I like that this is on the front page and there are no comments. I imagine because everyone is busy exploring and didn't yet go back to the comments to see what people think. Good sign!
This is so good! Using mouse motion as a control scheme is particularly genius - how did no one think of this before? I particularly like the points where the mouse control is taken away from you, i.e. when you float downstream, or when you go down a slide. It's also particularly genius how the mouse can 'teleport' around the screen (i.e. when you go into a door and come out somewhere else).
This idea could even be taken further - it would be really cool to have terrain that is more difficult to traverse. I'm also intrigued by the lack of walls. I think something like a hedge maze would be really fun!
I think the water is difficult to traverse, in that it slows you down when 'swimming'.
It's really interesting how it still feels grounded even though you can fly all around. Having the cursor disappear underneath bridges and behind buildings really helps the illusion.
There was an old game called cursors.io which was the same concept but collaboratively traversing a maze where you would sometimes have to leave other players behind to reach the next level
A random experiment I made a few weeks ago does something similar, but it only uses the real cursor position for now: https://2shine.nl/demo/mousemaze/
There's mention of the cave and a "convergence point". I tried looking all around the cave, but there doesn't seem to be anything there (although you can find the drawings on the walls)
Edit: I looked at the source though and I don't see anything else clickable in the cave... No hidden secret badge either, maybe it is just for ambiance.
Turning the antenna in the treehouse gives different messages of about two minutes each. It’s a bit hard to listen to the whole thing without someone else interrupting by changing the antenna, so here are the audio files:
There’s talk of the tent near the beach, the gong, and gathering at the big fire once you hear the call. There’s also talk of the cave, the star map, trusting the bats, and reading the right side of the book carefully. Though it seems to me the audio may be outdated and that the star map was initially in the book and was since moved to the telescope.
The right side of the book mentions the time 8:47.
If we look at the star map, only two of them are pointing inwards. If we consider that a “convergence point”, it should be around the area of the big fire and tent.
Hmm this is interesting. I was playing on mute so I didn't notice the radio messages.
I was thinking the "convergence point" was the center of camp with the sign since that's where all the paths meet up and the book mentions something about that. The radio also says "I just put a sign on it".
>it seems to me the audio may be outdated and that the star map was initially in the book and was since moved to the telescope
He also mentions he wrote it in 1967 but the book says 1987
There's also a locked door in one of the buildings, but I couldn't figure out what either mean if anything. It would be cool if the radio was used for something though
Because then you’d need to decode the full message and might read something you didn’t mean to. This way you can decode just the individual ones you want.
The badge names aren’t secret, they’re available in the book in the house even before you unlock them.
With Firefox, moving the cursor is really unresponsive and difficult, at least with my touch-pad. Taking many swipes to move even a little bit in each direction. It's a much more enjoyable experience with Chrome.
I've used Firefox as a daily driver for 20 years now (that's terrifying to say). I have to switch to another browser about once a month (although at a previous job I had to use $INTERNAL_WEBSITE in edge permanently). I have 0 issues with daily sites
I was indoctrinated as a teenager. A friends older brother was using it when he showed me World of Warcraft (not a euphamism) and I went home and downloaded it and never looked back.
I've contributed to a bunch of OSS, but for some reason never firefox.
Haha, this is hardly a daily site, is it? I can't remember the last time I experienced a firefox-specific browser issue before this. 95%+ of my issues usually come from ublock
No doubt, OP’s site is niche (and very cool!), but between weird graphical rendering I’ve experienced in the past with Firefox and WebGL, among a number of just flat out broken forms - I just gave up.
I want Gecko to succeed as Chromium being a bully in the web space has been unfortunate, though I’m even more rooting for Ladybird.
Firefox has years long outstanding bugs in regards to capturing cursor movements. It's really frustrating as someone who has spent years developing Babylon and three.js games and apps and uses FF as my primary browser. It basically makes Firefox completely unusable if you're relying on capturing cursors.
Brilliant. If you needed proof the internet is still alive, here you go. I feel like Neal's creations are the result of creatively iterating on "what if" and "why not".
It was fun rick rolling you all on the piano. Vibe coded a little script that would play all kinds of melodies including rick roll. I eventually attracted a whole audience of cursors emoji reacting to it.
I think it's incredible that you can feel a human connection with someone on the other side of the world purely by moving your cursors together. Just had a "game" of soccer with random people.
> There is an urban myth that the release of Dragon Quest III caused a law to be passed in Japan banning the sale of Dragon Quest games or video games in general except on certain days such as weekends or national holidays. When III was released in Japan, over 300 schoolchildren were arrested for truancy while waiting in stores for the game to be released. The rumor claims there was a measurable dip in productivity when a Dragon Quest game was released and although muggings of Dragon Quest titles became so widespread that there were hearings in the Japanese Diet, no law was ever passed.
Kamala Harris bragged about enforcing this law against parents in California. That’s the only way that I know that it’s an actual law that gets enforced because I had never heard of laws like this before, and I grew up in US public schools in the South.
Well this is one of the most adorable things I've seen in a while. Thank you for sharing a little joy. So many little details I love, falling off the waterfall, the cursor size fading into the background, the flashlight in the cave. Haven't explored it all but going to share this right away.
Club Penguin always held a special place in my heart but I never reflected on why. I'm sure part of it is a yearning for simpler times and a childhood unawareness of the nature of the world.
However, playing this reminded me of exploring hidden parts of a map imbued with love, the joys of finding other souls just lounging around or moving excitedly, and the cute little games and things strewn about every corner.
I got taken back to Club Penguin as well. Especially clicking into the cave or treehouse and getting transported into a little side pocket of the map. Amazing work!
This is so well made! In the car racing track there's an overpass, and the cursor correctly Z-orders depending on whether you're coming from the upper or lower part of the track. Respect.
Very cool, but I think the user's cursor should be a different shape/color from the others. I frequently tried to move a neighboring cursor by mistake.
Does anyone know how he is implementing country detection? I'm certain it's not GeoIP since my current IP address (and physical location) is different than the country it's showing me from.
GeoIP services can sometimes be wrong, they are essentially just lookup tables for IP subnets. I have a VPS in the Netherlands which most GeoIP providers detect as being in Czechia, for example. I assume whichever one the site is using just has the wrong country listed for your IP.
It's the same for me. I'm in Australia and on my work laptop I'm connected to an American VPN. It's showing my location as USA. I was wondering how it's detecting the country.
When I see the domain of a post is neal.fun, I instantly get a huge grin because I know I am about to be delighted. Thank you Neal! The beach yurt with the mushroom soup was a hilarious touch.
When I was a teenager we had the Living Books edition of Arthur's Teacher Trouble on CD-ROM as part of a "multimedia kit". Every page had short animations that would play by clicking on random things with your cursor, in addition to following along with the story, clicking on single words to hear them pronounced and spelled, etc. It was incredible and paved the way for similar phenomena like clickable Easter eggs in Homestar Runner cartoons.
I really had fun with this one. You know what would make it even cosier? Being able to choose a small avatar for ourselves. The mouse pointer as your icon feels a very impersonal at the moment. Having avatars would make it feel more like we're all hanging out together in this wonderland.
Strangely enough, when I enter the "convergence point" book, my cursor gets an American flag, even though it wasn't American before. Has anyone else seen this?
pretty hard to click through the cookie consent form because the browser hijacks the mouse and doesnt let it move to the right place. ended up using tab to click through it.
And the cookie consent form is one of those that require you to click a gazillion toggles. Hasn't it been established now that opt-out must be no harder than opt-in?
the law unambiguously says that, yes. However, companies these days seem to respond to enforcement, not the text of the law. They are all using the same few cookie banner libraries/providers, so that they have herd protection (if the eu wants to crack down on it, it has to do it to hundreds/thousands of companies simultaneously). It seems neal chose that route also.
Clearly it is working for many people. Perhaps if you share your setup and what exactly is the issue you’re facing, someone may have a suggestion. “It doesn’t work” is just about the worse “bug report” one can make.
One is kinda half hidden behind a tree on the far right and another one is next to the starting sign. The rest are on the beach area and very slightly off the beach area
please don't re-implement mouse movement, this would work perfectly fine without and now it just feels really bad to use because my sensitivity is fucked
My mouse is set to 400 DPI, acceleration off (libinput flat profile), and default (0) sensitivity (range -1.0 - 1.0, no change at 1.0). Had similar settings on Windows, games have crazy high default sensitivity but websites like this have extremely low sensitivity. I had to crank my DPI up to 2000 to make it usable and 4000 to be comfortable and roughly match desktop settings, but this also made the cursor extremely unwieldy when pausing the game.
This and volume control are my biggest gripes.
The soul of this game requires that your cursor can go "behind" things (like trees, or partially submerged in water), can have subtle nudges to keep you on paths and add friction when in water, and also to be able to take full control of your cursor for the lazy river etc!
