carlnewton

I've just moved away from hosting on AWS to buying a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060 and installing docker compose on it. Traffic comes in using a cloudflare tunnel. The only costs are electricity (it's very low power and virtually silent) and the domain (if you need one), and I'm thrilled with it.

I enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke the most this year. It has wonderful world building that was reminiscent of The Library of Babel. I'm currently really enjoying We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. So far it's a very fun spacefaring adventure.

Every time I see a title like this, I ask myself if I'm not being open enough, if my biases are interfering with any potential progress I could be making when it comes to utilising AI. Then I find out that the content is just more slop and it further solidifies my position on all of this. What a waste of energy. It really saddens me.

Yeah I think established Facebook groups are probably the biggest hurdle. To me, the benefits of not using Facebook are self evident, but a lot of people don't know about the issues around that or don't care. I think creating features that can't be achieved on Facebook could help. Outside of that, I think it's just a matter of providing meaningful content yourself. For Plantshare, I imagine it would be beneficial to be close to you because you, the developer of the app, presumably have a wide variety of plants because that's your interest. And if it's a success for you and your local community, you've succeeded, and any other pockets of success are a bonus. This is at least the way I'm looking at my project here. I still do intend to continue to work on the open source side of things though of course.

For some reason I've been really enjoying stories with endless and well described repeating rooms. Borges' Library of Babel got me started, I have just finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi - which was so wonderfully described, I don't know if I'll find anything to beat it. I'm now on A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, which outright mentions Borges' novel. If anyone has any similar recommendations I'd love to hear them.

Since writing this comment I've given it some more thought and decided that I wasn't being constructive enough, so here's something a bit more positive:

Given the issue described above, if we were to add a translation task to the player, this would feel more like a puzzle. For instance, if instead of a downward facing arrow, we had a blue tile. Blue tiles move down, orange tiles move left etc. This way, we can use the exact mechanic you've built here but start the player off with a 1x2 grid, and progressively grow to a larger grid with more colours/rules. This to me seems more fun than what it currently is, and it lends itself to a more compelling art style -- even Tetris pops with colours. Going off the art idea I had in my previous comment, perhaps blue frogs are always eaten by the frog below them, green frogs are always eaten by the frog to the left of them. It could be called Frog Eat Frog or something.

Wishing you the best of luck with your project.

Hey, I hope this comment doesn't bring you down. You asked for feedback with the aim of doing better -- I'm not going to pull my punches.

In my opinion, your game isn't performing well because the gameplay isn't very compelling. In best combo mode, I can see a grid of arrows, I'm informed that clicking one of these arrows will clear more than the others. It says that I should find "creative ways" to clear the grid. I'm not sure that such a thing is possible. At worst, this is a game of guess the 1/25 arrow to click. At best, it's a game of tracking backwards through the arrows. As somebody who enjoys puzzle games, I don't personally find this a fun mechanic.

My initial thought was that the art might be the problem. That perhaps if these were frogs that ate each other in order or if these were bubbles that popped in a satisfying way, this might be more enjoyable, but if you haven't got compelling gameplay, dressing it up isn't going to help. My recommendation is to focus on creating challenging and enjoyable gameplay first.

Perhaps play some other puzzle games and ask yourself what it is you're enjoying about them.

I couldn't quite tell from the wording of your question if you want to hear from developers who avoid the use of AI as well, so sorry if my comment here is unwelcome in the discussion.

I'm a senior web developer and help maintain hundreds of PHP repositories for work. I avoid the use of AI as best I can. When I do ask questions to an LLM, I feel that I'm partaking in a dirty habit that I should quit. I don't have anything for that installed on my machine/integrated in my IDE. I feel that using LLMs to understand and solve problems is unreliable, a barrier for my personal development, a threat to the future of the industry I work in, unfair to those who wrote the content it is trained on, and bad for the environment.

I also largely feel the same way about other AI products, such as image generation.