capncleaver

Awww I am sorry your piratey romance didn’t work out, people can definitely turn out to be different from their pirates, but I hope Puzzle Pirates (my game) was overall a positive experience for you. It’s nice to see it mentioned on HN. It’s still online today with a crew of quite salty pirates ;)

The aside about mailing lists is well made: with the exception of SMS, email is the one method of customer contact not mediated by big tech networks (save arguably Gmail) and portable across service providers. In games it’s the best way to keep in touch with players, much better than discord where the dots accumulate and most members ignore most server updates and notifs.

Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.

Surely! Too perfect to be accidental.

Context: Charles Stross 2005 book Accelerando features simulated Lobsters that achieve consciousness and, with the help of the central character, escape their Russian servers for the cosmos.

This is my earliest memory. When I was two, and did not yet know how to swim, I was visiting with family who had a place right on the river Thames near Henley. I was running around with my seven cousins, but I was the youngest and at some point found myself alone. I wandered out onto the towpath beside the river, where they had a small jetty.

Earlier an older cousin had been out in the canoe and it looked easy enough. I put one foot in and realised my error immediately, toppling into the water. I remember clearly the water bubbles going by and thinking 'Oh dear, my mum is going to be so angry about this.' I came back up and saw a couple now running up along the path -- they had seen me go in.

I don't remember anything else. I'm told the man fished me out and then there was a great kerfuffle as I was hung upside-down and coughed a bit. My cousins got a massive earful from my mother, who was furious with the eldest in particular for losing track of me. My father taught me to swim.

The man was thanked profusely, but we don't know his name. I hope he had a wonderful life and I'm grateful for mine.

Yes. See 'Thinking in Bets' by Annie Duke for a good summary of why Poker is interesting / useful. World is Casino!

Blood on the Clocktower is great! My 15yo son is always trying to get a group of 8+ together for a game.

Came here to recommend Skull, a quick and easy to learn bluffing game, of which the designer said he was aiming for 'the feelings of poker without the money or luck' and I would say succeeded.

If you have not, do read Cory Doctorow's 'The Lost Cause': it features a rebuild like this (no robots tho iirc.) You might like his mid-singularity novel Walkaway, too :)

This looks like a great tool and sort of makes me wish I was starting a new game rather than hand-knitting more cruft into our homemade backend. Kudos for open-sourcing it with a proper license.

My lad has been learning Python in Replit. It looks like they are trying to introduce community feedback loops.

For making games, Roblox is perhaps a good choice. You can post a modded example game and get your friends playing it very quickly, then iterate rapidly.