Canvas — The Fediverse’s r/place
It would be amazing if parts of it could be animated. Maybe multiple layers of canvases (say, 5 frames, shown over a second). Each with their own images, which could be viewed as a flipbook.
Instead of going for a larger canvas, go for more layers.
Just a thought.
Thanks for making it open source! I’m curious how complex the authentication stuff was. I didn’t place many pixels but it was fun to peek in and see what changed every once in a while! Would definitely be a fan of more in the future, though I don’t have any ideas
On mobile I kept opening the whois pixel by accident when dragging. I often tap and hold to initiate a drag because I'm still looking at the art, but when i drag away and let go, it opens the whois thing. I think if you drag a certain screen-space distance away it should cancel the whois pixel lookup.
The heatmap I found too hard to tell where recent pixels were placed. I think at 100% opacity the "cold" pixels should be dark blue instead of their actual color.
A couple times I placed a dot, realized I actually didn't want it there and ran out of time to undo, which felt bad having to wait 30s. I wish it was a bit longer.
When you try to place a pixel a few milliseconds too early I feel like it should queue it and wait the few milliseconds for you.
I'm not super sure on the canvas having transparency. Most people treated the canvas as white, not transparent. If you wanted a white-on-white drawing, people will just make an outline.
Maybe a concept worth testing: if you place a pixel next to your own pixels, you get a (slightly) reduced cooldown, that way you get an extra boost when completing your art. (At the same time, I think there is beauty in the canvas being as simple as possible:)
I often got the "you've already placed a pixel of that color there" error, even though I never touched this area. I also couldn't fix my own pixelart easily because of this.
You could get around that bug by choosing a different color and then pressing undo. After that it reverted to the correct color.
The event was fun for the first 48 hours - before the expansion. After that it was mostly policing and defending existing art. I would prefer a 48 hour canvas without expansion.
That said, it was fun anyways. Thanks for all your work and thanks to grant for setting everything up and fixing issues on the fly.
I'd be keen to run/test a local version, what do I need in the .env.local as a minimum to get up and running?
It looks like the compose file has REDIS_HOST and DATABASE_URL and point to included services. There’s also a few in the dockerfile for setting PORT (3000) and some node stuff I don’t understand
Escalating timers are an antipattern. It punishes anyone who looks away for more than thirty seconds - and thirty seconds per click is not exactly a brisk pace for maintaining attention.
Other than that, good shit, well done. Undo was a welcome surprise. Ditto the repetition prevention.
No wait, one other thing. (Complaint sandwich!) Scaling should be in integer powers. Everything but fully-zoomed-out and extremely-blown-up looked lumpy and distracting. Especially with all the pixel art going on.
One effect of this is that someone steadily editing got more pixels than someone editing in batches, which felt like a feature when defending against trolls.
I like the escalating time, but the pacing issue is a fair point.
So perhaps the escalation could be delayed? Give it a tiny larger timer (let's say, 40s?), and make the second pixel take as much time as the first. Like this:
This way you'd be only getting less pixels per minute after 80s of inactivity, not 30s.
I think it was 30s between every pixel at the start.
It was sort of, but it was a bug. If you just left them, you'd get one every 33ish seconds until you had 6. But if you had 2 then used one, you'd have to wait 66 seconds until you got another, unless you used your last one then it was back to 33.
It was fixed partway through to be as originally intended.