Week 2: Electric Boogaloo 117

Well, we haven't made much progress in the past week, but we did do a few things:

First, you might have noticed these posts are appearing on the website itself now, under "Release Notes". I always appreciated Mojang's use of putting the release notes as a main navigable page in the Minecraft application, so we'll follow this tradition. It'll also serve as a self-documenting history of the site, which I also appreciate. I'm sure someday we'll get to the point where all we post is the dreaded "bug fixes" note but today is not that day (yet).

Secondly, you'll see some of our toolbar items have been changed from text to icons. I hope the icons are self-explanatory, comment below if you hate them or like them.

Lastly, our index/landing page has some quick useful links, whereas before it had a pretty outdated description I created nearly a year ago.

Outside of the updates, we can talk about the most recent poll results! And the winner is... no one -.- The results to decide our next game were, unfortunately, inconclusive. So, in the effort of progress, I'm going ahead with what I think will be the simplest implementation for a game that will work roughly the same on mobile and desktop, Flappy Bird. Instead of Flappy Bird, we're going to call our spin "Flappy Dog". I've been in contact with some artists this week for game assets, and I've generated a few images for inspiration and test assets with our brother-in-code ChatGPT. As the game progresses, we might post some spoiler assets and screenshots in future updates.

Outside of this, there is more coming to the site than just video games. We're going to roughly cut applications into 3 categories for users:

1. Arcade: Obviously, these are games.

2. Productivity: Items in this category might include calculators, lists, the random word generator, etc.

3. Data: This category includes applications that report on your usage of the website, generate content for you personally, or provide you answers to easily reportable questions. Applications in this category don't normally look like normal applications to the user, as they might include your account page, Admin panels, and chatbots.

We've got our next Arcade game on the horizon, but what about the next Productivity and Data applications? Well wonder no more!

For our Productivity application we'll be incorporating a Simple Notes web app. This app will be functionally like the iPhone notes app, not a modern note taking application like Notion or One Note, so don't get too excited.

On the Data side, we'll soon be dipping our toes into the mystic realm by launching our application, Ceridwen. If you're familiar with ancient mystic and sorcery mythology, you know that Ceridwen is a medieval Welsh sorceress whose tale is a reminder of the potential consequences about the misuse of knowledge and power. Since she'll be our first data application, her name will serve as a great constant reminder about how we treat user data, and the power it holds.

Her use and purpose, however, will be far less serious. Ceridwen will be the site's fortune teller. Her launch will have her post daily Horoscopes. From there we'll continue to build out her capabilities over time. If you'd like to know more about how we're implementing Ceridwen in the backend, please see our upcoming poll, and vote in it. Finally, before I close out this paragraph, I feel the need to remind all readers that there is no such thing as fortune telling, and that any future fortune Ceridwen ever provides is for pure entertainment only.

I'll Be Back, Matt :)

Poll