yah Yah, I used AI, but I wrote everything by hand and understand most of the code, apart from Shaders, just don’t ask me please.. LOL.. But, I made this run with only 40 vertices, like WHAT THE FLUFFFF???? YOOOOO"}, {"post_id": 2775, "ts": "2026-06-05T16:03:25Z", "hours": 5.2967, "text": "Worked on Procedral Glass Breaking… Please don’t ask how long it took, because IT TOOK ME THROUGH THE CORNERS OF INTERNET TO FIND SOMETHING, and then refined it with AI.. Yah AI, I want to be open, But I am not smart enough dealing with such intricate part and design"}]...
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Title: Minecraft Web by @TruthEntity | Stardance
Title: Minecraft Web by @TruthEntity | Stardance
Devlogs:
Worked on Procedral Glass Breaking… Please don’t ask how long it took, because IT TOOK ME THROUGH THE CORNERS OF INTERNET TO FIND SOMETHING, and then refined it with AI.. Yah AI, I want to be open, But I am not smart enough dealing with such intricate part and design
Don’t even ask, why I made a 32x32x32 Minecraft world, and hyperoptimized it to run on GPU and write compute shaders, and eat myself multiple times in the process.. Yah Yah, I used AI, but I wrote everything by hand and understand most of the code, apart from Shaders, just don’t ask me please.. LOL.. But, I made this run with only 40 vertices, like WHAT THE FLUFFFF???? YOOOOO
First of all, thanks to rufus.gordonheywood for his following, because, I forgot, I was doing star dance, I literally, went so deep into making Minecraft work. If you want, you can check, this minecraft literally has no external dependencies.. THAT IS SOME CRAZY SHIT. I recently made procedral generation, multithreading, and so much more. And I want to be brutally honest with everyone, yes I am using AI, because I just couldn’t make it work without it, the WEBGPU Shaders, the compiling languages, and so much more. I am sorry for anyone who is disappointed. BTW, Currently, I am seeing a bug, that if you fork my project and run it through live server, it is working fine, but not through github. IDK, What’s wrong, but I will get into it ASAP, and make everyone enjoy my shit.
Lighting Engine Update, And tons of optimizations added to make it work. I hope, it doesn’t crash on anyone, because, when I check the memory usage of this bad boy, it was just 56MB, I was like, FAH??? I MADE ALL OF THIS, IN 56 MB???? That’s some crazy shit. I will be working on the Menu and all next. Stay tuned.
Rendering Pipeline Updated, to make it work with even more chunks Procedural Generation, and make it not suck. The main problem I was facing and is still facing is the fact that I am dumb, and also Lighting. Somehow, the Lighting Engine is not working out with so many parameters that I have tested with. I will probably just
Not to brag about anything, but I just rendered like over 4000 chunks with I know I know, 20 FPS, but you don’t realise, just see the CPU and GPU. It’s not even a proper GPU, Is uses VRAM from my storage no less.. For anyone wondering, Check Intel UHD Graphics, and my CPU is i3-1005G1, so it’s some antique peice, but yet, my algorithms held strong even in rendering 4000 fizzing chunks. Entities like cows coming soon.
Inventory Icon Update
ONLY 1% OF PEOPLE CAN FIND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY LODs LMAO XD… CAN YOU FIND THE 4 LEVELS OF LODS BECAUSE I CANNOT - DORA THE DRUG DEALER
Guys, I think, When I meant Water, I meant to add Water not BEANS IN MINECRAFT.. LMAOO… BEANS!!!!!! BEANS MOD COMING SOON TM
Currently I am working on Implementing Water, and let’s just say, it’s not working out well for me.
Water is finally working and it is moving.. It is animated so you can enjoy the ambience. Furthermore, I have dialed up the variables for my night. So, the night isn’t like a horror movie. Took me a little too long then I would anticipate.
Guys, I think, I found a friend.. Its not cute and all.. BUT IT’S LOVELY.. I LOVE HER SO MUCH.. YOU NAME IS WELL.. PET ROCK.. AWWWW.. YOU ARE SO LOVELY MS. PET ROCK.. Hope you don’t die the moment you fall.. 100% NOT FORESHADOWING..
Guys it’s been about 12 hours and let me tell you. First of all. I am just too tired after all this. I wanted to use better optimized code like SSBOs but basically, I cannot use it due to the fact that it is not available in OpenGL ES 30 so I had to go all around and make the entire game in another GPU.. Making shaders was already hard. THIS MADE IT WORSE!! So, Currenly, my app supports two formats and if you are stupid enough that you don’t have WebGPU, so it will run normally like WebGL will get on and help. Further optimized my code and also, I will be optimizing it even further. I have added grass by then SO I CAN TOUCH IT, ATLEAST WHEN I AM SITTING AND LEARNING AND DOING THESE STUPID STUFF. Uff.. Also the I have also added moving Cows so you can see, but the texture is just stone so please don’t mind.
IDK, How do I show you but basically, As I have moved to a typescript focused base. So, I had to change my monorepo and all. So Now, the game is playable for anyone to enjoy.
Water Update with bouyancy and all.. And made everything look like Avatar.. BLUE TONED.. Because you know, Water is blue, and blue is blue, I have no clue, so make everything blue. Now, you are blue, and me is blue
Umm.. Do cows have lawyers? Anyways, Today, i just worked on refactoring my code into different files, so it is easier to navigate and understand the code. Because it was getting a mess.
Final Finishing Touches, And I wanted to add much more, like better lighting support and all, but Now I am getting too much out of my comfort zone, and will have to work completely with AI, I have polished the UI, made an Inventory system and a bit more, but now, I am really tired, and cannot explain, how tedious it has become maintaining my own code. So I will have to halt my project now and ship it. Thanks to Stardance for giving me such a wonderful place to code at and work, and show my works and learn so so much cool stuff into the world of GPUs and Shaders.
Currently working on WebRTC and understanding, why do I exist, but also why do computers exist, and how do computers know that my computer is not your computer and your computer is well, how is it your computer. And can they secretly interact and do goofy things with ultrasonic, and I mean, it’s technically the speed of light so.. YAH..
Hate me as much as you want, because, I am rewriting my code once again for the idk, like 5th time, just to learn more, and finally I am able to structure my code properly. Go this was a bad plan. And I would not like to go to this hell ever again. Please god, forgive me for my sins.. But anyways, as you can see, I am currently, literally rewriting parts of the code, and organishing it, into much better folder structure, so I and you, and she who told you not to worry about his boy, can all understand this code and you don’t have to be a nerd to be changing parameters to buff yourself, to become the boy the girls needs.. IDK, I have been working too much on this project. I need therapy LMAO..
Better support for AO Voxels and lighting coming soon to this build. Stay Tunes or you might miss out. Here is a small working prototype of it. What is AO you may ask? AO means Ambient Occlusion, what it does is check in the four corners, and predict the shading based off of those corners. I mean, AO has much more, but this is like a basic and optimized version of it, that looks good, but also not performance heavy. Obviously, I am not using GAMING RTX 5090 for this.. Hell, My Laptop doesn’t even have a GPU, SO SHUT UP.. IT’S MY GAME AND I WILL DESIGN IT HOWEVER I WANT.
Playing Minecraft it was never meant to be LMAO.. On this, an important announcement to make here. I will not be able to add multiplayer into this build, because it adds extra complexity into the build, which I am not able to work it for now. It requires you to first have an server in the first place, and then work with streaming and all those. Latency can be a nightmare to tackle with. I am waiting for my last ship’s payout so I can push on github, all my updates. Till then, I am working on small things, like adding structures like trees, water and so on, because this is a new, and much more optimized build than the last one. You will also find it relatively pleasing to read my code, if you are nerdy enough, but isn’t that hard tbh.
Quick Update on the progress.. I mean, FAH.. The render distance so high, and yet the FPS IS PLAYABLE, without even much optimizations. I know, the terrain has nothing for now. But don’t worry.. SOON TM.. Let me handle the optimizations first. AND DON’T YOU DARE CROSS QUESTION ME, ELSE I WILL CROSS YOUR QUESTION BACK TO YOU
I am sorry, did I just get 60FPS?? I HAD TO PAUSE MY FRAME TO CAPTURE THIS MUCH OPTIMIZATION. I am not even at the peak of it. Furthermore, I was currently working on Sky Box, and I am tired to figuring out what’s wrong, so this is an early devlog of just about 2 hours. I want to rant about skyBox and what did I do to well, Make my game break.. So, what happened is that, the shaders that I am using, I was using vec3, which means sun’s direction is a vector of 3 floats, but somehow, vec3 must always start on a multiple of 16.. WHO DECIDED THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA.. WHO IS THAT MORON??? I WANT TO TAKE MY SHOTGUN OUT (TO FLEX) AND PUNCH HIM (BECAUSE WHO WASTES AMMO.. TOO EXPENSIVE LAH.) I GOT TIRED DEBUGGING THIS… Only for AI to tell me, you did everything right except everything.. I just uploaded everything. You guys might think this is a negative as no trees and grass, but TRUST THE PROCESS.. I KNOW YOU CAN, ELSE I WILL SHOW YOU MY SHOTGUN AND PUNCH YOU AS WELL!!
Current Lighting Rendering Engine, currently using the AO metrics that I used last time, but I never understood properly, but this time, this looks so so so cool.. This will be coming soon for you guys as well to enjoy. Stay tuned. This was a lot of trouble and back and forth. Because lighting engine, doesn’t one have to update one chunk, but four neighboring chunk as well, and idk why it took me so long to realise..
Guys, I think, I broke something, but I really cannot point out, what is wrong in my minecraft? I mean.. There is something missing, but what can it be?
I have just added the option to save, so basically, if you make something funny like 67 on your world with water blocks, first of all, EWW… And second of all, yes it will persist and now I will hate you even more.
Added leaves and foliage, this was arguable much easy, but I sure know, I again broke my optimizations or atleast something must be broken, because things cannot go this smooth.. AND FOR ONCE, I WROTE SOMETHING I CAN ALSO UNDERSTAND, and then AI was like Nuh Uh, SALTED TREE SIMULATOR!! USE SEED, AND FEED IT WITH SOME SALT, PUSH THAT UP A TREE, AND YOU HAVE BETTER TREES.. I am sometimes stunned that how much AI can really help you develop something, that can look this promising. I thought only top tier people, or people with tons and tons of money to burn on Claude can build this, but this is not that bad, if I am being honest. Obviously, I won’t reach the same level of achievements as that of something like Claude, but I think, I learnt so so much about Shaders, its types, like Vertex, Fragment and My fav, COMPUTE shaders.. And everything is just so cool. Still fixing some bugs here and there, because umm.. Yah, it still needs a lot, and A LOT OF OPTIMIZATIONS and polish, because my chunk generation worked better in my last attempt. Will be figuring everything out so stay tuned my dear friends.. NOTABLE MENTIONS:- YOUTUBERS Low Level Game Dev (He has some clever tricks up as well, which Vericidium didn’t) Vercidium (TRUE INSPIRATION AND GOATED, FOR MAKING MY PROJECT WORK) Frieends Rupnil (My cutiepie, NO QUESTIONS) Adamd (He helped me get funds for one of my hardware projects without asking anything in return. THANK YOU)
Guys, I will be completely open, and I have said before as well, but seeing so many people keep following me. Thank you so much for following a project, that is though made by me, but it like I am owning a shop that is run by someone else. AKA, AI has helped me a ton, and so much that, I don’t know, anything afterwards, specially with Shaders, WebGPU and other creative stuff and optimizations, which let’s be honest, the optimizations like, GREEDY MESHING!!, OCCLUSION CULLING, BACK CULLING (Though it was just like a line as it was native to WebGPU), and while reading through other low level youtubers about optimizations such as, EXTREMITY BOUND CHECKING, BITWISE MANIPULATION,CACHE LOCALITY, NOISE UPSAMPLING, NOISE CASHING, RUN LENGTH ENCODING, RLE BASED RUNTIME. VOXEL DATALOOKUP TABLES, AoSoA and so on, like these just become buzz words that I ask my AI to help with, and that’s the recipe to make everything fall apart when you want to add something new. AI’s context windows are just not big enough to have a full fedged Minecraft. Seeing all you guys support, I have decided to ask AI to now teach me, and help me with the flow, and never the code, I will be coding every single word by myself. Read Papers, and try to implement it myself and so on.. This might be a big turning point for the project because, YAH, I AM WRITING THIS ENTIRE CODE ONCE AGAIN, But this time, I promise, I will be learning everything, and I will keep this as running, and make a second repo like minecraft or something, to enjoy. Sorry to everyone who thought, this is entirely made by me, because that is just not possible for such small 7 second attention span kids like us.
Never in my life, I thought I would be so happy seeing a Red Triangle Render on my screen.. YAH, I WASTED LIKE 6 HOURS READING ARTICLES WRITING SHEESH, THEN ASKING AI, Obviously not to generate code, but about where to understand it better, and how to understand the concepts. And more. GUYS, STOP FOLLOWING ME.. It breaks my heart so much, that I am gonna disappoint you all, if I didn’t make this project, fully work.. Till I was trying to make stuff, and learn and sleep, and learn, I didn’t have so many followers, it was like, fine, if it broke for me, it’s completely fine with me, but now.. IT FEELS LIKE, IT IS NOT GOING TO BE FINE.. Thankfully, I am using a different repo, and that is accurately named as “Minecraft” rather than Puzzles to avoid confusion. As where did the Puzzle come from? Well, long story short, see my first ever devlog in here.
IDK, How should I actually show my research in here but this is like, I have been working on, I have made 5 different notes, and as you can see by the time.. Yah, I have worked some hours on this bad boy..
If anyone wants to understand more about what a Graphics API is, and how is it meant to work, I would highly suggest watching “Making my own 3D engine” by Inkbox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJoZSRnU0is
Yesterday, I was doing research, so I don’t disappoint any of you guys. I watched some matrices manipulation videos and all, and I made this small little copy for myself to store all the findings I have. I don’t really have a lot, but these are certainly my findings, and I don’t prefer making notes on laptop, because personal preference in that. Anyways Give this a read, it is not very hard, and you will learn something new about how the GPU works and specially if you always wondered, what is the actual use of “Matrices” because I am in high school, and I always thought Matrices were silly and all. For people, who have been since the start of this project. First of all, I wanted to talk to you guys.. I don’t really know, what to do to this project. And I feel like, I am going to get banned, because even after all those iterations, remember, the whole project is widely AI made.. Though I am currently research, and have been open. But I don’t really know, how to feel about it. My stupid little Autistic Brain is really panicing that all my 100 hours of work would be gone. Honestly, I won’t be sad or anything if I get banned, because, indeed I used AI, but I just wanted to write my best shot, that atleast, I had a point to say, and then whatever the friends at StarDance decide, I will be completely fine with it. My main goal for developing this project, came from watching a tutorial, and I wanted to try to make something like Minecraft but for the web, because I was fascinated by optimizations.. This optimization, that optimization.. And I was like, Wait, these youtubers are literally rendering trillions of vertexes, why not make it in the browser, and even if I am able to render in 100s.. I still would always find it fascinating.. I never really thought before I started, and I just wanted to talk to AI, about how everything worked, and all.. I did mostly the research about optimization, and I specifically chose Gemini Pro over Claude, because Claude really does the heavy lifting for everyone, whereas I was here to learn. That’s the reason, I had so many hours invested.. (and so many reiterations on my code LOL…). I wanted to learn, but not like the code, but like how to optimize, like, I used to think.. Wait, BITWISE MAPPING.. We can map this much bytes to this, and that, and let the AI write the code for that.. I was just so invested on this project, I forgot we had a rule of “NO MORE THAN 30% AI..” Ahh, I am stupid.. That’s why, I am trying to gain myself back a lot now.. Doing stuff without hours like writing on copy, because obviously I could have written through VSC or something.. but now, I have really given hope on this project as a Retired / Banned Project…. I literally am currently working on a different repo with the name Minecraft rather than this.. I am watching youtube videos and lectures about how WebGPU works and all.. And I want to gain myself back.. As in a good person, and not like an AI slop, who breaks rules..
Sorry for all my mental breakdowns.. Here is some actual progress that I did by myself.. I learnt about Assert from my last code.. And why do we need assert.. And I made my own Logger.. What are these so let me explain.. A Logger is atmost just a console.log message, but why to make it a separate class? This offers a lot of usability, as first, you can just say, this is a warning type of stuff, or this is just verbose.. Or MAYBE STOP SOMETHING IF IT IS SOMETHING VERY FATAL, AND SHOULD BE FIXED ASAP.. Not only that, often you will encounter like specially if you link something like a canvas, it might always be that well, Either you will force it using “!” in the end, or you will just do a command that eliminated undefined.. Like if (canvas !== undefined), but assert says.. OK, LET ME HAVE A CONDITION, and not only that, my asserts are special, as I have rigged it, so it will never ever return or what Typescript called a never return.. So you don’t need to write those.. Loggers also have a special use, as if the messages are verbose, instead of removing and readding all the console logs in like a stupid way.. You can declare a class and say, if the level is below fatal, like for verbose or info type of stuff, just cancel those stuff.. Just don’t show it.. It is very nice tool tbh.. Oh yah, I forgot.. Well, as these are custom, so You can literally add another parameter like context, as to what might be the reason for the breaking of the code, so if you check that code later on in life.. You will still know, what broke and where.. It’s a really handy tool in my opinion and everyone should give it a shot.
It was quite easy, I mean, I am finally writing shaders, and yes, you guys have seen me make a triangle before, but that was genuinely speaking, was just a normal little trinagle.. But this triangle.. NO NO.. I have structured it so nicely that dare you break this, and my FATAL ERROR systems start to panic and trigger alarms all around.. It was a chaotic mess, and yes I did rejuvanate some parts of my old project, but yah, It’s not like I don’t know what I am doing now.. Furthermore, Sorry for my mental issues, I GOT MY FIRST SHIP’S PAYOUT, and though I was not expecting it, I am more than happy, even if it was a 13x mult and yah, I got a lot of comments regarding Z-Fighting.. I don’t really know the source of this issue, so I will be making the stuff again anyways, in my ways this time.. And hopefully, it will be better than last time.. I am so happy that I literally broke a tear when I saw I got a payout.. Thanks to everyone for so so much support… I will not be working harder than ever towards this project.
Guys I can see progress..
Guys, My very first shader, completely written by me, and it looks so sick. All it does is feed into the fragment an attribute of space, and break that space with a checker.. And this is just fascinating.. I want to hug myself..
I have started following a tutorial, and I have done so much research, but it a shame that I cannot log that time. I went through some of the best documents written about WebGPU and explaining stuff.. But anyways, I have started following a tutorial on Three.js for making minecraft. It has literally made me in ease, because now I can log some actual time now.. By writing code rather than researching and for now here is my plan Continue to do this project Phase: 1 Draw a Cube with Controls, Draw 2 Cubes with Controls DRAW 64000 CUBES WITH CONTROLS.. By controls they are Orbital Controls, and then we will move on to the second part which is Working on a Naive Mesher, which will just give all the blocks its own 12 triangles on 8 edges each, and then blow up my laptop because if you realise 64000 * 12 is some sheesh work.. SO MANY TRIANGLES, AND I COULD SEE HARDLY 100.. But atleast, it will be the start, then I will work on Instancing and get me fps back up Also utilize the FrameStats which I will make for myself, like the same which well.. THREE.JS USES BUT WITH MY AKA TRUTHENTITY STYLE.. YOOOOO Then perhaps start erasing triangles that are connected through a second mesher Yes I will have multiple types of Meshers and Multiple type of Camera.. And all should follow a common Camera and everything else should be an Implementation like last time, I gave Geometry Pass the implementation of the simpler Renderer Pass, because it effectively make me plug and play with multiple different ways. This is going to be my stuff for next few days of my life.
Umm, Why is Three.js so easy?? HELLO?? JUST MADE A SIMPLE SLIDER THINGY, AND THIS IS SO DOPE GUYS..
This really feels surreal.. I am editing parameters to a game, in which people will land their beautiful foot on, ad mine ores, and do stuff, and this is like a dev mode, where I and I choose how much coal and Iron I want in my life.. Damn..
I hate to admit it, but did I just add, literal shadows, that would have taken me, so so much hours to be working on.. And THREE.JS SOMEHOW, LITERALLY HAS A FREAKING FUNCTION.. THAT DOES THAT AUTOMATICALLY?? EXCUSE ME??? THAT’S JUST CHEATING..
Collisions are now working, with this beautiful looking icosphere as an helper. I JUST WISH WEBGPU OFFERED SUCH CUSTOMIZABILITY.. BUT TRUST ME, I AM GOING TO ADD THESE INTO THE MAIN PROJECT AS WELL.. Three.JS is just so cool.. But again, my goal is to make it the most optimized stuff and see the Entire Earth, and not be happy with just collisions.. SO Let me just complete this tutorial, but I am having a blast.
Guys Just imagine a world, where the whole life is actually a simulation, and God is literally using his laptop like this, to see what you are doing.. (AND YES, YOU WERE BANGING YOUR HEAD, JUST NOT ON GRASS.. DON’T LIE TO ME.. I AM SEEING YOU..)
I want to ask, How do you literally add shadows, and fog, and everything and that so, all in just one line of code? That is just stupid to even think about.. But anyways, now I have made it so, you can break and place blocks and also, if you render out from the world, and come back in, the blocks will still be there.. BE READY FOR ANOTHER ROUND OF 67 … OH WAIT.. NEXT DEVLOG WILL BE 67.. OR WAIT, LET ME JUST.. LOL, 100% NOT A STRUCTURE IN GAME.. (ATLEAST FOR NOW.. HEHEHEHE)
Added Water, Trees, Sand and polish to my project… Like the toolbar, you can see in the bottom. Clean and Elegant.. COMMENT 67 IF YOU WANT TO SEE A 67 STRUCTURE ADDED TO MY GAME… ;)
Final few fixes before shipping, added biome support, and now I will be ready to be trying to make a project, without following tutorial, trying to optimize it, because obviously, three.js, though sounds cool and all.. Uses WebGL, which is widely supported.. but I want to use your entire GPU.. because obviously.. I PAID FOR THE ENTIRE GPU.. (BTW, I don’t even have a GPU, I have what is called Shared GPU Memory with storage but anyways.. THAT IS NOT THE POINT..)
I almost crashed out today. It was a hectic of a job today for me.. Basically, Today I wanted to work on Debugging tools in my original minecraft version. Though, this was hectic of a job, but now I am confident enough to say that, if anything goes wrong, my error codes will instantly trigger and stop those bugs to ever reach me, specially, If I messed up something. This is specifically made to guard rail myself (as I am a newbie in the GPU optimization and just breaks stuff way too often for comfort during my learning steps..) Now, you might be working what is so special that I did that I am being too optimistic (Specially if you know my history of crashouts LOL…) So, Basically, This time, I researched about an algorithm for dependencies.. Basically, what npm uses to keep track of all the dependencies.. You never know where knowledge might reach you LOL.. So, Basically, now each file, or system like Player, Physics, and to add, Chunks and More, will have to implement system, and each system would have a dependency tree, and then by using Kahn’s Algorithm, we can literally turn that tree upside down, and go through the data and make it work.. It literally tells you, which files are Missing in your code, that is just too good.. The only one critic is that, each time you need to be assing a new attribute, which might be tedious, but the profits are way too big to ignore at all..
I have connected my GPU now, and details are also loading nicely.. I will working on GPU Frames and all as well now.
I am crashing out a lot over some assets, because first of all, why is the grass block not green and a colormap, I mean, it does look cool.. BUT COME ON, THAT’S A MENTAL TRAUMA AND NOW WHICH COLOR OF GRASS SHOULD I PICK.. Furthermore, this is also a problem with water and all.. I am trying to find better ways, and actually learn about how Minecraft renders these and turns out, they just.. well.. OVERLAY A GREEN MAP or BLUE MAP over the grass.. I mean, that sounds HORRIBLE TO IMPLEMENT, MY GOD, THIS GAME SU…. IS FINE.. AND FUN.. Furthermore, thank you so so so much for all the reviewers out there.. The fact you guys appreciated my project, and said it is Fine to be using AI.. It just blew my heart.. This is the reason why I am currently working, else, I had already blew my mind with so much complex debugging, such that, I had to make my own engine, and debugger.. As with the latest you can see.. Things are tough but yah.. Also, I see you @skhsmrn on my devlog and another reviewer.. Your demands for 67 WILL BE FULFILLED SOON TM..
Been some time, and the amount of Logs that I am going through is just.. LMAO.. Crazy Crazy.. For my 67 fans, just give me like a few more moments.. Because, Now, I just want to render one block, and I will just add a sky, which will be a simple color gradient, and then I will work on whatever you that 67 thing.. This was really hectic to implement.. Literally had to go through and implement Archetype.. Yes, even I don’t know what they are… But after like learning about it, here is my understanding.. Archetype is basically a central place to keep all the components and all. Remember, we are optimizing the sheesh out of this project.. Archetypes allow us to apply the same gravity and same systems like Physics, collisions and so on, while still giving you customizabilty on if you want to enable it or not.. It’s really cool, but the amount of things I had to implement.. That’s some brutal stuff… Imagine, you forgot to plug the input system, and you are crashing out on, HOW TO FAH THE POSITION IS NOT CHANGING?? LOL, YAH 2 HOURS OF DEBUGGING WENT THERE, only to realise, I forgot to add that.. LOL..
LMAO, You know, you are at the pinnacle when you are going through forums and forums of actually big stuff, that very very few people ever talk about.. Literally..
Sorry, ANOTHER QUICK UPDATE I KNOW.. But trust me, this took me ages to implement, and yes, had to work from backwards, because and again found out, There was nothing being connected to the swapchain for some reason.. It’s actually really not that hard to find bugs when you are used to it, like when something isn’t rendering you know, something must be wrong with renderer and all.. and a quick side step, and you understand yah, swapchain being uninitialized is the key.
Added some simple tests for the ECS system and the topological sort Kahn’s Algorithm system and the Event Bus, so as to 100% confirm the workings of what is intended and what is not.. Also there was a problem with connection of gbuffers into swap chain, so had to make a custom pass called, composite pass, that will intercept and then gives us the necessary output. This might add very minute delay, but it is very unnoticable so don’t worry..
Procedural Generation unlocked, now, you can move as much as you want, and play. Current, block placing and all won’t work, but yah.. Frustum Culling is working as you can see with the culled meter.
67 Structure Implemented and running, and to those who recommended me this.. GUYS YOU REALLY NEED TO SEE A THERAPY OR SOMETHING.. LMAO..
I literally been sick for 2 days, and now that I come back, I somehow see worse.. Like, I wanted to implement meshing and all.. GUESS WHAT I DONE.. YES, MESHED THE ENTIRE WORLD TO DISAPPEAR.. BALLS… I AM GUAVA AND I WILL EAT MYSELF.. That’s enough coding for today as well, signing off..
Hi Everyone, My Devlogs have been lacking a bit, and this another quick devlog, because, I am really not feeling good these days. I am having fever and not feeling great about anything. Currently, I was just searching and asking AI about chunk generation. One of the things, where AI is now needed, because I know noise generation, but I don’t really know, how to make it into reality, and specially when people want realistic chunk generation and all.. I will get into good and start fixing first of all, this light problem, and then just hope, I get well soon, because India’s heat waves are really no joke. My Indian Friends.. Please stay safe and inside house.. IDK, Why even schools are open..
Ships:
Basically, What I have made is Minecraft Web, well Minecraft but on the Website, running on your Browser. Through the Power of Optimizations and knowing how to code, and also using AI for my shader building and debugging bugs like IDK, What I have done to my life. But Basically, I made my own Engine just to prove that You don’t always need THREE.js to do your heavy lifting, and honestly, it was not that hard. You can see the source code, just a few days ago, I refactored it. Hope you love and enjoy my project.
NOTE: Please Skip Voting, if it failed to run on your system please… Hi Friends, so, I have been working on Minecraft for a long time, and Virtually touching grass LOL.. AKA, Making Minecraft, it is quite challenging to say the least, you can check my devlogs.. Basically, I want to make a very very optimized version of minecraft, that you can see through far and far, and highly optimized. I want to add lighting and all, but the banner is a bit misleading.. I will continue to work on the project, but obviously, not Three.js, because What I have learnt is that.. You can use engines like Unity and Unreal, and make goated projects, the feel of making optimized content, and making it run even on a potato, is just on another level.. Seeing the entire generation moving towards fast making and prototyping, it is always a safe bet to try something new and interesting. This is one of the prototypes that taught me a lot, from How to deal with chunks, and manage chunks, to making biomes, which was actually new.. Chunks I have worked with AI before, and it helped me a ton, and I know about those, but not here.. Hope you love my project...
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1792835375.0242522
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1792921775.0242522
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927
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Squirrel by @Koei | Stardance
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Koei
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3
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104.0
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1915
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-19T13:34:37Z", "hours": 29.0, "multiplier": 17.36, "payout": 598, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "v1.0.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager for Windows and X11 Linux that is meant to be simple and intuitive. This major release overhauls the data storage schema to be more efficient, faster, and reliable. There are significant performance improvements. This release also adds configurability to Squirrel, allowing basic but much needed customization, and polishes up the overall app. Check the README for more information.", "repo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel", "demo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel/releases/latest"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-26T14:30:06Z", "hours": 30.0, "multiplier": 13.88, "payout": 499, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "v0.3.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager that is meant to be simple and intuitive. 2 new features in this version, namely pinning and image support. There are performance improvements as well as slight visual tweaks. Read the README for more info.", "repo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel", "demo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel/releases/latest"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-06-23T16:48:48Z", "hours": 45.0, "multiplier": 18.23, "payout": 818, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "v0.1.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager that is meant to be simple and intuitive. It remembers all the text you copy allowing you to paste whatever into wherever. You can also quickly search through your history. Squirrel is meant to be cross-platform, but for this release, Linux support on Wayland is very iffy (X11 is fine for the most part). I would highly recommend using Windows for testing this ship, sorry for the inconvenience. Expect potentially better support next ship.", "repo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel", "demo": "https://github.com/Koei32/squirrel/releases/latest"}]...
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[{"post_id": 63114, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 63114, "ts": "2026-09-06T18:50:53Z", "hours": 4.0806, "text": "v1.0.0 It’s official. Squirrel is now v1. devlog time is adding logging, updating readme, fixing some small tidbits and polishing up some areas of the app. Squirrel now prints pretty logs to console when running in development mode and writes logs to a file if running in release. Project status i realistically can not get a GUI settings panel done due to me needing to divert my attention to more important life stuff. this right here is probably going to be the extent of work done on Squirrel in stardance. i definitely do plan on working on this in the long term. for example, im not entirely happy and satisfied with the current UI, and global hotkey still does not work on wayland. but right now, more pressing issues are at hand and i cannot give it my all on this project. that said, i do believe that Squirrel is in a very usable 1.0 state, which was my goal. i might push minor updates if the reviews call for fixes/improvements, but definitely no major features. thanks for reading if you made it here."}, {"post_id": 54719, "ts": "2026-08-25T19:56:34Z", "hours": 3.9647, "text": "History persistence configuration now works. setting it to false means history is not retained between sessions. comes with true as default. pinned entries always persist. attachment shows the behavior when persistence is off. Implementation i ended up deciding not to do the in memory database method for this since it was a bit too much added complexity which could be avoided by just adding an additional is_persistent column to the db. im not the happiest about how i’ve implemented this right now but im willing to take that hit right now if it means i dont have to deal with databases. Next all of the config options are now implemented. we are very close to v1.0. expect progress to be rather slow from here on out. i’ve had to divert my attention towards other things and haven’t been able to spend a lot of time working on my projects. maybe i will work on a settings panel. depends on how much work it requires. it’s a maybe. i may just ship it as it stands right now."}, {"post_id": 51853, "ts": "2026-08-21T18:35:09Z", "hours": 0.8633, "text": "Item expiry and pin-preservation expired items are now automatically deleted on program startup. an entry is considered expired when the current time is more than its expires_at value. when pinned, the expires_at attribute is nulled, meaning this entry will never expire. the “Clear all” shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Del now respects pinned entries. it clears everything but leaves pinned entries untouched. Next the ephemeral db shenanigans. also, i have decided that Squirrel needs a settings panel in the frontend for easier config modification. that may or may not happen but it is tempting to do it."}, {"post_id": 51243, "ts": "2026-08-20T19:36:27Z", "hours": 5.9658, "text": "(i genuinely have no idea what to show in the devlog attachment, nothing’s changed visually. so have this stupid ass screenshot.) Massive refactor, breaking changes now that i’ve given myself the liberty to rethink and redesign Squirrel’s data models and storage in a breaking fashion for v1, we have managed to make a good amount of improvements across the board. database schema has been modified to better suit current needs and make it possible to implement the features I desire for v1. it has been a very satisfying refactor. What’s new: use UNIX microsecond timestamp for event ids instead of relying on sqlite autoincrement. this allows us to immediately send a captured event to the frontend without having to await a db write to obtain the event id. this also eliminates the timestamp column for events since the id is also the timestamp. a dedicated BLOB column for image entries to store raw image bytes instead of b64 encoded strings. this makes images weigh about ~33% lighter. decent perf boost. new expires_at column to store when an entry expires. pinned entries have an expiry of NULL . provides the base to actually implement expiring entries. get rid of ClipboardEventNotice since we no longer do the notify frontend -> write to db -> send data to frontend dance. it is now simply send whole event to frontend -> write to db . we enjoy simplifications. (!) as it stands now, old data (if it exists) would immediately be wiped when launching Squirrel v1. i could write some migration code but we’ll see. maybe clipboard data isn’t important enough to bother with migration. Next: actually implement entry expiration: should be trivial, just delete expired entries on launch. ephemeral/persistent toggle: this one is a bit tricky, and will involve some in memory database shenanigans. more details in the devlog when i implement this."}, {"post_id": 47102, "ts": "2026-08-14T19:04:13Z", "hours": 0.8614, "text": "Ignore programs you can specify programs in which Squirrel should not listen to clipboard events. this is useful when you’re working in a program wherein you need to use copy and paste a bunch. ignoring that program would keep your Squirrel history clean. also useful to ignore a program that you regularly copy secrets from. example of notepad being ignored:"}, {"post_id": 46488, "ts": "2026-08-13T18:43:57Z", "hours": 3.6642, "text": "devlog attachment obligation: here is me pasting some files i copied a couple minutes ago after i copied stuff on top of that. that out of the way, devlog. Several things app theme is now configurable from config, so you are not stuck with the system theme if you want to change it. cleanup across the backend; comments, TODOs, error handling, and stuff of the sort. performance enhancement in the clipboard event emitter loop. bugfix in the same loop where the thread panicked if you copied something while the app was launching. merged the config branch. the remaining config options would be better to implement in their own branches. dependabot updates"}, {"post_id": 46172, "ts": "2026-08-13T06:19:26Z", "hours": 3.2672, "text": "Configuration (wip) Squirrel now has a configuration file. squirrel.toml is created in the config directory of your OS (i.e. %appdata%/Squirrel on windows and /home/username/.config/Squirrel on linux), finally allowing some amount of customization support. right now, only the types and the max_image_size config options work. types allows you to choose which kind of clipboard items are captured/ignored. max_image_size is self explanatory. attached is the full config file. the remaining options require a bit of work to implement."}, {"post_id": 44184, "ts": "2026-08-09T19:34:47Z", "hours": 0.5053, "text": "Turns out, copy and paste support for files was a one line diff. also, Squirrel is now v0.4.0, yippee. anyways, moving swiftly on. Planning for a v1.0 Squirrel is now in a state where we have most of the major features i wanted it to have: support for essential clipboard data types, pinning and search. however, it is not quite in a v1.0 state. there are a bunch of things i want to add to polish up the program and make it feel sort of “complete”, which is mainly focusing on some basic configuration ability. since sensible defaults are hard to figure out, i’d rather let the user break things instead of being stuck with my arbitrary decisions. thus, i present the current planned feature list for v1: Configuration : enabling basic behavior customization through a config file (TOML most likely) Program exceptions : dont capture clipboard data on certain programs Auto delete/never store : ability to specify a “shelf life” for items, or whether to store them persistently at all. Disable specific types : ability to pick which kind of clipboard events to capture, i.e. only text or text and images, etc. Configurable image size threshold : currently locked to 5mb, this would allow to specify a custom value. (?) Custom data storage format : still torn on this, but there may be performance to be gained by moving to a data store more geared for our purposes. this list ofcourse, might change. implementing these features would make Squirrel much more flexible, and make it v1 worthy."}, {"post_id": 43522, "ts": "2026-08-08T20:50:19Z", "hours": 5.0344, "text": "Rudimentary file support we now have the most basic kind of file support there could be. which is just storing the path to the file. we then provide a link to the file in the frontend, clicking on which reveals the file in your explorer. we also now have tiny little icons on the entries which indicate the entry type. all icons thanks to https://lucide.dev/ files ofcourse, need a bit more work. right now, you cant really do much except revealing in explorer. i will work on adding copy and paste support for files next, as well as maybe improve the overall performance a bit."}, {"post_id": 40907, "ts": "2026-08-04T18:49:27Z", "hours": 0.4922, "text": "Acting on feedback a shipwright recommended i change my banner to include a screenshot of the program. so we now have a shiny new banner that should look good everywhere on the site. this required me to figure out what dimensions the banner is shown at across the site. i’ve attached a rough template for banners. fitting everything inside the marked areas should make sure your banner isn’t cut off anywhere that matters. one reviewer rightfully couldn’t figure out how to quick paste items. this is a miss on my part because i didn’t really have a list of shortcuts anywhere and kind of just mentioned them in passing in the README. that has been rectified by adding a Shortcuts section to the readme."}, {"post_id": 35201, "ts": "2026-07-26T13:57:06Z", "hours": 0.8461, "text": "Set for ship release is made, README updated. should be good to go."}, {"post_id": 33659, "ts": "2026-07-23T19:06:47Z", "hours": 0.9039, "text": "Basic image cache we now cache the last 32 images, fetching from the backend when required and updating the cache. made the image re-rendering issue instantly better. attached is the demo video i forgot to upload in the second to last devlog showing images in action. Performance images are a difficult thing to handle, especially when dealing with the system clipboard. i’ve made Squirrel as performant as i could to the best of my abilities, which is to say, it’s not the best. it isn’t as rich as i would like it to be, so i might return to this feature to improve it in the future. one restriction i’ve put on images to control some of the chaos is limiting the size to 5 megabytes, meaning any image above 5 megs isn’t registered. i could push that to 10, which is still practically instant. but Squirrel is intended to be a quick clipboard, and not dropbox. so this is my cheaty little escape. maybe i’ll relax the limit in the future if 5mb is really restrictive. Next? i’ll probably bump the minor version and ship (i wouldn’t dare a v1.0 currently). i’d say pinning and image support is enough to warrant a second ship. beyond that though, stands file(s) support, so a lot of decision making on how i want it to work to have a good balance of performance and usefulness. a bit of a lengthy devlog this one, and i appreciate if you read all that. but i wanted to clear up some things for myself and just have a frame of reference where Squirrel stands right now after returning from a development break."}, {"post_id": 33376, "ts": "2026-07-23T08:11:18Z", "hours": 0.3458, "text": "Image branch is merged yay, yippee even. next i need to implement a frontend cache to store the last X entries’ contents, particularly for images. the way it works right now, every time the images are re-rendered (due to being filtered by search, for example), content is fetched from the backend. this ofcourse, is less than ideal. but shouldnt be a lot of trouble to fix."}, {"post_id": 32539, "ts": "2026-07-21T19:47:15Z", "hours": 4.9058, "text": "Bunch of things Image Improvements some performance enhancements with images. made the clipboard image data fetching happen in Tauri’s dedicated thread pool, effectively parallelizing the operation. this made image copying a lot faster. image support should be merged into master soon enough. Lazy loading we now have lazy loading for images. image data isn’t loaded until it is scrolled into view. makes startup quick. CI enabled Dependabot updates and optimized the lint workflows for PRs. previously, all of the project was lint+checked on PR when changing anything. now it only checks the part that’s changed (i.e. frontend or backend)"}, {"post_id": 31397, "ts": "2026-07-19T18:47:59Z", "hours": 4.4964, "text": "Progress on images we finally have some form of working image support in Squirrel. This required even more sweeping refactoring changes to the codebase, which was a bit painful and im sure the new code isn’t the best quality either and will bite me later, but we’ll deal with it when we deal with it. getting images is a bit slow however, as right now we’re storing the image as base64 encoded PNGs. i plan to use the SQLite blob type to just store the raw bytes and pass that back and forth to improve the performance a bit (maybe some sort of caching as well?). there are also other areas where that are to be improved but i wanted to get a somewhat working prototype as fast as i can. explaining the silence i’ve been distracted by some life stuff, making me neglect my projects a bit. i also got distracted by the ESP32, fun little device. that is where the 9 days went. but, expect me to work semi-regularly again. thanks for reading."}, {"post_id": 26042, "ts": "2026-07-10T16:57:23Z", "hours": 3.0411, "text": "Lots of refactoring (apologies for the uneventful devlog attachment, i have nothing interesting to show except just code) to make it a bit more manageable when adding image support, a bunch of refactoring and reorganizing has been done in the backend. like i’ve previously mentioned, the codebase leaned too hard into only supporting text events. this fixes that. today’s changes also make the internal communication a bit more efficient. there are a couple more places where performance can be improved. and we will need every bit of performance we can get when dealing with image data. Changelog (shoutout @Hridya for stardance utils, just discovered this) 5b3f285 refactor: move clipboard structures into separate file b3ab1c8 perf: only get required data from db when copying an item 69dc003 refactor: modify data types to enable addition of image support Release CI (wip) currently writing the Release workflow for Squirrel. i have to figure out how to upload the artifacts to a github release with proper versioning and all that. the strategy is to run the workflow whenever something is pushed to the release branch. that is all for today."}, {"post_id": 25496, "ts": "2026-07-09T20:07:22Z", "hours": 0.7936, "text": "Version bump and docs bumped the minor version. Squirrel is officially v0.2.0, yippi. plus, updated the README, adding more explanation about the Wayland issue. also showcased the pin feature. i’ll try to whip up a release workflow to add to my CI tomorrow. I’m debating whether i should ship v0.2.0. the only major change from 0.1.0 is the addition of pinning. i might wait until i have image support and ship later, or i might change my mind, im unsure."}, {"post_id": 24896, "ts": "2026-07-08T19:03:24Z", "hours": 1.2706, "text": "Closed 1 (one) issue moved the global launch hotkey logic from the frontend to the backend. it didn’t behave well in certain situations, failing to activate and bringing up the Squirrel window. Starting work on images we’re experimenting with images. the current functionality is very much caveman and needs a lot of attention to make it actually usable. i’ve decided to stick with clipboard_rs for now, we’ll see how that pans out."}, {"post_id": 24277, "ts": "2026-07-07T18:55:23Z", "hours": 4.1067, "text": "Sadness so i just found out that Tauri’s global shortcut plugin does not yet support Wayland, which is sad to discover this deep into development. but, there is an active PR addressing this issue , which is nice. what this means for Squirrel is that proper Wayland support will unfortunately have to wait until this is merged. the joys of using a not-yet-completely-matured framework i suppose. though it does make me feel a bit guilty for calling Squirrel “cross-platform”. in other news (changelog): Squirrel now has a --silent launch flag that makes it start with the window hidden. useful when the app is set to launch on system startup. Squirrel now makes sure there is only one instance of it running. The shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Del will clear history permanently. (i forgot about clear history functionality in the first ship even though the code for it existed, there just wasnt a button in the frontend to call it)"}, {"post_id": 22186, "ts": "2026-07-04T14:50:25Z", "hours": 4.1014, "text": "CI dipped my toes into github workflows, messed around, an got check&lint workflows working on pull requests. will make a release workflow some time later. this change however, was only a part of this devlog’s time. Bad decisions catching up turns out, using clipboard_rs might’ve been the subpar choice for interfacing with the system clipboard. while clipboard_rs provides a easy way to listen to clipboard changes and get text from it, fetching raw clipboard data is buggy and inconvenient. when i sat down to work on image support, i was immediately brick-walled by how messy it is to just get raw data first. it would’ve been simple if i was building for just one target os but considering both windows and linux, it’s less than ideal. on top of this, the documentation for the crate is very lackluster. all this to say, i am very much debating migrating my clipboard stuff to using arboard . arboard doesnt provide direct functionality to listen to clipboard changes so i will have to implement that myself. but, it does have first class support for wayland. a very enticing choice, but we will see."}, {"post_id": 18315, "ts": "2026-06-29T12:51:11Z", "hours": 2.7625, "text": "Navigation improvements slight refactoring and bugfixes for frontend navigation. the navigation was kinda wonky before this and sometimes wouldn’t highlight the entry that was actually selected in the background. most of this devlog’s work was to make it so that what you see is what you get. also, a touch of color has been added to pinned entries (tentative)."}, {"post_id": 17064, "ts": "2026-06-27T18:22:53Z", "hours": 2.5814, "text": "Pins we now have basic entry pinning support. this was a bit less difficult than i thought it was going to be. but now you can pin an item and it always stays at the top of the list (unless you’re searching). anyways, that is one item ticked off the todo list. apart from that, i had to do some minor backend refactoring and reorganizing so that it is easier to build more upon. next? image and/or file copy support. this is one monumental task. i think the way we’ll approach this is by storing the entire file if it’s smaller than, say 5mb, and if it is larger, we just store the path to the file. we dont want to store the user’s 5gb video file they just copied. for images, i think the play is to generate a low quality thumbnail of the image to display in the app. for files, if it is a text file, we can show just the first 5 or so lines with a link to the file, other wise we’ll just give a link. until now, the code i’ve written sadly relies too much on the fact that every event is a text copy as we ignore everything else. it’s going to be a rather painstaking experience refactoring the codebase. the challenge is going to be keeping Squirrel quick and responsive while supporting all of this additional functionality."}, {"post_id": 14387, "ts": "2026-06-23T14:34:01Z", "hours": 2.1467, "text": "even more bugfixes ofcourse critical bugs pop up when im trying to release. the system tray icon wouldnt show up when running the single-file executable on any platform. that is now fixed. plus a couple more things have been done to make Squirrel behave like a good cross platform app, like storing the data in the OS’s appdata directory. there are some more things i would like to do but i think the app is in a releasable state and i’ve wanted to ship it for a while. I’ve set up the GitHub release and all the relevant instructions in the README. might be last devlog before ship #1."}, {"post_id": 11396, "ts": "2026-06-18T17:34:03Z", "hours": 1.2267, "text": "more polish and minor fixes more readme refining, linux support clarity, and installation instructions. also, i completely forgot about the tray icon actually needing an image icon, so until now it was just blank. anyways, we now have an icon. next, we put out releases on github and ship, hopefully. unfortunately we have to wait until tomorrow for linux builds."}, {"post_id": 10100, "ts": "2026-06-16T18:11:51Z", "hours": 1.3953, "text": "readme and polishing preparing to ship, writing docs, recording demos and stuff. there are a couple other things i want to sort out but i might ship in a few days."}, {"post_id": 9339, "ts": "2026-06-15T17:46:59Z", "hours": 2.4394, "text": "Dark theme! just glorious there isn’t a theme toggle button yet, it just goes off of your system’s theme for now. now that the colors are roughly standardized across the ui, tweaking the contrast and palette is a much more pleasant experience."}, {"post_id": 8830, "ts": "2026-06-14T18:02:58Z", "hours": 0.6531, "text": "wip dark theme support i want squirrel to use whatever theme the system is set to. currently it’s forced light mode but dark mode is something i’d be crucified for not adding. unfortunately, I in my infinite wisdom didn’t have the foresight to have consistent colors across even the light theme itself. there’s just random #aaa , #666 , etc colors everywhere where i went with what looked good. so work needs to be done to standardize the colors with css variables. then just modify the variables for dark theme accordingly. yes, i’m aware this is standard practice."}, {"post_id": 8047, "ts": "2026-06-13T12:50:39Z", "hours": 1.6972, "text": "Ticked a couple of items off the todo list: Squirrel now loads the history on launch. doing this was easier than i expected, but it’s a very naive way to do it (literally just send all of the history on launch). we also now have a logo. im no graphic designer by any means so this is the best i could do. shows in the titlebar and when your history is empty. check the project banner for a larger version if you feel like it. i might change the logo in the future, i just wanted an icon. todo pinning items test on linux"}, {"post_id": 7571, "ts": "2026-06-12T17:36:06Z", "hours": 1.2175, "text": "nothing significant. just docs and comments and cleanup. slowly making progress planning wise into loading the history at launch. the idea is to use a custom Tauri IPC Channel for incrementally streaming data to the frontend on app start. channels are supposedly faster for this and are meant for continuous messages like this in comparison to events. from the Tauri docs: Channels are designed to be fast and deliver ordered data. They are used internally for streaming operations such as download progress, child process output and WebSocket messages. i may implement a lazy loading system if i feel like it. i have nothing interesting to show so have a squirrel again"}, {"post_id": 6978, "ts": "2026-06-11T18:27:06Z", "hours": 4.3067, "text": "Item search i’ve wanted to add this for a long time but it needed a lot of refactoring in the frontend so i put it off for later. it is now later. we have instant search. press / or any of the non shortcut keys to start searching. frontend logic has had a big refactor making navigation and other operations more predictable and less wonky. it took a bit of battling with the specifics of Svelte’s each loop and bind:this directive but it was worth it. there is still some cleanup that can be done, the code is not idiomatic by a long shot, but im happy we have a very essential feature complete. changelog: add search fix broken arrow navigation and copy/delete operations applying to wrong entries. make window size a bit bigger by default (might change later) make copy icon turn into a green checkmark so that there is some visual feedback on copying make the database file always save at the executable’s location. todo ! still need to test linux ! load history on launch app icon and branding"}, {"post_id": 6358, "ts": "2026-06-10T18:17:34Z", "hours": 5.3111, "text": "Frontend improvements we now have buttons on the clipboard entries so you can also use the mouse to perform the basic functions like copy, delete, etc. (pins wip). there have also been a bunch of UI improvements and tweaks in general. deleting feels instant. navigation is fixed (for the most part). Backend slight optimization in the pasting operation, plus a couple of fixes and doc comments."}, {"post_id": 5833, "ts": "2026-06-09T19:30:37Z", "hours": 0.4139, "text": "custom scroll bar that is it, enjoy."}, {"post_id": 5013, "ts": "2026-06-08T17:39:05Z", "hours": 2.1789, "text": "UI tweaks as i mentioned before, im in the process of simplifying the UI. i hid the native titlebar and made a custom one. also tweaked the shape of the window to feel more like a clipboard. that is all that’s changed significantly this devlog. development will probably slow down a little bit in the coming days because i have irl stuff to deal with."}, {"post_id": 4379, "ts": "2026-06-07T18:13:01Z", "hours": 4.3942, "text": "more backend there isnt any significant change in the frontend but there’s a ton of backend refactoring and bugfixes. performance should be slightly better now with large copy/pastes. changelog: associate IDs with clipboard events so that we only have to pass IDs between the frontend and backend instead of the whole content. make paste operation more efficient ignore clipboard events caused by Squirrel itself (a bit hacky to achieve this but good enough) Quit button in tray icon menu so Squirrel can actually be closed (there was no way to close it before except killing it) make the shortcut to bring up Squirrel work in almost all situations refactor AppState + some other things more cleanup and comments anyways, attached image is the tentative color palette i might implement. i have no idea how to do this and which colors to use where or if it would even look good so i might just ditch it in the future. we’ll see. todo still have to test on linux and load history on app launch. probably will work on that next."}, {"post_id": 3711, "ts": "2026-06-06T19:20:52Z", "hours": 3.0414, "text": "we got shortcuts we now have Ctrl+Shift+V as the shortcut to bring up Squirrel. (i know it’s used for “Paste as plain text” in some programs and used for “Paste in place” in photoshop but whatever). once up, you can select items from your history using arrow keys. pressing Return pastes the selected item into your last window. we’re having some issues with permissions but i’ll look into it. i’m now slowly simplifying the UI to be geared more towards improving user ergonomics and make it something that is not cluttered and easy to use. apart from this, i’ve cleaned up the code a bit removing stray debug prints and random commented code, it was getting out of hand. will write proper doc comments soon. todo i have to make the app load the user’s past clipboard history on startup lmao i totally forgot i have to start testing on linux, urgently. i feel i should make devlogs more often. even if nothing’s changed in the actual project, detailing plans helps me keep track of things personally. that’s pretty much it, stay tuned. edit: please ignore the VC_UNDEFINED keys in the input overlay in the attached video, it’s Enigo inputs not translating well."}, {"post_id": 2305, "ts": "2026-06-04T18:30:06Z", "hours": 4.1042, "text": "a bunch of backend improvements: store timestamps for copy events more efficient message passing between frontend and backend Clear History functionality system tray (!) (pls ignore the missing icon in the tray, we don’t have an icon for the app yet) slightly better UI on the topic of UI, i’m getting around to deciding a color palette for the app. i will probably work more on the UI for a bit before switching gears to add more functionality (like image support). if i decide i want to ship early, v0.1 will probably go without image support and just get a lot of polish with text only functionality."}, {"post_id": 1590, "ts": "2026-06-03T18:26:51Z", "hours": 3.9078, "text": "frontend improvements! spent some time battling css for this relatively simple UI but it’s atleast somewhat pleasant to look at. will work on either image support or making it the app run in the background next."}, {"post_id": 922, "ts": "2026-06-02T17:41:08Z", "hours": 4.1017, "text": "nothing much has changed visually, but we now have a database to store the user’s clipboard actions. plus some refactoring changes and a bunch of minor improvements here and there. i have nothing to show for it except code so instead have an image of a squirrel"}, {"post_id": 261, "ts": "2026-06-01T13:38:29Z", "hours": 2.5611, "text": "init. figuring out Tauri’s emit/invoke mechanism and capturing clipboard copy events. slow start. we’ll do the color palette and icon and all the frontend pleasantries at a later date."}]...
|
Title: Squirrel by @Koei | Stardance
Devlogs:
ini Title: Squirrel by @Koei | Stardance
Devlogs:
init. figuring out Tauri’s emit/invoke mechanism and capturing clipboard copy events. slow start. we’ll do the color palette and icon and all the frontend pleasantries at a later date.
nothing much has changed visually, but we now have a database to store the user’s clipboard actions. plus some refactoring changes and a bunch of minor improvements here and there. i have nothing to show for it except code so instead have an image of a squirrel
frontend improvements! spent some time battling css for this relatively simple UI but it’s atleast somewhat pleasant to look at. will work on either image support or making it the app run in the background next.
a bunch of backend improvements: store timestamps for copy events more efficient message passing between frontend and backend Clear History functionality system tray (!) (pls ignore the missing icon in the tray, we don’t have an icon for the app yet) slightly better UI on the topic of UI, i’m getting around to deciding a color palette for the app. i will probably work more on the UI for a bit before switching gears to add more functionality (like image support). if i decide i want to ship early, v0.1 will probably go without image support and just get a lot of polish with text only functionality.
we got shortcuts we now have Ctrl+Shift+V as the shortcut to bring up Squirrel. (i know it’s used for “Paste as plain text” in some programs and used for “Paste in place” in photoshop but whatever). once up, you can select items from your history using arrow keys. pressing Return pastes the selected item into your last window. we’re having some issues with permissions but i’ll look into it. i’m now slowly simplifying the UI to be geared more towards improving user ergonomics and make it something that is not cluttered and easy to use. apart from this, i’ve cleaned up the code a bit removing stray debug prints and random commented code, it was getting out of hand. will write proper doc comments soon. todo i have to make the app load the user’s past clipboard history on startup lmao i totally forgot i have to start testing on linux, urgently. i feel i should make devlogs more often. even if nothing’s changed in the actual project, detailing plans helps me keep track of things personally. that’s pretty much it, stay tuned. edit: please ignore the VC_UNDEFINED keys in the input overlay in the attached video, it’s Enigo inputs not translating well.
more backend there isnt any significant change in the frontend but there’s a ton of backend refactoring and bugfixes. performance should be slightly better now with large copy/pastes. changelog: associate IDs with clipboard events so that we only have to pass IDs between the frontend and backend instead of the whole content. make paste operation more efficient ignore clipboard events caused by Squirrel itself (a bit hacky to achieve this but good enough) Quit button in tray icon menu so Squirrel can actually be closed (there was no way to close it before except killing it) make the shortcut to bring up Squirrel work in almost all situations refactor AppState + some other things more cleanup and comments anyways, attached image is the tentative color palette i might implement. i have no idea how to do this and which colors to use where or if it would even look good so i might just ditch it in the future. we’ll see. todo still have to test on linux and load history on app launch. probably will work on that next.
UI tweaks as i mentioned before, im in the process of simplifying the UI. i hid the native titlebar and made a custom one. also tweaked the shape of the window to feel more like a clipboard. that is all that’s changed significantly this devlog. development will probably slow down a little bit in the coming days because i have irl stuff to deal with.
custom scroll bar that is it, enjoy.
Frontend improvements we now have buttons on the clipboard entries so you can also use the mouse to perform the basic functions like copy, delete, etc. (pins wip). there have also been a bunch of UI improvements and tweaks in general. deleting feels instant. navigation is fixed (for the most part). Backend slight optimization in the pasting operation, plus a couple of fixes and doc comments.
Item search i’ve wanted to add this for a long time but it needed a lot of refactoring in the frontend so i put it off for later. it is now later. we have instant search. press / or any of the non shortcut keys to start searching. frontend logic has had a big refactor making navigation and other operations more predictable and less wonky. it took a bit of battling with the specifics of Svelte’s each loop and bind:this directive but it was worth it. there is still some cleanup that can be done, the code is not idiomatic by a long shot, but im happy we have a very essential feature complete. changelog: add search fix broken arrow navigation and copy/delete operations applying to wrong entries. make window size a bit bigger by default (might change later) make copy icon turn into a green checkmark so that there is some visual feedback on copying make the database file always save at the executable’s location. todo ! still need to test linux ! load history on launch app icon and branding
nothing significant. just docs and comments and cleanup. slowly making progress planning wise into loading the history at launch. the idea is to use a custom Tauri IPC Channel for incrementally streaming data to the frontend on app start. channels are supposedly faster for this and are meant for continuous messages like this in comparison to events. from the Tauri docs: Channels are designed to be fast and deliver ordered data. They are used internally for streaming operations such as download progress, child process output and WebSocket messages. i may implement a lazy loading system if i feel like it. i have nothing interesting to show so have a squirrel again
Ticked a couple of items off the todo list: Squirrel now loads the history on launch. doing this was easier than i expected, but it’s a very naive way to do it (literally just send all of the history on launch). we also now have a logo. im no graphic designer by any means so this is the best i could do. shows in the titlebar and when your history is empty. check the project banner for a larger version if you feel like it. i might change the logo in the future, i just wanted an icon. todo pinning items test on linux
wip dark theme support i want squirrel to use whatever theme the system is set to. currently it’s forced light mode but dark mode is something i’d be crucified for not adding. unfortunately, I in my infinite wisdom didn’t have the foresight to have consistent colors across even the light theme itself. there’s just random #aaa , #666 , etc colors everywhere where i went with what looked good. so work needs to be done to standardize the colors with css variables. then just modify the variables for dark theme accordingly. yes, i’m aware this is standard practice.
Dark theme! just glorious there isn’t a theme toggle button yet, it just goes off of your system’s theme for now. now that the colors are roughly standardized across the ui, tweaking the contrast and palette is a much more pleasant experience.
readme and polishing preparing to ship, writing docs, recording demos and stuff. there are a couple other things i want to sort out but i might ship in a few days.
more polish and minor fixes more readme refining, linux support clarity, and installation instructions. also, i completely forgot about the tray icon actually needing an image icon, so until now it was just blank. anyways, we now have an icon. next, we put out releases on github and ship, hopefully. unfortunately we have to wait until tomorrow for linux builds.
even more bugfixes ofcourse critical bugs pop up when im trying to release. the system tray icon wouldnt show up when running the single-file executable on any platform. that is now fixed. plus a couple more things have been done to make Squirrel behave like a good cross platform app, like storing the data in the OS’s appdata directory. there are some more things i would like to do but i think the app is in a releasable state and i’ve wanted to ship it for a while. I’ve set up the GitHub release and all the relevant instructions in the README. might be last devlog before ship #1.
Pins we now have basic entry pinning support. this was a bit less difficult than i thought it was going to be. but now you can pin an item and it always stays at the top of the list (unless you’re searching). anyways, that is one item ticked off the todo list. apart from that, i had to do some minor backend refactoring and reorganizing so that it is easier to build more upon. next? image and/or file copy support. this is one monumental task. i think the way we’ll approach this is by storing the entire file if it’s smaller than, say 5mb, and if it is larger, we just store the path to the file. we dont want to store the user’s 5gb video file they just copied. for images, i think the play is to generate a low quality thumbnail of the image to display in the app. for files, if it is a text file, we can show just the first 5 or so lines with a link to the file, other wise we’ll just give a link. until now, the code i’ve written sadly relies too much on the fact that every event is a text copy as we ignore everything else. it’s going to be a rather painstaking experience refactoring the codebase. the challenge is going to be keeping Squirrel quick and responsive while supporting all of this additional functionality.
Navigation improvements slight refactoring and bugfixes for frontend navigation. the navigation was kinda wonky before this and sometimes wouldn’t highlight the entry that was actually selected in the background. most of this devlog’s work was to make it so that what you see is what you get. also, a touch of color has been added to pinned entries (tentative).
CI dipped my toes into github workflows, messed around, an got check&lint workflows working on pull requests. will make a release workflow some time later. this change however, was only a part of this devlog’s time. Bad decisions catching up turns out, using clipboard_rs might’ve been the subpar choice for interfacing with the system clipboard. while clipboard_rs provides a easy way to listen to clipboard changes and get text from it, fetching raw clipboard data is buggy and inconvenient. when i sat down to work on image support, i was immediately brick-walled by how messy it is to just get raw data first. it would’ve been simple if i was building for just one target os but considering both windows and linux, it’s less than ideal. on top of this, the documentation for the crate is very lackluster. all this to say, i am very much debating migrating my clipboard stuff to using arboard . arboard doesnt provide direct functionality to listen to clipboard changes so i will have to implement that myself. but, it does have first class support for wayland. a very enticing choice, but we will see.
Sadness so i just found out that Tauri’s global shortcut plugin does not yet support Wayland, which is sad to discover this deep into development. but, there is an active PR addressing this issue , which is nice. what this means for Squirrel is that proper Wayland support will unfortunately have to wait until this is merged. the joys of using a not-yet-completely-matured framework i suppose. though it does make me feel a bit guilty for calling Squirrel “cross-platform”. in other news (changelog): Squirrel now has a --silent launch flag that makes it start with the window hidden. useful when the app is set to launch on system startup. Squirrel now makes sure there is only one instance of it running. The shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Del will clear history permanently. (i forgot about clear history functionality in the first ship even though the code for it existed, there just wasnt a button in the frontend to call it)
Closed 1 (one) issue moved the global launch hotkey logic from the frontend to the backend. it didn’t behave well in certain situations, failing to activate and bringing up the Squirrel window. Starting work on images we’re experimenting with images. the current functionality is very much caveman and needs a lot of attention to make it actually usable. i’ve decided to stick with clipboard_rs for now, we’ll see how that pans out.
Version bump and docs bumped the minor version. Squirrel is officially v0.2.0, yippi. plus, updated the README, adding more explanation about the Wayland issue. also showcased the pin feature. i’ll try to whip up a release workflow to add to my CI tomorrow. I’m debating whether i should ship v0.2.0. the only major change from 0.1.0 is the addition of pinning. i might wait until i have image support and ship later, or i might change my mind, im unsure.
Lots of refactoring (apologies for the uneventful devlog attachment, i have nothing interesting to show except just code) to make it a bit more manageable when adding image support, a bunch of refactoring and reorganizing has been done in the backend. like i’ve previously mentioned, the codebase leaned too hard into only supporting text events. this fixes that. today’s changes also make the internal communication a bit more efficient. there are a couple more places where performance can be improved. and we will need every bit of performance we can get when dealing with image data. Changelog (shoutout @Hridya for stardance utils, just discovered this) 5b3f285 refactor: move clipboard structures into separate file b3ab1c8 perf: only get required data from db when copying an item 69dc003 refactor: modify data types to enable addition of image support Release CI (wip) currently writing the Release workflow for Squirrel. i have to figure out how to upload the artifacts to a github release with proper versioning and all that. the strategy is to run the workflow whenever something is pushed to the release branch. that is all for today.
Progress on images we finally have some form of working image support in Squirrel. This required even more sweeping refactoring changes to the codebase, which was a bit painful and im sure the new code isn’t the best quality either and will bite me later, but we’ll deal with it when we deal with it. getting images is a bit slow however, as right now we’re storing the image as base64 encoded PNGs. i plan to use the SQLite blob type to just store the raw bytes and pass that back and forth to improve the performance a bit (maybe some sort of caching as well?). there are also other areas where that are to be improved but i wanted to get a somewhat working prototype as fast as i can. explaining the silence i’ve been distracted by some life stuff, making me neglect my projects a bit. i also got distracted by the ESP32, fun little device. that is where the 9 days went. but, expect me to work semi-regularly again. thanks for reading.
Bunch of things Image Improvements some performance enhancements with images. made the clipboard image data fetching happen in Tauri’s dedicated thread pool, effectively parallelizing the operation. this made image copying a lot faster. image support should be merged into master soon enough. Lazy loading we now have lazy loading for images. image data isn’t loaded until it is scrolled into view. makes startup quick. CI enabled Dependabot updates and optimized the lint workflows for PRs. previously, all of the project was lint+checked on PR when changing anything. now it only checks the part that’s changed (i.e. frontend or backend)
Image branch is merged yay, yippee even. next i need to implement a frontend cache to store the last X entries’ contents, particularly for images. the way it works right now, every time the images are re-rendered (due to being filtered by search, for example), content is fetched from the backend. this ofcourse, is less than ideal. but shouldnt be a lot of trouble to fix.
Basic image cache we now cache the last 32 images, fetching from the backend when required and updating the cache. made the image re-rendering issue instantly better. attached is the demo video i forgot to upload in the second to last devlog showing images in action. Performance images are a difficult thing to handle, especially when dealing with the system clipboard. i’ve made Squirrel as performant as i could to the best of my abilities, which is to say, it’s not the best. it isn’t as rich as i would like it to be, so i might return to this feature to improve it in the future. one restriction i’ve put on images to control some of the chaos is limiting the size to 5 megabytes, meaning any image above 5 megs isn’t registered. i could push that to 10, which is still practically instant. but Squirrel is intended to be a quick clipboard, and not dropbox. so this is my cheaty little escape. maybe i’ll relax the limit in the future if 5mb is really restrictive. Next? i’ll probably bump the minor version and ship (i wouldn’t dare a v1.0 currently). i’d say pinning and image support is enough to warrant a second ship. beyond that though, stands file(s) support, so a lot of decision making on how i want it to work to have a good balance of performance and usefulness. a bit of a lengthy devlog this one, and i appreciate if you read all that. but i wanted to clear up some things for myself and just have a frame of reference where Squirrel stands right now after returning from a development break.
Set for ship release is made, README updated. should be good to go.
Acting on feedback a shipwright recommended i change my banner to include a screenshot of the program. so we now have a shiny new banner that should look good everywhere on the site. this required me to figure out what dimensions the banner is shown at across the site. i’ve attached a rough template for banners. fitting everything inside the marked areas should make sure your banner isn’t cut off anywhere that matters. one reviewer rightfully couldn’t figure out how to quick paste items. this is a miss on my part because i didn’t really have a list of shortcuts anywhere and kind of just mentioned them in passing in the README. that has been rectified by adding a Shortcuts section to the readme.
Rudimentary file support we now have the most basic kind of file support there could be. which is just storing the path to the file. we then provide a link to the file in the frontend, clicking on which reveals the file in your explorer. we also now have tiny little icons on the entries which indicate the entry type. all icons thanks to https://lucide.dev/ files ofcourse, need a bit more work. right now, you cant really do much except revealing in explorer. i will work on adding copy and paste support for files next, as well as maybe improve the overall performance a bit.
Turns out, copy and paste support for files was a one line diff. also, Squirrel is now v0.4.0, yippee. anyways, moving swiftly on. Planning for a v1.0 Squirrel is now in a state where we have most of the major features i wanted it to have: support for essential clipboard data types, pinning and search. however, it is not quite in a v1.0 state. there are a bunch of things i want to add to polish up the program and make it feel sort of “complete”, which is mainly focusing on some basic configuration ability. since sensible defaults are hard to figure out, i’d rather let the user break things instead of being stuck with my arbitrary decisions. thus, i present the current planned feature list for v1: Configuration : enabling basic behavior customization through a config file (TOML most likely) Program exceptions : dont capture clipboard data on certain programs Auto delete/never store : ability to specify a “shelf life” for items, or whether to store them persistently at all. Disable specific types : ability to pick which kind of clipboard events to capture, i.e. only text or text and images, etc. Configurable image size threshold : currently locked to 5mb, this would allow to specify a custom value. (?) Custom data storage format : still torn on this, but there may be performance to be gained by moving to a data store more geared for our purposes. this list ofcourse, might change. implementing these features would make Squirrel much more flexible, and make it v1 worthy.
Configuration (wip) Squirrel now has a configuration file. squirrel.toml is created in the config directory of your OS (i.e. %appdata%/Squirrel on windows and /home/username/.config/Squirrel on linux), finally allowing some amount of customization support. right now, only the types and the max_image_size config options work. types allows you to choose which kind of clipboard items are captured/ignored. max_image_size is self explanatory. attached is the full config file. the remaining options require a bit of work to implement.
devlog attachment obligation: here is me pasting some files i copied a couple minutes ago after i copied stuff on top of that. that out of the way, devlog. Several things app theme is now configurable from config, so you are not stuck with the system theme if you want to change it. cleanup across the backend; comments, TODOs, error handling, and stuff of the sort. performance enhancement in the clipboard event emitter loop. bugfix in the same loop where the thread panicked if you copied something while the app was launching. merged the config branch. the remaining config options would be better to implement in their own branches. dependabot updates
Ignore programs you can specify programs in which Squirrel should not listen to clipboard events. this is useful when you’re working in a program wherein you need to use copy and paste a bunch. ignoring that program would keep your Squirrel history clean. also useful to ignore a program that you regularly copy secrets from. example of notepad being ignored:
(i genuinely have no idea what to show in the devlog attachment, nothing’s changed visually. so have this stupid ass screenshot.) Massive refactor, breaking changes now that i’ve given myself the liberty to rethink and redesign Squirrel’s data models and storage in a breaking fashion for v1, we have managed to make a good amount of improvements across the board. database schema has been modified to better suit current needs and make it possible to implement the features I desire for v1. it has been a very satisfying refactor. What’s new: use UNIX microsecond timestamp for event ids instead of relying on sqlite autoincrement. this allows us to immediately send a captured event to the frontend without having to await a db write to obtain the event id. this also eliminates the timestamp column for events since the id is also the timestamp. a dedicated BLOB column for image entries to store raw image bytes instead of b64 encoded strings. this makes images weigh about ~33% lighter. decent perf boost. new expires_at column to store when an entry expires. pinned entries have an expiry of NULL . provides the base to actually implement expiring entries. get rid of ClipboardEventNotice since we no longer do the notify frontend -> write to db -> send data to frontend dance. it is now simply send whole event to frontend -> write to db . we enjoy simplifications. (!) as it stands now, old data (if it exists) would immediately be wiped when launching Squirrel v1. i could write some migration code but we’ll see. maybe clipboard data isn’t important enough to bother with migration. Next: actually implement entry expiration: should be trivial, just delete expired entries on launch. ephemeral/persistent toggle: this one is a bit tricky, and will involve some in memory database shenanigans. more details in the devlog when i implement this.
Item expiry and pin-preservation expired items are now automatically deleted on program startup. an entry is considered expired when the current time is more than its expires_at value. when pinned, the expires_at attribute is nulled, meaning this entry will never expire. the “Clear all” shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Del now respects pinned entries. it clears everything but leaves pinned entries untouched. Next the ephemeral db shenanigans. also, i have decided that Squirrel needs a settings panel in the frontend for easier config modification. that may or may not happen but it is tempting to do it.
History persistence configuration now works. setting it to false means history is not retained between sessions. comes with true as default. pinned entries always persist. attachment shows the behavior when persistence is off. Implementation i ended up deciding not to do the in memory database method for this since it was a bit too much added complexity which could be avoided by just adding an additional is_persistent column to the db. im not the happiest about how i’ve implemented this right now but im willing to take that hit right now if it means i dont have to deal with databases. Next all of the config options are now implemented. we are very close to v1.0. expect progress to be rather slow from here on out. i’ve had to divert my attention towards other things and haven’t been able to spend a lot of time working on my projects. maybe i will work on a settings panel. depends on how much work it requires. it’s a maybe. i may just ship it as it stands right now.
v1.0.0 It’s official. Squirrel is now v1. devlog time is adding logging, updating readme, fixing some small tidbits and polishing up some areas of the app. Squirrel now prints pretty logs to console when running in development mode and writes logs to a file if running in release. Project status i realistically can not get a GUI settings panel done due to me needing to divert my attention to more important life stuff. this right here is probably going to be the extent of work done on Squirrel in stardance. i definitely do plan on working on this in the long term. for example, im not entirely happy and satisfied with the current UI, and global hotkey still does not work on wayland. but right now, more pressing issues are at hand and i cannot give it my all on this project. that said, i do believe that Squirrel is in a very usable 1.0 state, which was my goal. i might push minor updates if the reviews call for fixes/improvements, but definitely no major features. thanks for reading if you made it here.
Ships:
v0.1.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager that is meant to be simple and intuitive. It remembers all the text you copy allowing you to paste whatever into wherever. You can also quickly search through your history. Squirrel is meant to be cross-platform, but for this release, Linux support on Wayland is very iffy (X11 is fine for the most part). I would highly recommend using Windows for testing this ship, sorry for the inconvenience. Expect potentially better support next ship.
v0.3.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager that is meant to be simple and intuitive. 2 new features in this version, namely pinning and image support. There are performance improvements as well as slight visual tweaks. Read the README for more info.
v1.0.0 Squirrel is a clipboard manager for Windows and X11 Linux that is meant to be simple and intuitive. This major release overhauls the data storage schema to be more efficient, faster, and reliable. There are significant performance improvements. This release also adds configurability to Squirrel, allowing basic but much needed customization, and polishes up the overall app. Check the README for more information....
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1792835603.7713623
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1792922003.7713623
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21797
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Kursal by @koschi | Stardance
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koschi
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1
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110.0
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1954
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-06T15:56:24Z", "hours": 110.0, "multiplier": 17.9, "payout": 1954, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Hey, I made an introduction video for my friend’s project Kursal, a decentralized messaging app with end-to-end post-quantum encryption. 100% of the visuals were made by myself in Blender, and the sound editing in DaVinci Resolve. No AI were used in the making process of this video. The goal of the video was to showcase the project to the world, and giving it a bit more visibility, even though I honestly just wanted to do it for fun ngl :) Btw they are a few references throughout the video. For exemple the first scene was directly inspired by the movie Tron Legacy’s intro lmao.", "repo": "https://github.com/KursalChat/assets", "demo": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhyxh1NrVjo"}]...
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[{"post_id": 61103, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 61103, "ts": "2026-09-03T20:32:43Z", "hours": 7.3403, "text": "Well I realized that Stardance doesn’t allow for soundtracks so the video stays muted and you can’t hear the sound effects and everything, which kinda sucks. But anyway I finished the project, the sound editing and added the credit scene at the end for all the sound effects, the musics, the Macbook 3d model and the SVG icons. However the video is 200 MB so that won’t fit in a github description… nor in here. So I’ll have to compress it heavily which will affect the video quality."}, {"post_id": 46828, "ts": "2026-08-14T10:59:01Z", "hours": 3.3008, "text": "Okay sorry for the delay, I had some issues with lapse as it seemed to have somewhat disconnected from my hackatime so it wouldn’t let me select a project to link the lapses to. But I just found out I can just type the name of this project, and even though it says it will create a new folder for that project, it still links to the actual Kursal file. But anyway, enough with that, I started reworking the audio for the 1st scene of the video, this time using royalty free music and sound effect (sadly we had to replace the nintendo switch sound effect to avoid any possible lawsuit lol) and of course all of the artists will be credited at the end of the video. Now I just have to find out what to do for the next scene…"}, {"post_id": 43407, "ts": "2026-08-08T17:05:37Z", "hours": 3.8506, "text": "FINALLY !!! The animation is done, I just finished linking the last two parts with a clean animation and now we just have to render everything and edit it in adobe or Da Vinci with some sound effects and everything and that’s it. Well that makes it seem like it’ll be a fast and easy process but I’m pretty sure it’d be the complete opposite idk why…"}, {"post_id": 42834, "ts": "2026-08-07T19:34:25Z", "hours": 3.9378, "text": "I fixed that last part and started animating the final scene of the whole video, there isn’t much to say about it as there also isn’t much to show, but I will have to include the credits after that, once the video is completely done, including the sound design and everything. Btw I still need to make a proper transition between this and the previous shot, but I’ll do that tomorrow I think."}, {"post_id": 42280, "ts": "2026-08-06T22:16:16Z", "hours": 4.9142, "text": "ok so about that tutorial, well it turned out to be for after effects, not blender, so that sucks. But anyway, I still tried doing it myself, it doesn’t look as good but it’s fine. Don’t worry about the timings, that part was kinda rushed ngl, this is just a proof of concept after all."}, {"post_id": 41506, "ts": "2026-08-05T19:12:05Z", "hours": 11.215, "text": "Managed to show off Kursal’s many color themes. At first I tried using curves and array modifiers to make the laptops move along a bezier curve but sadly because of the way the Macbook’s 3d model has been made, that was pretty hard and even then it was too hard to coordinate its movement with the Kursal screens they were suppose to show, so I had to scrap that idea. Instead, I just duplicated them over 5 layers twice and extended them on the side while the camera zoomed out. Now you might think the camera movement is a bit weird and stuff but don’t worry we’ve got an idea in mind with sound effects, nw. Finally this is just half of the work, as those were only the Dark mode color palets, so I’ll have to do the same with white mode and somehow make a cool animation with a switch that goes from night no day ,or the opposite I don’t really know yet but I remember having seen a tutorial for that in my youtube recommendations a while ago so we’ll see."}, {"post_id": 40414, "ts": "2026-08-03T21:56:11Z", "hours": 4.6669, "text": "fixed the camera movement for that last part and added a few things to make the scene look less empty. And I re-rendered previous scenes to put them all together in order to get an idea of what the whole things looked like. I had to fix some minor stuff like transitions and glitched animations. However I noticed that the last part is way too fast and you can’t read the text so I’ll have to fix that next."}, {"post_id": 39670, "ts": "2026-08-02T19:59:44Z", "hours": 5.5339, "text": "Okay so I remade that last part to get rid of some of some of the animations glitches, it might not be as nice as I envisioned but it is definitely cleaner than my first attempt. Though I think I might have a few tweaks to do concerning the animation’s speed. But that’s it for now."}, {"post_id": 39075, "ts": "2026-08-01T19:21:28Z", "hours": 8.0881, "text": "I hate Blender, I just spent 8 hours straight without break fixing shit Blender messed up, and it’s still not done yet. For some reason it doesn’t want to see the laptop as a single object made up of different pieces, but rather a random arrangement of stuff which cannot move together as one, so rotating it means that half of the components will spin in one direction while the second half will spin in the other. Furthermore for some reason some parts have a habit of straight up vanishing towards outer space, which really doesn’t help with the process. But anyway I still manage to animate the first 3 seconds as I envisioned and the rest is, well… to optimize in the future… But one good news at least is that we’re getting very close to the end. Oh actually no I forgot we still have video editing and sound design to do after that."}, {"post_id": 38339, "ts": "2026-07-31T17:47:50Z", "hours": 5.9503, "text": "Just finished animating a transition between part 2 and part 3, got to play with blender’s geometry nodes a bit but I did need a quick tutorial for that last part ngl"}, {"post_id": 37749, "ts": "2026-07-30T17:40:01Z", "hours": 5.3486, "text": "After some thinking I finally figured out what I’m going to do next, hopefully what will be the last part of the video. For now I replaced the chat instances with actual ones and not just exact copies, and animated the central server to die out once everyone connects together through a decentralized network."}, {"post_id": 36470, "ts": "2026-07-28T16:35:58Z", "hours": 5.8214, "text": "Finally done with the decentralized network animation, which might be the hardest part in the whole introduction video. The connections are a bit weird since a majority of those animations play at the exact same time at the end but I just have to move the keyframes accordingly to what I want so I guess that’s an easy fix no worries."}, {"post_id": 35859, "ts": "2026-07-27T15:57:08Z", "hours": 2.8839, "text": "probably gonna stop here for today so here’s the latest result, good enough for me but probably need a few tweaks either way."}, {"post_id": 35756, "ts": "2026-07-27T12:15:23Z", "hours": 2.1503, "text": "just spent two and a half hours trying to make a single object glowy because every tutorial out there was outdated or made everything glowy even the 2 windows. Why is Blender so complicated I swear."}, {"post_id": 35411, "ts": "2026-07-26T19:53:52Z", "hours": 10.0172, "text": "daaaaamn that was atrocious but here’s the chatting demo section finally fully animated (for now at least…). Special thanks to that indian guy on youtube for the text’s typewriting animation tutorial lmao. Oh btw sorry but I was too lazy to render a proper gooq quality video this is 720p using low render setting, and I just noticed I forgot to get rid of the bar at the beginning but eh whatever who here cares anyway…"}, {"post_id": 24666, "ts": "2026-07-08T12:22:45Z", "hours": 4.3403, "text": "Finally after 6 hours of rendering, we’ve got it. Yeah we brainstormed a bit more and finally found ideas for what we would do next in the video, so we’re doing a demo of 2 instances connecting to each other. Not finished tho, we still need them actually making contact and sending messages, and sound editing it all together, and then scene 2 will be finished."}, {"post_id": 22361, "ts": "2026-07-04T19:55:31Z", "hours": 2.0503, "text": "Rendered all actual scenes I made in Blender together, and put some sound effects in (a bit randomly ngl) using Da Vinci Resolve (if my dumb ahh can’t do video editiong at least I can try sound design… I think). On that point there are some adjustments to make on the sound effects as we do NOT wish to get a cease and desist from Nintendo before the project even gets published in the first place…"}, {"post_id": 20979, "ts": "2026-07-02T18:33:39Z", "hours": 2.2333, "text": "Because of my sheer incompetence in using Da Vinci Resolve, I decided I might be better off sticking with Blender, so I remade that last part in 3d, no sounds yet, but at least that took like half the time I needed to do the same in da vinci resolve. Gotta say, I’m still not happy with how it turned out rn, but I’ll fix it later nw."}, {"post_id": 19974, "ts": "2026-07-01T13:21:22Z", "hours": 7.3172, "text": "Started doing some stuff in Da Vinci Resolve like adding Texts and sounds, has a few Fusion issues to fix which was a nightmare but for now I have a proof of concept if you will, it’s nowhere near clean enough rn but it’s like a draft."}, {"post_id": 13315, "ts": "2026-06-21T20:07:17Z", "hours": 9.4397, "text": "Sketched out the Kursal introduction video script (kinda) and animated the v1 of the first part using Blender 2D animation tool, even though it’s supposed to be used by 2D artists to animate their drawings, but somehow it still works quite well so whatever ig."}]...
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Title: Kursal by @koschi | Stardance
Devlogs:
Ske Title: Kursal by @koschi | Stardance
Devlogs:
Sketched out the Kursal introduction video script (kinda) and animated the v1 of the first part using Blender 2D animation tool, even though it’s supposed to be used by 2D artists to animate their drawings, but somehow it still works quite well so whatever ig.
Started doing some stuff in Da Vinci Resolve like adding Texts and sounds, has a few Fusion issues to fix which was a nightmare but for now I have a proof of concept if you will, it’s nowhere near clean enough rn but it’s like a draft.
Because of my sheer incompetence in using Da Vinci Resolve, I decided I might be better off sticking with Blender, so I remade that last part in 3d, no sounds yet, but at least that took like half the time I needed to do the same in da vinci resolve. Gotta say, I’m still not happy with how it turned out rn, but I’ll fix it later nw.
Rendered all actual scenes I made in Blender together, and put some sound effects in (a bit randomly ngl) using Da Vinci Resolve (if my dumb ahh can’t do video editiong at least I can try sound design… I think). On that point there are some adjustments to make on the sound effects as we do NOT wish to get a cease and desist from Nintendo before the project even gets published in the first place…
Finally after 6 hours of rendering, we’ve got it. Yeah we brainstormed a bit more and finally found ideas for what we would do next in the video, so we’re doing a demo of 2 instances connecting to each other. Not finished tho, we still need them actually making contact and sending messages, and sound editing it all together, and then scene 2 will be finished.
daaaaamn that was atrocious but here’s the chatting demo section finally fully animated (for now at least…). Special thanks to that indian guy on youtube for the text’s typewriting animation tutorial lmao. Oh btw sorry but I was too lazy to render a proper gooq quality video this is 720p using low render setting, and I just noticed I forgot to get rid of the bar at the beginning but eh whatever who here cares anyway…
just spent two and a half hours trying to make a single object glowy because every tutorial out there was outdated or made everything glowy even the 2 windows. Why is Blender so complicated I swear.
probably gonna stop here for today so here’s the latest result, good enough for me but probably need a few tweaks either way.
Finally done with the decentralized network animation, which might be the hardest part in the whole introduction video. The connections are a bit weird since a majority of those animations play at the exact same time at the end but I just have to move the keyframes accordingly to what I want so I guess that’s an easy fix no worries.
After some thinking I finally figured out what I’m going to do next, hopefully what will be the last part of the video. For now I replaced the chat instances with actual ones and not just exact copies, and animated the central server to die out once everyone connects together through a decentralized network.
Just finished animating a transition between part 2 and part 3, got to play with blender’s geometry nodes a bit but I did need a quick tutorial for that last part ngl
I hate Blender, I just spent 8 hours straight without break fixing shit Blender messed up, and it’s still not done yet. For some reason it doesn’t want to see the laptop as a single object made up of different pieces, but rather a random arrangement of stuff which cannot move together as one, so rotating it means that half of the components will spin in one direction while the second half will spin in the other. Furthermore for some reason some parts have a habit of straight up vanishing towards outer space, which really doesn’t help with the process. But anyway I still manage to animate the first 3 seconds as I envisioned and the rest is, well… to optimize in the future… But one good news at least is that we’re getting very close to the end. Oh actually no I forgot we still have video editing and sound design to do after that.
Okay so I remade that last part to get rid of some of some of the animations glitches, it might not be as nice as I envisioned but it is definitely cleaner than my first attempt. Though I think I might have a few tweaks to do concerning the animation’s speed. But that’s it for now.
fixed the camera movement for that last part and added a few things to make the scene look less empty. And I re-rendered previous scenes to put them all together in order to get an idea of what the whole things looked like. I had to fix some minor stuff like transitions and glitched animations. However I noticed that the last part is way too fast and you can’t read the text so I’ll have to fix that next.
Managed to show off Kursal’s many color themes. At first I tried using curves and array modifiers to make the laptops move along a bezier curve but sadly because of the way the Macbook’s 3d model has been made, that was pretty hard and even then it was too hard to coordinate its movement with the Kursal screens they were suppose to show, so I had to scrap that idea. Instead, I just duplicated them over 5 layers twice and extended them on the side while the camera zoomed out. Now you might think the camera movement is a bit weird and stuff but don’t worry we’ve got an idea in mind with sound effects, nw. Finally this is just half of the work, as those were only the Dark mode color palets, so I’ll have to do the same with white mode and somehow make a cool animation with a switch that goes from night no day ,or the opposite I don’t really know yet but I remember having seen a tutorial for that in my youtube recommendations a while ago so we’ll see.
ok so about that tutorial, well it turned out to be for after effects, not blender, so that sucks. But anyway, I still tried doing it myself, it doesn’t look as good but it’s fine. Don’t worry about the timings, that part was kinda rushed ngl, this is just a proof of concept after all.
I fixed that last part and started animating the final scene of the whole video, there isn’t much to say about it as there also isn’t much to show, but I will have to include the credits after that, once the video is completely done, including the sound design and everything. Btw I still need to make a proper transition between this and the previous shot, but I’ll do that tomorrow I think.
FINALLY !!! The animation is done, I just finished linking the last two parts with a clean animation and now we just have to render everything and edit it in adobe or Da Vinci with some sound effects and everything and that’s it. Well that makes it seem like it’ll be a fast and easy process but I’m pretty sure it’d be the complete opposite idk why…
Okay sorry for the delay, I had some issues with lapse as it seemed to have somewhat disconnected from my hackatime so it wouldn’t let me select a project to link the lapses to. But I just found out I can just type the name of this project, and even though it says it will create a new folder for that project, it still links to the actual Kursal file. But anyway, enough with that, I started reworking the audio for the 1st scene of the video, this time using royalty free music and sound effect (sadly we had to replace the nintendo switch sound effect to avoid any possible lawsuit lol) and of course all of the artists will be credited at the end of the video. Now I just have to find out what to do for the next scene…
Well I realized that Stardance doesn’t allow for soundtracks so the video stays muted and you can’t hear the sound effects and everything, which kinda sucks. But anyway I finished the project, the sound editing and added the credit scene at the end for all the sound effects, the musics, the Macbook 3d model and the SVG icons. However the video is 200 MB so that won’t fit in a github description… nor in here. So I’ll have to compress it heavily which will affect the video quality.
Ships:
Hey, I made an introduction video for my friend’s project Kursal, a decentralized messaging app with end-to-end post-quantum encryption. 100% of the visuals were made by myself in Blender, and the sound editing in DaVinci Resolve. No AI were used in the making process of this video. The goal of the video was to showcase the project to the world, and giving it a bit more visibility, even though I honestly just wanted to do it for fun ngl :) Btw they are a few references throughout the video. For exemple the first scene was directly inspired by the movie Tron Legacy’s intro lmao....
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1792846188.5442152
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1792932588.5442152
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5067
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Nest.APStudy by @derek_chen | Stardance
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derek_chen
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4
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145.97
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1964
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-08-14T17:33:45Z", "hours": 49.0, "multiplier": 14.1, "payout": 682, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Thank you all for the feedback from my first three ships. I have focused more on the codebase and bug fixes. All the bug/issues from my last ship are addressed now! Shoutout to the people who put their time to bug find :) To those who review this ship, please share any issues you had with the website, whether it be a broken link or something simply looking bad.", "repo": "https://github.com/SimpleLemon/nest.apstudy", "demo": "https://nest.apstudy.org"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-07-28T20:25:20Z", "hours": 38.0, "multiplier": 17.18, "payout": 642, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Thank you all for the feedback from my first two ships. I have focused more on detailed devlogs and small bug fixes. This ship’s focus was on general UI/UX improvements as well as a new /focus section. To those who review my 3rd ship, please share any issues you had with the website, whether it be a broken link or something simply looking bad.", "repo": "https://github.com/SimpleLemon/nest.apstudy", "demo": "https://nest.apstudy.org"}, {"ship_num": 3, "ts": "2026-07-01T18:50:16Z", "hours": 24.0, "multiplier": 15.16, "payout": 360, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "With this ship, I have drastically updated the Notes editor from a simple single-user editor into a writing workspace with block tools, rich paste normalization, and advanced features such as a print pipeline and expanded keyboard shortcuts. Sharing features such as public links, per-user shares, and a read-only view; performance optimization; accessibility (WCAG 2.2) compliance; and very, very extensive testing. Other minor fixes and admin panel changes were also included. https://nest.apstudy.org/join Let me know what you think! Please feel free to leave any suggestions and let me know of any bugs you find :)", "repo": "https://github.com/SimpleLemon/nest.apstudy", "demo": "https://nest.apstudy.org"}, {"ship_num": 4, "ts": "2026-06-16T03:46:40Z", "hours": 16.0, "multiplier": 18.6, "payout": 280, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "An Academic Command Center From now on, your day starts in one place! Features: central dashboard, calendar, tasks, notes, files, and a chat system. Course planning section specifically for Emory University students. Students can save courses, track seats, and simulate their course schedule. Build YOUR workspace today! https://nest.apstudy.org/join -# It solves my problems & reduces my stress. Hopefully it’ll solve yours too :)", "repo": "https://github.com/SimpleLemon/nest.apstudy", "demo": "https://nest.apstudy.org"}]...
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[{"post_id": 57811, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 57811, "ts": "2026-08-30T03:26:44Z", "hours": 9.0933, "text": "The calendar is currently still off, but I’m almost done with a fix by utilizing timezones properly. The status of each class isn’t completely accurate right now, but it should come together soon!"}, {"post_id": 56596, "ts": "2026-08-28T12:37:29Z", "hours": 9.88, "text": "I’m working on improving the calendar UI and adding .ics share features. It’s a long process, but I’m almost there for production release. The goal is to allow for .ics calendar link creation for simulated courses."}, {"post_id": 47049, "ts": "2026-08-14T17:27:53Z", "hours": 6.72, "text": "I’m beginning an extension that pairs with Nest! I’ve started porting features over to the extension to modify my school’s Canvas page. The Stardance extension project is here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/46459"}, {"post_id": 44444, "ts": "2026-08-10T06:16:00Z", "hours": 6.28, "text": "REFACTOR + BUG FIXES COMPLETE! After ~40 hours, I completed a large application-wide refactor, added collaborative note review tools, and focused heavily on reliability :) Bug Fixes Fixed calendar feed validation (you can no longer add random links) and syncing issues with read-only collaborative notes. Fixed duplicate cookie-consent dialogs and the privacy-details link (shout out to the ones who caught it in ship #3!). Fixed Nest Announcements rendering errors. Fixed chat messages failing after the first send, leaking between rooms, or appearing only after a refresh. Fixed file uploads, including CSRF handling, error responses, and cleanup after failed uploads. Fixed task priority, deadline, recurrence, and floating-menu interactions becoming unresponsive (it was pretty annoying). Fixed logout behavior (thank you to the one who caught this!) Added profile length validation (thank you to the one who caught this in Ship 3!) Improved GitHub authentication diagnostics and callback/session handling (again thanks to the one who caught it in ship 3!!). Improvements Split large chat, notes, calendar, dashboard, file, onboarding, and admin systems into focused modules and services so they can be tested and changed independently. Reworked chat synchronization to be more stable. Reduced duplicate chat, presence, notification, and database work. Consolidated templates and shared frontend styling into a more consistent design (yay!). Major Features Added inline comments to shared notes, including ‘anchored’ discussions, editing and deletion, review events, and suggestions. Added administrative calendar-feed health reporting so broken or unsafe subscriptions are easier to diagnose (for admins). **Major architectural refactor across 200+ files!! https://nest.apstudy.org/ Thanks for reading!"}, {"post_id": 43490, "ts": "2026-08-08T19:48:13Z", "hours": 10.2058, "text": "Refactor continues…."}, {"post_id": 41258, "ts": "2026-08-05T11:15:47Z", "hours": 6.9658, "text": "Should be done in 4-5 days :) This will fix the bugs a lot of Ship 3’s reviewers mentioned"}, {"post_id": 39683, "ts": "2026-08-02T20:21:26Z", "hours": 9.7067, "text": "Still working! I’ll drop a more detailed summary later."}, {"post_id": 38452, "ts": "2026-07-31T20:28:56Z", "hours": 8.7231, "text": "Began a heavy code refactor today. I’ll give a very detailed refactor summary after it is complete!"}, {"post_id": 36601, "ts": "2026-07-28T20:22:34Z", "hours": 9.0275, "text": "Bug Fixes Fixed dashboard loading-grid alignment. Improved calendar week rendering for events that span multiple days or time slots. Refined course availability tracking controls. Improved invite redirects and management flows. Improvements Expanded Focus Mode with playlist composer improvements, routine selection, playlist gestures, resizable music panels, and better playback feedback. Deferred optional Focus Mode runtimes to improve loading performance. Added support for keeping completed Focus sessions visible. Improved invite-management cards and settings presentation. Major Feature* (only for myself) Added a gated Echo Show dashboard at /derek/echo for my newly jailbroken Echo! See 1st image below :)"}, {"post_id": 33263, "ts": "2026-07-23T01:14:11Z", "hours": 9.9094, "text": "This past couple days, I added Focus Mode (still a work in progress), improved navigation, and polished the frontend foundation (still got many more hours to go). Bug Fixes Fixed calendar event-editor and hidden-control behavior. Improved toast notifications and error states across the application. Improved calendar, dashboard, and notes interactions. Improvements Refined settings themes and notification controls. Added a global workspace search to the command palette with links across courses, files, calendar, and user content. Added dashboard layout editing and improved agenda/calendar interactions. Major Features Added Focus Mode with timed sessions, session history, completion sound, music playlist support (so fire since it uses less memory than Spotify), multiple playlists, Spotify playback controls, and customizable player preferences. https://nest.apstudy.org/focus"}, {"post_id": 30819, "ts": "2026-07-18T19:01:19Z", "hours": 9.5517, "text": "This past week, I focused on improving the website’s core systems, UX, and reliability. Bug Fixes Notes dragging was restored on tablets and laptops → It works again! Fixed notes page-setup popovers and improved keyboard shortcuts. Repaired browser notification subscriptions and delivery errors. Fixed settings tab visibility and improved cookie-consent controls. Hardened CSRF handling with silent token refresh for long-lived pages. Improved admin status polling and directory search. Improvements Replaced generic loaders with page-specific loading skeletons. Polished the shell, dashboard spacing, and settings layout. Improved chat profiles, member panels, composer interactions, and media previews. Added secure chat media sharing, GIF support, and attachment storage. Improved tier badge placement and presentation across the app. Major Features Users can now receive unified browser notifications, configure delivery preferences, and get reminders for individual calendar events and task deadlines!"}, {"post_id": 25606, "ts": "2026-07-09T23:46:06Z", "hours": 9.2494, "text": "My Progress Summary This past week (since my last devlog), I started with a visual and privacy redesign. Bug Fixes Note image uploads didn’t work => They work now! Calendar Validation previously would accept broken links => Fixed now! File uploads didn’t work => I can upload now! Safari kept signing me out => No more! I also improved the admin controls and security and resilience of the backend, especially with CSFR refresh handling. The loading UX was refined into page-specific skeletons (it was so cool seeing it work for the first time), but it took a few tries. The big change: Major release for tiers and quotas so that users can’t spam uploads and tier system skeleton for later. This includes admin tier controls (yay for me) and pixel assets generated by ChatGPT’s latest model 5.6 Try it here: https://nest.apstudy.org/join"}, {"post_id": 20171, "ts": "2026-07-01T18:34:05Z", "hours": 8.6836, "text": "Major Changes w/ Notes Page/Editor 1. Notes & Folder Sharing Users can now share their notes and even folders with multiple notes files with other Nest users. Public links can be generated to give everyone (even non-users) view-only access. 2. Simplified the Editor Less empty space! Now your whole screen on your laptop is the editor 3. Printing & Formatting Fixes/Updates Clicking Cmd/Ctrl + P now prints the notes page properly with appropriate colors and sizing! This actually took so many hours. Who knew modifying how a page looks for printing took this much time :( Grammarly is now more compatible and less RAM-hungry. I also optimized the notes page to reduce RAM consumption when moving between documents & website pages. Pasting now formats AI and messy text. Copy and pasting from Nest to another website looks cleaner now too (no more extra new lines for no reason like those AI websites). 4. Speed & Accessibility Changes Went with a WCAG 2.2 accessibility friendliness: people navigating can now easily run stuff through their keyboard (which is easy to open/close) Faster loading with lazy-loaded images. 5. Soon to Come: Real-Time Editing + Editor Sharing Access Who knows, it may just be more optimized than Google Docs (with fewer features, of course). It will have logic to view other people’s cursor positions & email invitations with roles (viewing, suggesting, editing). And a 30-day version history timeline. Try it yourself! https://nest.apstudy.org/notes"}, {"post_id": 15360, "ts": "2026-06-24T23:37:30Z", "hours": 4.1522, "text": "Admin Analytics Page I’m getting users! But who knew making an analytics page was so complex? I’m literally using Google Analytics API, which means I’m not hardcoding JavaScript tracking. Rather, I’m outputting the data into an interactive UI. Fun fact: 72% of users are high schoolers! https://nest.apstudy.org"}, {"post_id": 13971, "ts": "2026-06-22T22:38:21Z", "hours": 7.2628, "text": "Notes Page Design + UI You always see Google Docs and be like, “That’s a simple UI.” 😭 Or at least that’s what I thought until I tried creating a notes UI similar to both Notion & Google Docs. The goal was to make a lighter, simpler docs page that I can share easily. While, unfortunately, there are no share features yet, the toolbar and hover features are slowly coming together! 😄 Give it a try and let me know what you think: https://nest.apstudy.org/notes"}, {"post_id": 11099, "ts": "2026-06-18T04:43:46Z", "hours": 1.5686, "text": "Improved Course Search UI Changes: More results show now More filters and more details in the saved json Faster pings Seats display on the course preview Features: Simulate Courses Track courses that aren’t in your simulated schedule Recieve Emails when a class opens up Add as many courses to tracking as you wish Unfortunately, this is still limited to only Emory University students because the course pulling takes a lot of time and effort. https://nest.apstudy.org/courses"}, {"post_id": 10781, "ts": "2026-06-17T18:09:38Z", "hours": 2.69, "text": "Backend + Sidebar Fixes There were a good few small UI bugs that hurt the user experience. I went through and fixed a bunch, especially the sidebar issue that has been there for weeks. (The admin button is completely backend and won’t show for any of the other users) https://nest.apstudy.org/dashboard"}, {"post_id": 9697, "ts": "2026-06-16T03:26:14Z", "hours": 3.9828, "text": "Admin Backend & Basic Frontend Updates! I have offically gotten to a stage where I can finally start promoting and having people become early users. Nest.APStudy is a web platform for student course planning and productivity, combining local Emory course data with user accounts, dashboards, calendars, tasks, notes, chat, file sharing, and related admin tools. User data is stored in VPS-hosted SQLite databases, with Appwrite handling authentication and file storage. I spent a few more hours working on the backend changes and setting myself up to be in a position to quickly find and repair bugs by connecting the hosting VPS to my admin portal securely. Take a look and let me know what you think! :)"}, {"post_id": 8289, "ts": "2026-06-13T19:42:50Z", "hours": 0.9914, "text": "Backend Updates Updated the /admin page and transferred my database away from Appwrite towards a locally hosted SQLite on my VPS. Please take a look at https://nest.apstudy.org All the features are looking really solid now!"}, {"post_id": 7751, "ts": "2026-06-12T23:01:22Z", "hours": 2.7614, "text": "Created landing page for my Productivity Web Platform Added hero image, animations, showcases of all the website features, etc. I added some avengers easter eggs if you can find them ;) As for the actual platform, it is currently not fully functioning because I hit the database limits on my GitHub education plan. I may be locally hosting the database soon. Check out the website at https://nest.apstudy.org and feel free to leave me any comments/suggestions/hate! I appreciate all feedback :)"}, {"post_id": 2252, "ts": "2026-06-04T17:22:02Z", "hours": 0.9125, "text": "Calendar Page Creation & Polish! https://nest.apstudy.org/calendar Weekly view: 7-column time grid starting with Sunday 24 hour scrollable view that auto-scrolls to 7:30 AM Stickied all-day row (if all-day events are present) for multi-day/all-day events! Monthly View: 6-week grids with leading and trailing days from the adjacent months (less visible) Multi-day events are shown as spanning bars with row packing Options to share calendar (lots of configuration), calendar visibility, previous/next, and easy toggle between weekly and monthly views."}, {"post_id": 1587, "ts": "2026-06-03T18:22:11Z", "hours": 7.4042, "text": "Nest.APStudy is my summer coding project that I started right before AP testing. Yeah, I know… great timing. But I couldn’t wait to start working! 7 APs got nothing on me! Let me enjoy coding and discover the wonderful digital world of cyber, hardware, software, and AI :) Soon to be up at https://nest.apstudy.org"}]...
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Title: Nest.APStudy by @derek_chen | Stardance
De Title: Nest.APStudy by @derek_chen | Stardance
Devlogs:
Nest.APStudy is my summer coding project that I started right before AP testing. Yeah, I know… great timing. But I couldn’t wait to start working! 7 APs got nothing on me! Let me enjoy coding and discover the wonderful digital world of cyber, hardware, software, and AI :) Soon to be up at https://nest.apstudy.org
Calendar Page Creation & Polish! https://nest.apstudy.org/calendar Weekly view: 7-column time grid starting with Sunday 24 hour scrollable view that auto-scrolls to 7:30 AM Stickied all-day row (if all-day events are present) for multi-day/all-day events! Monthly View: 6-week grids with leading and trailing days from the adjacent months (less visible) Multi-day events are shown as spanning bars with row packing Options to share calendar (lots of configuration), calendar visibility, previous/next, and easy toggle between weekly and monthly views.
Created landing page for my Productivity Web Platform Added hero image, animations, showcases of all the website features, etc. I added some avengers easter eggs if you can find them ;) As for the actual platform, it is currently not fully functioning because I hit the database limits on my GitHub education plan. I may be locally hosting the database soon. Check out the website at https://nest.apstudy.org and feel free to leave me any comments/suggestions/hate! I appreciate all feedback :)
Backend Updates Updated the /admin page and transferred my database away from Appwrite towards a locally hosted SQLite on my VPS. Please take a look at https://nest.apstudy.org All the features are looking really solid now!
Admin Backend & Basic Frontend Updates! I have offically gotten to a stage where I can finally start promoting and having people become early users. Nest.APStudy is a web platform for student course planning and productivity, combining local Emory course data with user accounts, dashboards, calendars, tasks, notes, chat, file sharing, and related admin tools. User data is stored in VPS-hosted SQLite databases, with Appwrite handling authentication and file storage. I spent a few more hours working on the backend changes and setting myself up to be in a position to quickly find and repair bugs by connecting the hosting VPS to my admin portal securely. Take a look and let me know what you think! :)
Backend + Sidebar Fixes There were a good few small UI bugs that hurt the user experience. I went through and fixed a bunch, especially the sidebar issue that has been there for weeks. (The admin button is completely backend and won’t show for any of the other users) https://nest.apstudy.org/dashboard
Improved Course Search UI Changes: More results show now More filters and more details in the saved json Faster pings Seats display on the course preview Features: Simulate Courses Track courses that aren’t in your simulated schedule Recieve Emails when a class opens up Add as many courses to tracking as you wish Unfortunately, this is still limited to only Emory University students because the course pulling takes a lot of time and effort. https://nest.apstudy.org/courses
Notes Page Design + UI You always see Google Docs and be like, “That’s a simple UI.” 😭 Or at least that’s what I thought until I tried creating a notes UI similar to both Notion & Google Docs. The goal was to make a lighter, simpler docs page that I can share easily. While, unfortunately, there are no share features yet, the toolbar and hover features are slowly coming together! 😄 Give it a try and let me know what you think: https://nest.apstudy.org/notes
Admin Analytics Page I’m getting users! But who knew making an analytics page was so complex? I’m literally using Google Analytics API, which means I’m not hardcoding JavaScript tracking. Rather, I’m outputting the data into an interactive UI. Fun fact: 72% of users are high schoolers! https://nest.apstudy.org
Major Changes w/ Notes Page/Editor 1. Notes & Folder Sharing Users can now share their notes and even folders with multiple notes files with other Nest users. Public links can be generated to give everyone (even non-users) view-only access. 2. Simplified the Editor Less empty space! Now your whole screen on your laptop is the editor 3. Printing & Formatting Fixes/Updates Clicking Cmd/Ctrl + P now prints the notes page properly with appropriate colors and sizing! This actually took so many hours. Who knew modifying how a page looks for printing took this much time :( Grammarly is now more compatible and less RAM-hungry. I also optimized the notes page to reduce RAM consumption when moving between documents & website pages. Pasting now formats AI and messy text. Copy and pasting from Nest to another website looks cleaner now too (no more extra new lines for no reason like those AI websites). 4. Speed & Accessibility Changes Went with a WCAG 2.2 accessibility friendliness: people navigating can now easily run stuff through their keyboard (which is easy to open/close) Faster loading with lazy-loaded images. 5. Soon to Come: Real-Time Editing + Editor Sharing Access Who knows, it may just be more optimized than Google Docs (with fewer features, of course). It will have logic to view other people’s cursor positions & email invitations with roles (viewing, suggesting, editing). And a 30-day version history timeline. Try it yourself! https://nest.apstudy.org/notes
My Progress Summary This past week (since my last devlog), I started with a visual and privacy redesign. Bug Fixes Note image uploads didn’t work => They work now! Calendar Validation previously would accept broken links => Fixed now! File uploads didn’t work => I can upload now! Safari kept signing me out => No more! I also improved the admin controls and security and resilience of the backend, especially with CSFR refresh handling. The loading UX was refined into page-specific skeletons (it was so cool seeing it work for the first time), but it took a few tries. The big change: Major release for tiers and quotas so that users can’t spam uploads and tier system skeleton for later. This includes admin tier controls (yay for me) and pixel assets generated by ChatGPT’s latest model 5.6 Try it here: https://nest.apstudy.org/join
This past week, I focused on improving the website’s core systems, UX, and reliability. Bug Fixes Notes dragging was restored on tablets and laptops → It works again! Fixed notes page-setup popovers and improved keyboard shortcuts. Repaired browser notification subscriptions and delivery errors. Fixed settings tab visibility and improved cookie-consent controls. Hardened CSRF handling with silent token refresh for long-lived pages. Improved admin status polling and directory search. Improvements Replaced generic loaders with page-specific loading skeletons. Polished the shell, dashboard spacing, and settings layout. Improved chat profiles, member panels, composer interactions, and media previews. Added secure chat media sharing, GIF support, and attachment storage. Improved tier badge placement and presentation across the app. Major Features Users can now receive unified browser notifications, configure delivery preferences, and get reminders for individual calendar events and task deadlines!
This past couple days, I added Focus Mode (still a work in progress), improved navigation, and polished the frontend foundation (still got many more hours to go). Bug Fixes Fixed calendar event-editor and hidden-control behavior. Improved toast notifications and error states across the application. Improved calendar, dashboard, and notes interactions. Improvements Refined settings themes and notification controls. Added a global workspace search to the command palette with links across courses, files, calendar, and user content. Added dashboard layout editing and improved agenda/calendar interactions. Major Features Added Focus Mode with timed sessions, session history, completion sound, music playlist support (so fire since it uses less memory than Spotify), multiple playlists, Spotify playback controls, and customizable player preferences. https://nest.apstudy.org/focus
Bug Fixes Fixed dashboard loading-grid alignment. Improved calendar week rendering for events that span multiple days or time slots. Refined course availability tracking controls. Improved invite redirects and management flows. Improvements Expanded Focus Mode with playlist composer improvements, routine selection, playlist gestures, resizable music panels, and better playback feedback. Deferred optional Focus Mode runtimes to improve loading performance. Added support for keeping completed Focus sessions visible. Improved invite-management cards and settings presentation. Major Feature* (only for myself) Added a gated Echo Show dashboard at /derek/echo for my newly jailbroken Echo! See 1st image below :)
Began a heavy code refactor today. I’ll give a very detailed refactor summary after it is complete!
Still working! I’ll drop a more detailed summary later.
Should be done in 4-5 days :) This will fix the bugs a lot of Ship 3’s reviewers mentioned
Refactor continues….
REFACTOR + BUG FIXES COMPLETE! After ~40 hours, I completed a large application-wide refactor, added collaborative note review tools, and focused heavily on reliability :) Bug Fixes Fixed calendar feed validation (you can no longer add random links) and syncing issues with read-only collaborative notes. Fixed duplicate cookie-consent dialogs and the privacy-details link (shout out to the ones who caught it in ship #3!). Fixed Nest Announcements rendering errors. Fixed chat messages failing after the first send, leaking between rooms, or appearing only after a refresh. Fixed file uploads, including CSRF handling, error responses, and cleanup after failed uploads. Fixed task priority, deadline, recurrence, and floating-menu interactions becoming unresponsive (it was pretty annoying). Fixed logout behavior (thank you to the one who caught this!) Added profile length validation (thank you to the one who caught this in Ship 3!) Improved GitHub authentication diagnostics and callback/session handling (again thanks to the one who caught it in ship 3!!). Improvements Split large chat, notes, calendar, dashboard, file, onboarding, and admin systems into focused modules and services so they can be tested and changed independently. Reworked chat synchronization to be more stable. Reduced duplicate chat, presence, notification, and database work. Consolidated templates and shared frontend styling into a more consistent design (yay!). Major Features Added inline comments to shared notes, including ‘anchored’ discussions, editing and deletion, review events, and suggestions. Added administrative calendar-feed health reporting so broken or unsafe subscriptions are easier to diagnose (for admins). **Major architectural refactor across 200+ files!! https://nest.apstudy.org/ Thanks for reading!
I’m beginning an extension that pairs with Nest! I’ve started porting features over to the extension to modify my school’s Canvas page. The Stardance extension project is here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/46459
I’m working on improving the calendar UI and adding .ics share features. It’s a long process, but I’m almost there for production release. The goal is to allow for .ics calendar link creation for simulated courses.
The calendar is currently still off, but I’m almost done with a fix by utilizing timezones properly. The status of each class isn’t completely accurate right now, but it should come together soon!
Ships:
An Academic Command Center From now on, your day starts in one place! Features: central dashboard, calendar, tasks, notes, files, and a chat system. Course planning section specifically for Emory University students. Students can save courses, track seats, and simulate their course schedule. Build YOUR workspace today! https://nest.apstudy.org/join -# It solves my problems & reduces my stress. Hopefully it’ll solve yours too :)
With this ship, I have drastically updated the Notes editor from a simple single-user editor into a writing workspace with block tools, rich paste normalization, and advanced features such as a print pipeline and expanded keyboard shortcuts. Sharing features such as public links, per-user shares, and a read-only view; performance optimization; accessibility (WCAG 2.2) compliance; and very, very extensive testing. Other minor fixes and admin panel changes were also included. https://nest.apstudy.org/join Let me know what you think! Please feel free to leave any suggestions and let me know of any bugs you find :)
Thank you all for the feedback from my first two ships. I have focused more on detailed devlogs and small bug fixes. This ship’s focus was on general UI/UX improvements as well as a new /focus section. To those who review my 3rd ship, please share any issues you had with the website, whether it be a broken link or something simply looking bad.
Thank you all for the feedback from my first three ships. I have focused more on the codebase and bug fixes. All the bug/issues from my last ship are addressed now! Shoutout to the people who put their time to bug find :) To those who review this ship, please share any issues you had with the website, whether it be a broken link or something simply looking bad....
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BadGPT by @28taidan | Stardance
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28taidan
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121.0
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1974
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-07T22:47:09Z", "hours": 121.0, "multiplier": 16.85, "payout": 1974, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "badGPT is a conglomeration of sequential ML projects I did this summer, culminating in a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude built from scratch using just python and numpy. I started off by building a name generation model, then a Shakespeare writing model, then finally a chatGPT-esque model. The model produces, for the most part, complete gibberish, so this was less a practical project and more an exercise in understanding how everything works. It performs so poorly because it’s so small. Models need a lot of parameters to be able to capture all the nuances required to produce coherent text, which makes the models much slower to train. The final model I made includes around 120,000 parameters, 4 transformer blocks of 4 attention heads each, and 64 tokens of context. It’s based largely on GPT-2, which for reference had about 1.5 billion parameters. Current frontier models, like Anthropic’s fable, have trillions of parameters and can have millions of input tokens, so it makes sense that my model is too small to make much sense at all. Even at its small size, it took my laptop more than 20 hours to train, so scaling up with my current hardware is not feasible. Many people like using libraries like pytorch and tensorflow, which include classes that handle backpropagation (the system that’s at the heart of letting the models learn), but I wanted to start from scratch so I wrote my own. If you wish to try any of my models out, you can visit the demo website (click try project), and click through the tabs to see each of the models. It all runs in your browser. You can also look through the Jupyter notebooks in the Github repository to get a sense of how everything works.", "repo": "https://github.com/Luchik28/BadGPT", "demo": "https://luchik28.github.io/BadGPT/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 63888, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 63888, "ts": "2026-09-07T22:03:29Z", "hours": 0.3219, "text": "Fixed up the readme a bit in preparation to ship. Specifically, I added info on what all the files do, but I named them poorly and then forgot what most of them do so it’s kind of confusing."}, {"post_id": 63871, "ts": "2026-09-07T21:24:10Z", "hours": 3.705, "text": "Trained the model a little more, exported it, wrote some UI to make it look more like a chatbot. It still sounds like gibberish. Sometimes I imagine that it’s output changes slightly depending on the context (for example, more numbers if I ask it a number related question, and a list if I ask it for a list, etc), but I’m probably just imagining it, it’s really just gibberish. Still kinda cool tho. You can check out the demo at https://luchik28.github.io/BadGPT/ ."}, {"post_id": 63606, "ts": "2026-09-07T15:13:11Z", "hours": 10.0569, "text": "Added an EOS ID, which is a special token that the model can output to indicate that it’s done. I built a script to insert this in between passages in the training data, so it can learn when it should shut up (otherwise it will yap forever, until it hits the max number of output tokens). This meant I had to retrain the entire model, but got it down to a loss of around 3.46. Obviously, it’s not very good. But I’m pretty sure the only way to improve is to scale up the model size and training time, something I don’t really have the capacity to do (this model trained for 15 hours on my laptop). I will probably continue by adding this model to my demo website, and build a chatGPT like UI, just for fun. After that, I think it might be time to ship!"}, {"post_id": 63248, "ts": "2026-09-06T23:29:21Z", "hours": 8.4769, "text": "Switched to using the fineweb edu dataset, instead of shakespear. This is the dataset I will use to train my actual model on. It’s a highly currated database of the internet, and is similar to what GPT2 was trained on (although the actual db they trained it on is closed source). I also reformated the sampling system so you can put in a query and get a response, as long as the query takes up less tokens than the context. Other than swapping out the training file, it’s the exact same. Next, I will probably implement a special ending token to my tokenizer, and also increase the scale of my model a little bit. I can’t increase it all the way to what Karpathy does in his tutorial (he uses cloud computing, so he paid to rent out like 8 64GB GPUs, or something like that), since I don’t want to spend money training it. However I think I can squeeze a little more out of my laptop."}, {"post_id": 49298, "ts": "2026-08-18T01:13:10Z", "hours": 9.3886, "text": "Started working on a more advanced tokenizer. The tokenizer is what splits the input text from words into numbers, and back again. Before, I was using a 10 dimensional embedding, where each letter is represented by a 10 long array (each value representing a dimension). But current models have much more advanced tokenizers, which often encompass entire words, or parts of words for longer words. This works using Byte Pair Encoding, which turns all of the letters pairs of letters into their utf encodings (usually 8), then iteratively merging the most common consecutive pairs into tokens to add to the vocabulary. You can see how tokenizers work at https://tiktokenizer.vercel.app/ , which is a cool website that lets you play around with stuff like that."}, {"post_id": 42029, "ts": "2026-08-06T16:03:32Z", "hours": 1.1833, "text": "Updated the demo website to include the wavenet model, and the new self-attention shakespear model. You can check it out here ."}, {"post_id": 41371, "ts": "2026-08-05T15:22:03Z", "hours": 1.2797, "text": "I finished training it! It finished with a val loss of around 1.76, it got down to 1.73 but ticked up at the end. The output is pretty good, but not substantially better than the wavenet model. However, it’s vaguely word-like, and took 20 hours to train so I’m not sure how much larger I can make the model before my laptop implodes. Next I will probably try to find a question-answer training dataset, so that I can start training it to answer questions. This step that I’ve been working on is the pre-training step, where I teach the model to basically spit out documents. Next, I have to have it spit out documents that happen to be question-answer documents."}, {"post_id": 41078, "ts": "2026-08-05T01:14:23Z", "hours": 9.7053, "text": "I made a bunch of tiny improvements. I didn’t change the architecture at all, but I did change the optimizer to AdamW. The optimizer is what controls how much each parameter is changed each epoch. Before, I was using a set learning rate, of about .1 for the first 80% of training then decreasing to .01 for the last 20%. Decreasing it at the end is important because as the loss settles into a local minimum, it might not be able to go to the lowest point because it keeps overshooting it since the lr is too high. Conversely, we can’t keep the lr too small the whole time because it might settle into a very tiny local minima that it might have been able to go over with a higher learning rate. It would also take forever. AdamW helps improve the optimizing step by changing the learning rate per parameter, helping the model train as fast as possible without overfitting. Overfitting isn’t really an issue I’m worrying about since my model is pretty small (around 56k params), so it’s not really large enough to learn the ins and outs of my dataset. Anyway I also changed the logging step, so it now logs validation dataset loss in addition to the training dataset loss. I split the dataset into train and validation so I can make sure it’s not overfitting. Currently the val loss is at 1.76, which is a lot better than where we were at before, which makes me hopeful. Training has around another 7,000 epochs to go, but Stardance is yelling at me I should write another devlog now so here you go, Stardance. I’m looking forward to sampling the model and seeing how much it’s improved!"}, {"post_id": 38899, "ts": "2026-08-01T14:11:19Z", "hours": 8.9297, "text": "I implemented self attention! I will try to explain here, but will do a terrible job: basically, what that is, is it lets the model decide what tokens in the input are more important than the others. The first thing I did was scrap the wavenet model, and switched to a simple bigram model. The second thing I implemented was bag of words, which edits the input tokens so every element is the average of that element and all that came before it. This lets all of the tokens “talk” to eachother. This is all fine and dandy but since all the things are averaged then you don’t know where things came from, and positional data is lost, so we lose a lot of resolution and data, so that sucks. So we have to encode positional data. So instead of just averaging all the elements that came before, we expand each averaged element into a list, which has all the elements in a row instead of averaging them into one number. So the first row could be [1, 0, 0] and the second [1, 2, 0] and the third [1, 2, 3], etc. We do this by masking it with the tril function, from numpy (very cool). But this is problematic, because all of the elements are given the exact same weight. A letter 34 characters back gets the same weight as the last character in the input (which is the letter immediately preceding the predicted letter, the output). To fix this, we add self attention! This is modeled after the groundbreaking paper Attention is All You Need, which started the whole AI hype thing. How it works is each token has a linear layer (that multiplies it by learned weights) called the key, and another called the query. The query is kind of like what that token is looking for, and the key is kind of like what that token has. And these can be multiplied with the keys and queries of all the other tokens, and that lets you know which token has the stuff that the most other tokens are looking for, and is thus more important and can be given more weight. That is a single head of attention, there are multiple heads that can specialize in different things. This, in theory, should increase performance. But it also drastically increases the amount of time it takes to train. The model only has ~56k parameters, which is less than half of the wavenet model, but takes a lot more time to do it’s thing. This is the output from the results of more than 13 hours of training. As you can see from the loss function, the loss was decreasing at a steady rate, so more training could probably improve it. Plus, this was at a highish learning rate the whole time (.1) so decreasing it would probably further improve it. But I can’t do anything on my computer while this is training or it runs out of RAM, and I have to use my computer now, so I will be moving on for now."}, {"post_id": 34926, "ts": "2026-07-26T01:22:29Z", "hours": 6.5472, "text": "I increased the block size from 8 characters to 64. This means that instead of the model taking in the previous 8 characters and outputting the next one, it takes in the previous 64 characters and outputs the next. This means that it should be able to keep track of longer words so it doesn’t get lost in them. However, it doesn’t seem to be improving the model too much, although that might be because I haven’t trained it as much as the others. I’ve done roughly 200,000 epochs, which took a long time, since this model is much larger (110,415 parameters vs 45,000), and has 6 hidden layers as apposed to 2, which means it is a lot slower. As you can see in the loss graph, it probably could make further gains, although it seems to be mostly good."}, {"post_id": 33555, "ts": "2026-07-23T16:18:09Z", "hours": 1.5631, "text": "Trained the wavenet architecture on a file with just shakespear in it. It’s got the structure down well, and sometimes can do words and wordlike outputs, but generally spouts straight gibberish. I will try to follow a lecture to build a better Tokenizer and Transformer next time. Right now each character is treated as a token, and embedded into 10 dimensions, it would be better if pairs of characters were treated as tokens and embedded. Increasing the context size could also help, it’s currently an input of the previous 8 characters and outputting 1. This is it’s output:"}, {"post_id": 32988, "ts": "2026-07-22T14:44:00Z", "hours": 8.5858, "text": "Implemented the wavenet architecture. Usually, during the flattening phase, the tensor goes from the shape (batch num, block size, embedding dimensions) to (batch num, block size * embedding dimensions). This squishes all of the embedded characters into one dimension. Wavenet does that more gradually, it slowly merges the different letters. So the first two letter embeddings get squished into one, then the next two, etc, and in the next layer then you have the first 4, then the next four, until by the final layer you have just one group of all the letters, which is the same as the original method, just a much more gradual approach. The first image is the training loss, the huge cliff is when the learning rate decreased. The second image is a visualization of the wavenet architecture from the paper. You can see that in each layer, nearby groups of input get merged together. In the original method, the graph would look like all of the inputs going to the 1st dot in the hidden layer, then continuing up. Next I will be actually building a GPT instead of this names project."}, {"post_id": 32125, "ts": "2026-07-21T02:19:34Z", "hours": 6.8089, "text": "I did a bunch of things to prep for implementing a wavenet architecture, which basically changes the model so instead of taking in all the characters of input at once and squishing them all into the first layer, it gradually puts them in at each separate layer. First, I put more stuff in classes! This didn’t really change the functionality, but instead of embedding the characters and flattening the model in separate chunks, I put them in their own classes so they can get put in the list of layers, and we can just run the input through each layer in the list, and compare it with the target at the end, instead of having half the layers in the list and half as separate chunks, which is a lot smoother. So the entire model is just: model = Sequential ([ Embedding ( vocab_size , n_embd ), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_embd * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_hidden * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_hidden * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), Linear ( n_hidden , vocab_size ), ]) Which I think is really cool. I also improved the loss graph, previously it looked like the screenshot on the right, because each iteration’s loss is graphed. Because our batch size is 32, which means in each iteration we look at just 32 inputs/output, a good deal of what the loss will be depends on how lucky we are with the input/output. Over a great number of iterations, it averages out into the correct value, though, so to fix the graph, we instead plot the average of every 1000 iterations, which lets us see a lot more detail that otherwise would be lost in the noise (the two loss graphs I added are not of the same model, but you get the idea). Anyway now I’m going to actually implement the wavenet architecture!"}, {"post_id": 29913, "ts": "2026-07-17T02:41:08Z", "hours": 3.23, "text": "I followed Karpathy’s lecture on backpropagation, where he implemented backpropagation manually. In the series, he’s using Pytorch, which does it for you, which is why he’s doing it manually. I’m not using Pytorch, so the only way to do it is to do it manually, so I didn’t get to add too much to the code, I just verified that I had implemented it correctly and learned a bunch. It is still pretty confusing though, and I couldn’t solve any of the exercises in the lecture without watching his explanations. Anyway here’s a name it generated that I think is pretty cool."}, {"post_id": 29276, "ts": "2026-07-16T02:51:51Z", "hours": 0.7719, "text": "Added a demo page! You can check it out here: https://luchik28.github.io/BadGPT/ . I saved the model weights, built a script that reconstructs the model using those weights, and hosted it using github pages."}, {"post_id": 29257, "ts": "2026-07-16T01:45:50Z", "hours": 3.1169, "text": "Put my model into the Layer class, so I can easily create lots of layers. The graph shows the activation distribution by layer. Each layer is pretty similar, as you can see. This devlog marks the end of the fourth lecture in Andrej Karpathy’s makemore series, out of 7, so we’re getting there! That’s just under 8 hours or lecture watched (so I spend roughly 5 minutes coding for every minute of lecture watched). Pretty interesting."}, {"post_id": 25900, "ts": "2026-07-10T12:09:18Z", "hours": 13.8508, "text": "I was playing around with how changing the number of epochs/other variable affected the output, and seeing how that differed to before I implemented Batch normalization, and so tried to put the epochs up a lot. I ended up training it for 20,000,000 epochs, which took like 8 hours, which is why this devlog has so much time logged. It didn’t really improve it much, you can see by the loss graph it didn’t go down very much at all, so I’ll need to change something in how the code works. It was still fun though."}, {"post_id": 24311, "ts": "2026-07-07T20:05:56Z", "hours": 2.4747, "text": "I worked on switching to a Jupyter notebook instead of just a python file, this made it easier since I didn’t have to constantly retrain the model, and also could print out stuff in line. I also added batch normalization, which helps change the range (really the standard deviation) of the values before going into the activation function (tanh) so that the values are more spread out. tanh squishes all values between -1 and 1, so if all of the numbers are greater than 1 or less than -1, then all of the values will essentially be squished to either -1 or 1, which makes the model lose a lot of the data. But if you divide all the numbers so that they are all closer to 0, then the activation function is a lot more spread out and the data is preserved. (I got the photo from google, I think it’s helpful when visualizing it)."}, {"post_id": 20360, "ts": "2026-07-01T22:48:01Z", "hours": 1.0503, "text": "I made a bunch of little improvements, including increasing the character encodings to 10 dimensions up from 2, increasing the epochs to 200,000, and also decreasing the learning rate from .1 to .01 for the laster 50,000 epochs. Although the loss is significantly lower than Andrej Karpathy’s makemore (which I modeled my model after), it’s names are worse. Karpathy got 2.17 ish on the testing dataset, while I got 1.776. However, Karpathy’s generated slightly abnormal but reasonably word-like names, like “jeron” and “ham” while mine where a little more random (“xxxhorlis” is one of them). I’m not sure how to improve from here, I don’t think increasing the epochs will do much, it already took around 10 minutes to train this model, I think we’ll get diminishing returns. I will, as always, continue on to the next video in Karpathy’s series, hoping that his tips will help improve it."}, {"post_id": 17855, "ts": "2026-06-28T19:57:08Z", "hours": 2.8889, "text": "I tuned the learning rate (The magnitude of how much it changes the weights, which is multiplied by the gradient of each weight to get the final change), added better printouts when training (Added a neat progress bar/tracking, output the loss, and a timer), and also using plotmatlib to plot the embeddings. The graph is how the model arranged each letter in space. What’s interesting is similar letters (like the ending character “.” and “e”, which both are commonly found near the end of the word) are in similar spots, so the model has sorted out some sort of meaning from their placements, which I think is pretty cool. The names are still quite nonsensicle, I think I might have to enlarge the model a little bit to improve performance, which means waiting longer for it to train :("}, {"post_id": 15817, "ts": "2026-06-25T18:20:16Z", "hours": 5.8631, "text": "I improved my model based off of Kerpathy’s makeMore part two tutorial and a 2003 paper by bengio et al (link is https://jmlr.org/papers/volume3/tmp/bengio03a.pdf ), it was really interesting. I increased the input size, so it takes in the previous 3 letters as an input instead of 1, and encoded each letter in a two dimensions instead of one hot encoding. I also had to start using numPy due to needing to do efficient matrix multiplication (numPy does it in C in a heavily optimized fashion, I considered trying to do this but decided it was out of the scope of the project). Doing it in just python would be way too slow. I also optimized it a little bit, having it select 32 examples randomly from the data set for each epoch, instead of just using the whole thing, which made it a lot faster while still training over the whole set. Hopefully this will make it produce more accurate results!"}, {"post_id": 12206, "ts": "2026-06-19T22:30:34Z", "hours": 1.1233, "text": "I finally got it to generate some names! They are sampled below. I watched the first half of Andrej Karpathy’s makemore video, and built a 2D array of the number of each instance of a letter following another instance. Then, when generating the name, it takes an array of the number of times in the training set each letter followed the previous letter in the name, multiplies that number by a random number 0 to 1, and chooses the highest number as the next letter in the name. This doesn’t work too well, as shown below, so I will spend some time improving, but it’s a start! Some names it generated are sampled below."}, {"post_id": 11053, "ts": "2026-06-18T02:41:06Z", "hours": 5.3719, "text": "Having completed the MLP I described in my last devlog, I set out to try to follow the next tutorial in the list I found. However, after I listened to the description of it, which is basically just a model that can take in a database of words and produce more words that sound similar, I foolishly believed I could try to build something similar without following the tutorial. I did take the database of names from the tutorial, since I will need those to train the model. I started by transforming the inputs (the previous letter in the word) into numbers, and then the output (a number) back into a letter. My first attempt just put in the ASCII code for the letter, and the rounded down output number. The first issue was I used the entire database to train, which took forever and quickly hit the maximum recursion depth, so I switched to using only the first 500 examples (using the entire database, combined with super high differences between the output and the expected output resulted in the initial loss being 1,934,198,245, compared to a loss of like 4 when just testing my MLP). After that, I got it to actually finish training without crashing, however, the loss didn’t go down, and it always outputted a null character. I realized I had been really stupid, as the tanh function at the end of every neuron in the MLP shrinks the result between -1 and 1, so the result could only ever be the ASCII codes 0 or 1, which are null. So instead, I changed it so instead of outputting the ASCII code directly, it outputs a 27 long array, each index representing a letter (and the last representing end of name), each value at an index represents the probability of that letter being chosen, so to decode the results it just has to find the highest probability, check that it’s not the last element, and add 97 to it’s index to get the ASCII codes (because the letter “a” is at 97, so if it’s index 0 and meant to be “a” it has to adjust). This led it to actually output letters, but it always outputted the same letter, as shown in the screenshot. The loss dropped rapidly and then plateaued at around 2000. I found some bugs (gradient accumilating over time instead of resetting each epoch) and made some changes (instead of inputting an ASCII code, it inputs in the same format as the output), but nothing had any effect. After thinking, I realized that the model is just picking the most common letter, and always outputting it. That’s why the loss can’t get any lower than 2000, because that’s the limit of how good this strategy can get. However, I have no idea how to fix this issue, and somehow teach the model the meaning behind the letters, so I will accept defeat and watch the tutorial, then implement what I learned."}, {"post_id": 9520, "ts": "2026-06-15T21:49:01Z", "hours": 4.8256, "text": "I implemented an MLP, I watched the entire Micrograd explanation by Andrej Karpathy, which was really interesting. I followed along, and played around with tuning my model (that does absolutely nothing useful) to predict stuff better. It has Value objects, which store the data, as well as gradients, and the operation/previous numbers used to create them, as well as all the operations. This can be used to calculate the gradient (or how much each Value object affected the last Value in the chain of operations), which is basically all you need for backpropogation (which is where it goes back and calculates how much each weight/bias affects the final output). It also has classes for each neuron, which is a collection of Values that act as the inputs, the weights (which are randomly generated at the start), and the bias for that nueron. These neurons make up layers, and the layers make up the MLP (multilayer perceptron). I created a couple arrays of inputs, and the desired output, which has the output for each input array. To train it, you have the model predict something, then calculate the loss (or the sum of how far away each prediction was squared), then do the backpropogation (go through each parameter, or each weight and bias), find out how much and in what direction it affected the loss function, and finally change each parameter slightly so it moves the loss in the right direction. As you can see in the screenshot, I got it down pretty low. This will be useful because when I am training my LLM, I will need to use a neural network like this, and get the loss down as low as possible so it predicts better words and produces better results. Karpathy’s video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9GvCAUhRvKZ&index=2 , it’s really quite amazing, I learned so much from it, and I haven’t even learned Calculus yet, which he states is a prerequisite in the description, I highly recommend if you’re interested. Next I will need to work on implementing transformers (which takes in the input (words), and derives meaning from them by encoding them into a vector)."}]...
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Title: BadGPT by @28taidan | Stardance
Devlogs:
I Title: BadGPT by @28taidan | Stardance
Devlogs:
I implemented an MLP, I watched the entire Micrograd explanation by Andrej Karpathy, which was really interesting. I followed along, and played around with tuning my model (that does absolutely nothing useful) to predict stuff better. It has Value objects, which store the data, as well as gradients, and the operation/previous numbers used to create them, as well as all the operations. This can be used to calculate the gradient (or how much each Value object affected the last Value in the chain of operations), which is basically all you need for backpropogation (which is where it goes back and calculates how much each weight/bias affects the final output). It also has classes for each neuron, which is a collection of Values that act as the inputs, the weights (which are randomly generated at the start), and the bias for that nueron. These neurons make up layers, and the layers make up the MLP (multilayer perceptron). I created a couple arrays of inputs, and the desired output, which has the output for each input array. To train it, you have the model predict something, then calculate the loss (or the sum of how far away each prediction was squared), then do the backpropogation (go through each parameter, or each weight and bias), find out how much and in what direction it affected the loss function, and finally change each parameter slightly so it moves the loss in the right direction. As you can see in the screenshot, I got it down pretty low. This will be useful because when I am training my LLM, I will need to use a neural network like this, and get the loss down as low as possible so it predicts better words and produces better results. Karpathy’s video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9GvCAUhRvKZ&index=2 , it’s really quite amazing, I learned so much from it, and I haven’t even learned Calculus yet, which he states is a prerequisite in the description, I highly recommend if you’re interested. Next I will need to work on implementing transformers (which takes in the input (words), and derives meaning from them by encoding them into a vector).
Having completed the MLP I described in my last devlog, I set out to try to follow the next tutorial in the list I found. However, after I listened to the description of it, which is basically just a model that can take in a database of words and produce more words that sound similar, I foolishly believed I could try to build something similar without following the tutorial. I did take the database of names from the tutorial, since I will need those to train the model. I started by transforming the inputs (the previous letter in the word) into numbers, and then the output (a number) back into a letter. My first attempt just put in the ASCII code for the letter, and the rounded down output number. The first issue was I used the entire database to train, which took forever and quickly hit the maximum recursion depth, so I switched to using only the first 500 examples (using the entire database, combined with super high differences between the output and the expected output resulted in the initial loss being 1,934,198,245, compared to a loss of like 4 when just testing my MLP). After that, I got it to actually finish training without crashing, however, the loss didn’t go down, and it always outputted a null character. I realized I had been really stupid, as the tanh function at the end of every neuron in the MLP shrinks the result between -1 and 1, so the result could only ever be the ASCII codes 0 or 1, which are null. So instead, I changed it so instead of outputting the ASCII code directly, it outputs a 27 long array, each index representing a letter (and the last representing end of name), each value at an index represents the probability of that letter being chosen, so to decode the results it just has to find the highest probability, check that it’s not the last element, and add 97 to it’s index to get the ASCII codes (because the letter “a” is at 97, so if it’s index 0 and meant to be “a” it has to adjust). This led it to actually output letters, but it always outputted the same letter, as shown in the screenshot. The loss dropped rapidly and then plateaued at around 2000. I found some bugs (gradient accumilating over time instead of resetting each epoch) and made some changes (instead of inputting an ASCII code, it inputs in the same format as the output), but nothing had any effect. After thinking, I realized that the model is just picking the most common letter, and always outputting it. That’s why the loss can’t get any lower than 2000, because that’s the limit of how good this strategy can get. However, I have no idea how to fix this issue, and somehow teach the model the meaning behind the letters, so I will accept defeat and watch the tutorial, then implement what I learned.
I finally got it to generate some names! They are sampled below. I watched the first half of Andrej Karpathy’s makemore video, and built a 2D array of the number of each instance of a letter following another instance. Then, when generating the name, it takes an array of the number of times in the training set each letter followed the previous letter in the name, multiplies that number by a random number 0 to 1, and chooses the highest number as the next letter in the name. This doesn’t work too well, as shown below, so I will spend some time improving, but it’s a start! Some names it generated are sampled below.
I improved my model based off of Kerpathy’s makeMore part two tutorial and a 2003 paper by bengio et al (link is https://jmlr.org/papers/volume3/tmp/bengio03a.pdf ), it was really interesting. I increased the input size, so it takes in the previous 3 letters as an input instead of 1, and encoded each letter in a two dimensions instead of one hot encoding. I also had to start using numPy due to needing to do efficient matrix multiplication (numPy does it in C in a heavily optimized fashion, I considered trying to do this but decided it was out of the scope of the project). Doing it in just python would be way too slow. I also optimized it a little bit, having it select 32 examples randomly from the data set for each epoch, instead of just using the whole thing, which made it a lot faster while still training over the whole set. Hopefully this will make it produce more accurate results!
I tuned the learning rate (The magnitude of how much it changes the weights, which is multiplied by the gradient of each weight to get the final change), added better printouts when training (Added a neat progress bar/tracking, output the loss, and a timer), and also using plotmatlib to plot the embeddings. The graph is how the model arranged each letter in space. What’s interesting is similar letters (like the ending character “.” and “e”, which both are commonly found near the end of the word) are in similar spots, so the model has sorted out some sort of meaning from their placements, which I think is pretty cool. The names are still quite nonsensicle, I think I might have to enlarge the model a little bit to improve performance, which means waiting longer for it to train :(
I made a bunch of little improvements, including increasing the character encodings to 10 dimensions up from 2, increasing the epochs to 200,000, and also decreasing the learning rate from .1 to .01 for the laster 50,000 epochs. Although the loss is significantly lower than Andrej Karpathy’s makemore (which I modeled my model after), it’s names are worse. Karpathy got 2.17 ish on the testing dataset, while I got 1.776. However, Karpathy’s generated slightly abnormal but reasonably word-like names, like “jeron” and “ham” while mine where a little more random (“xxxhorlis” is one of them). I’m not sure how to improve from here, I don’t think increasing the epochs will do much, it already took around 10 minutes to train this model, I think we’ll get diminishing returns. I will, as always, continue on to the next video in Karpathy’s series, hoping that his tips will help improve it.
I worked on switching to a Jupyter notebook instead of just a python file, this made it easier since I didn’t have to constantly retrain the model, and also could print out stuff in line. I also added batch normalization, which helps change the range (really the standard deviation) of the values before going into the activation function (tanh) so that the values are more spread out. tanh squishes all values between -1 and 1, so if all of the numbers are greater than 1 or less than -1, then all of the values will essentially be squished to either -1 or 1, which makes the model lose a lot of the data. But if you divide all the numbers so that they are all closer to 0, then the activation function is a lot more spread out and the data is preserved. (I got the photo from google, I think it’s helpful when visualizing it).
I was playing around with how changing the number of epochs/other variable affected the output, and seeing how that differed to before I implemented Batch normalization, and so tried to put the epochs up a lot. I ended up training it for 20,000,000 epochs, which took like 8 hours, which is why this devlog has so much time logged. It didn’t really improve it much, you can see by the loss graph it didn’t go down very much at all, so I’ll need to change something in how the code works. It was still fun though.
Put my model into the Layer class, so I can easily create lots of layers. The graph shows the activation distribution by layer. Each layer is pretty similar, as you can see. This devlog marks the end of the fourth lecture in Andrej Karpathy’s makemore series, out of 7, so we’re getting there! That’s just under 8 hours or lecture watched (so I spend roughly 5 minutes coding for every minute of lecture watched). Pretty interesting.
Added a demo page! You can check it out here: https://luchik28.github.io/BadGPT/ . I saved the model weights, built a script that reconstructs the model using those weights, and hosted it using github pages.
I followed Karpathy’s lecture on backpropagation, where he implemented backpropagation manually. In the series, he’s using Pytorch, which does it for you, which is why he’s doing it manually. I’m not using Pytorch, so the only way to do it is to do it manually, so I didn’t get to add too much to the code, I just verified that I had implemented it correctly and learned a bunch. It is still pretty confusing though, and I couldn’t solve any of the exercises in the lecture without watching his explanations. Anyway here’s a name it generated that I think is pretty cool.
I did a bunch of things to prep for implementing a wavenet architecture, which basically changes the model so instead of taking in all the characters of input at once and squishing them all into the first layer, it gradually puts them in at each separate layer. First, I put more stuff in classes! This didn’t really change the functionality, but instead of embedding the characters and flattening the model in separate chunks, I put them in their own classes so they can get put in the list of layers, and we can just run the input through each layer in the list, and compare it with the target at the end, instead of having half the layers in the list and half as separate chunks, which is a lot smoother. So the entire model is just: model = Sequential ([ Embedding ( vocab_size , n_embd ), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_embd * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_hidden * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), FlattenConsecutive ( 2 ), Linear ( n_hidden * 2 , n_hidden , bias = False ), BatchNorm1D ( n_hidden ), Tanh (), Linear ( n_hidden , vocab_size ), ]) Which I think is really cool. I also improved the loss graph, previously it looked like the screenshot on the right, because each iteration’s loss is graphed. Because our batch size is 32, which means in each iteration we look at just 32 inputs/output, a good deal of what the loss will be depends on how lucky we are with the input/output. Over a great number of iterations, it averages out into the correct value, though, so to fix the graph, we instead plot the average of every 1000 iterations, which lets us see a lot more detail that otherwise would be lost in the noise (the two loss graphs I added are not of the same model, but you get the idea). Anyway now I’m going to actually implement the wavenet architecture!
Implemented the wavenet architecture. Usually, during the flattening phase, the tensor goes from the shape (batch num, block size, embedding dimensions) to (batch num, block size * embedding dimensions). This squishes all of the embedded characters into one dimension. Wavenet does that more gradually, it slowly merges the different letters. So the first two letter embeddings get squished into one, then the next two, etc, and in the next layer then you have the first 4, then the next four, until by the final layer you have just one group of all the letters, which is the same as the original method, just a much more gradual approach. The first image is the training loss, the huge cliff is when the learning rate decreased. The second image is a visualization of the wavenet architecture from the paper. You can see that in each layer, nearby groups of input get merged together. In the original method, the graph would look like all of the inputs going to the 1st dot in the hidden layer, then continuing up. Next I will be actually building a GPT instead of this names project.
Trained the wavenet architecture on a file with just shakespear in it. It’s got the structure down well, and sometimes can do words and wordlike outputs, but generally spouts straight gibberish. I will try to follow a lecture to build a better Tokenizer and Transformer next time. Right now each character is treated as a token, and embedded into 10 dimensions, it would be better if pairs of characters were treated as tokens and embedded. Increasing the context size could also help, it’s currently an input of the previous 8 characters and outputting 1. This is it’s output:
I increased the block size from 8 characters to 64. This means that instead of the model taking in the previous 8 characters and outputting the next one, it takes in the previous 64 characters and outputs the next. This means that it should be able to keep track of longer words so it doesn’t get lost in them. However, it doesn’t seem to be improving the model too much, although that might be because I haven’t trained it as much as the others. I’ve done roughly 200,000 epochs, which took a long time, since this model is much larger (110,415 parameters vs 45,000), and has 6 hidden layers as apposed to 2, which means it is a lot slower. As you can see in the loss graph, it probably could make further gains, although it seems to be mostly good.
I implemented self attention! I will try to explain here, but will do a terrible job: basically, what that is, is it lets the model decide what tokens in the input are more important than the others. The first thing I did was scrap the wavenet model, and switched to a simple bigram model. The second thing I implemented was bag of words, which edits the input tokens so every element is the average of that element and all that came before it. This lets all of the tokens “talk” to eachother. This is all fine and dandy but since all the things are averaged then you don’t know where things came from, and positional data is lost, so we lose a lot of resolution and data, so that sucks. So we have to encode positional data. So instead of just averaging all the elements that came before, we expand each averaged element into a list, which has all the elements in a row instead of averaging them into one number. So the first row could be [1, 0, 0] and the second [1, 2, 0] and the third [1, 2, 3], etc. We do this by masking it with the tril function, from numpy (very cool). But this is problematic, because all of the elements are given the exact same weight. A letter 34 characters back gets the same weight as the last character in the input (which is the letter immediately preceding the predicted letter, the output). To fix this, we add self attention! This is modeled after the groundbreaking paper Attention is All You Need, which started the whole AI hype thing. How it works is each token has a linear layer (that multiplies it by learned weights) called the key, and another called the query. The query is kind of like what that token is looking for, and the key is kind of like what that token has. And these can be multiplied with the keys and queries of all the other tokens, and that lets you know which token has the stuff that the most other tokens are looking for, and is thus more important and can be given more weight. That is a single head of attention, there are multiple heads that can specialize in different things. This, in theory, should increase performance. But it also drastically increases the amount of time it takes to train. The model only has ~56k parameters, which is less than half of the wavenet model, but takes a lot more time to do it’s thing. This is the output from the results of more than 13 hours of training. As you can see from the loss function, the loss was decreasing at a steady rate, so more training could probably improve it. Plus, this was at a highish learning rate the whole time (.1) so decreasing it would probably further improve it. But I can’t do anything on my computer while this is training or it runs out of RAM, and I have to use my computer now, so I will be moving on for now.
I made a bunch of tiny improvements. I didn’t change the architecture at all, but I did change the optimizer to AdamW. The optimizer is what controls how much each parameter is changed each epoch. Before, I was using a set learning rate, of about .1 for the first 80% of training then decreasing to .01 for the last 20%. Decreasing it at the end is important because as the loss settles into a local minimum, it might not be able to go to the lowest point because it keeps overshooting it since the lr is too high. Conversely, we can’t keep the lr too small the whole time because it might settle into a very tiny local minima that it might have been able to go over with a higher learning rate. It would also take forever. AdamW helps improve the optimizing step by changing the learning rate per parameter, helping the model train as fast as possible without overfitting. Overfitting isn’t really an issue I’m worrying about since my model is pretty small (around 56k params), so it’s not really large enough to learn the ins and outs of my dataset. Anyway I also changed the logging step, so it now logs validation dataset loss in addition to the training dataset loss. I split the dataset into train and validation so I can make sure it’s not overfitting. Currently the val loss is at 1.76, which is a lot better than where we were at before, which makes me hopeful. Training has around another 7,000 epochs to go, but Stardance is yelling at me I should write another devlog now so here you go, Stardance. I’m looking forward to sampling the model and seeing how much it’s improved!
I finished training it! It finished with a val loss of around 1.76, it got down to 1.73 but ticked up at the end. The output is pretty good, but not substantially better than the wavenet model. However, it’s vaguely word-like, and took 20 hours to train so I’m not sure how much larger I can make the model before my laptop implodes. Next I will probably try to find a question-answer training dataset, so that I can start training it to answer questions. This step that I’ve been working on is the pre-training step, where I teach the model to basically spit out documents. Next, I have to have it spit out documents that happen to be question-answer documents.
Updated the demo website to include the wavenet model, and the new self-attention shakespear model. You can check it out here .
Started working on a more advanced tokenizer. The tokenizer is what splits the input text from words into numbers, and back again. Before, I was using a 10 dimensional embedding, where each letter is represented by a 10 long array (each value representing a dimension). But current models have much more advanced tokenizers, which often encompass entire words, or parts of words for longer words. This works using Byte Pair Encoding, which turns all of the letters pairs of letters into their utf encodings (usually 8), then iteratively merging the most common consecutive pairs into tokens to add to the vocabulary. You can see how tokenizers work at https://tiktokenizer.vercel.app/ , which is a cool website that lets you play around with stuff like that.
Switched to using the fineweb edu dataset, instead of shakespear. This is the dataset I will use to train my actual model on. It’s a highly currated database of the internet, and is similar to what GPT2 was trained on (although the actual db they trained it on is closed source). I also reformated the sampling system so you can put in a query and get a response, as long as the query takes up less tokens than the context. Other than swapping out the training file, it’s the exact same. Next, I will probably implement a special ending token to my tokenizer, and also increase the scale of my model a little bit. I can’t increase it all the way to what Karpathy does in his tutorial (he uses cloud computing, so he paid to rent out like 8 64GB GPUs, or something like that), since I don’t want to spend money training it. However I think I can squeeze a little more out of my laptop.
Added an EOS ID, which is a special token that the model can output to indicate that it’s done. I built a script to insert this in between passages in the training data, so it can learn when it should shut up (otherwise it will yap forever, until it hits the max number of output tokens). This meant I had to retrain the entire model, but got it down to a loss of around 3.46. Obviously, it’s not very good. But I’m pretty sure the only way to improve is to scale up the model size and training time, something I don’t really have the capacity to do (this model trained for 15 hours on my laptop). I will probably continue by adding this model to my demo website, and build a chatGPT like UI, just for fun. After that, I think it might be time to ship!
Trained the model a little more, exported it, wrote some UI to make it look more like a chatbot. It still sounds like gibberish. Sometimes I imagine that it’s output changes slightly depending on the context (for example, more numbers if I ask it a number related question, and a list if I ask it for a list, etc), but I’m probably just imagining it, it’s really just gibberish. Still kinda cool tho. You can check out the demo at https://luchik28.github.io/BadGPT/ .
Fixed up the readme a bit in preparation to ship. Specifically, I added info on what all the files do, but I named them poorly and then forgot what most of them do so it’s kind of confusing.
Ships:
badGPT is a conglomeration of sequential ML projects I did this summer, culminating in a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude built from scratch using just python and numpy. I started off by building a name generation model, then a Shakespeare writing model, then finally a chatGPT-esque model. The model produces, for the most part, complete gibberish, so this was less a practical project and more an exercise in understanding how everything works. It performs so poorly because it’s so small. Models need a lot of parameters to be able to capture all the nuances required to produce coherent text, which makes the models much slower to train. The final model I made includes around 120,000 parameters, 4 transformer blocks of 4 attention heads each, and 64 tokens of context. It’s based largely on GPT-2, which for reference had about 1.5 billion parameters. Current frontier models, like Anthropic’s fable, have trillions of parameters and can have millions of input tokens, so it makes sense that my model is too small to make much sense at all. Even at its small size, it took my laptop more than 20 hours to train, so scaling up with my current hardware is not feasible. Many people like using libraries like pytorch and tensorflow, which include classes that handle backpropagation (the system that’s at the heart of letting the models learn), but I wanted to start from scratch so I wrote my own. If you wish to try any of my models out, you can visit the demo website (click try project), and click through the tabs to see each of the models. It all runs in your browser. You can also look through the Jupyter notebooks in the Github repository to get a sense of how everything works....
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1792875233.3266373
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1793739233.3266373
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4018
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Celestial Capitalist by @idi0cy | Stardance
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idi0cy
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1
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109.0
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2005
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-18T08:45:07Z", "hours": 109.0, "multiplier": 18.79, "payout": 2005, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "Celestial Capitalist is a simulation game where the player simultaneously builds and ascends the corporate ladder from the bottom of the street to the self-built throne at the top of the cosmos. Beg your way from homelessness, run a lemonade stand, scam grandmas on the internet, start a cult, play union-buster tower defence, and generally just have a grand stupid time while the world slowly bends to your will. Coding is mighty stupid, and I had a lot of trouble patching all of the many bugs. With all that out of the way, I hope you enjoy Celestial Capitalist!", "repo": "https://github.com/idi0cy/Celestial-Capitalist", "demo": "https://ratseerofrattesse.itch.io/celestial-capitalist"}]...
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[{"post_id": 70009, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 70009, "ts": "2026-09-18T08:29:54Z", "hours": 2.7947, "text": "Finished The first stage, and therefor the shipped version of Celestial Capitalist (all rights reserved) is completed! I just spent over four hours in a voice call with @Ratseer patching all the bugs and balancing all the minigames. Audio settings work, but only on the editor version. The only forum post we found with a possible answer just told us they fixed but don’t know how, so our questions were not answered. Minigames were balanced, the sort. Very, very stupid code was fixed (more than I remember writing). More importantly, they sell soy sauce by the buckets and they also have deluxe versions worth hundreds of dollars. This fact was found out after I realized we priced soy sauce at $45. All the items were subsequently revalued. Celestial Capitalist Finally (but not fully) developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy . Thank you for your patience."}, {"post_id": 67502, "ts": "2026-09-13T16:58:21Z", "hours": 7.8861, "text": "Polishing and Suffering Celestial capitalist is nearing it’s completion, so over the past week or so I’ve just been polishing everything. Fixing bugs, balancing minigames, and small changes that make the game less buggy. My friend @Ratseer has been working on a couple of these mechanics, including revamping a goofy tutorial blob I wrote. Sound Effects A big change to note was the sound effects, and this is where the suffering comes in. I had to make a global script with a button signal that each button would send, which would cause a sound to play. After a big of debugging, I hooked up pressing a button to the signal, and it worked. Almost. The signal was sending, and it was telling the AudioStreamPlayer to play the sound, but for some reason it wasn’t. We testing using an input to play the sound, and that worked perfectly fine. I tried using another proxy function for no reason, and it didn’t work either. We even tried having both the input and the signal change the same variable to true, where the sound would play then it set to false again. This didn’t work. To this day, I’m not sure why nothing worked, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find out. But it was fine, since we eventually just made a new global script and for some reason everything worked totally normally after that. The image attached below depicts the setup we used for this coding conundrum. Celestial Capitalist Shrewdly developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy ."}, {"post_id": 65218, "ts": "2026-09-10T06:08:55Z", "hours": 4.8753, "text": "Title Screen and a Heftier Quota I did a couple things, starting with an upgrade to the title screen system. Now, you can read a bit about your role in this game before you’re thrown into the deep end. I wrote up a quick explanation, but it might get changed in the future based on vibes. The other big change is that I added more quota requirements. Instead of just making 500 bucks, you gotta do some more work like sell items, or gain skill points. There are three right now, and I plan to keep it that way. Bug Fixes Since CC is about ready to ship any time now, we’re doing some final bug patches and implementations to the game. I fixed a counting error on the fake injury game mode, as well as a bad gameplay mechanic in the sell minigame that caused targets to spawn on top of each other. Celestial Capitalist Treacherously developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy"}, {"post_id": 60923, "ts": "2026-09-03T16:11:15Z", "hours": 5.8194, "text": "Random Events It’s another day where I’ve actually done some coding work, and I completed the random events function of this game. Every 180 seconds a randomly selected random event occurs, and a popup shows up telling you what happened. Get robbed, find money on the floor, get robbed again, anything could happen. Each event has a different “weight” to it, which determines how likely it is to happen. In this recording, I changed the weight of losing an item to 2000, giving it a practically guaranteed chance of being picked. Event log will probably be removed, since it isn’t actually useful. Celestial Capitalist Legally developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy ."}, {"post_id": 55575, "ts": "2026-08-27T14:47:16Z", "hours": 2.4314, "text": "Title Screen Functionality For the longest time, the title screen has been completely non-functional. That ends today, when I do some actually easy coding and give functionality* to all of the buttons I put onto the title screen. Start game initiates a loading popup before loading the next scene. Credits gives the same text each time, with the exception of the green highlighted text, which chooses a random adjective each time the credits button is pressed. The settings are a lie. Celestial Capitalist var wordBank = [\"debatably\", \"demonstrably\", \"woefully\"] var msg = str(wordBank[randi_range(0, len(wordBank) - 1]) + \" developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer\" print(msg)"}, {"post_id": 44708, "ts": "2026-08-10T17:24:52Z", "hours": 3.9619, "text": "Skill Point System Completed I’m back, with more consistent developing time. The skills system has been completed, and its relatively simple which is actually a nice break. Typing minigame nearly killed me. You have certain attributes that you can divest your skill points into. A lot of these are the typical DnD stats, but some of them are different. Every three minutes you gain a skill point, which might be changed for balancing. Every time you complete a minigame from the get money section, you have the chance to get a skill point. Certain skills help with certain minigames, and the more you have the more positive modifiers you get for that minigame. This is all pretty intuitive. There are some parts not yet filled out, since I don’t know at all how the scavenge code works because my friend made that and not me. Celestial Capitalist Inconsistently developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer ."}, {"post_id": 38635, "ts": "2026-08-01T04:08:07Z", "hours": 4.4667, "text": "Quota Function Completed I’ve been on just a bit of a hiatus. The steal function has been fully completed, with a strength minigame based off both aim training and also timing. Also, I have a functioning quota system. You have certain tasks to complete before moving on to the next “level”, which definitely won’t be programmed very soon at the exponentially decaying rate that I’m moving at. I’m going to start looking at returning to daily contribution, all for those ikea sharks. You can focus the progress bar on certain tasks to complete, such as the cash requirement which is the only one right now. It fills in automatically, and has a nice texture. See the video for how it works. Thank you for viewing celestial capitalist, its not abandoned quite yet. Debatably developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer ."}, {"post_id": 25608, "ts": "2026-07-09T23:53:01Z", "hours": 9.0775, "text": "Steal Function In Progress Of course, there needs to be an option to rob people. Hence, stealing. I’ve programmed the stealth minigame into the stealing function of the game, and it works perfectly fine. The strength one, well not so much. Going to have to give a bit more of a wait on that one. Heavily inspired by Stardew Valley’s fishing minigame. I have to log these hours before I reach ten, because I just found out that stardance does NOT do overtime pay. Celestial Capitalist Greedily developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer ."}, {"post_id": 18522, "ts": "2026-06-29T18:19:15Z", "hours": 12.1594, "text": "Con Minigame Completed It’s been nine days, and I’ve worked on one minigame for 12 hours. The typing based minigame for conning strangers is now complete! When you con someone, you choose how you want to con them, for example a fake business opportunity, magical exorcism, or maybe even an unwinnable game to bet money on. You then type out a randomly picked prompt that was premade, and you are scored on your speed and accuracy. This determines how likely you are to succeed. You can also decide how much stakes you want to give the con, so that’s something. When you get something wrong, it highlights what was supposed to be typed red, unless you got it wrong on a space, in which it puts in what character you typed in red highlight where you typed it.. I won’t lie, it’s a bit unpolished. There are some weird text wrapping bugs that are unpleasant to look at, but it should be fine for the most part. This kinda took way too long, but whatever. We take what we can get. Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom… My associate who is also working on this project, @Ratseer has gotten strangers new sprites, names, and all that, along with a brand new scavenging system which I recommend you check out on all his devlogs. Formatting still sucks The preview function is great, thank you Stardance team. But still, now the ctrl Z shortcut is wonky, it’s harder to put in more line breaks when pressing the enter key, and also I tried uploading this earlier with the video and it said the video size was too large, and deleted the entire devlog, so now I’m writing this again. Features for thought. Celestial Capitalist Thank you for checking in with Celestial Capitalist, developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer ."}, {"post_id": 12623, "ts": "2026-06-20T16:58:09Z", "hours": 7.315, "text": "I’m Bad at Coding Recently, I’ve been trying to code a typing minigame where you do a type test to increase your chances of success. This is for the con action of Celestial Capitalist, where you just scam people. A couple of revelations have been made while I’ve been working on this, the first of which is that I’m bad at coding. As you can hopefully observe in the game, it’s supposed to be structured after a typing test like monkeytype. Each time you get it right, it highlights white. When you get a word wrong, it highlights it red. When you get it wrong on a space, a new letter is appended where you got it wrong. The most basic elements of this are working, such as getting the text correct and getting the normal non-space error text working. You know what’s not working? The other parts. Each time I try to do the error after a space, it bugs out because the backspace option doesn’t go well with it. When a word only autowraps after it’s completed, such as when I type “because” in the video, it only goes to where it should be after it’s done, which looks ugly. The indexing is wrong, little things work, and you can all see it in the video. I think I’ve also made some of the most inefficient code ever designed. I’ll keep toiling away at the minigame, and then toil away some more to actually integrate it into the minigame. These bugs will drive me to insanity. Well Well Well Would you look at that? They added a preview section. Where you can preview all of your markdown formatting. Y’know when that could have been useful? I sure do wonder. Markdown formatting is now my enemy."}, {"post_id": 10459, "ts": "2026-06-17T05:58:21Z", "hours": 3.2919, "text": "Blackmail and a Broken Clavicle You can now fake an injury, and demand blackmail to keep quiet about it and not make a fuss. In the true spirit of Reigen Arataka, you can pretend your clavicle is broken too. All of you should watch mob psycho. The recording attached better be the right one. . I’m still doing the backslashes. I’ve given up. I might try new formatting another day, but I’m tired. . Alright, so the minigame for faking an injury is pretty simple, its an fnf like rhythm game that is so unbalanced it’s insane. You are deducted points for pushing any button, and are given points for if you hit a note. You will be able to tell if you hit a note because it will expand like a balloon and fade away like my employment opportunities. You are given more points if the note is closer to the filling the center cavity of the button. . The point of this is to reward actually hitting them on time, and not just spamming. Missing notes deducts points. Severity of injury being faked determines game difficulty. Minigame performance has certain weight on how successful you are in getting money. If you perform in a negative fashion, it’s over. After blackmailing a stranger (successful or not), they will never talk to you again (kinda). They are removed from your current roster of strangers, but they might come back when reroll happens since we only have so much stranger types so far. . This thing is so heinously unbalanced, it’s insane. All the values need to be tweaked, and I haven’t done enough playtesting to know if it is fair or not. I’m hoping tweaking the values will be easy, but it might be hard to polish. That’s for another day. . Update on friendship My friend is working on actually interesting randomized dialogue, so that should be something to look forward to. Check out Ratseer’s stuff."}, {"post_id": 9974, "ts": "2026-06-16T14:41:33Z", "hours": 4.9433, "text": "Nothing is working I’m trying out on making the fake injury option, and it is not working as intended. It’s supposed to have a rhythm based minigame, sort of like friday night funkin even though i’ve never played that before, but it clearly isn’t working. \\ All the icons are sideways, there are too much notes, and for the longest time none of them would scale correctly because I forgot to assign the new scale to the scale property. \\ Markdown, again Okay I think I got it this time. If I just leave the backslashes alone…"}, {"post_id": 8518, "ts": "2026-06-14T05:11:10Z", "hours": 3.1353, "text": "Beg The beg minigame has been completed, meaning you can now get on your knees and start praying for money. I also did some polishing work, but I have absolutely no recollection of that. Frontotemporal dementia is simply a wonder, isn’t it? \\ I’m also trying some new mark down. Let’s see if my paragraphs space properly. \\ When you beg to someone, you get “dialogue options”. The options are based off the three methods of persuasion, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Pathos is appealing to human emotions like empathy, logos is using logic, and ethos is using authority to prove an argument. Each stranger will have a different reception to the persuasion types, based off data values stored in the code. \\ You have 8 chances to beg. I think. I might have changed the value. Again, frontotemporal dementia. \\ Everything is ledger compatible. If you get less than 25 progress somehow, which I might change to make it more difficult, you are rejected and cannot approach the stranger again (until strangers refresh). The more you use one strategy of persuasion, the less effective it gets. I plan to make this effect more pronounced when balancing. \\ That’s it. Please let this markdown formatting succeed."}, {"post_id": 8155, "ts": "2026-06-13T16:27:06Z", "hours": 2.9306, "text": "Polishing 0 Couple of polishing points that I put into the game to freshen things up and solve all the bugs that haggling made. Items are removed from inventory after selling, strangers walk away after you fail a sell attempt with them, and I fixed an integer division error that led to fearmongering being physically impossible to complete when you select it as a minigame. While I was working on the sell items minigame, my friend Ratseer has been working on the ledger which tracks all the finances. I’m too lazy to link him, but you should check it out over at his profile, if he devlogged it. I’ll put a video of it working here, but that’s just because I don’t think I can post this without a media element."}, {"post_id": 7287, "ts": "2026-06-12T04:34:09Z", "hours": 8.3356, "text": "Sell me this pen I finished the minigame for selling/haggling your items away. My markdown formatting is going to downgrade because I’m honestly not that motivated this feature took way too long to program, and i’m not very energetic right now. A couple things. After you talk to the person, you select which item you want to sell, and then sell it. There are dialogue options, and the safer ones like recommend make the minigame easier but you make less progress towards convincing them each time you succeed in clicking the button, but the riskier options like fearmonger are high reward types. After that, you can give a highball or lowball offer on a scale. The game calculates your chances of succeeded by combining pure randomness, your progress towards convincing them, and how much you priced your item in comparison to it’s actual value. Ignore the system text that says “five tries remaining”, that is vestigial and I forgot to remove it after redoing the whole minigame design. I can’t believe I spent 8 hours on this, and it isn’t even polished. Cool New Art Yes, as you can see, my friend is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to me trying to not lose my soul to krita. Lots of great sprite art here that makes the game look much better. I’ll have to clarify some text elements to make them more legible but it should be fine for now. Circle of ignorance If knowledge was a circle of light in a dark 2D plane, ignorance would be the darkness. We only reveal how much of it we find ourselves in by seeing the circumference of our small circle of knowledge. The more knowledge we obtain, the more unknown we must face. I’ve become bluntly aware of my own little ignorance circle. I’ve only done one of the five actions, and it’s unpolished, and it took me 8 hours, and the money isn’t even tracked because the ledger hasn’t been programmed yet, and I can only feel the great abyss devouring my spirit slightly more by the day. Watch the attached video to see how it works. I know, it isn’t that visually appealing, and I’ll probably spam lerp functions again to make it look smoother, but IT IS WHAT IT IS."}, {"post_id": 5980, "ts": "2026-06-10T01:07:53Z", "hours": 3.3317, "text": "Action Screen and the Power of Friendship For actual game development, the main progress made was continuing to develop the action screen. After you approach a stranger, you can now see their sprite art in a zoomed in fashion, and click on some actions. As you can see in the video, after the first part where I flex my new sprite art, clicking on an action gives a description of what it will do, and clicking the take action button to confirm that has the terminal display some fun text before the mini-game starts. I don’t believe I ran into too much bugs while developing this, and I haven’t gotten to the actually much harder part, which are the actual mini-games. I solved that previously devlogged bug with like five lines of code it was so infuriatingly easy. New Sprites You may be asking, “idi0cy, I saw your water bottle sprites, and I find myself confounded as to how you have managed to improve so much in your art.” Your suspicions are correct. I’m not making that art, my friend Ratseer is, because I got them on the project. They probably won’t code a lot for now since they still need to decipher the horrendous logic I used in the making of this game. It is very strange knowing that there is likely nobody actually reading this except for said friend, and now the acknowledgement of said fact might have just made it more awkward."}, {"post_id": 5164, "ts": "2026-06-08T20:57:07Z", "hours": 0.8678, "text": "Crushed buble emoji. Knowledgeable thoughts cannot describe my disappointment."}, {"post_id": 4655, "ts": "2026-06-08T01:56:35Z", "hours": 4.9778, "text": "Social Interaction Studies show I am not fond of it, but I’m still programming all of that into my game. This is the beginning of the sell function, where you are able to sell off your goods to strangers on the street. Having it be named “Sell” is a bit misleading, since the general game mechanic is a bit more broad than that. When you approach a stranger, you will be able to initiate a sales pitch, beg, steal, fake an injury, and tons of more fun options for making money. I’m still thinking of what I want as minigames for all of those, as I’m not sure if there will be separate minigames for each one. Each action you perform will have differing chances of success depending on game performance and the person you approach. For example, shouting into a crowd that a kid just injured you and demanding payment from said kid will have a zero percent chance of success. As of now, it still needs polishing, and while I’ve gotten the big obvious bugs out of the way (nothing rendering, nothing rendering after I click another button and go back, nothing rendering once more), I’m sure more await me. Next devlog will likely be on polishing the UI for the sell window. Finally using that clock Depending on what time of day it is, you are likely to find more/less strangers. If it’s rush hour, more people will be on the street in comparison to at 1 AM. Sprite art strikes back Everything was fine when I was drawing water bottles or whatever, but people are too much. In the meantime, I’ve substituted the human appearance with a sprite that in no way alludes to my mental state at the time of drawing. As soon as my friend who can actually draw is freed from the shackles of crunching at the end of school, I am selling their soul to the sprite art directory. Don’t tell them I said that."}, {"post_id": 3826, "ts": "2026-06-06T21:42:03Z", "hours": 0.5472, "text": "Timer Created a time variable to count in game time of day, and a time button/counter for the player to tell what time it is. I plan to have different minigames operate with separate loot-tables or success chances depending on what time of day it is. Pretty short devlog, but I’ll have to integrate this time variable into a LOT of different features that I don’t completely look forward to. New and improved markdown superpowers I think I’ve figured it out. Hopefully I no longer fumble all my markdown. But then again I still have no way of telling."}, {"post_id": 3654, "ts": "2026-06-06T18:06:08Z", "hours": 4.9564, "text": "Inventory Inventory system that displays all the items you currently possess. Upon clicking on one of the items in your possession, information on the item such as quality, value, and item name will be displayed. More information is planned to be available to the player, however that has not been developed yet. Unfortunately, the item icons for the inventory do not have the same smooth lerp scaling that I was able to use for the buttons, as texture buttons do not have a proper scale function. I could theoretically group a texture button with a sprite2D node, however the gridbox I’m using to organize all the items is unlikely to cooperate. All the item’s values are spaced out automatically so they have room and aren’t too close together. Each item has different information, and it’s only bestowed to them each time the inventory opens, since that is when the icons are generated. This forced me to do some weird signal connection logic in the scripts, but it worked out. ##Sprite Art Sprite art is overrated, and I want to stop doing it. All my hours are being spent drawing water bottles and pencils in krita, just to never be logged. I offloaded one of the sprite arts to my friend because they were bored, and he produced the hamburger sprite. Note that the hamburger sprite icon does NOT have the same colour as all of the other icons, because said friend is unable to use the colour picker tool for whatever reason. ##New Markdown Superpowers I learned how you format these, and I’m hoping it ends up looking good upon posting. I don’t really have a way of telling as of writing, however. ##Way too ambitions Me and associates started actually being interested in developing the game. In the near future, I plan to involve my associates as collaborators for the project, since we have a lot more planned than I originally thought. “Union Buster Tower Defense” might be a game feature that we actually consider making."}, {"post_id": 2559, "ts": "2026-06-05T03:26:38Z", "hours": 4.4472, "text": "How in the world do people format these to look nice? Is it markdown? something . Can’t tell if that worked. Doesn’t show me in the writing box. Progress for the day includes creating the first “stage” or area of the game. It’s themed after a sidewalk, as you are currently broke and probably living on one. Central cavity will be able to display UI for certain mini-games/elements related to tasks such as buying or selling items. All the buttons have been reformatted, since they didn’t look that good the first time I made them. Clicking the buttons has more response now since it gets smaller upon button press. I wasted so much time re-doing pixel art."}, {"post_id": 1878, "ts": "2026-06-04T02:55:48Z", "hours": 2.3606, "text": "Hopefully, the video that I attached will display properly, though I have no indication of whether it will as of writing. Progress today includes finishing the title screen for the player to start the game. There are currently three buttons with un-programmed functionalities, including a “Start Game”, “Credits”, and “Settings” button. There is also a large title for the game, which took me a bit too much unlogged hours to create for what it’s worth. Each element “flies” onto the screen, title from the right, and buttons from the left. Movement is generated using lerp() for fluidity."}, {"post_id": 1630, "ts": "2026-06-03T19:18:55Z", "hours": 3.9267, "text": "Making a 2D based semi idle game. Like any generic game in the genre, it starts with a button, so I just made that so far. Each button has an icon that can display pixel art, and a textbox for text. The original plan was to have a border that could grow/shrink independently of the main body of the button, however it was hard to create a general button function I could use for various purposes, as it didn’t scale properly to ensure a constant padding throughout. Settled on this type of button, that expands slightly when hovering over it so you can more visibly see the purple background. Might have to make other types in the future, but it should be fine for now. Button uses lerp function to smoothly expand the background sprite through time. Images show the button normally, and the button when hovering over it with the cursor. Also made some title screen art that will definitely be changed."}]...
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Title: Celestial Capitalist by @idi0cy | Stardance Title: Celestial Capitalist by @idi0cy | Stardance
Devlogs:
Making a 2D based semi idle game. Like any generic game in the genre, it starts with a button, so I just made that so far. Each button has an icon that can display pixel art, and a textbox for text. The original plan was to have a border that could grow/shrink independently of the main body of the button, however it was hard to create a general button function I could use for various purposes, as it didn’t scale properly to ensure a constant padding throughout. Settled on this type of button, that expands slightly when hovering over it so you can more visibly see the purple background. Might have to make other types in the future, but it should be fine for now. Button uses lerp function to smoothly expand the background sprite through time. Images show the button normally, and the button when hovering over it with the cursor. Also made some title screen art that will definitely be changed.
Hopefully, the video that I attached will display properly, though I have no indication of whether it will as of writing. Progress today includes finishing the title screen for the player to start the game. There are currently three buttons with un-programmed functionalities, including a “Start Game”, “Credits”, and “Settings” button. There is also a large title for the game, which took me a bit too much unlogged hours to create for what it’s worth. Each element “flies” onto the screen, title from the right, and buttons from the left. Movement is generated using lerp() for fluidity.
How in the world do people format these to look nice? Is it markdown? something . Can’t tell if that worked. Doesn’t show me in the writing box. Progress for the day includes creating the first “stage” or area of the game. It’s themed after a sidewalk, as you are currently broke and probably living on one. Central cavity will be able to display UI for certain mini-games/elements related to tasks such as buying or selling items. All the buttons have been reformatted, since they didn’t look that good the first time I made them. Clicking the buttons has more response now since it gets smaller upon button press. I wasted so much time re-doing pixel art.
Inventory Inventory system that displays all the items you currently possess. Upon clicking on one of the items in your possession, information on the item such as quality, value, and item name will be displayed. More information is planned to be available to the player, however that has not been developed yet. Unfortunately, the item icons for the inventory do not have the same smooth lerp scaling that I was able to use for the buttons, as texture buttons do not have a proper scale function. I could theoretically group a texture button with a sprite2D node, however the gridbox I’m using to organize all the items is unlikely to cooperate. All the item’s values are spaced out automatically so they have room and aren’t too close together. Each item has different information, and it’s only bestowed to them each time the inventory opens, since that is when the icons are generated. This forced me to do some weird signal connection logic in the scripts, but it worked out. ##Sprite Art Sprite art is overrated, and I want to stop doing it. All my hours are being spent drawing water bottles and pencils in krita, just to never be logged. I offloaded one of the sprite arts to my friend because they were bored, and he produced the hamburger sprite. Note that the hamburger sprite icon does NOT have the same colour as all of the other icons, because said friend is unable to use the colour picker tool for whatever reason. ##New Markdown Superpowers I learned how you format these, and I’m hoping it ends up looking good upon posting. I don’t really have a way of telling as of writing, however. ##Way too ambitions Me and associates started actually being interested in developing the game. In the near future, I plan to involve my associates as collaborators for the project, since we have a lot more planned than I originally thought. “Union Buster Tower Defense” might be a game feature that we actually consider making.
Timer Created a time variable to count in game time of day, and a time button/counter for the player to tell what time it is. I plan to have different minigames operate with separate loot-tables or success chances depending on what time of day it is. Pretty short devlog, but I’ll have to integrate this time variable into a LOT of different features that I don’t completely look forward to. New and improved markdown superpowers I think I’ve figured it out. Hopefully I no longer fumble all my markdown. But then again I still have no way of telling.
Social Interaction Studies show I am not fond of it, but I’m still programming all of that into my game. This is the beginning of the sell function, where you are able to sell off your goods to strangers on the street. Having it be named “Sell” is a bit misleading, since the general game mechanic is a bit more broad than that. When you approach a stranger, you will be able to initiate a sales pitch, beg, steal, fake an injury, and tons of more fun options for making money. I’m still thinking of what I want as minigames for all of those, as I’m not sure if there will be separate minigames for each one. Each action you perform will have differing chances of success depending on game performance and the person you approach. For example, shouting into a crowd that a kid just injured you and demanding payment from said kid will have a zero percent chance of success. As of now, it still needs polishing, and while I’ve gotten the big obvious bugs out of the way (nothing rendering, nothing rendering after I click another button and go back, nothing rendering once more), I’m sure more await me. Next devlog will likely be on polishing the UI for the sell window. Finally using that clock Depending on what time of day it is, you are likely to find more/less strangers. If it’s rush hour, more people will be on the street in comparison to at 1 AM. Sprite art strikes back Everything was fine when I was drawing water bottles or whatever, but people are too much. In the meantime, I’ve substituted the human appearance with a sprite that in no way alludes to my mental state at the time of drawing. As soon as my friend who can actually draw is freed from the shackles of crunching at the end of school, I am selling their soul to the sprite art directory. Don’t tell them I said that.
Crushed buble emoji. Knowledgeable thoughts cannot describe my disappointment.
Action Screen and the Power of Friendship For actual game development, the main progress made was continuing to develop the action screen. After you approach a stranger, you can now see their sprite art in a zoomed in fashion, and click on some actions. As you can see in the video, after the first part where I flex my new sprite art, clicking on an action gives a description of what it will do, and clicking the take action button to confirm that has the terminal display some fun text before the mini-game starts. I don’t believe I ran into too much bugs while developing this, and I haven’t gotten to the actually much harder part, which are the actual mini-games. I solved that previously devlogged bug with like five lines of code it was so infuriatingly easy. New Sprites You may be asking, “idi0cy, I saw your water bottle sprites, and I find myself confounded as to how you have managed to improve so much in your art.” Your suspicions are correct. I’m not making that art, my friend Ratseer is, because I got them on the project. They probably won’t code a lot for now since they still need to decipher the horrendous logic I used in the making of this game. It is very strange knowing that there is likely nobody actually reading this except for said friend, and now the acknowledgement of said fact might have just made it more awkward.
Sell me this pen I finished the minigame for selling/haggling your items away. My markdown formatting is going to downgrade because I’m honestly not that motivated this feature took way too long to program, and i’m not very energetic right now. A couple things. After you talk to the person, you select which item you want to sell, and then sell it. There are dialogue options, and the safer ones like recommend make the minigame easier but you make less progress towards convincing them each time you succeed in clicking the button, but the riskier options like fearmonger are high reward types. After that, you can give a highball or lowball offer on a scale. The game calculates your chances of succeeded by combining pure randomness, your progress towards convincing them, and how much you priced your item in comparison to it’s actual value. Ignore the system text that says “five tries remaining”, that is vestigial and I forgot to remove it after redoing the whole minigame design. I can’t believe I spent 8 hours on this, and it isn’t even polished. Cool New Art Yes, as you can see, my friend is an absolute lifesaver when it comes to me trying to not lose my soul to krita. Lots of great sprite art here that makes the game look much better. I’ll have to clarify some text elements to make them more legible but it should be fine for now. Circle of ignorance If knowledge was a circle of light in a dark 2D plane, ignorance would be the darkness. We only reveal how much of it we find ourselves in by seeing the circumference of our small circle of knowledge. The more knowledge we obtain, the more unknown we must face. I’ve become bluntly aware of my own little ignorance circle. I’ve only done one of the five actions, and it’s unpolished, and it took me 8 hours, and the money isn’t even tracked because the ledger hasn’t been programmed yet, and I can only feel the great abyss devouring my spirit slightly more by the day. Watch the attached video to see how it works. I know, it isn’t that visually appealing, and I’ll probably spam lerp functions again to make it look smoother, but IT IS WHAT IT IS.
Polishing 0 Couple of polishing points that I put into the game to freshen things up and solve all the bugs that haggling made. Items are removed from inventory after selling, strangers walk away after you fail a sell attempt with them, and I fixed an integer division error that led to fearmongering being physically impossible to complete when you select it as a minigame. While I was working on the sell items minigame, my friend Ratseer has been working on the ledger which tracks all the finances. I’m too lazy to link him, but you should check it out over at his profile, if he devlogged it. I’ll put a video of it working here, but that’s just because I don’t think I can post this without a media element.
Beg The beg minigame has been completed, meaning you can now get on your knees and start praying for money. I also did some polishing work, but I have absolutely no recollection of that. Frontotemporal dementia is simply a wonder, isn’t it? \ I’m also trying some new mark down. Let’s see if my paragraphs space properly. \ When you beg to someone, you get “dialogue options”. The options are based off the three methods of persuasion, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Pathos is appealing to human emotions like empathy, logos is using logic, and ethos is using authority to prove an argument. Each stranger will have a different reception to the persuasion types, based off data values stored in the code. \ You have 8 chances to beg. I think. I might have changed the value. Again, frontotemporal dementia. \ Everything is ledger compatible. If you get less than 25 progress somehow, which I might change to make it more difficult, you are rejected and cannot approach the stranger again (until strangers refresh). The more you use one strategy of persuasion, the less effective it gets. I plan to make this effect more pronounced when balancing. \ That’s it. Please let this markdown formatting succeed.
Nothing is working I’m trying out on making the fake injury option, and it is not working as intended. It’s supposed to have a rhythm based minigame, sort of like friday night funkin even though i’ve never played that before, but it clearly isn’t working. \ All the icons are sideways, there are too much notes, and for the longest time none of them would scale correctly because I forgot to assign the new scale to the scale property. \ Markdown, again Okay I think I got it this time. If I just leave the backslashes alone…
Blackmail and a Broken Clavicle You can now fake an injury, and demand blackmail to keep quiet about it and not make a fuss. In the true spirit of Reigen Arataka, you can pretend your clavicle is broken too. All of you should watch mob psycho. The recording attached better be the right one. . I’m still doing the backslashes. I’ve given up. I might try new formatting another day, but I’m tired. . Alright, so the minigame for faking an injury is pretty simple, its an fnf like rhythm game that is so unbalanced it’s insane. You are deducted points for pushing any button, and are given points for if you hit a note. You will be able to tell if you hit a note because it will expand like a balloon and fade away like my employment opportunities. You are given more points if the note is closer to the filling the center cavity of the button. . The point of this is to reward actually hitting them on time, and not just spamming. Missing notes deducts points. Severity of injury being faked determines game difficulty. Minigame performance has certain weight on how successful you are in getting money. If you perform in a negative fashion, it’s over. After blackmailing a stranger (successful or not), they will never talk to you again (kinda). They are removed from your current roster of strangers, but they might come back when reroll happens since we only have so much stranger types so far. . This thing is so heinously unbalanced, it’s insane. All the values need to be tweaked, and I haven’t done enough playtesting to know if it is fair or not. I’m hoping tweaking the values will be easy, but it might be hard to polish. That’s for another day. . Update on friendship My friend is working on actually interesting randomized dialogue, so that should be something to look forward to. Check out Ratseer’s stuff.
I’m Bad at Coding Recently, I’ve been trying to code a typing minigame where you do a type test to increase your chances of success. This is for the con action of Celestial Capitalist, where you just scam people. A couple of revelations have been made while I’ve been working on this, the first of which is that I’m bad at coding. As you can hopefully observe in the game, it’s supposed to be structured after a typing test like monkeytype. Each time you get it right, it highlights white. When you get a word wrong, it highlights it red. When you get it wrong on a space, a new letter is appended where you got it wrong. The most basic elements of this are working, such as getting the text correct and getting the normal non-space error text working. You know what’s not working? The other parts. Each time I try to do the error after a space, it bugs out because the backspace option doesn’t go well with it. When a word only autowraps after it’s completed, such as when I type “because” in the video, it only goes to where it should be after it’s done, which looks ugly. The indexing is wrong, little things work, and you can all see it in the video. I think I’ve also made some of the most inefficient code ever designed. I’ll keep toiling away at the minigame, and then toil away some more to actually integrate it into the minigame. These bugs will drive me to insanity. Well Well Well Would you look at that? They added a preview section. Where you can preview all of your markdown formatting. Y’know when that could have been useful? I sure do wonder. Markdown formatting is now my enemy.
Con Minigame Completed It’s been nine days, and I’ve worked on one minigame for 12 hours. The typing based minigame for conning strangers is now complete! When you con someone, you choose how you want to con them, for example a fake business opportunity, magical exorcism, or maybe even an unwinnable game to bet money on. You then type out a randomly picked prompt that was premade, and you are scored on your speed and accuracy. This determines how likely you are to succeed. You can also decide how much stakes you want to give the con, so that’s something. When you get something wrong, it highlights what was supposed to be typed red, unless you got it wrong on a space, in which it puts in what character you typed in red highlight where you typed it.. I won’t lie, it’s a bit unpolished. There are some weird text wrapping bugs that are unpleasant to look at, but it should be fine for the most part. This kinda took way too long, but whatever. We take what we can get. Meanwhile, at the Legion of Doom… My associate who is also working on this project, @Ratseer has gotten strangers new sprites, names, and all that, along with a brand new scavenging system which I recommend you check out on all his devlogs. Formatting still sucks The preview function is great, thank you Stardance team. But still, now the ctrl Z shortcut is wonky, it’s harder to put in more line breaks when pressing the enter key, and also I tried uploading this earlier with the video and it said the video size was too large, and deleted the entire devlog, so now I’m writing this again. Features for thought. Celestial Capitalist Thank you for checking in with Celestial Capitalist, developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer .
Steal Function In Progress Of course, there needs to be an option to rob people. Hence, stealing. I’ve programmed the stealth minigame into the stealing function of the game, and it works perfectly fine. The strength one, well not so much. Going to have to give a bit more of a wait on that one. Heavily inspired by Stardew Valley’s fishing minigame. I have to log these hours before I reach ten, because I just found out that stardance does NOT do overtime pay. Celestial Capitalist Greedily developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer .
Quota Function Completed I’ve been on just a bit of a hiatus. The steal function has been fully completed, with a strength minigame based off both aim training and also timing. Also, I have a functioning quota system. You have certain tasks to complete before moving on to the next “level”, which definitely won’t be programmed very soon at the exponentially decaying rate that I’m moving at. I’m going to start looking at returning to daily contribution, all for those ikea sharks. You can focus the progress bar on certain tasks to complete, such as the cash requirement which is the only one right now. It fills in automatically, and has a nice texture. See the video for how it works. Thank you for viewing celestial capitalist, its not abandoned quite yet. Debatably developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer .
Skill Point System Completed I’m back, with more consistent developing time. The skills system has been completed, and its relatively simple which is actually a nice break. Typing minigame nearly killed me. You have certain attributes that you can divest your skill points into. A lot of these are the typical DnD stats, but some of them are different. Every three minutes you gain a skill point, which might be changed for balancing. Every time you complete a minigame from the get money section, you have the chance to get a skill point. Certain skills help with certain minigames, and the more you have the more positive modifiers you get for that minigame. This is all pretty intuitive. There are some parts not yet filled out, since I don’t know at all how the scavenge code works because my friend made that and not me. Celestial Capitalist Inconsistently developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer .
Title Screen Functionality For the longest time, the title screen has been completely non-functional. That ends today, when I do some actually easy coding and give functionality* to all of the buttons I put onto the title screen. Start game initiates a loading popup before loading the next scene. Credits gives the same text each time, with the exception of the green highlighted text, which chooses a random adjective each time the credits button is pressed. The settings are a lie. Celestial Capitalist var wordBank = ["debatably", "demonstrably", "woefully"] var msg = str(wordBank[randi_range(0, len(wordBank) - 1]) + " developed by @idi0cy and @Ratseer" print(msg)
Random Events It’s another day where I’ve actually done some coding work, and I completed the random events function of this game. Every 180 seconds a randomly selected random event occurs, and a popup shows up telling you what happened. Get robbed, find money on the floor, get robbed again, anything could happen. Each event has a different “weight” to it, which determines how likely it is to happen. In this recording, I changed the weight of losing an item to 2000, giving it a practically guaranteed chance of being picked. Event log will probably be removed, since it isn’t actually useful. Celestial Capitalist Legally developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy .
Title Screen and a Heftier Quota I did a couple things, starting with an upgrade to the title screen system. Now, you can read a bit about your role in this game before you’re thrown into the deep end. I wrote up a quick explanation, but it might get changed in the future based on vibes. The other big change is that I added more quota requirements. Instead of just making 500 bucks, you gotta do some more work like sell items, or gain skill points. There are three right now, and I plan to keep it that way. Bug Fixes Since CC is about ready to ship any time now, we’re doing some final bug patches and implementations to the game. I fixed a counting error on the fake injury game mode, as well as a bad gameplay mechanic in the sell minigame that caused targets to spawn on top of each other. Celestial Capitalist Treacherously developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy
Polishing and Suffering Celestial capitalist is nearing it’s completion, so over the past week or so I’ve just been polishing everything. Fixing bugs, balancing minigames, and small changes that make the game less buggy. My friend @Ratseer has been working on a couple of these mechanics, including revamping a goofy tutorial blob I wrote. Sound Effects A big change to note was the sound effects, and this is where the suffering comes in. I had to make a global script with a button signal that each button would send, which would cause a sound to play. After a big of debugging, I hooked up pressing a button to the signal, and it worked. Almost. The signal was sending, and it was telling the AudioStreamPlayer to play the sound, but for some reason it wasn’t. We testing using an input to play the sound, and that worked perfectly fine. I tried using another proxy function for no reason, and it didn’t work either. We even tried having both the input and the signal change the same variable to true, where the sound would play then it set to false again. This didn’t work. To this day, I’m not sure why nothing worked, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find out. But it was fine, since we eventually just made a new global script and for some reason everything worked totally normally after that. The image attached below depicts the setup we used for this coding conundrum. Celestial Capitalist Shrewdly developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy .
Finished The first stage, and therefor the shipped version of Celestial Capitalist (all rights reserved) is completed! I just spent over four hours in a voice call with @Ratseer patching all the bugs and balancing all the minigames. Audio settings work, but only on the editor version. The only forum post we found with a possible answer just told us they fixed but don’t know how, so our questions were not answered. Minigames were balanced, the sort. Very, very stupid code was fixed (more than I remember writing). More importantly, they sell soy sauce by the buckets and they also have deluxe versions worth hundreds of dollars. This fact was found out after I realized we priced soy sauce at $45. All the items were subsequently revalued. Celestial Capitalist Finally (but not fully) developed by @Ratseer and @idi0cy . Thank you for your patience.
Ships:
Celestial Capitalist is a simulation game where the player simultaneously builds and ascends the corporate ladder from the bottom of the street to the self-built throne at the top of the cosmos. Beg your way from homelessness, run a lemonade stand, scam grandmas on the internet, start a cult, play union-buster tower defence, and generally just have a grand stupid time while the world slowly bends to your will. Coding is mighty stupid, and I had a lot of trouble patching all of the many bugs. With all that out of the way, I hope you enjoy Celestial Capitalist!...
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1792853815.7745492
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1792940215.7745492
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43572
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AKidsDream by @MrCode | Stardance
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MrCode
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2
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190.61
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2036
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-21T13:57:00Z", "hours": 107.0, "multiplier": 19.36, "payout": 1877, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "👾 AKidsDream~~(name work in progress)~~ , is a early version of a turn based strategy game , where you can controll multiple different units to win. 🤔 Why A Kid’s Dream? When I was a child, I created a small board game using paper and scissors. It was very complex, but still incredibly fun to play. 🏳️🏴Goal Its not just an attempt to make a game , its the challenge of creating modular , future proof system and to learn to clean code , using all my knoweledge of over the past 4 years of learning . (so even if i dont get rich with this game i did learn a lot xdd) What’s🆕 As this isn’t the first ship of the project, the project now contains: Mana💎 & a working card/hand systems Juicy new animations (as you may have seen with thecard drawing) more ℹ️nfo (who is playing and support for multiple local players) Hardships (￣ε(#￣)☆╰╮o(￣皿￣///) Trying to code everything modular and clean takes time, which is valuable resource :( Also the progress feels much slower at the beginning (but i could reuse the modular ability system for the cards which made everything easier:)) As i have invested close to 200hourse, the project has grown so much that sometimes its hard to see how one system may break another , then its another 1 hour debugging", "repo": "https://github.com/MrCode200/AKidsDream", "demo": "https://github.com/MrCode200/AKidsDream/releases/tag/v0.2.0-pre-alpha.1"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-08-09T19:50:41Z", "hours": 72.0, "multiplier": 8.67, "payout": 159, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "👾 AKidsDream(name work in progress), is a early version of a turn based strategy game, where you can controll multiple different units to win. 🤔 Why A Kid’s Dream? When I was a child, I created a small board game using paper and scissors. It was very complex, but still incredibly fun to play. A Kid’s Dream 🌜is my attempt to recreate that experience. Not exactly as it was, but from the pieces that remain in my memory. It is a game inspired by childhood imagination, handmade rules, and the joy of turning simple ideas into an adventure. ⚔️ Currently the game is in very early alpha, basically a proof of concept. I would love support, about what you would like to see, Game Design tips and tricks and what a winning condition could be. (destroy objectives vs destory a unit(like a king 🤴)", "repo": "https://github.com/MrCode200/AKidsDream", "demo": "https://github.com/MrCode200/AKidsDream/releases/tag/v0.2.0-pre-alpha.1"}]...
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[{"post_id": 75690, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 75690, "ts": "2026-09-30T19:21:12Z", "hours": 11.6108, "text": "Devlog 16: Extensions, Plugins && MODSSSSS Yes, it has been time, for what has given success to most games EVER!!!!!! ➕MODS Hard as hell to implement, as you need to make sure that each coding dependencies are implemented correctly… Had to change hole game structure to be easily extendable/moddable (fun and hard ) But i have to say i am learning more which is awsome But still many bugs and logic to fix/implement lul…"}, {"post_id": 70733, "ts": "2026-09-19T17:44:42Z", "hours": 10.015, "text": "Devlog 15: The Power of Plugins 🔌 Turned the Tween System into a plugin :)) Now it is way easier to reuse animations everywhere 🎞️ Also finished all Card + Hand logic 🃏 and cleaned up lots of code + bugs along the way 😭 The project’s recent work includes a refactor of the ability/card systems plus deck and cardcasting functionality."}, {"post_id": 65311, "ts": "2026-09-10T11:39:01Z", "hours": 10.4142, "text": "Devlog 14: Is it SatisFeelingable enough ☺️ (Help Q&Q: what animation feels more satisfying ?:00) Added clean card animation (in not so clean code 😭😭) More information on who’s turn it is. with bumb up🆙 animations for the Q&Q see the videos <3 Next 🆙: Card Deck and card into effect animations (spawn animations if above works without coding problems, which i feel is a delusional hope🥲 )"}, {"post_id": 62821, "ts": "2026-09-06T10:50:51Z", "hours": 11.515, "text": "Devlog 13: 3rr0Rssss$s ❌ and ✅Results<> Completely rewrote ȩ̷̪̓̈́́́͗͝ŗ̵͔̥̜̹̬̭̯̏̆̽͂̈́̅̐͛̾͘ͅr̸͗̌͌̾̌̾̂́͜ö̷̪̰́͊̆͗̈́̿̏́̀̂r̶̨̮̹͎̹̫͑̅̂̽̾̎͌s , Now each method returns in its chain a Result<TValue, TError> Methods like Map,Bind,Tap etc. make it now super easy to process results and errors :))"}, {"post_id": 61536, "ts": "2026-09-04T14:30:32Z", "hours": 12.2986, "text": "Devlog 12: Cards and MORE Cards 🃏 I have added Cards which can now summon units Also needed to redo the ability validation as now the modular ability system came in handy. I was able to combine both the Ability System and the Cards , so that the cards can use them freely."}, {"post_id": 58885, "ts": "2026-08-31T13:41:36Z", "hours": 8.9453, "text": "Devlog 11: I Hereby SUMMON YOU! (＃°Д°) Today we are adding CARDS , 🃏Cards contain MANA Portrait Health Duration (after how many rounds does the card play its effect ) One problem i am encountering is how to identify clicking vs draggin in godot 😵💫, but i believe i could use a workaround"}, {"post_id": 56779, "ts": "2026-08-28T17:55:17Z", "hours": 13.4456, "text": "Devlog 10: MOOORE ANIMATIONSS!!!! Added a TweenComponent🎞️, allowing quick *reactive* and configurabel way to add TWEENS Created AutoGenerated Scripts⚙️ (if you know Godot.SignalNames , in a way i created the same) And for some reason one of my scripts reset so i had to debug it completly from the beginning 😭, but somehow it just got better lol."}, {"post_id": 53811, "ts": "2026-08-24T14:46:01Z", "hours": 11.2481, "text": "Devlog 9: Soo can i remove it?:0 New modular UI animations and able to delete and see order of tiles selected 😃 Tween Component 🎞️ Allows Resources to animate specifics (loop, ping pong) on specific actions (ready, shown etc.) For multiselectable tiles, there is a new layer which shows when which tiles were selected. Allows also the deletion of tiles if still valid."}, {"post_id": 50525, "ts": "2026-08-19T18:26:55Z", "hours": 8.7558, "text": "Devlog 8: So thats how much more i can CUT you😈 100+ hours 🥳 Finally added a UI for Pool Points💯 (How often an ability can be cast) Pool Updates 💧 The pool shows Icon and Count/MaxCount , with custom ANIMATIONS when the count changes Blocking Manager 🫸 The new Blocking Manager keeps track of the game states and automatically, blocks specific ui. Very Dynamic ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ (using enums for options) Next UP: More juicy animations for the Pool count (showing diff, based on current selected tiles, and a crash animation (hopefully 😅, if i can figure that out xd ))"}, {"post_id": 47365, "ts": "2026-08-15T08:27:57Z", "hours": 4.3611, "text": "Devlog 8: Ahhh you, I hit (￣ε(#￣)💥╰╮o(￣皿￣///) Through the new ability System, was finally able to add hit flashes ! But it was such a pain to get the Shaders working 〒▽〒 , they were never firing once, but 3 - 4 times in one row which didn’t make sense for 1 SLAP. If you hit them hard enough they jitter 😱 … Future destination 🛣️ I could imagine updating the system to be reactive to the effect applied to each Unit (so more DMG => More BOOM💥) Also added finally animations (was time).🕺"}, {"post_id": 46304, "ts": "2026-08-13T13:09:07Z", "hours": 3.7408, "text": "Devlog 7: 🐦🔥 HUGE Ability CHANGES Finally finished the new ability system (just took like 14 HOuRs Xdd) The new system introducestwo ways of running abilities (🤫see video): ⛓️Sequential Runs all selected tiles one by one, and casts the effect 📦Batch Runs the effect on all selected tiles. Also Added Context so that Abilities/Effects can now communicate and influence each other : Cost = Base Cost + Selected Tiles ... Damage = Cost * Base Damage (infinite cycle of death 🩻) This will allow huge upgrades to make in a modular way complex abilities super simple and fast ."}, {"post_id": 45761, "ts": "2026-08-12T13:46:07Z", "hours": 11.2067, "text": "Devlog 6: Rebuilding the Ability System Completely restructured the ability system , allowing abilities to be either sequentially or in batches . Also improved the underlying patterns, making abilities easier to modify, reuse, and plug into the game.(see image) Currently implementing EffectTrigger , which allows Effects of abilities to happen on specific Frames or after specific Time etc."}, {"post_id": 44495, "ts": "2026-08-10T09:23:28Z", "hours": 1.1089, "text": "Devlog 5: Camera Movement & Board Centralization Added camera movement and board centralization It feels super smooth ( zooming and moving ) thanks to lerp (love that name xd) 🤫 Also auto centers dynamically based on BOARD SIZE (if you want you can fight your friends on 1000 x 1000 tiles lul)"}, {"post_id": 44174, "ts": "2026-08-09T19:13:05Z", "hours": 0.4558, "text": "Devlog 4: Pre-Alpha Release 🥳🥳 Pre-alpha release is out! ( under review shipping, follow to see when comes live ;)) Also fixed positioning of ability buttons 🔥"}, {"post_id": 44122, "ts": "2026-08-09T18:03:26Z", "hours": 6.4614, "text": "Devlog 3: Big Progress on Units & Turn Logic Made great progress… ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Added unit sprites Implemented turn logic Overengineered like always, xd but if i every want to make a 2v2 or how many vs how many , it will work Good thing: it now supports local X vs X , which is great for testing. :)) Next up: cool animations hehehe."}, {"post_id": 40688, "ts": "2026-08-04T11:39:41Z", "hours": 1.4419, "text": "Devlog 2: A Super Compact, Dynamic Ability System Drag and drop your Patterns (Cross, etc.) and Tada👀, you’ve got a new ability.💪 Need a special effect? Just plug in one of: DamageEffect SpawnEffect MoveSelfEffect …and many more."}, {"post_id": 40390, "ts": "2026-08-03T21:11:26Z", "hours": 63.7325, "text": "Devlog 1: 50 hours in the bag, joined stardance now! Added Ability system and backend Teams Logic (nothing visual sadly yet…)"}]...
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Title: AKidsDream by @MrCode | Stardance
Devlogs: Title: AKidsDream by @MrCode | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog 1: 50 hours in the bag, joined stardance now! Added Ability system and backend Teams Logic (nothing visual sadly yet…)
Devlog 2: A Super Compact, Dynamic Ability System Drag and drop your Patterns (Cross, etc.) and Tada👀, you’ve got a new ability.💪 Need a special effect? Just plug in one of: DamageEffect SpawnEffect MoveSelfEffect …and many more.
Devlog 3: Big Progress on Units & Turn Logic Made great progress… ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ Added unit sprites Implemented turn logic Overengineered like always, xd but if i every want to make a 2v2 or how many vs how many , it will work Good thing: it now supports local X vs X , which is great for testing. :)) Next up: cool animations hehehe.
Devlog 4: Pre-Alpha Release 🥳🥳 Pre-alpha release is out! ( under review shipping, follow to see when comes live ;)) Also fixed positioning of ability buttons 🔥
Devlog 5: Camera Movement & Board Centralization Added camera movement and board centralization It feels super smooth ( zooming and moving ) thanks to lerp (love that name xd) 🤫 Also auto centers dynamically based on BOARD SIZE (if you want you can fight your friends on 1000 x 1000 tiles lul)
Devlog 6: Rebuilding the Ability System Completely restructured the ability system , allowing abilities to be either sequentially or in batches . Also improved the underlying patterns, making abilities easier to modify, reuse, and plug into the game.(see image) Currently implementing EffectTrigger , which allows Effects of abilities to happen on specific Frames or after specific Time etc.
Devlog 7: 🐦🔥 HUGE Ability CHANGES Finally finished the new ability system (just took like 14 HOuRs Xdd) The new system introducestwo ways of running abilities (🤫see video): ⛓️Sequential Runs all selected tiles one by one, and casts the effect 📦Batch Runs the effect on all selected tiles. Also Added Context so that Abilities/Effects can now communicate and influence each other : Cost = Base Cost + Selected Tiles ... Damage = Cost * Base Damage (infinite cycle of death 🩻) This will allow huge upgrades to make in a modular way complex abilities super simple and fast .
Devlog 8: Ahhh you, I hit (￣ε(#￣)💥╰╮o(￣皿￣///) Through the new ability System, was finally able to add hit flashes ! But it was such a pain to get the Shaders working 〒▽〒 , they were never firing once, but 3 - 4 times in one row which didn’t make sense for 1 SLAP. If you hit them hard enough they jitter 😱 … Future destination 🛣️ I could imagine updating the system to be reactive to the effect applied to each Unit (so more DMG => More BOOM💥) Also added finally animations (was time).🕺
Devlog 8: So thats how much more i can CUT you😈 100+ hours 🥳 Finally added a UI for Pool Points💯 (How often an ability can be cast) Pool Updates 💧 The pool shows Icon and Count/MaxCount , with custom ANIMATIONS when the count changes Blocking Manager 🫸 The new Blocking Manager keeps track of the game states and automatically, blocks specific ui. Very Dynamic ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ (using enums for options) Next UP: More juicy animations for the Pool count (showing diff, based on current selected tiles, and a crash animation (hopefully 😅, if i can figure that out xd ))
Devlog 9: Soo can i remove it?:0 New modular UI animations and able to delete and see order of tiles selected 😃 Tween Component 🎞️ Allows Resources to animate specifics (loop, ping pong) on specific actions (ready, shown etc.) For multiselectable tiles, there is a new layer which shows when which tiles were selected. Allows also the deletion of tiles if still valid.
Devlog 10: MOOORE ANIMATIONSS!!!! Added a TweenComponent🎞️, allowing quick *reactive* and configurabel way to add TWEENS Created AutoGenerated Scripts⚙️ (if you know Godot.SignalNames , in a way i created the same) And for some reason one of my scripts reset so i had to debug it completly from the beginning 😭, but somehow it just got better lol.
Devlog 11: I Hereby SUMMON YOU! (＃°Д°) Today we are adding CARDS , 🃏Cards contain MANA Portrait Health Duration (after how many rounds does the card play its effect ) One problem i am encountering is how to identify clicking vs draggin in godot 😵💫, but i believe i could use a workaround
Devlog 12: Cards and MORE Cards 🃏 I have added Cards which can now summon units Also needed to redo the ability validation as now the modular ability system came in handy. I was able to combine both the Ability System and the Cards , so that the cards can use them freely.
Devlog 13: 3rr0Rssss$s ❌ and ✅Results<> Completely rewrote ȩ̷̪̓̈́́́͗͝ŗ̵͔̥̜̹̬̭̯̏̆̽͂̈́̅̐͛̾͘ͅr̸͗̌͌̾̌̾̂́͜ö̷̪̰́͊̆͗̈́̿̏́̀̂r̶̨̮̹͎̹̫͑̅̂̽̾̎͌s , Now each method returns in its chain a Result<TValue, TError> Methods like Map,Bind,Tap etc. make it now super easy to process results and errors :))
Devlog 14: Is it SatisFeelingable enough ☺️ (Help Q&Q: what animation feels more satisfying ?:00) Added clean card animation (in not so clean code 😭😭) More information on who’s turn it is. with bumb up🆙 animations for the Q&Q see the videos <3 Next 🆙: Card Deck and card into effect animations (spawn animations if above works without coding problems, which i feel is a delusional hope🥲 )
Devlog 15: The Power of Plugins 🔌 Turned the Tween System into a plugin :)) Now it is way easier to reuse animations everywhere 🎞️ Also finished all Card + Hand logic 🃏 and cleaned up lots of code + bugs along the way 😭 The project’s recent work includes a refactor of the ability/card systems plus deck and cardcasting functionality.
Devlog 16: Extensions, Plugins && MODSSSSS Yes, it has been time, for what has given success to most games EVER!!!!!! ➕MODS Hard as hell to implement, as you need to make sure that each coding dependencies are implemented correctly… Had to change hole game structure to be easily extendable/moddable (fun and hard ) But i have to say i am learning more which is awsome But still many bugs and logic to fix/implement lul…
Ships:
👾 AKidsDream(name work in progress), is a early version of a turn based strategy game, where you can controll multiple different units to win. 🤔 Why A Kid’s Dream? When I was a child, I created a small board game using paper and scissors. It was very complex, but still incredibly fun to play. A Kid’s Dream 🌜is my attempt to recreate that experience. Not exactly as it was, but from the pieces that remain in my memory. It is a game inspired by childhood imagination, handmade rules, and the joy of turning simple ideas into an adventure. ⚔️ Currently the game is in very early alpha, basically a proof of concept. I would love support, about what you would like to see, Game Design tips and tricks and what a winning condition could be. (destroy objectives vs destory a unit(like a king 🤴)
👾 AKidsDream~~(name work in progress)~~ , is a early version of a turn based strategy game , where you can controll multiple different units to win. 🤔 Why A Kid’s Dream? When I was a child, I created a small board game using paper and scissors. It was very complex, but still incredibly fun to play. 🏳️🏴Goal Its not just an attempt to make a game , its the challenge of creating modular , future proof system and to learn to clean code , using all my knoweledge of over the past 4 years of learning . (so even if i dont get rich with this game i did learn a lot xdd) What’s🆕 As this isn’t the first ship of the project, the project now contains: Mana💎 & a working card/hand systems Juicy new animations (as you may have seen with thecard drawing) more ℹ️nfo (who is playing and support for multiple local players) Hardships (￣ε(#￣)☆╰╮o(￣皿￣///) Trying to code everything modular and clean takes time, which is valuable resource :( Also the progress feels much slower at the beginning (but i could reuse the modular ability system for the cards which made everything easier:)) As i have invested close to 200hourse, the project has grown so much that sometimes its hard to see how one system may break another , then its another 1 hour debugging...
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1792828401.6872187
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1792914801.6872187
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16300
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EpochOS by @Mokila | Stardance
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Mokila
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2
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119.0
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2078
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-07-22T09:43:03Z", "hours": 112.0, "multiplier": 19.26, "payout": 2078, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "EpochOS is a fully functional operating system built entirely with vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It doesnt require any client side installations or anything and runs directly in your browser. Its features include a file explorer, a browser, a media player, many essential applications, lots of customisation, widgets, and an actual ecosystem that mimics a real operating system. It also has no backend so it’s all run locally on your browser using the browser’s localStorage. Some things you should know before you test this out: Firstly, please don’t finish rating this project until you experience all the features because there are many hidden features that might change your opinion. An example is easter eggs. I implemented many easter eggs which you must experience before voting because these easter eggs are very devloped. If you can’t find them or are stuck on one of the easter eggs, read ARCHITECTURE.md and at the very bottom, i listed all the easter eggs so you can check them out. In fact, read the ARCHITECTURE.md because it provides valuable info about many of the features in the OS and how they work so make sure to read that aswell Secondly, this OS is not compatible with mobile or tablet devices and is optimized for desktop only. So please keep that in mind when you are testing it. Thank you so much for testing this project and hope you enjoy it :)", "repo": "https://github.com/Moksha-0102/MyOwnWebOS", "demo": "https://my-web-os-inky.vercel.app/"}, {"ship_num": 2, "ts": "2026-06-13T15:31:39Z", "hours": 7.0, "multiplier": null, "payout": 0, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I created a simple operating system with HTML, CSS, and Javascript that runs on you web browser. It has a nostalgic look and feel with old-styled buttons and looks. To make it more like an OS, a calculator and a notepad have been created and implemented in the app. Moreover, to allow the user to personalise as much as they want, many settings have been included, from custom wallpapers to wallpapers that come from NASA itself and more. This was my first large scale project that I have coded so it’s an interesting experience for me. Before this, I only used to do challenges on platforms like Codewars and other than some small side projects, I don’t have a practical experience. Therefore, i think this project has taught me a lot on how to built stuff yourself. I hope you like my project :)", "repo": "https://github.com/Moksha-0102/MyOwnWebOS", "demo": "https://my-web-os-inky.vercel.app/"}]...
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[{"post_id": 32866, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 32866, "ts": "2026-07-22T09:36:10Z", "hours": 0.3622, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #21: Final Submission Just did some final changes to the welcome text and am about to ship it"}, {"post_id": 32842, "ts": "2026-07-22T07:57:53Z", "hours": 1.0103, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #20: Updated README.md and ARCHITECTURE.md + changed properties window I just realised I had a properties window in the OS and that was quite outdated so I changed to include some new info like the Last Modified date which updates everytime the user saves something because i added a localStorage.setItem that saves the timestamp. I also updated the README and ARCHITECTURE files to make them sound better and to add some additional info. Anyway, this devlog is probably the last on for this project! Hope you enjoy :)"}, {"post_id": 32822, "ts": "2026-07-22T06:51:37Z", "hours": 7.8417, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #19: README.md + ARCHITECTURE.md + additional customisation features I’m in the final stages of the project and in this long session, I did many things. Firstly, I wrote a README.md with all the necessary stuff and i also made an ARCHITECTURE.md file which explains the nitty gritty insides of the WebOS so anyone can understand how the website works. Other than that I added a couple of other stuff. Firstly, i realised that even though I have accents to customize the desktop, I don’t have a wallpaper gallery (except the nasa apod) which I found was quite necessary. At first, i coded my own wallpapers like a synthwave grid wallpaper, pinstripe wallpaper for the legace theme, a tranforming aurora wallpaper and like 3 more but after i coded them, they just looked so damn ugly. So i scratched the idea of me coding my own wallpapers and added three categories of wallpapers in the wallpaper dropdown with each category having three 4k wallpapers in them so every time you pick that category, you get a random wallpaper from the three. I also added an about section in the settings which has a buttton that leads to the github page."}, {"post_id": 32308, "ts": "2026-07-21T12:14:02Z", "hours": 5.4103, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #18: Debugging session I swear random bugs keep popping up no matter how much debugging I do. There’s always something that’s wrong or doesn’t work but that’s just how it is. In this session which was longer than expected, i fixed a lot of different bugs. Here is a summary of the changes i did: I spent lots of time rewriting the mathematics for the desktop icon layout, and also changed the strict grid-snapping to free-form placement cus it felt it was quite annoying not to be able to place stuff on the desktop wherever you want. Unfortunately, it took too long and i abandoned the idea and just moved on without making any changes. I also spent some time cleaning up the code and tried to optimizing the code. Some other bugs I fixed include: Desktop icons were randomly rearranging themselves every time a file was saved. I found out that the reason was that since the localStorage returns keys randomly, everytime i wrote sth to localStorage, the items were randomized so the ordier they appeared on the desktop changed. So i rewrote the logic to sort the stuff alphabetically before displaying. The Notepad app was also blindly overwriting existing files with the same name. I fixed it by adding a localStorage query to intercept matching keys and to display an osConfirm dialog, forcing the user to explicitly authorize the overwrite. The internal browser was throwing captchas all the time and failed to load error screens for blocked domains. Since Google aggressively blocks embeds and flags them as bot traffic, i changed the default browser to Bing, which was much better and i didn’t get captchas everytime i search somehting up I also modified the system daemon engine so that it introduces itself when a user first view the OS. The weather widget was pulling the location not from where the user was but rather where my ISP was routing my traffic through. So if i lived in a village and ISP routes my traffic through like New York, the weather that showed up was that of New York. To fix this, i swapped the logic to request exact hardware GPS coordinates via navigator.geolocation, while falling back to the IP routing API if the user denies the browser prompt. If the location is inaccurate the user can enable the location permission in the browser and the weather widget then shows the correct location. The visualizer widget was working perfectly but i had the idea to add a text container above the bars which shows what the user is playing. I made way way more changes but many of them conform to the easter eggs and mainly about the theme that gets unlocked (small spoiler there ;)) so i won’t really get too much into it."}, {"post_id": 31915, "ts": "2026-07-20T18:15:51Z", "hours": 10.1178, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #17: Media player + Audio spectrum widget implementation It has been a massive coding session. And I barely managed to keep the time below 10 hours and I still went over it. But, on the bright side, the OS now has a fully functional, media player and an audio spectrum widget! In the media player, anyone can listen to radios, and lots of music. But the reason it took 10 hours is because implementing these stuff required facing some serious bugs-some of them for genuinely stupid mistakes-and rebuilding the audio engine the right way (you’ll see what I mean). Here is a breakdown of how these new features work, what went wrong, and some other stuff: Overview of features The Media Player: The new Media Player is a audio application that routes requests to three distinct APIs to fetch music that the user can listen two: Audius: This is a “decentralized music streaming platform for artists, labels, and fans.” And it’s free! I fetches some of the music from this API. Radio-Browser: This is a platform that is, in a nutshell, Wikipedia for radios. I fetched thousands of live, global radio broadcasts using this API Apple iTunes (Preview): This was a golden find because I didn’t know this existed (not for free anyway). This API pulls top hits and previews of music. Granted, it’s not full music tracks but the songs are much more famous and popular. The Audio Spectrum Widget To complement the player, I also added an Audio Spectrum visualizer. It uses the Web Audio API, or more specifically, its AudioContext and an AnalyserNode to get the frequency data from the audio element. That data is then mapped to an HTML5 element. Using requestAnimationFrame, I made it such that the spectrum repaints 40 individual frequency bars roughly 60 times a second, which creates the audio visualiser waveform thing. Challenges The Geolocation failure: The OS was originally hardcoded to fetch radio stations from my address because I hardcoded that for testing purposes. But I stupidly forgot to remove that so when attempting to make this dynamic by using vpns I spent like 40 minutes trying to figure out why ut kept showing stations from my local area and not japan (where my VPN was connected to). And the reason for that is the hardcoded address I mentioned earlier. Moreover, some of the API queries were too specific, causing the media player to return empty for smaller regions like the Bahamas. To fix it i used the BigDataCloud API to quietly ping the user’s IP address, cache their true country code, and inject it into the API queries. the broken audio spectrum: Initially, the audio visualizer was completely blank. Even when fixed, the baseline would just disappear the second music started playing. The canvas drawing logic was also aggressively using clearRect to wipe the entire widget, which erased the idle state baseline. To fix it, I changed the baseline math so that the baseline sits firmly at the bottom of the widget. I also remade the drawing loop to explicitly redraw the baseline before checking the isPlaying state, so the frequency bars can work smoothly. retro theme problems: I completely forgot about the retro theme as i was just focused on building the player and the widget. So, in the end i had to make the stuff retro theme aswell. I encountered some problems there like some white on white text and some styles not applying which turned out to be because my dumbass brain mispelled the ids and classes Oh, and I found some other big bugs. The dragging engine was hella laggy. Like the response time was like 3 seconds before it registered. I would go deeped but im abt to cross the 4000 character devlog word limit but in a nutshell I realised it was because the mousemove event listener was directly updating the inline CSS (style.left and style.top) on every single microscopic mouse movement so it was really laggy."}, {"post_id": 30592, "ts": "2026-07-18T09:18:19Z", "hours": 8.5214, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #16: Widget implementation + debugging In this session, i made multiple changes to the OS to improve the overall UX. I had to pull another all nighter again 🥲. Here is what i changed: Change 1: Debugging Everytime i enabled the system daemon in the settngs, the entire os reloaded which was quite annoying so I ripped out the location.reload() in the Settings app. I also moved him to the body so he didn’t get trapped behind windows, because most of the time the daemon was floating behind windows and i couldnt really see him. I also gave the Welcome screen a massive 9999999 z-index so the daemon would float behind it because my previous step was too effective and he was infront of every single screen including like the bootloading screen. Challenges: I ran into z-index hell because I didn’t plan the stacking initially. He was either in the very front or at the very back and it was all a bit weird. Change 2: Widget implementation I initially wanted to implement sticky notes as a widget which was inspired my the mac sticky notes so i coded all of that in first but I realised i can take it a step further and code in multiple widgets. Challenge: But the thing was i hardcoded the sticky notes widget so i had to recode everything and integrate all of the widgets at once I added a simple analog clock widget I added a calendar widget I initially added a system monitor with like the ram and cpu data but the thing was due to the security restrictions, I can’t get the actualy live hardware data so it would have to be a simulation, which i didnt want so I replace the system monitor with a live weather widget which uses the BigDataCloud and Open-Meteo APIs to provide weather data. Change 3: Originally I had all hte widgets in the context menu on after the other but they looked like a list and a bit redundant. So i removed all then in the html file and added one ‘Add a widget…’ option which connects to a screen with all the widget options"}, {"post_id": 30122, "ts": "2026-07-17T13:15:43Z", "hours": 6.5461, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #15: System Daemon implementation To keep the users more engaged so even when they saw everythign, they would still spend more time doing stuff, I wanted to build something alive for the desktop environment that would interact with the user. So, instead of a standard app, I built a system daemon! If you dont know what that is, it is a digital pet that hangs out on your desktop and does random stuff. I dont hav ea name for him yet so ill just call him daemon for now. When he’s healthy, he flies around the screen and shouts random stuff at you. But I didn’t want him to just be a visual gimmick. He interacts with the actual operating system itself and has states: He is hungry: Because I previously built a drag-and-drop system for the File Explorer, I hooked him into it. You can drag actual text files or folders out of your explorer and drop them on his face. He will chew them up and literally delete them from the virtual hard drive (localStorage). He has a digestive tract: I built a array for his stomach that records what he has last eaten. If he ate a file you actually needed, you can rapid-click his face 5 times. He will regurgitate the raw file data perfectly back onto your desktop. He has boundaries: I ‘taught’ him to recognize core OS files. If you try to feed him Notepad.app or the System Settings, he will violently reject them and yell at you. He has one more state but that relates to the easter egg so i wont provide any additional details in order to not spoil it Oh, and i changed his appearance for the retro theme. anywhat that’s all for this change. I didn’t get into the nitty gritty of how I built him because I am so excited to finish this project. Just a few more features and then I’m done."}, {"post_id": 29444, "ts": "2026-07-16T12:05:56Z", "hours": 7.8072, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #14: Easter Eggs Pt. 2 I am now done with making the easter eggs and in total i made 5 of them, which may seem less but some of them are really really complex and developed. I stayed up till 2am making these 😭. Out of these 5, three of them are simple easter eggs, one is more complex but still quite simple and the final one is essentialyl the absolut highlight. It is the reason why the easter egg section took me so long. I am not going to go into detail to avoid spoilers. Anyway i hope you have fun with the easter eggs :) p.s the attached pic is a screen shot again cus i dont want to give spoilers"}, {"post_id": 29017, "ts": "2026-07-15T17:46:09Z", "hours": 8.8292, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #13: Easter Eggs Pt. 1 I was looking forward to this a looooot. I’m not giving any spoilers whatsoever but I was so locked in tday and yesterday coding easter eggs into the OS. I added like 2 easter eggs (might seem less but trust me they’re very developed), one’s a very simple one but the other one is my favourite and is the reason this devlog took so long. It’s still not finished and im only lik halfway done w/ it but I’m not going to go into any details because it will spoil the fun but im sure you’ll enjoy it. Also, im not done with making easter eggs and i just made this devlog cus the time is almost 10hrs. I still have to finish the second easter egg and do more on top of that. The next one will hopefully be the final easter egg session (unless i get another absolute brainwave). p.s to prevent spoilers, the attached pic is just a screenshot once again"}, {"post_id": 28283, "ts": "2026-07-14T13:15:34Z", "hours": 3.2847, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #12: Debugging Session + retro theme redesign In this session I started debugging the os and wow i found a lot of bugs. Im not going to get into them because it would take too long but some of them include how the bootloading sequence absolutely breaks if the user presses escape before the setup is finished because the cache isnt cleared properly so when the user gets the setup agian, he wont we able to configure some stuff like the password because the cache wasnt cleared properly. I also redesigned the retro theme because it looked ugly because the accents i implemented in the modern theme appeared in the retro theme which didnt fit together. Moreover, some of the aspects of the retro theme, such as the top part of the web browser or the settings screen were just uncomfortable to look at. Changing the retro theme was such a pain because everytime i thought i fixed it, a new discrepancy appears and at one point after i fixed it, my retro-theme.css was so messy i couldnt be bothered to fix it so i just inputted the messy working version into gemini and it cleaned it up. Anyway that was all i changed this time. And I did more and more changes but many of them are small and it would take too long to explain in a devlog. p.s. didnt know which pic to attach so its just a simple screenshot of the desktop."}, {"post_id": 28127, "ts": "2026-07-14T06:44:53Z", "hours": 9.4628, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #11: Reset btn + Notepad IDE + other changes This was a long long coding session. Had to stay awake till like 2am. Here are the changes i made. Ill try to keep everythign concise because theres a 4000 char limit and i have lot more to say than that. Change 1: I added a factory reset button in settings that directs the user to the webos setup screen like the one they get when they first enter the website. When testing this feature, i realised that random variables from completely different web projects started appearing in the File Manager. Because browsers share localStorage databases across the same local port (e.g., 127.0.0.1:5500), the OS was inheriting the ghosts of old projects. The solution: I had to upgrade the Initial Setup Utility. When formatting the Virtual Hard Drive, the system now temporarily caches the user’s OS credentials in memory that they entered, executes a total localStorage.clear() wipe to delete all the localStorage varialbles, and then safely restores the username and stuff before continuing normally. Change 2: Notepad IDE This was the part that took the longest (and its still not done). I wanted to create something absolutely unique that i havent seen in any other webos projects that i saw. And i realised, why dont i make an IDE in me webos? Not an actual IDE ofc but the goal was to allow users to write raw HTML/JS in the Notepad, save it as a .app file, and double-click it on the desktop to launch it as a fully functioning, program. Attempt 1 (Failure): I initially tried parsing the saved text and running it directly in the OS context using eval(). It was an absolute security and stability nightmare. The custom app had root access to the OS memory and instantly overwrote the osState object, completely crashing the Window Manager within seconds. Attempt 2 (Failure): I tried fixing attempt 1 but messed up the entire code in the process so i had to revert to that commit and this time, i tried putting the apps in Web Components and the Shadow DOM. While this successfully isolated the CSS so custom apps didn’t break the OS styling, the JavaScript still executed in the global window scope. Running two different custom apps simultaneously caused variable collisions that bricked the taskbar. It was too complex and fundamentally flawed. I wiped the slate clean again. Attempt 3 (Success): I realised that the answer was looking straignt at me. I was so stupid. I can just take the code and slap it on to an iframe, and it runs it, just like how i made the web browser. The solution was that When a user double-clicks a custom .app, the OS takes the raw code and converts it into a text/html Blob. It then passes that Blob through URL.createObjectURL(), creating a localized URL. By feeding that URL into an , the custom app boots perfectly. I am really proud of this feature. It’s still not fully done but i had to make a devlog since the tracked time almost reached 10hrs."}, {"post_id": 27267, "ts": "2026-07-12T18:02:31Z", "hours": 4.4556, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #10: icon implementation + taskbar remodeling When i looked at the webos, i realised it missed something to look like an actual os. It wasnt realistic enough. So, i decided to do two changes to make it more realistic. Here is what it did: Change 1: I added some real user data in the taskbar. More specifically, the host device’s actual network and battery status and date. I used the the browser’s native navigator.onLine and the navigator.getBattery() APIs. I also made it such that the os actively listens for network connection drops such as when wifi is disconnected and battery charging/level events, and updates the data accordingly. Change 2: I also noticed that my entire os is filled with emojis for stuff like calculator, file manages (all the apps essentially), the taskbar, the browser, the sites in the browser, etc. THis made it look really unprofessional so i fixed it. I replace all system emojis with Google Material Symbols to make it look a lot better. I did face one challenge however, the emojis in my website in my web browser weren’t being replaced by icons for some reason and I then realised that the iframe sites acts as a sandbox and they dont inherit the imported apis from the main html file. So I just injected a tag and imported the Google Material Symbols API directly in the isolated HTML code in my js file. Change 3: The goal of this change was ot allow the user to snap the taskbar to the top of the screen (Linux style). This was the part that took longer than expected. I originally just added an optoin in the settings to move my taskbar to the top of the screen but the pill-like, floating taskbar i had was really ugly when it was at the top. So, i spent like more than an hour and half trying out new designs and redesigning the taskbar so it looks good both when its at the top and the bottom and finalised a design that actually looks much better than what i had before. It now takes up like the entire bottom/top of the screen instead of floating in the middle liek before. That was all the changes made since the last devlog."}, {"post_id": 26774, "ts": "2026-07-11T19:22:51Z", "hours": 3.2697, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #9: Implemented color accents and some browser improvements I was originally going to do some debugging and finish of this project but i was looking through other peoples’ webos projects and realised there was much i could improve. I then got like a huge brainwave about new stuff to implement so ig it’ll be a bit longer before I ship this project. One of these ideas was adding color accents because right now my modern theme is limited only to a light pinkish color. Here are the changes i made: Change 1: Accents In the settings screen, i added an option to choose the system accents. I also gave some basic presets and added an option to pick a color by adding a color picker option. Implementing this was quite simple, just replace all hardcoded pink colors with –os-accent (which i added in css). I linked htis –os-accents attribute/class to the color that the user chooses in js and made ti that all the places where the accent pops up, the color variable there is replaced with –os-accents. So if the user changes the accent in settings, the places where –os-accent is set changes color automatically. Challenge 1: Contrasting invisible text The problem: Swapping a single hex code for an accent color that the user chooses breaks all translucent UI elements (like shadows). Furthermore, if a user picks a bright color (like Mint Green or Yellow), the hardcoded white text on the title bars becomes completely invisible. The Solution: I implemented a Hex-to-RGB engine that injects raw RGB values directly into the CSS :root. This solves the first part of the problem. To solve the text contrast issue, I implemented the WCAG Relative Luminance algorithm ( used a bit of outside help here iykwim ;)). The OS now mathematically calculates the perceived brightness of the user’s chosen color. If the relative luminance passes a threshold of 0.179, the OS flips the title bar text to pitch black so its legible comfortable. Change 2: i was just playing around in the webbrowser and exploring, and i found some stuff that needed to be fixed: when building a simulated web browser using tags, embedding sites like google resulted in a “Refused to Connect” error. These servers send an X-Frame-Options: DENY header. Because client-side JavaScript is legally blind to server headers, the OS couldn’t detect the block to show the custom error screen I made. I knew this error existed and knew this was a thing but only after experiencing it like a real user did i realise how annoyinf this was and it made my os seem broken. Solution 1 (attempt): I initially tried routing requests through a third-party API to read the headers, but ad-blockers and privacy shields just made the API requests not work, crashing the entire browser app (at least thats what i think is the cause). The Solution: I used a massive Regex blocklist, such that the browser now instantly intercepts requests to 99% of top-tier websites that block iframes (like youtube or google), and routs the user to a custom error page. (did these stuff with the help of some ai only) Next Problem: When a user searches Google inside the iframe and clicks a link in the embedded page, the OS address bar wouldn’t update. This is a browser restriction. Browsers mathematically lock JavaScript out of reading cross-origin URLs for security reasons. At this point i just stopped instead of trying to waste my time trying to break through some military grade (i think?) restrictions. Change 3: Before, only iframe compatible websites worked but i had an idea to route all queries (except the ones in websites format) through a google search. Apparently, google.com doesn work in iframe but the google search works. So now if i type hello world, it just redirects me to a google search page with hello world searched. P.S. I made some other tiny changes aswell but i cant rlly remember them now sry"}, {"post_id": 20257, "ts": "2026-07-01T20:07:19Z", "hours": 2.9408, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #8: Migrated to ES6 arch. and split css into any files I just realised that essentially all my code is squished into three files-index.html, index.css, and index.js. And all of them were quite big. Like the js file had more than 2,000 lines, and css had more than a 1,000 lines. I dont know why i havent noticed it before but im glad that i did now because i was plannign to do a deep debugging session next and it wouldve been hella hard to do in a 2000+ line file. Plus, a single bug in e.g. the calculator could crash the file manager, and debugging required scrolling through thousands of lines of code. So, i decided to migrate the index.js into an ES6 architecture and split the index.css into multiple manageable files. That’s all i can say for this devlog ig. There was nothing new except some lines of code i had to add after the migration to make sure everything is working. There were no really new features added. But there were many things that delayed me: i accidentally deleted a block of code in the index.css without moving it and didnt notice it so some styles were broken and i had to like retrace my steps and stuff to fix all the problems it caused. That’s all ig. The project is almost coming to an end! Can’t wait to ship it :)"}, {"post_id": 19868, "ts": "2026-07-01T08:56:38Z", "hours": 3.9269, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #7: Web Browser Implementation I reached the final couple of phases of my project and this is one is one of the crucial ones: building a web browser. My plan was to use iframe. But the thing about building a webbrowser inside a webbrowser or inside a sandboxed environment like a website is most websites (about 99%) like google, youtube, or github use X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors ‘none’ which means they specifically block their websites from being displayed in cases like this ot prevent clickjacking. So every time i tried loading a webpage, it just says this webpage refused to connect or sth. I used ai to try bypassing it but it didnt work, so with the help of the same aforementioned ai, i implemented a solution. The solution: Since I cannot disable host browser security policies, and i dont have a backend proxy server, I had an idea to just build my own native ‘browser’: EpochOS IntraNet (just decided on the name EpochOS btw). This didnt take too long cus i had someone (ai) helping me cus it was almost midnight and i was tired as hell. Here are the features: I wrote a parser that intercepts navigation requests. If the user navigates to webos://home or webos://directory, the engine injects a large data:text/html;charset=utf-8 string directly into the iframe’s src attribute. This opens a local, HTML dashboard without triggering cross-origin blocks. Essentially, i wrote html in js and injected that html into the iframe src, so i essentially made my own ‘web-page’. Standard links inside a data URI iframe will try to navigate the iframe itself, which doesn’t update the OS address bar. To fix this, I set up a window.addEventListener(‘message’) listener on the parent OS. The buttons inside the iframe use parent.postMessage() to pass the target URL up to the OS, allowing the JavaScript engine to handle the routing and update the UI properly. A real browser alse doesn’t lose a page’s state (like scroll position) when you switch tabs. And im trying to make a real browser. So, to achieve this, the browser engine now doesn’t share a single iframe but rather new ones get created: Every time the user clicks the “New Tab” button, a new node is generated and appended to the container. Switching tabs simply toggles the CSS display property between none and block. This keeps inactive pages fully loaded in memory. Because cross-origin security rules (the ones i mentioned before) lock us out of accessing the iframe’s native window.history object, I had to build a custom history router. Every tab object in the JS array maintains its own history array and a historyIndex pointer. The back/forward buttons just decrement or increment this pointer and re-apply the URL to the iframe. Kinda genius ngl (this was an idea from ai btw) But for a browser to be useful, it needs to have some proper webpages. After some scouring, i found some webpages that do work in iframe and dont have the restrictions that websites like google do. I’m not gonna tell you what websites those are, you just have to see yourself. I found like 10 or sth so there’ll be plenty of stuff to do. Other features of the browser include: bookmarking, reloading (i also added a reloading spinner btw) and some more stuff."}, {"post_id": 19207, "ts": "2026-06-30T14:00:14Z", "hours": 1.9208, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #6: UI, UX and functionality improvements This update focuses heavily on stabilizing what i already have and also refining the less finer aspects of the UI. Here is what i did: Theme improvenets: I overhauled the .theme-retro class. stuff were contradicting each other with one thing saying this and the other saying that (too many to even give an example). I also changed some other minor stuff too like increased the grid size in the desktop to prevent icons from overlapping. But this was the main change: System Security & Identity Manager: Implemented a global sanitizeIdentity utility (Regex: /[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]/g) to remove spaces and illegal characters from usernames and hostnames when the user sets it before writing to localStorage because if i have sth like ‘John Doe’ as the username and ‘my school computer’ as the host name, the terminal command would look sth like John Doe@my school computer. And this just looks hella ugly. Dedicated Identity UI: removed the raw identity inputs out of the Settings menu like i had before and moved them into a dedicated Identity Manager window because its more secure that way. I also added an authenticaiton wall before this window pops up. To do this, i wrote an async while loop for identity verification. All the users now have successfully pass the password prompt (or use the recover override to bypass the password) before it allows them to modify any identity settings. Bootloader improvements: btn-shutdown now properly halts system processes (clearing systemClockInterval and locking pointer events) instead of just hiding the UI like it did before where it just had like a black screen with text on it saying shutting down and stuff. It now has like a loading screen and all that stuff. Context Booting: i also implemented sessionStorage.setItem(‘boot_context’, ‘warm’) to track system restarts so different boots have like different bootloading sequences (the point below this). This didn’t take too long as i could just copy and past what i had in other sequenes and just take the text. Differnet Boot Sequences: The bootloader now reads the sessionStorage context. A Cold Boot triggers the full POST memory checks and hardware scans (dont know what this is. had to use ai for the sequences cus i didnt know what the data was). A Warm Boot (restart) bypasses POST and executes a different initialization sequence. THis makes the user more immersed in the environment."}, {"post_id": 18635, "ts": "2026-06-29T20:34:42Z", "hours": 3.7578, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #5: File manager overhaul + custom dialog box I realised that always having the custom browser alerts was kinda boring and interrupting so i made my own dialogue box. I also changed the file manager to include some essential functions that it was missing to make it more like an OS (see below). Here are the changes i made: I abandoned the old array-based folders. I made it so that it now reads and writes directly to localStorage using stricter pathing (e.g., webos-file-Root/Documents/file.txt). I also built a native getUniqueName() function. If you create a duplicate file or folder, there’s no like a (1), (2), etc. at the end of it, which prevents data overwrites. This makes it more like a real OS Drag-and-Drop: I alos removed the old custom JavaScript coordinate trackers for file movement. It now uses the native HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API. You can physically pick up a file from the Explorer window, drag it out, and drop it directly onto the visual Desktop wallpaper. Custom Dialog Box: Native browser popups (alert(), confirm()) look hella ugly and break the flow so i built a custom dialog engine using JavaScript Promises. Now, when the system needs confirmation a custom window that fits with the theme appears. Because it uses async/await, the JavaScript pauses and waits for user acceoting or declining without freezing the browser. List View & Item Properties: I introduced a hybrid Grid/List view (just like a real os like mac). Because tracking file metadata (like Date Modified) from the start would have been way to complicated, I just built this engine where when the File Explorer encounters a file without a timestamp, it instantly generates metadata key (os-meta-path) using Date.now() and saves it permanently, which means that it allows for Date sorting without breaking anything."}, {"post_id": 17638, "ts": "2026-06-28T14:55:23Z", "hours": 4.0281, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #4: Initial bootloading sequence + login (optional) When i looked at other projects i realised that they all have some kind of flashy bootloading sequences but mine didnt have any so i built one. I didn’t want it to be too flashy so i made a simple, straightforward sequence. I also knew what exactly I wanted so I managed to finish this in 4hrs on the dot or it would’ve taken a lot longer. This is what it consists of: Bootloader that takes into account the selected theme: Since I had two themes in my OS (Modern and Legacy), it didnt make sense for both to have the same loading screen. So the system now actually boots up differnetly before loading the UI. Depending on your settings, you’ll either get a quick Modern UEFI startup, or a 1995 Legacy BIOS sequence complete with memory checks, IDE drive detection, and ASCII loading bars (had to use some outside help [ai] for this one as I’m not that old to know all that stuff). Hardware Interrupts: Just like a real PC, if you hit esc while the system is booting, it triggers a hardware interrupt and drops you into a configuration screen. Interactive OS Installation: If it’s your first time booting up (or you reset your system), you now have to actually “install” the OS. You can type in your preferred Username, network Hostname, and set an Administrator Password right inside the terminal. You even get the option to format your virtual hard drive. Login: If you set a password (which is optoinal) during setup, the boot sequence will actually halt and lock the system until you type it in. (Don’t worry, I added a recover command bypass in case anyone forgets it). Terminal Integration: The CLI terminal now dynamically reads your setup data. Instead of a normal prompt that you used to get with the default user@stardance or sth, you’ll see your actual custom username@hostname:~/$. Loading text: as the os loads and goes through the bootloading sequence some highly advanced random computer text ‘loads’ to add a little bit to the realism. Some of them are actual data from the host computer such as ram, gpu, and stuff like that. I had lots of other text and loading content that came from the the user’s actual real life hardware and software data, which added to the realism I had to research and use ai to make this because I had no knowledge of how computers were back then. There’s more but it wont fit here so you’ll just have to see it when i host it after my next ship."}, {"post_id": 17451, "ts": "2026-06-28T07:29:09Z", "hours": 2.8478, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #3: Building a UNIX Terminal + some other improvements This was a major update today for WebOS 2.0 as i built a genuinely realistic CLI. It’s looks and acts like a Mac Terminal (cus i use mac). Here is what i implemented: In the terminal, i implemented the following commands: help, clear, pwd, ls, cd, cat, touch, mkdir, rm, echo, whoami, date, history, and nano. This part itseld wasnt so difficult cus I had previously done something similar before but it was still challenging nonetheless. I wanted the CLI to be as realistic as possible so I implemented (with a little bit of help from gemini) a custom AST-style parser. It fully supports logical command chaining (&&, ||, ;), quotation marks usage (both single and double), and file redirection (>, ») straight into the virtual hard drive. Autocomplete: This was probably the hardest thing i tried to build and i am happy with how it turned out. I implemented a zsh-style Tab completion system. Pressing Tab auto-fills the longest common prefix and then shows all the possible options directly beneath your active prompt. This is one of the things I a most proud of because after using it, it was essentially very similar to the mac Terminal. This autocomplete works both for commands and files/folders. Errors and stuff: The terminal behaves exactly like real bash. If you type ls -la (-la is not implemented [yet?]) or cd too many args, it won’t just blindly execute or fail silently (it originally did so i had to change it), but it will spit back the same error message you’d expect to see on a real machine. GUI/CLI Integration: When i was implementing nano, i tried to think of how to implement a CLI editor. But i then realised, i can just connect the nano command to the notepad that I alreadu made. So typing nano test.txt in the terminal now just launches the Notepad app and opens the file for editing. And I made some other changes to stuff like the file manager but the terminal implementation above is the biggest change."}, {"post_id": 16900, "ts": "2026-06-27T13:19:35Z", "hours": 1.9075, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #2: UI & UX Debugging + UI Improvements This was quite a short session mainly focused on debugging. Here are the changes for this session. New Setup Wizard: The Welcome Screen has been completely redesigned into a classic two-pane setup wizard. (In Retro mode, it even has the iconic sideways teal text on the sidebar). State Persistence: The OS now remembers your settings. Your preferences for military time, desktop icon labels, and whether you want to see the welcome screen on boot are all permanently saved to localStorage. Calculator & Layout Fixes: The calculator now properly displays full math expressions (e.g., 3 + 5) instead of instantly wiping the screen. Before it still worked but it just showed the numbers and the answer-it didnt show what the user was doing. I also fixed a ton of bugs. Apps that are maximized now perfectly snap to the taskbar without overlapping, and the File Explorer drag-to-select doesn’t glitch when you move the window because before the drag-to-select used to activate when i was dragging the window."}, {"post_id": 16391, "ts": "2026-06-26T17:48:49Z", "hours": 13.705, "text": "WebOS 2 Devlog #1: Transitioning into an actual OS. The WebOS 2 mission just unlocked so all the time before i spent working on this overhaul, hence the 13 hour devlog. In the last devlog, i had a very basic beginning: a basic onboarding screen with some text and a “Continue” button. There was no actualy proper desktop, not that many apps, and definitely no File Explorer. Over the last 13 hours, I managed to change the project into a fully functioning, browser-based operating system with its own virtual file system, and app ecosystem. Here is a breakdown of everything that was built in this time. Since i made a lot of changes, i’ll keep it brief and won’t go into it too much: The Window & Desktop Engine: the core physics of the OS were built completely from scratch. Drag and Drop: Windows can be dragged freely but are strictly clamped to the viewport so they can never be lost off-screen. Window Controls: remade the full Minimize, Maximize, and Close logic. Animations: Implemented a requestAnimationFrame state machine so windows don’t just appear—they like animate and scale and fade out into the taskbar. Desktop Grid: Desktop icons are draggable and auto-snap to an invisible grid when released. File System (File Manager): Going from zero file management to a complete virtual system was perhaps the biggest change. It is powered by localStorage, and the OS now remembers everything: Dynamic File Explorer: Built a grid/list view system complete with a sidebar, path breadcrumbs, and directory navigation. Context Menus: Right-clicking files now opens custom context menus to rename, delete, or restore items. Recycle Bin: Files are moved to a functional Trash directory where they can be permanently emptied or restored to the Root folder. Drag-and-Select: made a custom mouse-drag selection box (the translucent pink lasso) to highlight multiple files at once. App Ecosystem: Themes: I built a dynamic theme engine with two main themes. Modern Dark: The default OS features premium glassmorphism, background blurs, and other stuff, and has like a pink accent color. Retro: It changes the OS back to what it looked like in like 1995 by replacing animations and toggles with grey borders, checkboxes, and the blue desktop background. The New Welcome Screen: That old, basic onboarding screen looked ass so it was completely scrapped. I replaced it with a better and cleaner on that also remembers their preference if they check “Don’t show this on startup.”"}, {"post_id": 8031, "ts": "2026-06-13T12:06:02Z", "hours": 0.6592, "text": "Devlog #3: Onboarding and Eliminating FOUC Before shipping the WebOS 1 project and moving on to WebOS 2 project, I needed to implement an Onboarding/Welcome Screen to introduce users to the OS environment. This required a full-screen dark overlay. this is what i did: Z-index mismatch Because my custom Drag Engine automatically increments the zIndex of any .window it touches, the moment I clicked the Welcome Screen, the engine overwrote its god-tier Z-Index (99999). This caused an immediate Z-Index collapse, burying the modal underneath the desktop icons and the dark overlay. The Fix: I had to implement a strict exception in the JavaScript mousedown event listener to protect the Welcome Screen’s ID from being overwritten. DOM Reordering: To guarantee that the Welcome Screen will be at the very top,, I moved the Welcome Screen to the absolute bottom of the document. This means it will naturally sit on top of the other elements. Eliminating the FOUC I used the localStorage API so users could check a “Don’t show this again” box, saving their preference to the hard drive. However, this caused a massive FOUC bug. The Problem: HTML renders faster than JavaScript executes. On boot, the browser would instantly paint the Welcome Screen to the monitor. A few milliseconds later, JavaScript would read the hard drive, realize the user disabled the screen, and violently delete it—causing an ugly flicker. Fix: I basically just inverted the rendering logic. I hardcoded ‘display: none;’ directly into the HTML so the modal is completely invisible by default. Now, the browser paints nothing. JavaScript checks the hard drive, and only turns the welcome screen on if it confirms the user actually wants to see it. Now it’s much better. Ig this is the end of my WebOS 1 project. I will be shipping this project and then moving on to WebOS 2 where I’ll be implementing File Management, In-browser-browser?, and maybe some other built in tools. That’s the plan for now."}, {"post_id": 8007, "ts": "2026-06-13T11:10:55Z", "hours": 0.6994, "text": "Devlog #2: Debugging + Icon dragging features + localStorage implementation The core window manager is working properly so this second session was all about polishing the UI and UX aspects. But there were some challenges: The faulty dragging I transitioned the desktop icons from a static flexbox grid to absolute positioning so they could be freely dragged around the screen (like an actual operating system). However, this immediately triggered native browser collisions. The Problem: When clicking and dragging an icon, the browser saw the action as trying to highlight text or drag an image to a new tab. This triggered a native HTML “ghost drag,” completely overriding my custom JavaScript drag engine and leaving the icon permanently stuck to the cursor. The Solution: I just basically implemented multiple stuff to solve this: Applied ‘-webkit-user-select: none’ and ‘user-select: none’ to prevent highlighting. Injected ‘draggable=“false”’ natively into the HTML. Applied ‘pointer-events: none’ on the inner emoji and label text. This forces the mouse click to pass through the text and hit the icon container directly, ensuring my custom e.preventDefault() mousedown event works properly every time. State Persistence (The Local Storage API) An OS is useless if it resets every time you turn it on. I wired up the browser’s native localStorage API so it saves some of the stuff that the user did. So far it’s only the position of the icons, but I’m planning to add more stuff to the localStorage. Here are the changes: Upgraded the mouseup event listener to capture the exact X and Y coordinates of an icon the moment it is let go after dragging. Built a boot sequence that loops through .desktop-icon elements on page load, fetches their saved coordinates , and implementes them. Wallpaper changing bug The NASA API integration was fetching data successfully, but massive high-res images were causing visual lag, leading to a blank blue screen while the image downloaded in the background. Made a new thing where the newImage() is inserted into the virtual memory of the js. The UI now triggers a document.body.style.cursor = ‘wait’ loading wheel and displays a “Downloading…” status. JavaScript intentionally halts the DOM update until the virtual image’s ‘.onload’ event fires, ensuring the wallpaper only gets applied to the screen exactly when it is 100% ready. Lastly, I also added a setting in the settings tab where the user can choose if the icon labels are hidded or shown. What’s Next? The desktop environment is now completely stable, personalized, and persistent. Next up: More UI and UX refinements before shipping for WebOS 1. Gonna implement File Management for WebOS 2 :)"}, {"post_id": 7644, "ts": "2026-06-12T19:27:06Z", "hours": 5.5711, "text": "Devlog #1: Booting Up - Building a Custom Window Manager & Desktop Environment from Scratch Today marks the official first boot of my WebOS project. I’m trying to build a full OS that runs in the Web Browser directly using HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript. It acts like an actual operating system, like windows for example, but the only difference is the way it looks, it’s identity and that it runs in your web browser. Over the past few hours, I changed the project from a static layout into a fully interactive environment. Here is a breakdown of the core engine and features that I currently built. The Custom Window Manager The hardest part of making an OS is handling window states. I built a universal Drag-and-Drop engine with dynamic Z-Index management. The Problem: Windows would get stuck behind each other, or the browser would lose track of the mouse if the user dragged too fast or threw the window off-screen, so i wouldn’t be able to drag it back. The Solution: I implemented an event elegation system attached to the document root, calculating mouse offsets relative to the title bars. This means wherever the mouse moves, the title bars move to keep that offset difference the same, which is essentially what the drag and drop function is. I also engineered physical constraints so windows can never be dragged out of the viewport. The Desktop Environment To not make seem like this is just a website, I completely changed the browser’s default behavior. I Implemented double-click event listeners for desktop icons and then overrode the native browser right-click menu ( e.preventDefault() ) and built a custom OS context menu this makes it feel more unique. Core Applications Notepad: A fully resizable text editor using CSS flexbox so the typing area automatically expands with the window. Calculator: Quite self-explanatory. Engineered the math logic from scratch. Settings (NASA API): Built a customization menu that toggles a global 12hr/24hr clock state, and fetches real-time data from NASA’s APOD API to dynamically change the desktop wallpaper based on the NASA Picture of the Day. What’s Next? The UI feels like an OS, but it lacks permanence. Next on the roadmap: File Management. I’ll be engineering a system to actually save the data typed into the Notepad so it survives page refreshes. Also, I want to create a web browser with actual internet access to really bring that OS feeling. That’s all I have planned out. p.s. I’ve attached some pictures of my website below - hope you like it :) Stay tuned."}]...
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Title: EpochOS by @Mokila | Stardance
Devlogs:
De Title: EpochOS by @Mokila | Stardance
Devlogs:
Devlog #1: Booting Up - Building a Custom Window Manager & Desktop Environment from Scratch Today marks the official first boot of my WebOS project. I’m trying to build a full OS that runs in the Web Browser directly using HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript. It acts like an actual operating system, like windows for example, but the only difference is the way it looks, it’s identity and that it runs in your web browser. Over the past few hours, I changed the project from a static layout into a fully interactive environment. Here is a breakdown of the core engine and features that I currently built. The Custom Window Manager The hardest part of making an OS is handling window states. I built a universal Drag-and-Drop engine with dynamic Z-Index management. The Problem: Windows would get stuck behind each other, or the browser would lose track of the mouse if the user dragged too fast or threw the window off-screen, so i wouldn’t be able to drag it back. The Solution: I implemented an event elegation system attached to the document root, calculating mouse offsets relative to the title bars. This means wherever the mouse moves, the title bars move to keep that offset difference the same, which is essentially what the drag and drop function is. I also engineered physical constraints so windows can never be dragged out of the viewport. The Desktop Environment To not make seem like this is just a website, I completely changed the browser’s default behavior. I Implemented double-click event listeners for desktop icons and then overrode the native browser right-click menu ( e.preventDefault() ) and built a custom OS context menu this makes it feel more unique. Core Applications Notepad: A fully resizable text editor using CSS flexbox so the typing area automatically expands with the window. Calculator: Quite self-explanatory. Engineered the math logic from scratch. Settings (NASA API): Built a customization menu that toggles a global 12hr/24hr clock state, and fetches real-time data from NASA’s APOD API to dynamically change the desktop wallpaper based on the NASA Picture of the Day. What’s Next? The UI feels like an OS, but it lacks permanence. Next on the roadmap: File Management. I’ll be engineering a system to actually save the data typed into the Notepad so it survives page refreshes. Also, I want to create a web browser with actual internet access to really bring that OS feeling. That’s all I have planned out. p.s. I’ve attached some pictures of my website below - hope you like it :) Stay tuned.
Devlog #2: Debugging + Icon dragging features + localStorage implementation The core window manager is working properly so this second session was all about polishing the UI and UX aspects. But there were some challenges: The faulty dragging I transitioned the desktop icons from a static flexbox grid to absolute positioning so they could be freely dragged around the screen (like an actual operating system). However, this immediately triggered native browser collisions. The Problem: When clicking and dragging an icon, the browser saw the action as trying to highlight text or drag an image to a new tab. This triggered a native HTML “ghost drag,” completely overriding my custom JavaScript drag engine and leaving the icon permanently stuck to the cursor. The Solution: I just basically implemented multiple stuff to solve this: Applied ‘-webkit-user-select: none’ and ‘user-select: none’ to prevent highlighting. Injected ‘draggable=“false”’ natively into the HTML. Applied ‘pointer-events: none’ on the inner emoji and label text. This forces the mouse click to pass through the text and hit the icon container directly, ensuring my custom e.preventDefault() mousedown event works properly every time. State Persistence (The Local Storage API) An OS is useless if it resets every time you turn it on. I wired up the browser’s native localStorage API so it saves some of the stuff that the user did. So far it’s only the position of the icons, but I’m planning to add more stuff to the localStorage. Here are the changes: Upgraded the mouseup event listener to capture the exact X and Y coordinates of an icon the moment it is let go after dragging. Built a boot sequence that loops through .desktop-icon elements on page load, fetches their saved coordinates , and implementes them. Wallpaper changing bug The NASA API integration was fetching data successfully, but massive high-res images were causing visual lag, leading to a blank blue screen while the image downloaded in the background. Made a new thing where the newImage() is inserted into the virtual memory of the js. The UI now triggers a document.body.style.cursor = ‘wait’ loading wheel and displays a “Downloading…” status. JavaScript intentionally halts the DOM update until the virtual image’s ‘.onload’ event fires, ensuring the wallpaper only gets applied to the screen exactly when it is 100% ready. Lastly, I also added a setting in the settings tab where the user can choose if the icon labels are hidded or shown. What’s Next? The desktop environment is now completely stable, personalized, and persistent. Next up: More UI and UX refinements before shipping for WebOS 1. Gonna implement File Management for WebOS 2 :)
Devlog #3: Onboarding and Eliminating FOUC Before shipping the WebOS 1 project and moving on to WebOS 2 project, I needed to implement an Onboarding/Welcome Screen to introduce users to the OS environment. This required a full-screen dark overlay. this is what i did: Z-index mismatch Because my custom Drag Engine automatically increments the zIndex of any .window it touches, the moment I clicked the Welcome Screen, the engine overwrote its god-tier Z-Index (99999). This caused an immediate Z-Index collapse, burying the modal underneath the desktop icons and the dark overlay. The Fix: I had to implement a strict exception in the JavaScript mousedown event listener to protect the Welcome Screen’s ID from being overwritten. DOM Reordering: To guarantee that the Welcome Screen will be at the very top,, I moved the Welcome Screen to the absolute bottom of the document. This means it will naturally sit on top of the other elements. Eliminating the FOUC I used the localStorage API so users could check a “Don’t show this again” box, saving their preference to the hard drive. However, this caused a massive FOUC bug. The Problem: HTML renders faster than JavaScript executes. On boot, the browser would instantly paint the Welcome Screen to the monitor. A few milliseconds later, JavaScript would read the hard drive, realize the user disabled the screen, and violently delete it—causing an ugly flicker. Fix: I basically just inverted the rendering logic. I hardcoded ‘display: none;’ directly into the HTML so the modal is completely invisible by default. Now, the browser paints nothing. JavaScript checks the hard drive, and only turns the welcome screen on if it confirms the user actually wants to see it. Now it’s much better. Ig this is the end of my WebOS 1 project. I will be shipping this project and then moving on to WebOS 2 where I’ll be implementing File Management, In-browser-browser?, and maybe some other built in tools. That’s the plan for now.
WebOS 2 Devlog #1: Transitioning into an actual OS. The WebOS 2 mission just unlocked so all the time before i spent working on this overhaul, hence the 13 hour devlog. In the last devlog, i had a very basic beginning: a basic onboarding screen with some text and a “Continue” button. There was no actualy proper desktop, not that many apps, and definitely no File Explorer. Over the last 13 hours, I managed to change the project into a fully functioning, browser-based operating system with its own virtual file system, and app ecosystem. Here is a breakdown of everything that was built in this time. Since i made a lot of changes, i’ll keep it brief and won’t go into it too much: The Window & Desktop Engine: the core physics of the OS were built completely from scratch. Drag and Drop: Windows can be dragged freely but are strictly clamped to the viewport so they can never be lost off-screen. Window Controls: remade the full Minimize, Maximize, and Close logic. Animations: Implemented a requestAnimationFrame state machine so windows don’t just appear—they like animate and scale and fade out into the taskbar. Desktop Grid: Desktop icons are draggable and auto-snap to an invisible grid when released. File System (File Manager): Going from zero file management to a complete virtual system was perhaps the biggest change. It is powered by localStorage, and the OS now remembers everything: Dynamic File Explorer: Built a grid/list view system complete with a sidebar, path breadcrumbs, and directory navigation. Context Menus: Right-clicking files now opens custom context menus to rename, delete, or restore items. Recycle Bin: Files are moved to a functional Trash directory where they can be permanently emptied or restored to the Root folder. Drag-and-Select: made a custom mouse-drag selection box (the translucent pink lasso) to highlight multiple files at once. App Ecosystem: Themes: I built a dynamic theme engine with two main themes. Modern Dark: The default OS features premium glassmorphism, background blurs, and other stuff, and has like a pink accent color. Retro: It changes the OS back to what it looked like in like 1995 by replacing animations and toggles with grey borders, checkboxes, and the blue desktop background. The New Welcome Screen: That old, basic onboarding screen looked ass so it was completely scrapped. I replaced it with a better and cleaner on that also remembers their preference if they check “Don’t show this on startup.”
WebOS 2 Devlog #2: UI & UX Debugging + UI Improvements This was quite a short session mainly focused on debugging. Here are the changes for this session. New Setup Wizard: The Welcome Screen has been completely redesigned into a classic two-pane setup wizard. (In Retro mode, it even has the iconic sideways teal text on the sidebar). State Persistence: The OS now remembers your settings. Your preferences for military time, desktop icon labels, and whether you want to see the welcome screen on boot are all permanently saved to localStorage. Calculator & Layout Fixes: The calculator now properly displays full math expressions (e.g., 3 + 5) instead of instantly wiping the screen. Before it still worked but it just showed the numbers and the answer-it didnt show what the user was doing. I also fixed a ton of bugs. Apps that are maximized now perfectly snap to the taskbar without overlapping, and the File Explorer drag-to-select doesn’t glitch when you move the window because before the drag-to-select used to activate when i was dragging the window.
WebOS 2 Devlog #3: Building a UNIX Terminal + some other improvements This was a major update today for WebOS 2.0 as i built a genuinely realistic CLI. It’s looks and acts like a Mac Terminal (cus i use mac). Here is what i implemented: In the terminal, i implemented the following commands: help, clear, pwd, ls, cd, cat, touch, mkdir, rm, echo, whoami, date, history, and nano. This part itseld wasnt so difficult cus I had previously done something similar before but it was still challenging nonetheless. I wanted the CLI to be as realistic as possible so I implemented (with a little bit of help from gemini) a custom AST-style parser. It fully supports logical command chaining (&&, ||, ;), quotation marks usage (both single and double), and file redirection (>, ») straight into the virtual hard drive. Autocomplete: This was probably the hardest thing i tried to build and i am happy with how it turned out. I implemented a zsh-style Tab completion system. Pressing Tab auto-fills the longest common prefix and then shows all the possible options directly beneath your active prompt. This is one of the things I a most proud of because after using it, it was essentially very similar to the mac Terminal. This autocomplete works both for commands and files/folders. Errors and stuff: The terminal behaves exactly like real bash. If you type ls -la (-la is not implemented [yet?]) or cd too many args, it won’t just blindly execute or fail silently (it originally did so i had to change it), but it will spit back the same error message you’d expect to see on a real machine. GUI/CLI Integration: When i was implementing nano, i tried to think of how to implement a CLI editor. But i then realised, i can just connect the nano command to the notepad that I alreadu made. So typing nano test.txt in the terminal now just launches the Notepad app and opens the file for editing. And I made some other changes to stuff like the file manager but the terminal implementation above is the biggest change.
WebOS 2 Devlog #4: Initial bootloading sequence + login (optional) When i looked at other projects i realised that they all have some kind of flashy bootloading sequences but mine didnt have any so i built one. I didn’t want it to be too flashy so i made a simple, straightforward sequence. I also knew what exactly I wanted so I managed to finish this in 4hrs on the dot or it would’ve taken a lot longer. This is what it consists of: Bootloader that takes into account the selected theme: Since I had two themes in my OS (Modern and Legacy), it didnt make sense for both to have the same loading screen. So the system now actually boots up differnetly before loading the UI. Depending on your settings, you’ll either get a quick Modern UEFI startup, or a 1995 Legacy BIOS sequence complete with memory checks, IDE drive detection, and ASCII loading bars (had to use some outside help [ai] for this one as I’m not that old to know all that stuff). Hardware Interrupts: Just like a real PC, if you hit esc while the system is booting, it triggers a hardware interrupt and drops you into a configuration screen. Interactive OS Installation: If it’s your first time booting up (or you reset your system), you now have to actually “install” the OS. You can type in your preferred Username, network Hostname, and set an Administrator Password right inside the terminal. You even get the option to format your virtual hard drive. Login: If you set a password (which is optoinal) during setup, the boot sequence will actually halt and lock the system until you type it in. (Don’t worry, I added a recover command bypass in case anyone forgets it). Terminal Integration: The CLI terminal now dynamically reads your setup data. Instead of a normal prompt that you used to get with the default user@stardance or sth, you’ll see your actual custom username@hostname:~/$. Loading text: as the os loads and goes through the bootloading sequence some highly advanced random computer text ‘loads’ to add a little bit to the realism. Some of them are actual data from the host computer such as ram, gpu, and stuff like that. I had lots of other text and loading content that came from the the user’s actual real life hardware and software data, which added to the realism I had to research and use ai to make this because I had no knowledge of how computers were back then. There’s more but it wont fit here so you’ll just have to see it when i host it after my next ship.
WebOS 2 Devlog #5: File manager overhaul + custom dialog box I realised that always having the custom browser alerts was kinda boring and interrupting so i made my own dialogue box. I also changed the file manager to include some essential functions that it was missing to make it more like an OS (see below). Here are the changes i made: I abandoned the old array-based folders. I made it so that it now reads and writes directly to localStorage using stricter pathing (e.g., webos-file-Root/Documents/file.txt). I also built a native getUniqueName() function. If you create a duplicate file or folder, there’s no like a (1), (2), etc. at the end of it, which prevents data overwrites. This makes it more like a real OS Drag-and-Drop: I alos removed the old custom JavaScript coordinate trackers for file movement. It now uses the native HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API. You can physically pick up a file from the Explorer window, drag it out, and drop it directly onto the visual Desktop wallpaper. Custom Dialog Box: Native browser popups (alert(), confirm()) look hella ugly and break the flow so i built a custom dialog engine using JavaScript Promises. Now, when the system needs confirmation a custom window that fits with the theme appears. Because it uses async/await, the JavaScript pauses and waits for user acceoting or declining without freezing the browser. List View & Item Properties: I introduced a hybrid Grid/List view (just like a real os like mac). Because tracking file metadata (like Date Modified) from the start would have been way to complicated, I just built this engine where when the File Explorer encounters a file without a timestamp, it instantly generates metadata key (os-meta-path) using Date.now() and saves it permanently, which means that it allows for Date sorting without breaking anything.
WebOS 2 Devlog #6: UI, UX and functionality improvements This update focuses heavily on stabilizing what i already have and also refining the less finer aspects of the UI. Here is what i did: Theme improvenets: I overhauled the .theme-retro class. stuff were contradicting each other with one thing saying this and the other saying that (too many to even give an example). I also changed some other minor stuff too like increased the grid size in the desktop to prevent icons from overlapping. But this was the main change: System Security & Identity Manager: Implemented a global sanitizeIdentity utility (Regex: /[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]/g) to remove spaces and illegal characters from usernames and hostnames when the user sets it before writing to localStorage because if i have sth like ‘John Doe’ as the username and ‘my school computer’ as the host name, the terminal command would look sth like John Doe@my school computer. And this just looks hella ugly. Dedicated Identity UI: removed the raw identity inputs out of the Settings menu like i had before and moved them into a dedicated Identity Manager window because its more secure that way. I also added an authenticaiton wall before this window pops up. To do this, i wrote an async while loop for identity verification. All the users now have successfully pass the password prompt (or use the recover override to bypass the password) before it allows them to modify any identity settings. Bootloader improvements: btn-shutdown now properly halts system processes (clearing systemClockInterval and locking pointer events) instead of just hiding the UI like it did before where it just had like a black screen with text on it saying shutting down and stuff. It now has like a loading screen and all that stuff. Context Booting: i also implemented sessionStorage.setItem(‘boot_context’, ‘warm’) to track system restarts so different boots have like different bootloading sequences (the point below this). This didn’t take too long as i could just copy and past what i had in other sequenes and just take the text. Differnet Boot Sequences: The bootloader now reads the sessionStorage context. A Cold Boot triggers the full POST memory checks and hardware scans (dont know what this is. had to use ai for the sequences cus i didnt know what the data was). A Warm Boot (restart) bypasses POST and executes a different initialization sequence. THis makes the user more immersed in the environment.
WebOS 2 Devlog #7: Web Browser Implementation I reached the final couple of phases of my project and this is one is one of the crucial ones: building a web browser. My plan was to use iframe. But the thing about building a webbrowser inside a webbrowser or inside a sandboxed environment like a website is most websites (about 99%) like google, youtube, or github use X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors ‘none’ which means they specifically block their websites from being displayed in cases like this ot prevent clickjacking. So every time i tried loading a webpage, it just says this webpage refused to connect or sth. I used ai to try bypassing it but it didnt work, so with the help of the same aforementioned ai, i implemented a solution. The solution: Since I cannot disable host browser security policies, and i dont have a backend proxy server, I had an idea to just build my own native ‘browser’: EpochOS IntraNet (just decided on the name EpochOS btw). This didnt take too long cus i had someone (ai) helping me cus it was almost midnight and i was tired as hell. Here are the features: I wrote a parser that intercepts navigation requests. If the user navigates to webos://home or webos://directory, the engine injects a large data:text/html;charset=utf-8 string directly into the iframe’s src attribute. This opens a local, HTML dashboard without triggering cross-origin blocks. Essentially, i wrote html in js and injected that html into the iframe src, so i essentially made my own ‘web-page’. Standard links inside a data URI iframe will try to navigate the iframe itself, which doesn’t update the OS address bar. To fix this, I set up a window.addEventListener(‘message’) listener on the parent OS. The buttons inside the iframe use parent.postMessage() to pass the target URL up to the OS, allowing the JavaScript engine to handle the routing and update the UI properly. A real browser alse doesn’t lose a page’s state (like scroll position) when you switch tabs. And im trying to make a real browser. So, to achieve this, the browser engine now doesn’t share a single iframe but rather new ones get created: Every time the user clicks the “New Tab” button, a new node is generated and appended to the container. Switching tabs simply toggles the CSS display property between none and block. This keeps inactive pages fully loaded in memory. Because cross-origin security rules (the ones i mentioned before) lock us out of accessing the iframe’s native window.history object, I had to build a custom history router. Every tab object in the JS array maintains its own history array and a historyIndex pointer. The back/forward buttons just decrement or increment this pointer and re-apply the URL to the iframe. Kinda genius ngl (this was an idea from ai btw) But for a browser to be useful, it needs to have some proper webpages. After some scouring, i found some webpages that do work in iframe and dont have the restrictions that websites like google do. I’m not gonna tell you what websites those are, you just have to see yourself. I found like 10 or sth so there’ll be plenty of stuff to do. Other features of the browser include: bookmarking, reloading (i also added a reloading spinner btw) and some more stuff.
WebOS 2 Devlog #8: Migrated to ES6 arch. and split css into any files I just realised that essentially all my code is squished into three files-index.html, index.css, and index.js. And all of them were quite big. Like the js file had more than 2,000 lines, and css had more than a 1,000 lines. I dont know why i havent noticed it before but im glad that i did now because i was plannign to do a deep debugging session next and it wouldve been hella hard to do in a 2000+ line file. Plus, a single bug in e.g. the calculator could crash the file manager, and debugging required scrolling through thousands of lines of code. So, i decided to migrate the index.js into an ES6 architecture and split the index.css into multiple manageable files. That’s all i can say for this devlog ig. There was nothing new except some lines of code i had to add after the migration to make sure everything is working. There were no really new features added. But there were many things that delayed me: i accidentally deleted a block of code in the index.css without moving it and didnt notice it so some styles were broken and i had to like retrace my steps and stuff to fix all the problems it caused. That’s all ig. The project is almost coming to an end! Can’t wait to ship it :)
WebOS 2 Devlog #9: Implemented color accents and some browser improvements I was originally going to do some debugging and finish of this project but i was looking through other peoples’ webos projects and realised there was much i could improve. I then got like a huge brainwave about new stuff to implement so ig it’ll be a bit longer before I ship this project. One of these ideas was adding color accents because right now my modern theme is limited only to a light pinkish color. Here are the changes i made: Change 1: Accents In the settings screen, i added an option to choose the system accents. I also gave some basic presets and added an option to pick a color by adding a color picker option. Implementing this was quite simple, just replace all hardcoded pink colors with –os-accent (which i added in css). I linked htis –os-accents attribute/class to the color that the user chooses in js and made ti that all the places where the accent pops up, the color variable there is replaced with –os-accents. So if the user changes the accent in settings, the places where –os-accent is set changes color automatically. Challenge 1: Contrasting invisible text The problem: Swapping a single hex code for an accent color that the user chooses breaks all translucent UI elements (like shadows). Furthermore, if a user picks a bright color (like Mint Green or Yellow), the hardcoded white text on the title bars becomes completely invisible. The Solution: I implemented a Hex-to-RGB engine that injects raw RGB values directly into the CSS :root. This solves the first part of the problem. To solve the text contrast issue, I implemented the WCAG Relative Luminance algorithm ( used a bit of outside help here iykwim ;)). The OS now mathematically calculates the perceived brightness of the user’s chosen color. If the relative luminance passes a threshold of 0.179, the OS flips the title bar text to pitch black so its legible comfortable. Change 2: i was just playing around in the webbrowser and exploring, and i found some stuff that needed to be fixed: when building a simulated web browser using tags, embedding sites like google resulted in a “Refused to Connect” error. These servers send an X-Frame-Options: DENY header. Because client-side JavaScript is legally blind to server headers, the OS couldn’t detect the block to show the custom error screen I made. I knew this error existed and knew this was a thing but only after experiencing it like a real user did i realise how annoyinf this was and it made my os seem broken. Solution 1 (attempt): I initially tried routing requests through a third-party API to read the headers, but ad-blockers and privacy shields just made the API requests not work, crashing the entire browser app (at least thats what i think is the cause). The Solution: I used a massive Regex blocklist, such that the browser now instantly intercepts requests to 99% of top-tier websites that block iframes (like youtube or google), and routs the user to a custom error page. (did these stuff with the help of some ai only) Next Problem: When a user searches Google inside the iframe and clicks a link in the embedded page, the OS address bar wouldn’t update. This is a browser restriction. Browsers mathematically lock JavaScript out of reading cross-origin URLs for security reasons. At this point i just stopped instead of trying to waste my time trying to break through some military grade (i think?) restrictions. Change 3: Before, only iframe compatible websites worked but i had an idea to route all queries (except the ones in websites format) through a google search. Apparently, google.com doesn work in iframe but the google search works. So now if i type hello world, it just redirects me to a google search page with hello world searched. P.S. I made some other tiny changes aswell but i cant rlly remember them now sry
WebOS 2 Devlog #10: icon implementation + taskbar remodeling When i looked at the webos, i realised it missed something to look like an actual os. It wasnt realistic enough. So, i decided to do two changes to make it more realistic. Here is what it did: Change 1: I added some real user data in the taskbar. More specifically, the host device’s actual network and battery status and date. I used the the browser’s native navigator.onLine and the navigator.getBattery() APIs. I also made it such that the os actively listens for network connection drops such as when wifi is disconnected and battery charging/level events, and updates the data accordingly. Change 2: I also noticed that my entire os is filled with emojis for stuff like calculator, file manages (all the apps essentially), the taskbar, the browser, the sites in the browser, etc. THis made it look really unprofessional so i fixed it. I replace all system emojis with Google Material Symbols to make it look a lot better. I did face one challenge however, the emojis in my website in my web browser weren’t being replaced by icons for some reason and I then realised that the iframe sites acts as a sandbox and they dont inherit the imported apis from the main html file. So I just injected a tag and imported the Google Material Symbols API directly in the isolated HTML code in my js file. Change 3: The goal of this change was ot allow the user to snap the taskbar to the top of the screen (Linux style). This was the part that took longer than expected. I originally just added an optoin in the settings to move my taskbar to the top of the screen but the pill-like, floating taskbar i had was really ugly when it was at the top. So, i spent like more than an hour and half trying out new designs and redesigning the taskbar so it looks good both when its at the top and the bottom and finalised a design that actually looks much better than what i had before. It now takes up like the entire bottom/top of the screen instead of floating in the middle liek before. That was all the changes made since the last devlog.
WebOS 2 Devlog #11: Reset btn + Notepad IDE + other changes This was a long long coding session. Had to stay awake till like 2am. Here are the changes i made. Ill try to keep everythign concise because theres a 4000 char limit and i have lot more to say than that. Change 1: I added a factory reset button in settings that directs the user to the webos setup screen like the one they get when they first enter the website. When testing this feature, i realised that random variables from completely different web projects started appearing in the File Manager. Because browsers share localStorage databases across the same local port (e.g., 127.0.0.1:5500), the OS was inheriting the ghosts of old projects. The solution: I had to upgrade the Initial Setup Utility. When formatting the Virtual Hard Drive, the system now temporarily caches the user’s OS credentials in memory that they entered, executes a total localStorage.clear() wipe to delete all the localStorage varialbles, and then safely restores the username and stuff before continuing normally. Change 2: Notepad IDE This was the part that took the longest (and its still not done). I wanted to create something absolutely unique that i havent seen in any other webos projects that i saw. And i realised, why dont i make an IDE in me webos? Not an actual IDE ofc but the goal was to allow users to write raw HTML/JS in the Notepad, save it as a .app file, and double-click it on the desktop to launch it as a fully functioning, program. Attempt 1 (Failure): I initially tried parsing the saved text and running it directly in the OS context using eval(). It was an absolute security and stability nightmare. The custom app had root access to the OS memory and instantly overwrote the osState object, completely crashing the Window Manager within seconds. Attempt 2 (Failure): I tried fixing attempt 1 but messed up the entire code in the process so i had to revert to that commit and this time, i tried putting the apps in Web Components and the Shadow DOM. While this successfully isolated the CSS so custom apps didn’t break the OS styling, the JavaScript still executed in the global window scope. Running two different custom apps simultaneously caused variable collisions that bricked the taskbar. It was too complex and fundamentally flawed. I wiped the slate clean again. Attempt 3 (Success): I realised that the answer was looking straignt at me. I was so stupid. I can just take the code and slap it on to an iframe, and it runs it, just like how i made the web browser. The solution was that When a user double-clicks a custom .app, the OS takes the raw code and converts it into a text/html Blob. It then passes that Blob through URL.createObjectURL(), creating a localized URL. By feeding that URL into an , the custom app boots perfectly. I am really proud of this feature. It’s still not fully done but i had to make a devlog since the tracked time almost reached 10hrs.
WebOS 2 Devlog #12: Debugging Session + retro theme redesign In this session I started debugging the os and wow i found a lot of bugs. Im not going to get into them because it would take too long but some of them include how the bootloading sequence absolutely breaks if the user presses escape before the setup is finished because the cache isnt cleared properly so when the user gets the setup agian, he wont we able to configure some stuff like the password because the cache wasnt cleared properly. I also redesigned the retro theme because it looked ugly because the accents i implemented in the modern theme appeared in the retro theme which didnt fit together. Moreover, some of the aspects of the retro theme, such as the top part of the web browser or the settings screen were just uncomfortable to look at. Changing the retro theme was such a pain because everytime i thought i fixed it, a new discrepancy appears and at one point after i fixed it, my retro-theme.css was so messy i couldnt be bothered to fix it so i just inputted the messy working version into gemini and it cleaned it up. Anyway that was all i changed this time. And I did more and more changes but many of them are small and it would take too long to explain in a devlog. p.s. didnt know which pic to attach so its just a simple screenshot of the desktop.
WebOS 2 Devlog #13: Easter Eggs Pt. 1 I was looking forward to this a looooot. I’m not giving any spoilers whatsoever but I was so locked in tday and yesterday coding easter eggs into the OS. I added like 2 easter eggs (might seem less but trust me they’re very developed), one’s a very simple one but the other one is my favourite and is the reason this devlog took so long. It’s still not finished and im only lik halfway done w/ it but I’m not going to go into any details because it will spoil the fun but im sure you’ll enjoy it. Also, im not done with making easter eggs and i just made this devlog cus the time is almost 10hrs. I still have to finish the second easter egg and do more on top of that. The next one will hopefully be the final easter egg session (unless i get another absolute brainwave). p.s to prevent spoilers, the attached pic is just a screenshot once again
WebOS 2 Devlog #14: Easter Eggs Pt. 2 I am now done with making the easter eggs and in total i made 5 of them, which may seem less but some of them are really really complex and developed. I stayed up till 2am making these 😭. Out of these 5, three of them are simple easter eggs, one is more complex but still quite simple and the final one is essentialyl the absolut highlight. It is the reason why the easter egg section took me so long. I am not going to go into detail to avoid spoilers. Anyway i hope you have fun with the easter eggs :) p.s the attached pic is a screen shot again cus i dont want to give spoilers
WebOS 2 Devlog #15: System Daemon implementation To keep the users more engaged so even when they saw everythign, they would still spend more time doing stuff, I wanted to build something alive for the desktop environment that would interact with the user. So, instead of a standard app, I built a system daemon! If you dont know what that is, it is a digital pet that hangs out on your desktop and does random stuff. I dont hav ea name for him yet so ill just call him daemon for now. When he’s healthy, he flies around the screen and shouts random stuff at you. But I didn’t want him to just be a visual gimmick. He interacts with the actual operating system itself and has states: He is hungry: Because I previously built a drag-and-drop system for the File Explorer, I hooked him into it. You can drag actual text files or folders out of your explorer and drop them on his face. He will chew them up and literally delete them from the virtual hard drive (localStorage). He has a digestive tract: I built a array for his stomach that records what he has last eaten. If he ate a file you actually needed, you can rapid-click his face 5 times. He will regurgitate the raw file data perfectly back onto your desktop. He has boundaries: I ‘taught’ him to recognize core OS files. If you try to feed him Notepad.app or the System Settings, he will violently reject them and yell at you. He has one more state but that relates to the easter egg so i wont provide any additional details in order to not spoil it Oh, and i changed his appearance for the retro theme. anywhat that’s all for this change. I didn’t get into the nitty gritty of how I built him because I am so excited to finish this project. Just a few more features and then I’m done.
WebOS 2 Devlog #16: Widget implementation + debugging In this session, i made multiple changes to the OS to improve the overall UX. I had to pull another all nighter again 🥲. Here is what i changed: Change 1: Debugging Everytime i enabled the system daemon in the settngs, the entire os reloaded which was quite annoying so I ripped out the location.reload() in the Settings app. I also moved him to the body so he didn’t get trapped behind windows, because most of the time the daemon was floating behind windows and i couldnt really see him. I also gave the Welcome screen a massive 9999999 z-index so the daemon would float behind it because my previous step was too effective and he was infront of every single screen including like the bootloading screen. Challenges: I ran into z-index hell because I didn’t plan the stacking initially. He was either in the very front or at the very back and it was all a bit weird. Change 2: Widget implementation I initially wanted to implement sticky notes as a widget which was inspired my the mac sticky notes so i coded all of that in first but I realised i can take it a step further and code in multiple widgets. Challenge: But the thing was i hardcoded the sticky notes widget so i had to recode everything and integrate all of the widgets at once I added a simple analog clock widget I added a calendar widget I initially added a system monitor with like the ram and cpu data but the thing was due to the security restrictions, I can’t get the actualy live hardware data so it would have to be a simulation, which i didnt want so I replace the system monitor with a live weather widget which uses the BigDataCloud and Open-Meteo APIs to provide weather data. Change 3: Originally I had all hte widgets in the context menu on after the other but they looked like a list and a bit redundant. So i removed all then in the html file and added one ‘Add a widget…’ option which connects to a screen with all the widget options
WebOS 2 Devlog #17: Media player + Audio spectrum widget implementation It has been a massive coding session. And I barely managed to keep the time below 10 hours and I still went over it. But, on the bright side, the OS now has a fully functional, media player and an audio spectrum widget! In the media player, anyone can listen to radios, and lots of music. But the reason it took 10 hours is because implementing these stuff required facing some serious bugs-some of them for genuinely stupid mistakes-and rebuilding the audio engine the right way (you’ll see what I mean). Here is a breakdown of how these new features work, what went wrong, and some other stuff: Overview of features The Media Player: The new Media Player is a audio application that routes requests to three distinct APIs to fetch music that the user can listen two: Audius: This is a “decentralized music streaming platform for artists, labels, and fans.” And it’s free! I fetches some of the music from this API. Radio-Browser: This is a platform that is, in a nutshell, Wikipedia for radios. I fetched thousands of live, global radio broadcasts using this API Apple iTunes (Preview): This was a golden find because I didn’t know this existed (not for free anyway). This API pulls top hits and previews of music. Granted, it’s not full music tracks but the songs are much more famous and popular. The Audio Spectrum Widget To complement the player, I also added an Audio Spectrum visualizer. It uses the Web Audio API, or more specifically, its AudioContext and an AnalyserNode to get the frequency data from the audio element. That data is then mapped to an HTML5 element. Using requestAnimationFrame, I made it such that the spectrum repaints 40 individual frequency bars roughly 60 times a second, which creates the audio visualiser waveform thing. Challenges The Geolocation failure: The OS was originally hardcoded to fetch radio stations from my address because I hardcoded that for testing purposes. But I stupidly forgot to remove that so when attempting to make this dynamic by using vpns I spent like 40 minutes trying to figure out why ut kept showing stations from my local area and not japan (where my VPN was connected to). And the reason for that is the hardcoded address I mentioned earlier. Moreover, some of the API queries were too specific, causing the media player to return empty for smaller regions like the Bahamas. To fix it i used the BigDataCloud API to quietly ping the user’s IP address, cache their true country code, and inject it into the API queries. the broken audio spectrum: Initially, the audio visualizer was completely blank. Even when fixed, the baseline would just disappear the second music started playing. The canvas drawing logic was also aggressively using clearRect to wipe the entire widget, which erased the idle state baseline. To fix it, I changed the baseline math so that the baseline sits firmly at the bottom of the widget. I also remade the drawing loop to explicitly redraw the baseline before checking the isPlaying state, so the frequency bars can work smoothly. retro theme problems: I completely forgot about the retro theme as i was just focused on building the player and the widget. So, in the end i had to make the stuff retro theme aswell. I encountered some problems there like some white on white text and some styles not applying which turned out to be because my dumbass brain mispelled the ids and classes Oh, and I found some other big bugs. The dragging engine was hella laggy. Like the response time was like 3 seconds before it registered. I would go deeped but im abt to cross the 4000 character devlog word limit but in a nutshell I realised it was because the mousemove event listener was directly updating the inline CSS (style.left and style.top) on every single microscopic mouse movement so it was really laggy.
WebOS 2 Devlog #18: Debugging session I swear random bugs keep popping up no matter how much debugging I do. There’s always something that’s wrong or doesn’t work but that’s just how it is. In this session which was longer than expected, i fixed a lot of different bugs. Here is a summary of the changes i did: I spent lots of time rewriting the mathematics for the desktop icon layout, and also changed the strict grid-snapping to free-form placement cus it felt it was quite annoying not to be able to place stuff on the desktop wherever you want. Unfortunately, it took too long and i abandoned the idea and just moved on without making any changes. I also spent some time cleaning up the code and tried to optimizing the code. Some other bugs I fixed include: Desktop icons were randomly rearranging themselves every time a file was saved. I found out that the reason was that since the localStorage returns keys randomly, everytime i wrote sth to localStorage, the items were randomized so the ordier they appeared on the desktop changed. So i rewrote the logic to sort the stuff alphabetically before displaying. The Notepad app was also blindly overwriting existing files with the same name. I fixed it by adding a localStorage query to intercept matching keys and to display an osConfirm dialog, forcing the user to explicitly authorize the overwrite. The internal browser was throwing captchas all the time and failed to load error screens for blocked domains. Since Google aggressively blocks embeds and flags them as bot traffic, i changed the default browser to Bing, which was much better and i didn’t get captchas everytime i search somehting up I also modified the system daemon engine so that it introduces itself when a user first view the OS. The weather widget was pulling the location not from where the user was but rather where my ISP was routing my traffic through. So if i lived in a village and ISP routes my traffic through like New York, the weather that showed up was that of New York. To fix this, i swapped the logic to request exact hardware GPS coordinates via navigator.geolocation, while falling back to the IP routing API if the user denies the browser prompt. If the location is inaccurate the user can enable the location permission in the browser and the weather widget then shows the correct location. The visualizer widget was working perfectly but i had the idea to add a text container above the bars which shows what the user is playing. I made way way more changes but many of them conform to the easter eggs and mainly about the theme that gets unlocked (small spoiler there ;)) so i won’t really get too much into it.
WebOS 2 Devlog #19: README.md + ARCHITECTURE.md + additional customisation features I’m in the final stages of the project and in this long session, I did many things. Firstly, I wrote a README.md with all the necessary stuff and i also made an ARCHITECTURE.md file which explains the nitty gritty insides of the WebOS so anyone can understand how the website works. Other than that I added a couple of other stuff. Firstly, i realised that even though I have accents to customize the desktop, I don’t have a wallpaper gallery (except the nasa apod) which I found was quite necessary. At first, i coded my own wallpapers like a synthwave grid wallpaper, pinstripe wallpaper for the legace theme, a tranforming aurora wallpaper and like 3 more but after i coded them, they just looked so damn ugly. So i scratched the idea of me coding my own wallpapers and added three categories of wallpapers in the wallpaper dropdown with each category having three 4k wallpapers in them so every time you pick that category, you get a random wallpaper from the three. I also added an about section in the settings which has a buttton that leads to the github page.
WebOS 2 Devlog #20: Updated README.md and ARCHITECTURE.md + changed properties window I just realised I had a properties window in the OS and that was quite outdated so I changed to include some new info like the Last Modified date which updates everytime the user saves something because i added a localStorage.setItem that saves the timestamp. I also updated the README and ARCHITECTURE files to make them sound better and to add some additional info. Anyway, this devlog is probably the last on for this project! Hope you enjoy :)
WebOS 2 Devlog #21: Final Submission Just did some final changes to the welcome text and am about to ship it
Ships:
I created a simple operating system with HTML, CSS, and Javascript that runs on you web browser. It has a nostalgic look and feel with old-styled buttons and looks. To make it more like an OS, a calculator and a notepad have been created and implemented in the app. Moreover, to allow the user to personalise as much as they want, many settings have been included, from custom wallpapers to wallpapers that come from NASA itself and more. This was my first large scale project that I have coded so it’s an interesting experience for me. Before this, I only used to do challenges on platforms like Codewars and other than some small side projects, I don’t have a practical experience. Therefore, i think this project has taught me a lot on how to built stuff yourself. I hope you like my project :)
EpochOS is a fully functional operating system built entirely with vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It doesnt require any client side installations or anything and runs directly in your browser. Its features include a file explorer, a browser, a media player, many essential applications, lots of customisation, widgets, and an actual ecosystem that mimics a real operating system. It also has no backend so it’s all run locally on your browser using the browser’s localStorage. Some things you should know before you test this out: Firstly, please don’t finish rating this project until you experience all the features because there are many hidden features that might change your opinion. An example is easter eggs. I implemented many easter eggs which you must experience before voting because these easter eggs are very devloped. If you can’t find them or are stuck on one of the easter eggs, read ARCHITECTURE.md and at the very bottom, i listed all the easter eggs so you can check them out. In fact, read the ARCHITECTURE.md because it provides valuable info about many of the features in the OS and how they work so make sure to read that aswell Secondly, this OS is not compatible with mobile or tablet devices and is optimized for desktop only. So please keep that in mind when you are testing it. Thank you so much for testing this project and hope you enjoy it :)...
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Chess Bot by @GunRattler28 | Stardance
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[{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-0 [{"ship_num": 1, "ts": "2026-09-21T06:00:32Z", "hours": 127.0, "multiplier": 16.58, "payout": 2096, "blessing": "neutral", "text": "I’m finally shipping the chess bot! So excited to see what people think of it :) . Before you try my project I highly suggest reading the README (on my github page https://github.com/GunRattler28/Chess-Bot ). It has a full list of all controls which will help you understand how to play. Anways, can’t wait to see what you guys think of it!", "repo": "https://github.com/GunRattler28/Chess-Bot", "demo": "https://github.com/GunRattler28/Chess-Bot/releases"}]...
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[{"post_id": 80354, "ts": "202 [{"post_id": 80354, "ts": "2026-10-17T11:49:41Z", "hours": 0.8044, "text": "So, I’ve actually decided to work on making my bot playable on a website since that was one of the main things people said they would have wanted last ship and stardance is ending soon. But thats not why I’m posting. I’m posting because I spent the last 40 minutes rooting out a bug that caused my premoves to not be played. My first step was playing the release version that can be downloaded to see if the bug was there as well. Luckily it wasn’t so I went to my current commit on my main branch and kepy undoing commits (and saving them with git stash ) until the bug was gone. I then found that the bug only became a thing after I merged my commenting branch. Because of this I did the same thing of undoing commits and saving them on the commenting branch til I found the commit that caused the bug. I then went through all the changes until I found the problem. Then I fixed the bug, merged the fix to main then merged main into my other branches so that they would have the bug fix as well. I’ve already done some research and have found that pygbag seems to fit my needs for turning my pygame program into a website pretty well. Due to this I will probably use pygbag to get a website version of my chess bot up and running! Attached is a screenshot of the commit that caused the bug. Before the commit is on the left and after the commit is on the right. Try to find what caused the bug! If you can’t check the comments of the post as I am gonna say what the problem was there. I also attached a photo of how my git tree looks now and… it looks sooo messy lol."}, {"post_id": 79553, "ts": "2026-10-14T16:01:16Z", "hours": 2.835, "text": "I started getting bored of just commenting my code so I created a new branch in which I am trying to make my bot be able to play other bots. After some research, I found that the engine needs to be able to take in moves in the form of algebraic notation (a type of shorthand notation for moves. for example: Be4). Because of this I read a Wikipedia page on algebraic notation and made a function to convert between it and the parameters my makeMove() takes, that being: startRow , startColumn , endRow and endColumn . I have done this by first checking if the move is a castle (notated by O-O or O-O-O) then forming the full start and end coordinates by hardcoding the column values and finding the row based off the colour that is castling. Then I find what piece is moving (shown by the first letter) and if there is a promotion (shown by ‘=’ sign). Algebraic also has characters to show captures (x), checkmates (#) and checks (+), however the engine does not need these and so they are removed in 3 separate while loops. At this point I am left with just the end coordinates and maybe a combination of start coordinates. To find the full start coordinates (as they are all I am missing) I loop through the specific bitboard for the piece and whenever I find a square where there is a piece, I check whether it matches with the start coordinates I have, and if it does whether it can legally reach the end square. If it can then that is my piece and I return its start coordinates and the end coordinates it moves to (which is given in the input string). Currently, this function lives inside a random file in my project folder but my next step will be to properly integrate it into the rest of the code."}, {"post_id": 78191, "ts": "2026-10-09T22:40:08Z", "hours": 7.2036, "text": "Yup! I did what I said I would last time, and finished commenting ALL of logic.py . I don’t think I can describe how long this took and how annoying it was to have to go through 750+ lines of code and add comments explaining things. And then I realise that there’s just random stuff that I don’t even need. Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied that I managed to comment so much. This is definitely the largest file and so I’m happy I’ve gotten it out of the way. There’s not really much I can’t say like explaining and stuff because all I’ve done for the last 5 hours is explain stuff. Anyway once I’ve commented everything, I’ll probably make another devlog and then go and work on something else."}, {"post_id": 72816, "ts": "2026-09-23T19:46:37Z", "hours": 5.8231, "text": "Thanks for all the positive feedback and constructive criticism on my ship! Working to improve where people said and I am starting by trying to add comments to my code to explain what is happening. So far I’ve fully commented 3 / 7 files and am around 30% through commenting logic.py which contains most of the complicated code. Its taking a while but I really hope that this will help people understand what I am doing and that they will like my project more because of this. Next I am going to continue adding comments to logic.py and will probably have to make a devlog after just that since the file is pretty big and has slightly complicated stuff in it. Once again thanks to all the people who rated the project or gave feedback!"}, {"post_id": 71494, "ts": "2026-09-20T22:33:25Z", "hours": 2.5339, "text": "I’ve made a few small changes that help slightly speed the bot up. I stopped checking whether I have surpassed the time limit every move I search and instead every 2048 moves I search. This is better as it removes thousands of unnecessary library calls which each add a small amount of time to how long each move takes to search. Since computers are very fast 2048 doesn’t actually take long at all but it massively reduces the amount of times the pygame library is called. I also changed my move ordering to sort manually instead of with in a lambda function since this lambda functions are more inefficient. I am next going to ship the project!!!"}, {"post_id": 69354, "ts": "2026-09-16T21:16:32Z", "hours": 3.3497, "text": "Premoves finished! My premoves are now fully implemented and the branch is merged. Making the move with middle click removes that specific premove. Middle clicking a random square clears all premoves and arrows. I also added principal variation search (pvs) which is just searching moves that aren’t the previous best move with a tight move score boundary then researching them normally if they are better than expected. I am probably going to ship soon and so will start polishing the project up now."}, {"post_id": 63850, "ts": "2026-09-07T20:35:48Z", "hours": 6.9336, "text": "Way better premoves. I’ve updated my premove system to store multiple premoves. I did this by storing eaach premove as a tuple of ( startRow , startColumn , endRow , endColumn ). These tuples contain all the data I need to know and can be easily appended into an array. To clear a premove you can either do the same move again which removes that specific premove or tap the middle mouse button anywhere which clears all premoves and arrows. I also render a translucent version of the piece that I’ve moved to its premove destination and remove the texture for where it was originally. This helps you keep track of what your premoves are actually doing. I do this by drawing the board normally then looping through each move in the premoves array and drawing that piece at its correct destination in reduced alpha. Next I am going to try to improve my bot further so that I can push to a depth of around 10 during midgame."}, {"post_id": 59871, "ts": "2026-09-01T21:01:21Z", "hours": 5.3678, "text": "I’ve added FEN strings! FEN strings (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) are a way to store positions of chess games. They are used by many chess engines to allow players to start from different positions or midway through games. Adding these wasn’t too difficult as the strings are formatted in a nice way. I simply split up the FEN string into its 6 parts and set my variables to the value in the FEN string. To test if it worked I inputted the FEN string 4kb1r/p2n1ppp/4q3/4p1B1/4P3/1Q6/PPP2PPP/2KR4 w k - 1 16 which gives the position of the famous opera game directly before the queen sacrifice. I then set the bot colour to white and was glad to see that it immediately found the best move (the queen sacrifice). I also added premoves so that I can choose my move in advance. I did this by just storing the move I make when it is the bot’s turn and playing it as soon as the bot plays. However I can only premove 1 move ahead. Next I will try to allow the user to premove multiple moves ahead."}, {"post_id": 52243, "ts": "2026-08-22T10:35:52Z", "hours": 2.8078, "text": "Quiescent search is amazing! After adding it my bot instantly became better. A quiescent search just means that when evaluating a board state to a certain depth even if you reach that depth you need to evaluate until a quiet move (a move that isn’t a capture). This means that even if the bot reaches the max depth in the middle of a piece trade it won’t just think the move is amazing since all it can see it won a piece. Since I added the bot, when tested against other bots it has made 0 blunders! In fact it beat Li, a bot rated 2000 on chess.com ! I’m really proud of this and think it is really cool to say that my bot has beaten a 2000 rated bot. However, it only beat the bot once and so it could just be lucky. I was going to test it in 2 more games against the same bot but found myself getting bored of manually inputting moves into chess.com and my bot to get them to play each other. Therefore, I’m planning on making my bot able to play other bots on its own. To do this I will need to download the other bots and make my bot give properly formatted inputs and outputs."}, {"post_id": 51300, "ts": "2026-08-20T21:17:05Z", "hours": 3.5539, "text": "Massive improvements in depth! I added 2 changes: null move pruning and late move reduction. Null move pruning is when the bot ‘passes its turn’, when searching for the best move. The bot then evaluates the board at a reduced depth after letting the opponent play twice in a row. If it is still in a winning position then that means it is winning by a lot. This means that it can prune this branch since the opponent wouldn’t let the game get to this state and would make a better decision earlier in the tree. Since the opponent wouldn’t let the game get to this it means that further analysis isn’t necessary. Late move reduction works on the basis that I have good move ordering, which I just worked on so I would hope I do. Late move reduction means that I search the later moves at a reduced depth since the best moves are at the start and so later moves are likely bad. If they turn out to be good after the reduced evaluation depth then they are researched at the full depth. This helps reduce the amount of moves which need to be evaluated by a lot. Together null move pruning and late move reduction have taken my depth from around 6 - 7 in midgame to around depth 7 - 10 in midgame! In endgame this is even more. When I tested it in endgame it got to a depth of 13! My next change is something called quiescent search which will boost the bot’s elo by massive amounts as it should mostly stop the bot from making blunders."}, {"post_id": 50191, "ts": "2026-08-19T10:05:52Z", "hours": 1.9161, "text": "Move ordering improved! I’ve merged my SCRUM-29/move-ordering branch with main and now have my improved move ordering in main. This has let me go from a depth of 5 to almost always a depth of at least 6. I then merged main into SCRUM-42/improve-maintainability so that I could add comments to the code I added from the move ordering branch. Next I am going to add some comments explaining what things do."}, {"post_id": 48364, "ts": "2026-08-16T17:56:17Z", "hours": 4.4589, "text": "I’ve massively improved my organisation! I’m now properly utilising branches which is allowing me to work on multiple changes at the same time. Currently I am working on 2 branches. One is about improving my maintainability by adding comments so that other people can understand what I am doing and why. This also has the added benefit of me being able to make some small improvements and bug fixes as I am reading through all of my code. The second branch is about move ordering which is super important as it makes my alpha beta pruning more effective. Working on these changes on branches is useful because it not only keeps it organised and easy to see what each commit is for but also means that if I decide I don’t want the change anymore it is easy to remove as it isn’t mixed in with all the other changes. To help with this I’ve also created a Jira board which helps me keep my ideas organised. My branches are called SCRUM-NUMBER/NAME . The scrum number is given to me by Jira. As well as improving my organisation I also further improved my zobrist hashing by replacing using modulo on the hash to get the index of the transposition with using an and gate between my hash and the table size - 1 (which is just all 1s and a single 0 on the left most digit since the table size is a power of 2). I also stored my castle rights as a single 4 digit binary digit where each digit represents whether a certain rook has castling rights or not. My logic with this was since the point of bitboards is 12 integer is better than 64 integers, a single 4 digit integer is better than a dictionary of 4 values but I am not actually sure if this is true or not. On the maintainability branch so far I have added comments to all of main.py . On the move ordering branch I have improved my sorting from just sorting by most valuable capture and least valuable attacker which is only good for captures to also scoring promotions very highly. I also instantly push the previous best move to the front of the queue and score moves which cutoff branches in alpha beta pruning highly as well. Next I will try to add comments to one of my other files and improve my move ordering by not using lambda functions."}, {"post_id": 47220, "ts": "2026-08-15T00:10:15Z", "hours": 4.5128, "text": "I’ve improved my endgame condition. When testing the bot I found that during endgame it would sometimes move its king to the corners of the board. I realised that this was because it saw a queen on the board and due to the poor endgame condition it thought this meant that it wasn’t endgame and instead used the early / mid game position bonus table which rewards staying safe in the corners. However in endgame moving the king to the corner isn’t good as it makes checkmates easier for the opponent and means that the king isn’t used to help checkmate the opponent, which is crucial in certain endgames such as a king and queen against just a king. In situations like this the king is necessary in achieving a checkmate. I changed it to being if there is less than (2 black queens and 2 white queens and less than 16 pieces) or if there is less than 5 pieces not including pawns. This is more accurate and ensures the king actually helps win and tries to stop a checkmate on itself. I also improved my zobrist hashing by fully incrementing it. Previously I incremented it for everything except castling and en passant however now these are implemented as well. I also noticed that the bot would walk its king towards the centre of the board during the opening which puzzled me until I read through my code and realised its because I set totalPieces to 0, asked if it was endgame, and afterwards set totalPieces to the true value. This was pretty difficult to find as I couldn’t see it by just seeing if it thought it was endgame at the end of a move. This makes sure I can actually get my hashes in O(1) time. Next I am going to try and make my arrows darker when over each other."}, {"post_id": 46626, "ts": "2026-08-14T00:35:40Z", "hours": 3.7133, "text": "I’ve added a better endgame condition! Now endgame is determined if (there are no queens and less than 16 pieces on the board) or if there is less than 8 pieces on the board. This is better because it means when pawns promote the king doesn’t run to the corners or use the other position bonus table. I also improved my bot’s 3 fold repetition check when searching for moves by using a dictionary with hashes as keys and number of times they have appeared as values. This lets me check if I have been in the position 3 times before in O(1) instead of O(n) . I also improved my makeMove() and previousMove() functions by checking if its the bot searching for moves and if it is then only storing the key information instead of everything. To help simplify previousMove() I instead created a seperate function called unmakeMove() (clearly related to makeMove() ) to undo moves when the bot is searching. I also changed the time the bot has to move from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds so that it feels snappier. Probably cos I have 0 patience when I want to test if the bot works :). Next I am going to try and make my bot faster by improving the move ordering so that alpha beta pruning can be more effective."}, {"post_id": 46469, "ts": "2026-08-13T18:10:03Z", "hours": 6.67, "text": "Iterative deepening! The bot now searches depths in an ascending order instead of descending. This is only possible thanks to my transposition tables but means that I can give the bot a time limit. Once the time limit is reached it just return the best move of the highest depth its fully searched. This means that I can search to different depths in different positions whilst making sure I always play within the time limit. This is good as it means I can have a high depth during the opening and endgame whilst having a medium depth during mid game instead of having a medium depth everywhere to ensure moves at midgame don’t take too long. Midgame usually has a lower depth due to the high number or possible moves that can be played. I can also easily change the time limit with just a single variable. This means I can get my bot to play faster but also worse or take longer but play better. I added incremental evaluation. This means that for each move, instead of looping through all 12 bitboards and recalculating the evaluation score from scratch I instead update it from the current evaluation score. So when I move a piece I subtract its old it’s material value and then add the material value if it still exists. The same happens for the position bonuses. This takes my time complexity from O(n) to O(1) which is a massive upgrade. These changes lets my depth in early game and endgame almost always stay at 7 whilst during midgame hover between depth 6 and depth 7. Currently I determine if I am in endgame if both queens are gone and the total amount of pieces is below 16 however I feel that this isn’t a good measure and I should improve this. Next I will try to improve efficiency by improving my move ordering so that the alpha beta pruning is more efficient."}, {"post_id": 45212, "ts": "2026-08-11T15:18:18Z", "hours": 7.8964, "text": "Transposition tables! I’ve added zobrist hashing so that I can create a dictionary that contains all of the board states I have already evaluated. Since many different moves can lead to the same position it means that I can save computing power by just getting the score of that board state instead of having to re-evaluate the board again. Zobrist hashes are just a way to represent the board in hash. This is useful as I can use them as the keys in my dictionary and quickly see if the current board state has been evaluated yet. I also fixed a bug that let the bot play illegal moves as there wasn’t a legality check after the aspiration window failed. An abort flag was also added that is set to True when the user undos or redos a move. This lets me instantly stop that thread’s search for the best move ensuring it doesn’t use unneccessary computing power. Next I am going to try and implement iterative deepening so that I can force the bot to move within a certain amount of time. This would let me make the bot play different ‘time controls’ by altering how long it has to think about what move it should play. I tested it against some bots from chess.com and it managed to beat Wally (a 1800 bot) but lost to Li (a 2000 bot)"}, {"post_id": 43276, "ts": "2026-08-08T13:19:50Z", "hours": 9.4272, "text": "Improved efficiency! I’ve improved the efficiency of the bot by sorting the possible moves better. This is useful as it means when the alpha beta pruning goes over everything it searches the best trees first. This means that it can prune more branches. I also removed some random integer conversions on my bitboards as they did nothing, since the bitboards are already integers. I also removed a restriction that didn’t let the player do anything on the bot’s turn. Now the player can draw during the bot’s turn. I also went across all of my code and changed it to use (row, column) instead of (column, row). This helps keep things cleaner. I then also changed the bot calculations from from using the fullyLegalMoves() function to the movementLegalMoves function(). fullyLegalMoves() just makes sure that the king isnt in check after the move. If it is then it undoes the move. By insteading doing this in my bot.py it means I can just not undo the move and immediately remove that move. This means that I don’t need to undo the move more times than needed. This is very helful as undoing a move takes up computing power. I also completely replaced the piece names with integers as this would be slightly better and I could use bit operations with integers. As well as this I also added a timer that shows how long the bot took to make its move. By adding all of these changes the bot reduced its time on the first move as white from ~4 seconds (with depth 4) to 3 seconds (with depth 5). This shows that it is much more efficient as, time taken increases exponentially as depth increases. As well as this 3 seconds is the earliest the bot can move and so the true speed is likely much less."}, {"post_id": 40993, "ts": "2026-08-04T21:24:23Z", "hours": 1.4964, "text": "Better arrows! I don’t remember where but there is one place where drawing arrows in a knights movement creates an L shaped arrow instead of just a normal arrow. I love this and so implemented it into my program. I also added aspiration windows. Aspiration windows work on the basis that moves don’t usually swing the score by a lot. This means that when going down paths we can set the lower and upper bounds to previous score ± window size. This helps prune more paths. If we find that the score is actually higher than we expect we search again but without the aspiration window. This helps remove lots of the obviously bad paths which makes the program much more efficient. Next I am going to add zobrist hashing so that I can use transposition tables."}, {"post_id": 40821, "ts": "2026-08-04T16:15:52Z", "hours": 2.5794, "text": "Colour randomisation! The colour you play as is chosen at random at the start of the game. The board is also automatically rotated so that you are at the bottom and the bot is at the top. This also helps to show which colour you are playing as. I also show the last move by making the starting square #97C997 and the ending square #8DCE8D. I did this as when I asked I watched someone play it I noticed that they would often undo the move, to see what the bot just did, then redo the move again. This helps make everything feel more polished. I like the ending square colour ( #8DCE8D ) but I’m not sure if I like the starting square colour ( #97C997 ). These colours are very easy to change though and so I can quickly edit them to test out different colours. I also realised that when I eventually ship the project most people who download it won’t have the font I use ( dynapuff ) installed. I tested it out to see what it is like without it and found that it crashed. To fix this, I implemented a try - except statement which sees if dynapuff exists on the user’s computer. If it does then it uses dynapuff which is how it is supposed to be played but if they don’t have the font it uses arial instead. Due to the strange spacing of dynapuff I used double spaces between the words on the game over messages, but when using arial the double spaces look quite strange. I also tweaked some of the position bonus values to further encourage castling. Next I am going to try to add a file to reward moves which keep keep the king safe."}, {"post_id": 40296, "ts": "2026-08-03T18:45:17Z", "hours": 10.2542, "text": "I’ve added position bonuses! I created a new file which rewards moves which place certain pieces in certain areas. For example pawns are rewarded for controlling the centre and pushing to the 7th rank (so that they can promote). The bot now tries to control squares and this means it now has proper openings. I also completely updated the file structure to split the responsibilities more clearly. I also updated main.py and logic.py and made them classes. Making logic.py a class means that I can use it for both the player actions and bot actions without them interfering. This also makes my previousMove() much cleaner as it means when the bot uses it, it doesn’t interfere with when the player uses it. Due to the new file structure it means that I can easily change the weights of each of the different modules to change how the bot plays easily. Later I will add a slider or at least a setting that lets the player control these modules. As well as this I also changed it so that drawing the same arrow again removes the arrow. Next I am going to try add another module that rewards moves which keep the king safe."}, {"post_id": 37668, "ts": "2026-07-30T15:47:33Z", "hours": 7.4286, "text": "I’ve added a bot! The main point of this was to link the new file I made ( bot.py ) to main.py . The bot currently just chooses moves based off of what would result in the best material difference between white (player) and black (bot). It calculates these moves with a depth of 4. Since the main point wasn’t to actually make a bot in one go the bot isn’t very good currently. However I still added alpha beta pruning. Alpha beta pruning works by storing the best guaranteed outcome for you (alpha) and the best guaranteed outcome for the opponent (beta). Whenever it finds a path where the opponent can force a move that is worse than the alpha, it immediately stops going down that path. The same happens for beta. I also removed some duplicated code in main.py and fixed the undo and redo move logic as I forgot to check if it still worked properly after switching from tkinter to pygame. Currently you can only tap the buttons and but can’t hold to go back multiple moves. Undoing and redoing moves with a bot was a bit confusing for me and so I decided to make it so that when undoing and redoing there is 3 seconds before the bot moves. During these 3 seconds you can go forwards or backwards to reset the timer. I used threading so that the bot starts to calculate what move it would make at the same time as the 3 seconds are passing. This means that if you decide to stay on the turn you don’t need to wait as long. I also blurred the background of the the promotion GUI so that it is grabs the players attention. Next I am going to try and add a better bot by assigning each possible move a score that is based off of the squares it controls, offensive and defensive opportunities and potentials for forks (when 2 pieces are being attacked by 1 piece so only one piece can move out of danger)."}, {"post_id": 36896, "ts": "2026-07-29T08:41:59Z", "hours": 1.9431, "text": "I’ve split my file into 5 now. There is moveGeneration.py which calculates all the legal moves, moveExecution.py which actually moves the pieces, updateBoard.py which updates the board, gui.py which handles graphics (like arrows, promotion page and clicks) and main.py which says what functions should happen when an input is given and has a while loop for while the game is running (as is needed by pygame). Splitting the file makes it much easier to debug, keep track and add features instead of just having one ~1000 line file where everything is jumbled up. Next I am going to start work on the actual bot."}, {"post_id": 36538, "ts": "2026-07-28T18:38:30Z", "hours": 1.1517, "text": "Insufficient material and 50 move rule! These were the last things I needed to add before step 1 was complete. Now the next step is to actually add the bot! I’ve got everything I need down for a game of chess before 2 players. I added insufficient material by creating a new insufficientMaterial() . Inside the function are some if statements that determine whether winning is still possible (not assisted by opponent going into the corner). I also added the 50 move rule by checking moves since last pawn advancement or capture and if it exceeds 50 then end the game. I also made it so that once the game ends you can go undo moves and continue playing instead of just having the game end. Next I am going to try to clean up my code, split the code into multiple files and optimise it."}, {"post_id": 36025, "ts": "2026-07-27T20:54:24Z", "hours": 1.3014, "text": "En passant has been added. I find if it is legal by making sure the pawn capturing is on its fifth rank and the pawn being captured is moved 2 forward. Thats all I need for en passant (also only available for the first go it is there). I also made my program more efficient by ensuring I only rely on an array for finding what piece is on an index and drawing. Everything else uses bitboards which helps me fully utilise bitboards. I now have 2 things left: 50 move rule and Insufficient Material. Both of these end in a draw and are the last things I need for my program to have all the rules of chess! Next I will add the 50 move rule"}, {"post_id": 34600, "ts": "2026-07-25T13:43:51Z", "hours": 2.65, "text": "I was so unimpressed by how my old arrows looked I just completely switched libraries! I now use pygame instead of tkinter. It offers much more graphical customisability and now I can draw arrows (and other shapes) with true transparency instead of just stipples. One of the main downsides of pygame is that it constantly redraws each frame. This takes computing power and drains battery. To stop this I created a redraw boolean which tells my script when to redraw. This means instead of redrawing every single frame I redraw whenever something actually changes. Due to pygame I also customised the arrows so that the tails are rounded. This means that multiple arrows from the same point looks much cleaner. I also get true translucency instead of stipples and I added an icon!"}, {"post_id": 34132, "ts": "2026-07-24T17:06:08Z", "hours": 4.1839, "text": "Need to get your strategies into something you can see? Lines let you do just that. Right clicking and dragging draws a line that follows your cursor around. Right clicking again places the line. The lines are automatically centred so that they snap to the centre of the squares. If you line starts and ends at the same place it creates a circle instead. I also spent lots of time making sure my bitboards are used properly as when I created the array last time I used it for more than I intended and lost most of the arrays of bitboards. I also noticed that the promotion GUI wasn’t properly centred and so fixed that. I don’t really like the lines as they use stipples instead of a solid colour and overall don’t look nice but tkinter doesn’t offer transparency apart from stipples and doesn’t allow lots of customisation of the arrows. Next I will likely try to add en passant."}, {"post_id": 33646, "ts": "2026-07-23T18:39:22Z", "hours": 4.0794, "text": "Finally, promotions! This was the last major part of chess that I didn’t have. I added it by finding the row of the piece when I move something. I hardcoded it so that it knows when the pawn is at the last row. When at the last row, it runs a choosePromotion() function. That function then creates a frame inside of my window. I then loop for each of the choices of the pieces I can choose. For each of these pieces I create a button with the piece (in the correct colour) in the centre. The frame waits until I pick a choice before adding a 1 on that piece’s bitboard at the correct location and removes the 1 on the pawn bitboard. Thats all I need to do to register a promotion! The rest of the time I spent optimising my code and realising that I didn’t have to use just a bitboard or an array, I could use both. Knowing that, I removed my getPiece() function and instead used an array to find the piece at a row and column. This is more efficient as arrays have a lookup time of O(1) whereas the getPiece() function has a lookup time of O(n) in the worst case. This is because my getPiece() function worked by cycling through each bitboard to find what piece was at a certain coordinate. This meant that I could also remove my totalPieces bitboard since this was only used in the getPiece() function to avoid cycling through all 12 bitboards if there was nothing there. Overall I’m really happy with how everything is going as I have all I really need for a proper game of 2 player chess. Next I am going to try and add the small things I am still missing such as En passant and the 50 move rule."}, {"post_id": 33388, "ts": "2026-07-23T09:22:55Z", "hours": 1.5583, "text": "Stalemates and three-fold repetition have now been added. Stalemates are calculated if legalMoves(turnColour) returns none but the king is not in check. I find if there is three-fold repetition by storing a hash of the board every move. This is stored in a dictionary as dictionaries are much better than arrays for lookups. After each move I see if that board state is in the dictionary. If it is I increase its value by 1. If not I set its value to 1. I then see how many times its reached that board state and if it is 3 times I end the game and show bright red text saying ‘Three-fold Repetition! Nobody wins!’. The hash includes piece positions, turn colour and castling rights as these are 3 of the 4 criteria that FIDE use. The fourth is en passant however that has not been added yet. Next I will add pawn promotions as this is the last major thing I don’t have."}, {"post_id": 33184, "ts": "2026-07-22T21:11:59Z", "hours": 2.3886, "text": "Castling! I’ve actually added castling this time. The castling also works with undo / redo move so that it undoes and redoes the move correctly. I’m starting to think my python file is getting a bit big now so I also created a few helper functions to help reduce code duplication. Its 572 lines currently. Luckily I am quite close to finishing the actual board and getting everything ready for a 2 person game of chess. This was my first goal so that the bot just becomes one of the players. Once I’m ready for a 2 person game of chess I’ll try to create another python file for the bot. This will help me keep track of what is doing what. Next I am going to add pawn promotion as that’s one of the biggest things that I don’t have yet. It is essential in late game and so is one of my priorities."}, {"post_id": 32902, "ts": "2026-07-22T11:18:43Z", "hours": 2.9108, "text": "Ever misclick and sell the game? Well not anymore! You can now undo moves by tapping the left arrow on the keybord and also redo those same moves if you change your mind by tapping the right arrow ! I did this by adding a saveMove() function which I run after every move I make. This saves the details of the last move to the moveHistory array: Piece Moved Start Position End Position Piece Captured (Just “” if None) Turn Colour Moves so far In my undoMove() function I remove the last move done and add it to an array called redoHistory . I then set all the details to the last entry in moveHistory . I do the same in my redoMove() function excpet I use the last entry in redoHistory instead. I’ve allowed undos after checkmate so that you can look for what went wrong and try other moves that might’ve stopped it. I also added sound! You’ll be able to see / hear all of this if the video uploads instead of just a screenshot. Next I am going to add castling (for real this time)."}, {"post_id": 32585, "ts": "2026-07-21T21:11:56Z", "hours": 2.6961, "text": "The game can now end! I have added a check to see if it is checkmate. When it is checkmate bright red text appears on the screen that says “Checkmate! WINNER wins!” (it says the colour which won not WINNER). I have also changed it so that when a player is in check they are forced to make a move that stops them from being in check. The only circles that come up are ones which would block the check to make it a bit easier for players. I’ve also made it so that my new function blockCheck() takes the calculations made by calculateLegalMoves() and uses it to display and allow only legal moves. As well as this anywhere that used to call calculateLegalMoves() now calls blockCheck instead. By making sure each function does 1 task it makes debugging easier ( not that anything would ever go wrong… ). Next I am going to try and add castling as this is a crucial mechanic that is used often."}, {"post_id": 32399, "ts": "2026-07-21T15:39:28Z", "hours": 2.8764, "text": "I’ve added better red and green overlays that are translucent so that you can see through them an easily know what piece you are taking. But most importantly, I’ve added check detection. I created a few new functions to do this. The first function I created was the isSquareAttacked(row, column, atkColour) function. It works by cycling through the bitboards and checking if they are atkColour or not. If they are find the type of piece and those pieces could attack the king. I think this will be helpful when I start to actually make the bot. I also created a simple findKing(colour) function to see where the king is so that I can parse that information into the isSquareAttacked() function. I then get a boolean. If it is true (the king is in check) I add the red overlay to the king so that the player easily knows they are in check but I don’t actually force them to block the attack yet. I think the overlay should be different but am not sure what to make it (gimme some ideas). I also created a slidingMoves() function as in my calculateLegalMoves() function I had ~40 lines of almost fully repeated code. Next I am going to force the player to block the check and end the game if it is checkmate."}, {"post_id": 32072, "ts": "2026-07-20T23:45:34Z", "hours": 0.9622, "text": "Finally took the time to change the piece textures so that black has an actual piece colour and you don’t get confused about whose pieces are whose"}, {"post_id": 31762, "ts": "2026-07-20T12:27:13Z", "hours": 3.4017, "text": "I’ve added dots to show where you can move when you click on a piece. If the position you want to move the piece to the dot is green but if it has an enemy piece the dot is red. Sadly, tkinter (the library I’m using) doesn’t support transparency. Because of this the dot takes up some of piece you want to capture. I can fix this by instead of drawing a circle drawing a translucent image… but tbh i rly cba. I will eventually do it to make it look better and actually add black pieces but i want to focus on getting things to actually work for now. The reason why this took me so long to implement is because as I was making the function to draw the dots I found that it was doing something very similar to my validMove() function but it was MUCH more efficient. In the old function I went through every square on the board and looked if the piece selected could get there. This is very inefficient and would build up quickly when I call the function 1000s of times per second (when I eventually add the bot). In my new function I look at the selected piece and have an array of each of the places it can move relative to its position. I then add the dots to those places if they are able to move there. This ended up with me just completely removing the old function and knowing its a valid move if there is a dot there. Next I am going to add something to see if the king is in check and maybe add some text when it is checkmate."}, {"post_id": 31082, "ts": "2026-07-19T06:07:07Z", "hours": 2.55, "text": "I’ve implemented bitboards instead of an array to store my board. At first I didn’t understand why bitboards were so good but after an amazing youtube video ( here ) I understand them and love them. I use them by having a 64 bit long integer (wow thats long) that represents the 8 by 8 board. Each bit can either be a 0 or 1 and represent whether there is a piece there or not. But you might think then how do you know what type of piece each 1 is? Thats why I use 12 bitboards (technically theres 1 more I added for extra efficiency but I don’t need that). Each of these 12 bitboards represents a type of piece in a specific colour (for example: white pawns and black pawns have 2 different bitboards). Then when I want to move pieces I create a position integer which is just 63 zeroes and a single 1 where the piece should be. I then invert this and use an AND statement so that all of the results for the AND are true where there are pieces apart from where I set the 1 at the start (though it is now a 0)."}, {"post_id": 30753, "ts": "2026-07-18T16:10:19Z", "hours": 3.6586, "text": "Added move legality. You can now mostly only make legal moves however I have not added something to checks if the king is in check. I made sure the move was legal by taking the startRow startColumn and endRow endColumn. I then look at what piece is being moved and ensure it is ok. If it isn’t nothing happens when you try to click and you have to make another move. I made sure that the correct colour moves as well. I also haven’t added pawn promotions, castling or en passant (tbh im not 100% certain on the rules of en passant). I couldn’t add castling as I don’t have a move history so would have no way of knowing if the king or rook have moved before. I’m now working on converting my current way of storing the board (a 2D array) into bitboards. After some research I found that bitboards are more than 5 times more efficient than arrays!"}, {"post_id": 30312, "ts": "2026-07-17T19:23:30Z", "hours": 2.0086, "text": "I can now move pieces! But there is no legality check yet. I also added a green outline if you select a piece. It works by listening for a click. Then when it gets a click it takes mouseX and mouseY and divides by positionSize to find which row and column it is on. It then checks against the board to see what is on that position. If it is a piece then it creates an outline and sets that as the active square. If it is empty AND active square has a value, it moves the piece."}, {"post_id": 30018, "ts": "2026-07-17T08:18:30Z", "hours": 1.4367, "text": "I’ve finally decided to actually making a chess bot and stick to it! So far I’ve set up the chess board for just visuals. Everything right now is purely visual. I am using python and the tkinter library."}]...
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Title: Chess Bot by @GunRattler28 | Stardance
Dev Title: Chess Bot by @GunRattler28 | Stardance
Devlogs:
I’ve finally decided to actually making a chess bot and stick to it! So far I’ve set up the chess board for just visuals. Everything right now is purely visual. I am using python and the tkinter library.
I can now move pieces! But there is no legality check yet. I also added a green outline if you select a piece. It works by listening for a click. Then when it gets a click it takes mouseX and mouseY and divides by positionSize to find which row and column it is on. It then checks against the board to see what is on that position. If it is a piece then it creates an outline and sets that as the active square. If it is empty AND active square has a value, it moves the piece.
Added move legality. You can now mostly only make legal moves however I have not added something to checks if the king is in check. I made sure the move was legal by taking the startRow startColumn and endRow endColumn. I then look at what piece is being moved and ensure it is ok. If it isn’t nothing happens when you try to click and you have to make another move. I made sure that the correct colour moves as well. I also haven’t added pawn promotions, castling or en passant (tbh im not 100% certain on the rules of en passant). I couldn’t add castling as I don’t have a move history so would have no way of knowing if the king or rook have moved before. I’m now working on converting my current way of storing the board (a 2D array) into bitboards. After some research I found that bitboards are more than 5 times more efficient than arrays!
I’ve implemented bitboards instead of an array to store my board. At first I didn’t understand why bitboards were so good but after an amazing youtube video ( here ) I understand them and love them. I use them by having a 64 bit long integer (wow thats long) that represents the 8 by 8 board. Each bit can either be a 0 or 1 and represent whether there is a piece there or not. But you might think then how do you know what type of piece each 1 is? Thats why I use 12 bitboards (technically theres 1 more I added for extra efficiency but I don’t need that). Each of these 12 bitboards represents a type of piece in a specific colour (for example: white pawns and black pawns have 2 different bitboards). Then when I want to move pieces I create a position integer which is just 63 zeroes and a single 1 where the piece should be. I then invert this and use an AND statement so that all of the results for the AND are true where there are pieces apart from where I set the 1 at the start (though it is now a 0).
I’ve added dots to show where you can move when you click on a piece. If the position you want to move the piece to the dot is green but if it has an enemy piece the dot is red. Sadly, tkinter (the library I’m using) doesn’t support transparency. Because of this the dot takes up some of piece you want to capture. I can fix this by instead of drawing a circle drawing a translucent image… but tbh i rly cba. I will eventually do it to make it look better and actually add black pieces but i want to focus on getting things to actually work for now. The reason why this took me so long to implement is because as I was making the function to draw the dots I found that it was doing something very similar to my validMove() function but it was MUCH more efficient. In the old function I went through every square on the board and looked if the piece selected could get there. This is very inefficient and would build up quickly when I call the function 1000s of times per second (when I eventually add the bot). In my new function I look at the selected piece and have an array of each of the places it can move relative to its position. I then add the dots to those places if they are able to move there. This ended up with me just completely removing the old function and knowing its a valid move if there is a dot there. Next I am going to add something to see if the king is in check and maybe add some text when it is checkmate.
Finally took the time to change the piece textures so that black has an actual piece colour and you don’t get confused about whose pieces are whose
I’ve added better red and green overlays that are translucent so that you can see through them an easily know what piece you are taking. But most importantly, I’ve added check detection. I created a few new functions to do this. The first function I created was the isSquareAttacked(row, column, atkColour) function. It works by cycling through the bitboards and checking if they are atkColour or not. If they are find the type of piece and those pieces could attack the king. I think this will be helpful when I start to actually make the bot. I also created a simple findKing(colour) function to see where the king is so that I can parse that information into the isSquareAttacked() function. I then get a boolean. If it is true (the king is in check) I add the red overlay to the king so that the player easily knows they are in check but I don’t actually force them to block the attack yet. I think the overlay should be different but am not sure what to make it (gimme some ideas). I also created a slidingMoves() function as in my calculateLegalMoves() function I had ~40 lines of almost fully repeated code. Next I am going to force the player to block the check and end the game if it is checkmate.
The game can now end! I have added a check to see if it is checkmate. When it is checkmate bright red text appears on the screen that says “Checkmate! WINNER wins!” (it says the colour which won not WINNER). I have also changed it so that when a player is in check they are forced to make a move that stops them from being in check. The only circles that come up are ones which would block the check to make it a bit easier for players. I’ve also made it so that my new function blockCheck() takes the calculations made by calculateLegalMoves() and uses it to display and allow only legal moves. As well as this anywhere that used to call calculateLegalMoves() now calls blockCheck instead. By making sure each function does 1 task it makes debugging easier ( not that anything would ever go wrong… ). Next I am going to try and add castling as this is a crucial mechanic that is used often.
Ever misclick and sell the game? Well not anymore! You can now undo moves by tapping the left arrow on the keybord and also redo those same moves if you change your mind by tapping the right arrow ! I did this by adding a saveMove() function which I run after every move I make. This saves the details of the last move to the moveHistory array: Piece Moved Start Position End Position Piece Captured (Just “” if None) Turn Colour Moves so far In my undoMove() function I remove the last move done and add it to an array called redoHistory . I then set all the details to the last entry in moveHistory . I do the same in my redoMove() function excpet I use the last entry in redoHistory instead. I’ve allowed undos after checkmate so that you can look for what went wrong and try other moves that might’ve stopped it. I also added sound! You’ll be able to see / hear all of this if the video uploads instead of just a screenshot. Next I am going to add castling (for real this time).
Castling! I’ve actually added castling this time. The castling also works with undo / redo move so that it undoes and redoes the move correctly. I’m starting to think my python file is getting a bit big now so I also created a few helper functions to help reduce code duplication. Its 572 lines currently. Luckily I am quite close to finishing the actual board and getting everything ready for a 2 person game of chess. This was my first goal so that the bot just becomes one of the players. Once I’m ready for a 2 person game of chess I’ll try to create another python file for the bot. This will help me keep track of what is doing what. Next I am going to add pawn promotion as that’s one of the biggest things that I don’t have yet. It is essential in late game and so is one of my priorities.
Stalemates and three-fold repetition have now been added. Stalemates are calculated if legalMoves(turnColour) returns none but the king is not in check. I find if there is three-fold repetition by storing a hash of the board every move. This is stored in a dictionary as dictionaries are much better than arrays for lookups. After each move I see if that board state is in the dictionary. If it is I increase its value by 1. If not I set its value to 1. I then see how many times its reached that board state and if it is 3 times I end the game and show bright red text saying ‘Three-fold Repetition! Nobody wins!’. The hash includes piece positions, turn colour and castling rights as these are 3 of the 4 criteria that FIDE use. The fourth is en passant however that has not been added yet. Next I will add pawn promotions as this is the last major thing I don’t have.
Finally, promotions! This was the last major part of chess that I didn’t have. I added it by finding the row of the piece when I move something. I hardcoded it so that it knows when the pawn is at the last row. When at the last row, it runs a choosePromotion() function. That function then creates a frame inside of my window. I then loop for each of the choices of the pieces I can choose. For each of these pieces I create a button with the piece (in the correct colour) in the centre. The frame waits until I pick a choice before adding a 1 on that piece’s bitboard at the correct location and removes the 1 on the pawn bitboard. Thats all I need to do to register a promotion! The rest of the time I spent optimising my code and realising that I didn’t have to use just a bitboard or an array, I could use both. Knowing that, I removed my getPiece() function and instead used an array to find the piece at a row and column. This is more efficient as arrays have a lookup time of O(1) whereas the getPiece() function has a lookup time of O(n) in the worst case. This is because my getPiece() function worked by cycling through each bitboard to find what piece was at a certain coordinate. This meant that I could also remove my totalPieces bitboard since this was only used in the getPiece() function to avoid cycling through all 12 bitboards if there was nothing there. Overall I’m really happy with how everything is going as I have all I really need for a proper game of 2 player chess. Next I am going to try and add the small things I am still missing such as En passant and the 50 move rule.
Need to get your strategies into something you can see? Lines let you do just that. Right clicking and dragging draws a line that follows your cursor around. Right clicking again places the line. The lines are automatically centred so that they snap to the centre of the squares. If you line starts and ends at the same place it creates a circle instead. I also spent lots of time making sure my bitboards are used properly as when I created the array last time I used it for more than I intended and lost most of the arrays of bitboards. I also noticed that the promotion GUI wasn’t properly centred and so fixed that. I don’t really like the lines as they use stipples instead of a solid colour and overall don’t look nice but tkinter doesn’t offer transparency apart from stipples and doesn’t allow lots of customisation of the arrows. Next I will likely try to add en passant.
I was so unimpressed by how my old arrows looked I just completely switched libraries! I now use pygame instead of tkinter. It offers much more graphical customisability and now I can draw arrows (and other shapes) with true transparency instead of just stipples. One of the main downsides of pygame is that it constantly redraws each frame. This takes computing power and drains battery. To stop this I created a redraw boolean which tells my script when to redraw. This means instead of redrawing every single frame I redraw whenever something actually changes. Due to pygame I also customised the arrows so that the tails are rounded. This means that multiple arrows from the same point looks much cleaner. I also get true translucency instead of stipples and I added an icon!
En passant has been added. I find if it is legal by making sure the pawn capturing is on its fifth rank and the pawn being captured is moved 2 forward. Thats all I need for en passant (also only available for the first go it is there). I also made my program more efficient by ensuring I only rely on an array for finding what piece is on an index and drawing. Everything else uses bitboards which helps me fully utilise bitboards. I now have 2 things left: 50 move rule and Insufficient Material. Both of these end in a draw and are the last things I need for my program to have all the rules of chess! Next I will add the 50 move rule
Insufficient material and 50 move rule! These were the last things I needed to add before step 1 was complete. Now the next step is to actually add the bot! I’ve got everything I need down for a game of chess before 2 players. I added insufficient material by creating a new insufficientMaterial() . Inside the function are some if statements that determine whether winning is still possible (not assisted by opponent going into the corner). I also added the 50 move rule by checking moves since last pawn advancement or capture and if it exceeds 50 then end the game. I also made it so that once the game ends you can go undo moves and continue playing instead of just having the game end. Next I am going to try to clean up my code, split the code into multiple files and optimise it.
I’ve split my file into 5 now. There is moveGeneration.py which calculates all the legal moves, moveExecution.py which actually moves the pieces, updateBoard.py which updates the board, gui.py which handles graphics (like arrows, promotion page and clicks) and main.py which says what functions should happen when an input is given and has a while loop for while the game is running (as is needed by pygame). Splitting the file makes it much easier to debug, keep track and add features instead of just having one ~1000 line file where everything is jumbled up. Next I am going to start work on the actual bot.
I’ve added a bot! The main point of this was to link the new file I made ( bot.py ) to main.py . The bot currently just chooses moves based off of what would result in the best material difference between white (player) and black (bot). It calculates these moves with a depth of 4. Since the main point wasn’t to actually make a bot in one go the bot isn’t very good currently. However I still added alpha beta pruning. Alpha beta pruning works by storing the best guaranteed outcome for you (alpha) and the best guaranteed outcome for the opponent (beta). Whenever it finds a path where the opponent can force a move that is worse than the alpha, it immediately stops going down that path. The same happens for beta. I also removed some duplicated code in main.py and fixed the undo and redo move logic as I forgot to check if it still worked properly after switching from tkinter to pygame. Currently you can only tap the buttons and but can’t hold to go back multiple moves. Undoing and redoing moves with a bot was a bit confusing for me and so I decided to make it so that when undoing and redoing there is 3 seconds before the bot moves. During these 3 seconds you can go forwards or backwards to reset the timer. I used threading so that the bot starts to calculate what move it would make at the same time as the 3 seconds are passing. This means that if you decide to stay on the turn you don’t need to wait as long. I also blurred the background of the the promotion GUI so that it is grabs the players attention. Next I am going to try and add a better bot by assigning each possible move a score that is based off of the squares it controls, offensive and defensive opportunities and potentials for forks (when 2 pieces are being attacked by 1 piece so only one piece can move out of danger).
I’ve added position bonuses! I created a new file which rewards moves which place certain pieces in certain areas. For example pawns are rewarded for controlling the centre and pushing to the 7th rank (so that they can promote). The bot now tries to control squares and this means it now has proper openings. I also completely updated the file structure to split the responsibilities more clearly. I also updated main.py and logic.py and made them classes. Making logic.py a class means that I can use it for both the player actions and bot actions without them interfering. This also makes my previousMove() much cleaner as it means when the bot uses it, it doesn’t interfere with when the player uses it. Due to the new file structure it means that I can easily change the weights of each of the different modules to change how the bot plays easily. Later I will add a slider or at least a setting that lets the player control these modules. As well as this I also changed it so that drawing the same arrow again removes the arrow. Next I am going to try add another module that rewards moves which keep the king safe.
Colour randomisation! The colour you play as is chosen at random at the start of the game. The board is also automatically rotated so that you are at the bottom and the bot is at the top. This also helps to show which colour you are playing as. I also show the last move by making the starting square #97C997 and the ending square #8DCE8D. I did this as when I asked I watched someone play it I noticed that they would often undo the move, to see what the bot just did, then redo the move again. This helps make everything feel more polished. I like the ending square colour ( #8DCE8D ) but I’m not sure if I like the starting square colour ( #97C997 ). These colours are very easy to change though and so I can quickly edit them to test out different colours. I also realised that when I eventually ship the project most people who download it won’t have the font I use ( dynapuff ) installed. I tested it out to see what it is like without it and found that it crashed. To fix this, I implemented a try - except statement which sees if dynapuff exists on the user’s computer. If it does then it uses dynapuff which is how it is supposed to be played but if they don’t have the font it uses arial instead. Due to the strange spacing of dynapuff I used double spaces between the words on the game over messages, but when using arial the double spaces look quite strange. I also tweaked some of the position bonus values to further encourage castling. Next I am going to try to add a file to reward moves which keep keep the king safe.
Better arrows! I don’t remember where but there is one place where drawing arrows in a knights movement creates an L shaped arrow instead of just a normal arrow. I love this and so implemented it into my program. I also added aspiration windows. Aspiration windows work on the basis that moves don’t usually swing the score by a lot. This means that when going down paths we can set the lower and upper bounds to previous score ± window size. This helps prune more paths. If we find that the score is actually higher than we expect we search again but without the aspiration window. This helps remove lots of the obviously bad paths which makes the program much more efficient. Next I am going to add zobrist hashing so that I can use transposition tables.
Improved efficiency! I’ve improved the efficiency of the bot by sorting the possible moves better. This is useful as it means when the alpha beta pruning goes over everything it searches the best trees first. This means that it can prune more branches. I also removed some random integer conversions on my bitboards as they did nothing, since the bitboards are already integers. I also removed a restriction that didn’t let the player do anything on the bot’s turn. Now the player can draw during the bot’s turn. I also went across all of my code and changed it to use (row, column) instead of (column, row). This helps keep things cleaner. I then also changed the bot calculations from from using the fullyLegalMoves() function to the movementLegalMoves function(). fullyLegalMoves() just makes sure that the king isnt in check after the move. If it is then it undoes the move. By insteading doing this in my bot.py it means I can just not undo the move and immediately remove that move. This means that I don’t need to undo the move more times than needed. This is very helful as undoing a move takes up computing power. I also completely replaced the piece names with integers as this would be slightly better and I could use bit operations with integers. As well as this I also added a timer that shows how long the bot took to make its move. By adding all of these changes the bot reduced its time on the first move as white from ~4 seconds (with depth 4) to 3 seconds (with depth 5). This shows that it is much more efficient as, time taken increases exponentially as depth increases. As well as this 3 seconds is the earliest the bot can move and so the true speed is likely much less.
Transposition tables! I’ve added zobrist hashing so that I can create a dictionary that contains all of the board states I have already evaluated. Since many different moves can lead to the same position it means that I can save computing power by just getting the score of that board state instead of having to re-evaluate the board again. Zobrist hashes are just a way to represent the board in hash. This is useful as I can use them as the keys in my dictionary and quickly see if the current board state has been evaluated yet. I also fixed a bug that let the bot play illegal moves as there wasn’t a legality check after the aspiration window failed. An abort flag was also added that is set to True when the user undos or redos a move. This lets me instantly stop that thread’s search for the best move ensuring it doesn’t use unneccessary computing power. Next I am going to try and implement iterative deepening so that I can force the bot to move within a certain amount of time. This would let me make the bot play different ‘time controls’ by altering how long it has to think about what move it should play. I tested it against some bots from chess.com and it managed to beat Wally (a 1800 bot) but lost to Li (a 2000 bot)
Iterative deepening! The bot now searches depths in an ascending order instead of descending. This is only possible thanks to my transposition tables but means that I can give the bot a time limit. Once the time limit is reached it just return the best move of the highest depth its fully searched. This means that I can search to different depths in different positions whilst making sure I always play within the time limit. This is good as it means I can have a high depth during the opening and endgame whilst having a medium depth during mid game instead of having a medium depth everywhere to ensure moves at midgame don’t take too long. Midgame usually has a lower depth due to the high number or possible moves that can be played. I can also easily change the time limit with just a single variable. This means I can get my bot to play faster but also worse or take longer but play better. I added incremental evaluation. This means that for each move, instead of looping through all 12 bitboards and recalculating the evaluation score from scratch I instead update it from the current evaluation score. So when I move a piece I subtract its old it’s material value and then add the material value if it still exists. The same happens for the position bonuses. This takes my time complexity from O(n) to O(1) which is a massive upgrade. These changes lets my depth in early game and endgame almost always stay at 7 whilst during midgame hover between depth 6 and depth 7. Currently I determine if I am in endgame if both queens are gone and the total amount of pieces is below 16 however I feel that this isn’t a good measure and I should improve this. Next I will try to improve efficiency by improving my move ordering so that the alpha beta pruning is more efficient.
I’ve added a better endgame condition! Now endgame is determined if (there are no queens and less than 16 pieces on the board) or if there is less than 8 pieces on the board. This is better because it means when pawns promote the king doesn’t run to the corners or use the other position bonus table. I also improved my bot’s 3 fold repetition check when searching for moves by using a dictionary with hashes as keys and number of times they have appeared as values. This lets me check if I have been in the position 3 times before in O(1) instead of O(n) . I also improved my makeMove() and previousMove() functions by checking if its the bot searching for moves and if it is then only storing the key information instead of everything. To help simplify previousMove() I instead created a seperate function called unmakeMove() (clearly related to makeMove() ) to undo moves when the bot is searching. I also changed the time the bot has to move from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds so that it feels snappier. Probably cos I have 0 patience when I want to test if the bot works :). Next I am going to try and make my bot faster by improving the move ordering so that alpha beta pruning can be more effective.
I’ve improved my endgame condition. When testing the bot I found that during endgame it would sometimes move its king to the corners of the board. I realised that this was because it saw a queen on the board and due to the poor endgame condition it thought this meant that it wasn’t endgame and instead used the early / mid game position bonus table which rewards staying safe in the corners. However in endgame moving the king to the corner isn’t good as it makes checkmates easier for the opponent and means that the king isn’t used to help checkmate the opponent, which is crucial in certain endgames such as a king and queen against just a king. In situations like this the king is necessary in achieving a checkmate. I changed it to being if there is less than (2 black queens and 2 white queens and less than 16 pieces) or if there is less than 5 pieces not including pawns. This is more accurate and ensures the king actually helps win and tries to stop a checkmate on itself. I also improved my zobrist hashing by fully incrementing it. Previously I incremented it for everything except castling and en passant however now these are implemented as well. I also noticed that the bot would walk its king towards the centre of the board during the opening which puzzled me until I read through my code and realised its because I set totalPieces to 0, asked if it was endgame, and afterwards set totalPieces to the true value. This was pretty difficult to find as I couldn’t see it by just seeing if it thought it was endgame at the end of a move. This makes sure I can actually get my hashes in O(1) time. Next I am going to try and make my arrows darker when over each other.
I’ve massively improved my organisation! I’m now properly utilising branches which is allowing me to work on multiple changes at the same time. Currently I am working on 2 branches. One is about improving my maintainability by adding comments so that other people can understand what I am doing and why. This also has the added benefit of me being able to make some small improvements and bug fixes as I am reading through all of my code. The second branch is about move ordering which is super important as it makes my alpha beta pruning more effective. Working on these changes on branches is useful because it not only keeps it organised and easy to see what each commit is for but also means that if I decide I don’t want the change anymore it is easy to remove as it isn’t mixed in with all the other changes. To help with this I’ve also created a Jira board which helps me keep my ideas organised. My branches are called SCRUM-NUMBER/NAME . The scrum number is given to me by Jira. As well as improving my organisation I also further improved my zobrist hashing by replacing using modulo on the hash to get the index of the transposition with using an and gate between my hash and the table size - 1 (which is just all 1s and a single 0 on the left most digit since the table size is a power of 2). I also stored my castle rights as a single 4 digit binary digit where each digit represents whether a certain rook has castling rights or not. My logic with this was since the point of bitboards is 12 integer is better than 64 integers, a single 4 digit integer is better than a dictionary of 4 values but I am not actually sure if this is true or not. On the maintainability branch so far I have added comments to all of main.py . On the move ordering branch I have improved my sorting from just sorting by most valuable capture and least valuable attacker which is only good for captures to also scoring promotions very highly. I also instantly push the previous best move to the front of the queue and score moves which cutoff branches in alpha beta pruning highly as well. Next I will try to add comments to one of my other files and improve my move ordering by not using lambda functions.
Move ordering improved! I’ve merged my SCRUM-29/move-ordering branch with main and now have my improved move ordering in main. This has let me go from a depth of 5 to almost always a depth of at least 6. I then merged main into SCRUM-42/improve-maintainability so that I could add comments to the code I added from the move ordering branch. Next I am going to add some comments explaining what things do.
Massive improvements in depth! I added 2 changes: null move pruning and late move reduction. Null move pruning is when the bot ‘passes its turn’, when searching for the best move. The bot then evaluates the board at a reduced depth after letting the opponent play twice in a row. If it is still in a winning position then that means it is winning by a lot. This means that it can prune this branch since the opponent wouldn’t let the game get to this state and would make a better decision earlier in the tree. Since the opponent wouldn’t let the game get to this it means that further analysis isn’t necessary. Late move reduction works on the basis that I have good move ordering, which I just worked on so I would hope I do. Late move reduction means that I search the later moves at a reduced depth since the best moves are at the start and so later moves are likely bad. If they turn out to be good after the reduced evaluation depth then they are researched at the full depth. This helps reduce the amount of moves which need to be evaluated by a lot. Together null move pruning and late move reduction have taken my depth from around 6 - 7 in midgame to around depth 7 - 10 in midgame! In endgame this is even more. When I tested it in endgame it got to a depth of 13! My next change is something called quiescent search which will boost the bot’s elo by massive amounts as it should mostly stop the bot from making blunders.
Quiescent search is amazing! After adding it my bot instantly became better. A quiescent search just means that when evaluating a board state to a certain depth even if you reach that depth you need to evaluate until a quiet move (a move that isn’t a capture). This means that even if the bot reaches the max depth in the middle of a piece trade it won’t just think the move is amazing since all it can see it won a piece. Since I added the bot, when tested against other bots it has made 0 blunders! In fact it beat Li, a bot rated 2000 on chess.com ! I’m really proud of this and think it is really cool to say that my bot has beaten a 2000 rated bot. However, it only beat the bot once and so it could just be lucky. I was going to test it in 2 more games against the same bot but found myself getting bored of manually inputting moves into chess.com and my bot to get them to play each other. Therefore, I’m planning on making my bot able to play other bots on its own. To do this I will need to download the other bots and make my bot give properly formatted inputs and outputs.
I’ve added FEN strings! FEN strings (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) are a way to store positions of chess games. They are used by many chess engines to allow players to start from different positions or midway through games. Adding these wasn’t too difficult as the strings are formatted in a nice way. I simply split up the FEN string into its 6 parts and set my variables to the value in the FEN string. To test if it worked I inputted the FEN string 4kb1r/p2n1ppp/4q3/4p1B1/4P3/1Q6/PPP2PPP/2KR4 w k - 1 16 which gives the position of the famous opera game directly before the queen sacrifice. I then set the bot colour to white and was glad to see that it immediately found the best move (the queen sacrifice). I also added premoves so that I can choose my move in advance. I did this by just storing the move I make when it is the bot’s turn and playing it as soon as the bot plays. However I can only premove 1 move ahead. Next I will try to allow the user to premove multiple moves ahead.
Way better premoves. I’ve updated my premove system to store multiple premoves. I did this by storing eaach premove as a tuple of ( startRow , startColumn , endRow , endColumn ). These tuples contain all the data I need to know and can be easily appended into an array. To clear a premove you can either do the same move again which removes that specific premove or tap the middle mouse button anywhere which clears all premoves and arrows. I also render a translucent version of the piece that I’ve moved to its premove destination and remove the texture for where it was originally. This helps you keep track of what your premoves are actually doing. I do this by drawing the board normally then looping through each move in the premoves array and drawing that piece at its correct destination in reduced alpha. Next I am going to try to improve my bot further so that I can push to a depth of around 10 during midgame.
Premoves finished! My premoves are now fully implemented and the branch is merged. Making the move with middle click removes that specific premove. Middle clicking a random square clears all premoves and arrows. I also added principal variation search (pvs) which is just searching moves that aren’t the previous best move with a tight move score boundary then researching them normally if they are better than expected. I am probably going to ship soon and so will start polishing the project up now.
I’ve made a few small changes that help slightly speed the bot up. I stopped checking whether I have surpassed the time limit every move I search and instead every 2048 moves I search. This is better as it removes thousands of unnecessary library calls which each add a small amount of time to how long each move takes to search. Since computers are very fast 2048 doesn’t actually take long at all but it massively reduces the amount of times the pygame library is called. I also changed my move ordering to sort manually instead of with in a lambda function since this lambda functions are more inefficient. I am next going to ship the project!!!
Thanks for all the positive feedback and constructive criticism on my ship! Working to improve where people said and I am starting by trying to add comments to my code to explain what is happening. So far I’ve fully commented 3 / 7 files and am around 30% through commenting logic.py which contains most of the complicated code. Its taking a while but I really hope that this will help people understand what I am doing and that they will like my project more because of this. Next I am going to continue adding comments to logic.py and will probably have to make a devlog after just that since the file is pretty big and has slightly complicated stuff in it. Once again thanks to all the people who rated the project or gave feedback!
Yup! I did what I said I would last time, and finished commenting ALL of logic.py . I don’t think I can describe how long this took and how annoying it was to have to go through 750+ lines of code and add comments explaining things. And then I realise that there’s just random stuff that I don’t even need. Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied that I managed to comment so much. This is definitely the largest file and so I’m happy I’ve gotten it out of the way. There’s not really much I can’t say like explaining and stuff because all I’ve done for the last 5 hours is explain stuff. Anyway once I’ve commented everything, I’ll probably make another devlog and then go and work on something else.
I started getting bored of just commenting my code so I created a new branch in which I am trying to make my bot be able to play other bots. After some research, I found that the engine needs to be able to take in moves in the form of algebraic notation (a type of shorthand notation for moves. for example: Be4). Because of this I read a Wikipedia page on algebraic notation and made a function to convert between it and the parameters my makeMove() takes, that being: startRow , startColumn , endRow and endColumn . I have done this by first checking if the move is a castle (notated by O-O or O-O-O) then forming the full start and end coordinates by hardcoding the column values and finding the row based off the colour that is castling. Then I find what piece is moving (shown by the first letter) and if there is a promotion (shown by ‘=’ sign). Algebraic also has characters to show captures (x), checkmates (#) and checks (+), however the engine does not need these and so they are removed in 3 separate while loops. At this point I am left with just the end coordinates and maybe a combination of start coordinates. To find the full start coordinates (as they are all I am missing) I loop through the specific bitboard for the piece and whenever I find a square where there is a piece, I check whether it matches with the start coordinates I have, and if it does whether it can legally reach the end square. If it can then that is my piece and I return its start coordinates and the end coordinates it moves to (which is given in the input string). Currently, this function lives inside a random file in my project folder but my next step will be to properly integrate it into the rest of the code.
So, I’ve actually decided to work on making my bot playable on a website since that was one of the main things people said they would have wanted last ship and stardance is ending soon. But thats not why I’m posting. I’m posting because I spent the last 40 minutes rooting out a bug that caused my premoves to not be played. My first step was playing the release version that can be downloaded to see if the bug was there as well. Luckily it wasn’t so I went to my current commit on my main branch and kepy undoing commits (and saving them with git stash ) until the bug was gone. I then found that the bug only became a thing after I merged my commenting branch. Because of this I did the same thing of undoing commits and saving them on the commenting branch til I found the commit that caused the bug. I then went through all the changes until I found the problem. Then I fixed the bug, merged the fix to main then merged main into my other branches so that they would have the bug fix as well. I’ve already done some research and have found that pygbag seems to fit my needs for turning my pygame program into a website pretty well. Due to this I will probably use pygbag to get a website version of my chess bot up and running! Attached is a screenshot of the commit that caused the bug. Before the commit is on the left and after the commit is on the right. Try to find what caused the bug! If you can’t check the comments of the post as I am gonna say what the problem was there. I also attached a photo of how my git tree looks now and… it looks sooo messy lol.
Ships:
I’m finally shipping the chess bot! So excited to see what people think of it :) . Before you try my project I highly suggest reading the README (on my github page https://github.com/GunRattler28/Chess-Bot ). It has a full list of all controls which will help you understand how to play. Anways, can’t wait to see what you guys think of it!...
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