Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14947766

by max0563 • 9 years ago

4 7 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm curious about some of the side projects that you guys and girls are working on.

enkiv23• 9 years ago

Every year I do NaNoGenMo, so I have a couple narrative-generation projects in planning stages for that.

I'm working on a VN involving time loops, which is essentially an attempt to integrate the typical completionist play style of hardcore VN players (wherein people will often try for 100% completion of all dialogue and game devs will often hide the canonical plot threads behind options that only open up when you get all the good ends or all the good & bad ends) with the narrative -- i.e., the plot only progresses when the character dies and restarts.

I also write small projects periodically. (For instance, recently I wrote a script that superimposed Jenny Holzer quotes in white-on-red on black and white images, aping Barbara Kreuger's iconic style.)

_jdams2• 9 years ago

Oh my, I've had an idea for a long time to code a procedurally generated story of some kind. Didn't know there was already an internet community doing this!!!

First had the idea when I stumbled upon the game called Dwarf Fortress.

enkiv23• 9 years ago

The procedurally generated game community is huge. The procedurally generated prose community is much smaller.

NaNoGenMo has been going since, like, 2013. Every year, a bunch of us get together in the issues section of a github page and discuss attempts to generate long-form narrative. (We've been able to generate passable poetry for years, but we have yet to figure out a way to get prose that remains engaging, coherent, and human-like for more than about a chapter.) There are a lot of very different techniques being used. (For instance, a couple years ago I wrote a planner that emitted debug output in the form of a first-person hardboiled heist story; somebody else that year produced a really good simulation of bad star trek fanfiction using a mixture of templating and object-oriented state tracking; somebody else made a great comic book by picking random sentences from public domain detective novels and then finding creative commons licensed photos on flickr based on tags taken from key words in those sentences and post-processing them to make them look hand-drawn.)

Findeton• 9 years ago

I'm working on a small solidity/Ethereum project.

max0563• 9 years ago

Do you have anymore info you can give on that?

Ask HN: What side projects are you working on?

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