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Scott Antipa

06/15/2022, 1:01 AM
I made a url-based game where you take care of emojis that live inside your url bar: https://linkians.com. It's like Sims but it's a 1 dimensional world of emojis. The game state is entirely contained in the url path so that you can at any point copy the url and save/share it, or edit it however you want to start the game from a different state. For example you could start from any of these links: β€’ https://linkians.com/🌴_πŸ˜˜πŸ˜€__ β€’ https://linkians.com/_🌴🧘🌴___πŸ˜€_ β€’ https://linkians.com/🌴_πŸ•ΊπŸ”ŠπŸ˜…__ I know this isn't pushing coding forward necessarily, but is an experiment in terms of user hackable game state and storage systems. I wanted to make a game where the game "server" has no logic and stores no state. The user can completely control the state of the game and save/edit/share it with just a human readable link. It's a work in progress, I'd love feedback! (cc @Mark Christian)
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Ivan Reese

06/15/2022, 3:07 AM
Not the first "game in the URL bar" I've seen, but definitely the first one with quote-unquote "real" graphics! Very nice.
Though, actually, it's more subtle than just "game in the URL bar". It's more like a Nintendo DS, or maybe the Dreamcast memory card, where the URL bar is like a second-screen experience that goes along with the main game that happens in the window.
This is a really generative idea. You could change the page title, so that you can see some of your Linkians even when the tab isn't active. You could set up some sort of BroadcastChannel so that multiple tabs could communicate, each tab housing a "family" of Linkians. This is super fun.
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Scott Antipa

06/15/2022, 4:26 AM
Thanks Ivan. One of the first people I saw doing emoji experiments in urls is this (which is hilarious):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YZt4HEv48Yβ–Ύ

second-screen experience
I've experimented with having zero UI, just the game in the url itself, but it wasn't as fun and was limiting. The main thing I tried to stick to was a) Any state the game produces is represented in the url (at each tick) and is also a valid starting point (if you refresh your browser), and b) the state is human read/write-able so you could theoretically just type in your world after
<http://linkians.com/|linkians.com/>
with whatever emojis etc you want.
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wtaysom

06/15/2022, 6:21 AM
@Scott Antipa are you familiar with a New Kind of Science?
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Joe Nash

06/15/2022, 9:20 AM
Oh this is super cute
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William Bull

06/15/2022, 10:09 PM
@Mark Christian you’re right; it is right up my alley. πŸ˜‰
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Joshua Horowitz

06/15/2022, 10:33 PM
see also @Glen Chiacchieri's experiments here (tho some have broken a bit, it seems)
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Scott Antipa

06/16/2022, 12:36 AM
@wtaysom haven’t read it but Im a bit familiar with the work
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wtaysom

06/16/2022, 5:07 AM
The prose isn't worth it, the pictures are nice though, and its all about linear little games simpler than this.