phaser

it was in this link included in this same story https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2026/02/03/the-sideprocalypse/

I launched an idea 75 days ago, here as Show HN. It snowballed into a little community and a game that now sells every day. Maybe not an overnight sensation but the encouragement I found in the community was the motivation that i needed to take it further to a bigger audience.

It was not just a product launch for me. I was, sort-of in a crisis. I had just turned 40 and had dark thoughts about not being young, creative and energetic anymore. The outlook of competing with 20 year old sloptimists in the job market made me really anxious.

Upon seeing people enjoying my little game, even if it's just a few HNers, I found an "I still got it" feeling that pushed me to release on Steam, to good reviews.

It was never about the money, it was about recovering my self confidence. Thank you HN, I will return the favour and be the guy checking the new products you launch. If Show HN is drowning, i will drown with it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137953

I have the exact same problem. plus, I have usually surprised system processes eating up CPU like ‘suggestd’ and it’s hard to get information about what it does. I guess one could find out by reverse engineering, but that’s not the point. they could easily make it transparent and documented and the feeling of my own computer being a black box is constantly pissing me off. I regret all my investment in the Apple ecosystem and I wish I hadn’t locked me in as much.

Maybe this is the living room dumb-TV that I was waiting for

Do we have mass murdering CEOs now? What did I miss?

Microlandia - The Brutally honest city builder.

I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.

This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.

https://microlandia.city

It’s interesting to see the posts from warpbuild, blacksmith, buikdjet and others defending their business model that was based on the inefficiency of GitHub. I love the fact that git is built in such an open way that if you are worried about running in your own infrastructure you can easily deploy it (It’s just like SSH!) yourself. At least for me, cheaper GitHub actions is a win because I can’t justify running my own git. But these companies that are based on offering you a faster or cheaper github actions service are actually the worst of both worlds: they are not your platform and they are not in the position to offer you a better service. I’m not gonna miss them when they’re gone or transformed into an AI pivot.

Hahah this is the third time I get this. Now I can't unsee it... will do it :)

Regarding custom buildings, it will likely start as a simple JSON setting some variables like workerCapacity, studentCapacity, depth, height, etc and a voxel 3D file, so players can create cities with custom architectural styles.

Like a city with only stalin-era and soviet-era buildings. Or something where all the residents live in victorian townhouses.

Thanks for the purchase. In the next days I plan to release many bugfixes targeting Linux and steam deck, it's the most requested thing at the moment.

Parking is a constraint in microlandia :) and parking issues have impact on company productivity and employment. however, there’s a lot of things I’m still missing, like different types of lanes (bike-proprity, bus-priority, highways, etc) so it’s one of the things i will work hard on the next month or two.

Exciting idea! I see that it could happen in more than one way:

there is a simulation parameters file that we document openly[1]

it’s a no brainer for me to allow playing with a custom simulation file.

buildings are typescript types with hook-functions, making new ones is quite fun and easy and after adding sandboxing and safety it should be totally doable to plug in custom ones

also, the simulation is a websockets protocol, so the game client can connect to a totally custom simulation

however at this stage data types and names are changing too fast for practical modding

1. https://microlandia.city/simulation_parameters

I started working on it around years ago very infrequently, this was the time where I experimented with concepts and programming languages... initially it was a monetary policy simulator written in go. Around 3 months ago I had the concept and basic idea working, then it was decided that I should launch.

At this point I pushed an early access build to itch.io as soon as possible. It was very incomplete and full of problems.

I changed the alarm clock to 6am and started working for a good 3 hours before work every weekday, this was great to capture my early morning energy which is when I'm the most creative and sharp. Weekends were full-time days. I sacrificed my social life completely (which is what I'm now determined to get back) what I did not sacrifice was sleep.

I released a build every single day during those three months. Some of the time was new content, some of the time was bug fixes, most of the time was both. Shipping every day forced me to slice every task in something that can be managed in a couple of days so I would keep the daily cadence.

I'm fortunate to have my wife help me with art and my good friend Pablo with the soundtrack.

So basically my formula was: 1. Work before the job 2. Sacrifice weekends 3. Sleep well 4. Daily progress 5. Ask for help

Right now, a little flaky: Issues with controls and texture loading in Linux have been reported, but now that i've launched I'm gonna take a deeper look, hopefully next week playing in steam deck will be a decent experience.

Your game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D

I seem to be the only one with some degree of success with Tauri :)

After someone suggested here in HN I switched Microlandia[1] from deno-webview[2] to Tauri.

So far, it’s been a pretty good experience in Windows and macOS, of all the bug reports I received, zero are related to Tauri. Only one caveat: For Steam Linux, I had to package the game in electron after spending an entire weekend in library hell trying to get it to work in the Steamworks sniper SDK.

1. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

2. https://github.com/webview/webview_deno

I think the context here is important. regardless if videogames are an artform or not. putting off work, parenting or whatever are priorities in life to get a videogame fix is not the same as playing video games in your leisure time when is not an impulsive decision

This reminds me of the heartbreaking story of “The Lawyer, the Addict”, which was a reality check for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/business/lawyers-addictio...

> I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.

If you are referring to the citizens, yes, at individual level. However for traffic I'm using a sampling rate.

> Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.

That's an awesome idea, I added it to my backlog :)

> less money less likely to have kids?

This is mega tricky, because it happens very differently across the world. Yes, can be expensive computationally that's why the city is so small (for now) but as I start to distribute the simulation into many cores, players with high core CPU will be able to choose a bigger city size :) I agree that individual level simulation is what makes it interesting and I plan to keep it like that.

> Brutally honest? I hope it shows the huge amount of land needed for parking lots :P

Parking space simulation is coming soon. I feel I will completely miss the point if I leave that out. The idea is to have street parking (with configurable profit for the city) parking lots, and buildings with underground parking, that should conflict, of course, with metro lines.

Public transport is the next thing I wanna work on. Will start with buses, which I have an idea on how it will be implemented, but for metro I will want to start learning about how it can be simulated faithfully.

This weekend I have plans to start playing a lot Subway Builder (https://www.subwaybuilder.com) which I'm really excited about, and maybe get some books on the subject, in order to get it right

That's something I haven't thought about, but I 100% agree that it should be possible! Very soon I want to introduce roads with bicycle lanes, that have less car bandwidth, that will make me refactor the traffic simulation and the idea of a bicycle-only road type will become possible.

this look super cool but is it hugged to death? i can’t upload the document :(

how does it work with long papers? will it ever work with small books?

will try it out tomorrow again

Microlandia, the brutally honest city builder. Posting this for a second time, because i’ve been working super hard on a steam release.

last month’s “what are you working on” thread impulsed me to upload this game to itch and 1 month later, i’ve got a small community, lots of feedback and iterations. It brought a whole new life to a project that was on the verge of abandoning.

So, I’m really grateful for this thread. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

Unfortunately and with the pain of my soul, after 10 years working in start ups, I have to admit that yes, the truth is that politics matters and matters much more than good engineering, that is something that I have learned the hard way. And it’s the only reason I’m considering leaving the game completely, as soon as I have enough economic freedom.

> Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

I have confirmed that this is true, and a useful mental model to be successful in the world of start-ups, but also describes very well the opportunity seized by certain historic character of 1930s Europe.

This idea is old, but today it conveys a much bigger meaning. There are two new developments since then that are very scary. The first is that artificial intelligence is supposedly replacing some jobs, but not only that, it is also being used to select jobs, and the latter is something that I have seen firsthand. The other phenomenon is the advance, in places of the world that classically were liberal, of political ideas that will hinder or directly eliminate the right to private communication over the Internet.

Combine these three factors: data brokerage, the use of AI to replace and select jobs, and the political landscape around the right to encryption, and we get a recipe for a future where the word dystopian falls short.

I miss RSS too much, I have decided to start using it again today. For those who are in it, what is your favorite client?

I think the point of how the city center is totally disconnected from the value of the property is super spot on, for example in my hometown, Santiago de Chile I have seen or it is my impression that although when the city was founded the city center, it had the highest value, and it is where aristocratic families lived today the reality is quite the opposite, the price of the properties has moved even towards the periphery of the city in comunas (boroughs) such as Barnechea and Vitacura and the city center of the city is perceived as a place of low status; On the contrary in the city where I live now, Berlin, the center of the city Mitte is in my perception where the most expensive properties are, so it’s difficult for me, to understand what is the connection between the city center and the value of the properties. In the case of Santiago the neighborhoods that are most appreciated, they are really super far from everything and require a road trip to go to the airport or any other central place, then perhaps I imagine that the value of the land, is very subjective and very based on the culture of the city. Despite the fact that the center of Santiago I find it a beautiful and quite interesting place, it is perceived by being perceived under status in a culture where status is important, that seems to be the most important factor more than any other type of deterministic formula.

Perhaps it could also be argued that because the resources received by neighbourhoods in Chile are based on the affluence of their residents, it follows that the comunas with more resources are, of course, more important and appreciated. This is because the people who live there are considered more valuable, even though I may be less important in other ways.

Microlandia, the brutally honest city building game

https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

Sound like it’s newspeak for repurposing the word “internet” to a UK or China style of regulated censorship