I always wanted to build a real-life puzzle game, which is app/mobile assisted. Had yet another eureka moment, and built a usable prototype (backend plus iOS app). Good feedback from a small circle.
For a while I was aware of someone (I knew by sight) who worked in the same sort of subject matter (but a non-tech). I approached her, we had a coffee, I pitched the idea and how she could bring it to life, as I made the tech side. She jumped on board.
We're two and a half weeks in, have gone full speed and are making something great (for our audience). My future co-founder is amazing, great insights, opinions, drive. We're potentially launching in a couple of weeks, a free/MVP version of a puzzle game.
I've been through many iterations of trying to get something off the ground. Tried tech co-founders, and the last years of going solo (very hard after you've done the coding). But this now feels right. A puzzle app/game for every day people to have some fun. And a future co-founder whose life is outside tech, who's bring a sort of fun energy outwith let's make loads of money or isn't the framework/AI cool.
Balance is good. Contact with reality is good too :)
* assisted coding, not full code generation
Currently we’re using AWS and Backblaze B2, but I’m formulating a plan to move to colocated servers. Not being billed per GB will open up a lot of new opportunities. Even at today’s server prices the math still adds up.
Since last month we’ve stabilized the search UI/UX and have 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer.
We entered May with over 50 paying customers and have recently launched Uruky Site Search [2] (for website owners, this effectively is our own search index and crawler, which we’ll be bringing into Uruky soon as another search provider option)!
Customers really enjoy the simple UI (search doesn’t require JavaScript) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though.
You can see the main differences between Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc. and Uruky in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code!
Our main challenge right now is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring a project per month (Qubes OS, The Tor Project, and Hister so far), with our limited budget of ~$100 / month.
Because of bots and abuse there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a week for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!
Thanks.
I started with this last summer. Usually I get tired of an idea, but this one is just an endless pit of things to try out.
Currently seeing how we can get an analytics agent working on the canvas. Video here: https://x.com/i/status/2053410747137266070
I've been working on something in the vein of a indie game for a little over a year now. It has been a passion project, but I'm starting to come around on showing it to people.
I am a big fan of Telltale style narrative games. I think Baldur's Gate 3 was the biggest revelation of this for me. Taking that branching dialogue and freedom of choice, and tacking it on to a fun combat system was just everything.
When text based GTRPGs started popping up, I found it hard to connect with them stylistically. I found that I needed the multimodal stimulus of visuals and audio. This led me to start building something, and it ended up being somewhat of a cross between a Telltale game, a Visual novel, and a TTRPG.
Orpheus (https://orpheus.gg) is a fully on-the-fly generated tabletop simulator, with graphics, audio (TTS), and the freedom you can usually only find at a real TTRPG table. That means you can play a sci-fi, fantasy, or even a modern setting in your campaign. The assets are made for you as needed. It runs in your browser so nothing to install or tinker with.
Getting the harness right so the AI GM can stay coherent and organized has been the biggest challenge. It took a lot of iterations to get it to a point where it could understand the scenes it was building as the player changed them.
I've built it to be played with either a keyboard or a gamepad so you can play from your couch. You can switch between them as you feel like it. There is a 3D tabletop for combat, full character sheets, dice rolling, lore tracking. I want it to be dense.
Mostly, I’m looking for people who want to try it, break it, and tell me what feels magical, confusing, boring, or broken. My biggest roadblock currently is that asset generation is relatively expensive. I'm currently mulling over whether a playtest would allow for a BYOK setup so people could try playing as much as they'd like, or if I should add turn limits.
You can join the playtest waitlist at https://orpheus.gg/ -- and I just setup a discord (https://discord.gg/pychWyzf) that I will use for early playtests. (Just me right now! Come hang out!)
Bg2-like is playable at https://archipelago-sandy.vercel.app
