It was Saturday night, deep into a dark chocolate bar and well-paired Cabernet, when Cranksy [0] pinged me on IRC gauging interest in collaborating on this year's Blender [1] competition.
"Would it be too much work to just throw an ANSI on the screen and play an ogg file?" he asked.
Inebriated enough to get a little enthusiastic about something like this, I joined #blender on efnet, and noted this year's words had already been chosen.
"Damn, we've got a late start." I thought as I read the channel's topic:
Monkeys / Rescuing / Between Realities
It must have been all the COVID-19 news I've been endlessly assaulted with, because it was immediately clear that these words would fit perfectly with a game of monkeys saving other monkeys from viruses by transporting them to another reality.
A bottle of wine and one sleepless night of drunken coding later and a tiny game [2] is born. WARNING: there's a potentially NSFW ANSI graphic in-game, if ANSI can possibly be considered NSFW.
Unusual for these kinds of things, I'm also releasing the entire C source code [3] of everything needed to rebuild and fork/hack if desired. The only external dependencies are SDL2, SDL_Mixer, whatever those pull in like libvorbis/libogg, and OpenGL.
If you clone the repository, be sure to use a recursive clone as there are submodules.
Also, if you'd like to be notified via email of interesting creations like these, you can submit your email address in the text box @ http://pengaru.com.
If you're interested in collaborating on making demos, intros, or video games, reach out - I prefer email, Cranksy is on twitter.
Please be kind to my server, hopefully it doesn't get hugged to death, thanks!
[0] http://cranksy.net
[1] http://mistigris.org/blender/blend.html
[2] http://pengaru.com/~vc/tmp/hungrycat-sars-rev1.zip (Includes native OSX/Windows/Linux executables)
[3] git://git.pengaru.com/sars
1. If you're going to show a game, show screenshots and videos.
2. You start with the backstory. I'm not invested enough to sit through your memories of wine and cransky. Who's cransky? Why should I care? I'm here to see the game.
3. Speaking of game links, it's your 3rd link! Link [0] is to some the site of some random guy. You'd think that for a 'Show HN', the first link is of the thing you're trying to show.
4. The link is to a zip file with the executable. People on this site are technical enough that they are not going to download random executable files from a temporary folder on pengaru.com.
5. I figured maybe I'll browse some code on github. Nope, I have to clone your repo and open up files in the editor. I could be clicking on some links on github instead.
Basically, your presentation makes people work more than expected of 'news', and maybe you think it's all worth it because you're obviously invested and proud of your own work, which you should be, but strangers on the internet need a reason to be invested in order to exert more than the minimal effort justified by curiosity.
Think of it this way: if you didn't care enough to spend your time to make your product presentable and attractive - you just threw some things together in a zip file and wrote some stuff in a text box on HN - why would anyone else care to spend their time on it?