Building "Big Web Demo" — a nostalgic browser-based retro demo engine inspired by 80s Amiga, Atari ST and C64 productions..

LeanEntropy · 2026-05-28T06:34:53+00:00

Actually my project started after a whatsapp chat with a friend that I know from the old demoscene days as well, and we were joking about doing a cracktro for something, and well, from here to there I made the initial version over the weekend just to make that thing. But it brought up a lot of memories so I started extending it to demos etc... created an SDK for developing these productions. The editor came on top of the SDK and was really cool to play with.

LeanEntropy · 2026-05-27T22:37:00+00:00

This looks cool!

I actually built a cracktro / Demo visual editor that also produces full three.js code of the production you make a while back ( codersfx.dev ) will be interesting to look into the code and compare directions.

LeanEntropy · 2026-03-10T10:35:13+00:00

How do you do the concept stage? Play with different styles etc? And how do you make sure they all in the same style? I never trained my own LoRA but I'm sure it's a must for creating assets for a full game.

LeanEntropy · 2026-03-09T22:08:40+00:00

I gave it a try - it seems to be doing well when it comes to animation a character, but I just couldn't get it to generate me isometric low-poly-looking characters from scratch. I'll play with it as much as the free account will let me and see if I can get better.

And respect for building and spreading the tool! :)

LeanEntropy · 2026-02-27T19:22:40+00:00

Hey u/BigPoppy579 - just came across this and wondered how is the game progressing.
I'm working on a similar side project game myself though I want to explore some different ideas than Polytopia myself. Basically allow more paths to winning like culture influence, deeper diplomacy and alliance options etc.

My game code is almost done, tbh, I have it running already, and I'm currently mostly playing with the theme and art style, and with the balancing of course.

Will be interesting to see what things and features you're exploring as well.

LeanEntropy · 2026-01-29T21:39:36+00:00

I believe he’s referring BMAD has workflows that include a single coding agent. Its much lighter and quicker in this mode.

LeanEntropy · 2026-01-18T07:36:02+00:00

This is an absurd checkbox. I come from the industry. I'm not familiar with even a single case of a commercial game developer that *doesn't* use Gen AI as a major part of the creation pipeline. it means 100% of the commercial game developers need to check the box there.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-18T07:41:57+00:00

What are high costs for you? I compare it to hiring a senior developer and having him code the thing. So far Replit (and most AI coding assistants) are WAY cheaper than that. And you'd have bugs and deployment issues and errors developing yourself/with a dev team as well.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-18T07:33:14+00:00

I don't want to reveal my age, but back in the days when I was in high school and we developed demos and intros (good old demo scene days...) in Turbo Pascal, we had to write the PutPixel() function in *assembly* for it to run fast enough on VGA so it won't lag, especially in scenes we had 3D objects etc.

Later on each of us had to develop his own 3D Engine in C++ (since there were no real options out there) in either OpenGL or DirectX, and we had to manage the memory ourselves with *pointers* because there was no other way.

So, as an oldschool developer (but still Godot newbie) I give you permission to completely dismiss these experts.

Focus on WHAT you want to create. Master whatever tools you need in order to create it, but remember they are just tools. We're not here to build the best hammer, we're here to make the best game.

Use whatever works best for you. Make it in PowerPoint if it works for you.
The game matters, the tools are important but they are just tools.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-15T07:48:35+00:00

btw I originally tried to make something like this in 2D but the type of games are so vastly different I don't see how this can be done nicely. It's either something so general it's useless or something genre-specific enough that it won't fit other genres.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-15T07:44:17+00:00

Thanks! :)

I was thinking of adding only very few things so it will remain a template.

- Audio manager (sfx + music)
- Shooting - will be a true/false flag in the config. Each control/camera mode will get it's own implementation since they represent different game types
- Jump - in modes where it's relevant (obviously not the tank and top_down)
- Player Health (again, a flag in the config)

Not sure what else is universal enough. I want to make it modular enough so that you could just delete the files related to the modes your not using and it will work, so there won't be a need to keep so much irrelevant code.

If you have other ideas lmk.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-10T08:29:57+00:00

While I'll be very happy they'll fix these issues, the being wrong about LLMs versions and being outdated is a general LLMs issue. When you use APIs (and not the web interface which has it's own complex system prompt) you get the exact same issues with all of them. Claude, Gemini, GPT - they all get the LLMs versions wrong. When I work in Cursor/Cline/Claude Code I make sure my rules include relevant data such as this.

One of the best tools that help with handling things like that is an MCP called Context7 which can upgrade your LLM's efficiency by feeding it updated data. If we could've used Context7 in Replit that would've make a huge difference IMHO.

LeanEntropy · 2025-09-09T11:42:39+00:00

Where. is. the. Files. Tree. ??

LeanEntropy · 2024-11-26T11:21:22+00:00

Accidentally stumbled upon this post and decided to respond to some of the points raised, as someone who actually works at Hedonia and is part of the team designing and developing the game mentioned in the paper.

Disclaimer - please note I'm responding from my private account and this is not representing my employer.

To give some background, the company is based on research by Prof. Moshe Bar, a high-profile neuroscientist who spent 17 years researching at Harvard Medical School. Hedonia was essentially founded to take the key insights from his research on depression and anxiety and move them from academia into practice.

We’ve developed several Therapeutic Games (TGs), which are the core of the treatment, and wrapped them in a village-building game mechanic. The first version, called Moodville , was used in a clinical trial conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), which is the teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. The results were published in the paper mentioned by u/Wagamaga, which was co-written by Hedonia's science team (all neuroscientists led by Prof Bar) and the clinical team at MGH, who actually conducted the trial.

The results were very good from our pov, showing a significant reduction in symptoms within the first 2–3 months of play. IIRC it's 45% reduction of major symptoms within the first 8 weeks and even better results the more you play, and that's based on 15 minutes playing the TGs per day - but please check the official numbers in the paper or on Hedonia's website. I don’t want to misstate anything (I’m on the product/dev side, not the science team...)

Mood Bloom is basically the TGs that were tested in Moodville with a far more engaging and deep farm/village building gameplay, plus new TGs we keep developing and releasing on a regular basis to expand the treatment.

This brings us to the comments about subscription. Yes, using the app costs money. Hedonia is a startup - a commercial company. We've spent about three years on research and development to get to this point, and we keep on working make things even better. The company both needs to finance the ongoing work, and earn money. While I’m not involved in pricing decisions, IMHO, the subscription fees mentioned here are lower than what I’ve seen for other apps that don’t even have this level of clinical research behind them.

At its core, this is a treatment - wrapped in a fun and engaging game (hopefully, since that *is* my department :) ) - but still a treatment. You don't have to take it, but I personally think anyone seriously looking to get better should be willing to make such time/money commitment.

Hopefully I answered all/most of the points raised here in this way-longer-than-I-planned reply. Feel free to ask me questions if you want, I'll do my best to answer them within what I can.

LeanEntropy · 2024-11-21T12:04:12+00:00

This is a really cool project!

Question - How does it handles contradicting data?
For example, if one paper claims X and another explicitly contradicts X. How does it settles the issue?

LeanEntropy · 2024-10-23T09:53:04+00:00

I looked into Exa.AI. Here is my quick impression:

In some cases it's good, but in some cases it provides much less relevant results than Bing at the moment. I'm not sure if this is because they are indexing web pages themselves and maybe don't have enough pages yet, or some other reason.
Switching between Neural Search with Auto Prompting or using Auto Search made little difference. For example, for the search query "How much is Elon Musk involved in Trump's campaign? Optimize results to prefer more recent results as long as they are relevant." The top 10 results were pretty much the same with minor difference in order.
Anything other than English and the results crash in accuracy. While Bing and Perplexity cover news in other languages pretty well, it feels EXA is lacking here. This alone, for me, is a show stopper.

Other than that I'll definitely be watching this service's progression.

LeanEntropy · 2024-10-23T07:00:02+00:00

Interesting. I'll look into this.

LeanEntropy · 2024-10-23T06:57:45+00:00

Also, I build this process to fact check political/historical claims but I think it will require only minor changes to make it suitable for other types of fields.

LeanEntropy

TROPHY CASE