Please give it a try - and if you draw anything you’re proud of, consider submitting it to the (already growing!) Egg Gallery.

As always, I’ve written a little post about making the game. This post isn’t super long (the game didn’t take too long to make!) but it covers my two favorite problems from making the game (lighting up the egg and designing speedrun mode).

Other Things

As I mentioned last email, much of my work right now is for longer-term stuff that will happen this Summer or Fall. Most of that work is still unannounced - but I’m happy to say that I’ll be designing this year’s ICFP Programming Contest! Stay tuned for more details, but we’ll likely be running the contest in late July.

I’ll hopefully have more work to announce soon. And I’m sure I’ll be back with something else goofy and small in not that long either way.

Anyway. Hope you enjoy.

It’s Time To Build Eggs

Open a terminal and type ssh snakes.run to play

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed program - if you’re curious about its history you can learn more here. And if you want to know how the game works, check out my breakdown.

I’ve had a lot of fun testing this game - I hope you enjoy playing!

Some other stuff I’ve made

I’m back to writing and posting after a long break. Here are a few more (smaller) things that I’ve made recently:

Are two heads better than one? is a short blog about a funny statistical quirk I ran into late last year. You can check the discussion on hacker news if you’d like.

Will AI pet my dog for me? is a little piece wondering whether LLMs will take away the things that I love about programming. Yes, I know, I’m sick of AI thinkpieces too.

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke? is a fun debugging story that I ran into while building snakes.run. This was also discussed on hacker news and elsewhere, although plenty of the discussion is people being angry at me for using claude code lol. Don’t visit /r/programming, is a lesson I learned here.

tiny.christmas was a one-day project I built for christmas and a precursor to snakes.run

I’m back?

It’s been several months since I’ve launched a new game (or posted anything here). Sorry about that!

Last summer I decided to take a break. I’ve found that thinking about attention on the internet is bad for your soul - but unfortunately to drive traffic to multiplayer games I have to think a little bit about attention.

I spent a while wondering whether it was time to do something else. I’m still thinking about that - if you’re doing something really interesting consider getting in touch! - but I’ve decided that for the time being, I need to make some more games :)

I’ve also got some exciting collaborations / galleries / shows coming up - nothing public yet, but I’m really looking forward to sharing more when I can.

Anyway, that’s it. Let’s keep having fun on the internet.

It runs in a single process and handled millions of moves and hundreds of millions of queries at launch. I’m particularly proud of how the game implements “rollback” - applying moves in your browser immediately and then undoing them if they aren’t valid.

After releasing the game, I found that plenty of folks were as interested in understanding how it works as they were in actually playing it! So I’ve taken some time to write that down.

You can read about how it works here (sorry, the post is far too long and image heavy for me to be able to send it over substack).

I’ve also made a video version of the essay, which you can watch here1. Making a long-form video (instead of short form content) was refreshing; it felt like I was making something that contributed to a real body of work, which I typically don’t feel when I make a 30 second video about my latest project.

I’ve also been playing with some funny ideas.

The browser tells you where the cursor is

I’ve spent the last few weeks experimenting with games that are about selecting text.

It turns out that the browser tells you when the user is selecting text, and it even tells you exactly what you’ve selected! And so if you’re clever (and if you change that text out from under them) you can build full little games inside text boxes.

These experiments started out simple - like here where selecting text creates a “bridge”

There’s something delightful (for me, at least) about taking a familiar mechanism like selecting text and adding this level of interactivity to it. And it’s very nice to be able to rely on the browser’s built in behaviors - the arrow keys work out of the box since this is just…a text box!

I’ve spent a while trying to come up with more complicated actions that selecting text might represent. Maybe you’re selecting text to draw back an arrow on a bow:

Or maybe you’re creating an umbrella to shield yourself from the rain:

I’m not quite sure where I’d like to take these experiments - maybe they’re a game, or maybe I just want a little gallery of them. But I’ll have more to share here eventually.

More multiplayer stuff

I’m also hard at work on my next multiplayer game. I’m not ready to describe exactly how it works just yet, but I can say that it *won’t* run in the browser this time.

Till next time,

-N

Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.

You can play it here.

One Million Chessboards is a follow up to One Million Checkboxes, a surprisingly popular game that I made last year.

It was a little more technically challenging to make! It turns out that there’s a whole lot that goes into running a million simultaneous games of chess.

Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I’ve tried to design this site to handle some degree of load. Although to be honest I have no idea how it’s going to perform (or whether it will get enough traffic for that to matter!). I’ll do a proper writeup of the design once I see how it performs.

There’s a (very short) summary of the details here if you’d like to see them.

Anyway. That’s my new game. I hope you enjoy it.

I was thinking…I’m a game developer. Could I put that space to better use? And I think I have.

I present: Pong running inside 240 unclosed chrome tabs

This project was a whole lot of fun. It started with seeing my friend Tru’s version of Flappy Bird inside a Favicon and wondering how I could extend it.

The process ended up being pretty involved! I’ve written down all the gory technical details on my site (fixed link) if you’d like to read them. And while the code is pretty bad, you can see it here if you'd like.

That’s it! Hope this wasn’t too short

Thanks for everyone who responded to my question about whether my emails were too frequent or infrequent. Most responses seemed to either say “either is fine” or “I’d prefer more” so I figured I’d send this one out on its own.

But of course if that bothers you please let me know! And if I notice a massive subscriber drop as soon as I send this I might adapt either way…

I’ve got 5 more weeks at the Recurse Center, one of my favorite places and a great spot for experiments like this. So either way I hope to be back with more content for you soon.

It’s fun, and of course it is making it hard to type this blog post.

You can see it here - but I feel obligated to say that if you’re not comfortable running programs on the command line you should probably just enjoy this one from the sidelines (mom, feel free to skip it).

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Bad Apple in Vim

A few weeks ago I got Bad Apple - a compelling black and white music video that people enjoy embedding in surprising spots - running inside vim, the program I use to edit text.

Getting this working was a fun journey and I learned a lot! You can read about it here (or check out the discussion on Hacker News).

1Crossword

One more game for you! This one is called 1Crossword, and it creates crosswords using the passwords in 1Password the password manager.

Here's a link to the blog and code

I just figured that I use my password manager enough that it should have some good games, you know?

This one made it back to a few employees at 1Password, which is always fun to see.

Wrapping up

That’s all I’ve got for you.

One question I have, for people that keep up with my work through this newsletter (thank you!) is: was this email ok?

That is, I held off on emailing about any individual one of these projects, since they’re all pretty small. I thought it was better to send a single email with a few of them.

Does that match what you want? Or would you rather hear about everything immediately

Let me know!

(I typed this while letting strangers TOggle My CapslOCK key; sorry for any typos, I did mY best)

So last week, I wrote down every UUID. And then I wrote about writing down every UUID over on my blog. And…people seemed to like it! The website was, for example, quite popular on Hacker News.

Now, you might be asking questions like “what is a UUID” or “why did you do this,” as several folks on Tiktok did when they saw my video:

And I’m sorry to inform you that this is an impossibly dumb programming joke that requires *so much* dissecting of the frog to explain that I’m not going to try.

Instead, let’s just appreciate that the CEO of Epic Games played along with my silly bit and move on.

A decade without a drink

So this is *way* outside my “whimsical games” lane, and I don’t plan on revisiting it. But as of today I haven’t had a drink in a decade. It’s a big deal for me.

I wrote about it here. I was really hungry for stories like this back when I quit, and if that’s you now I hope it’s helpful.

And if you’re not looking to read a harrowing but ultimately uplifting personal history on a Tuesday afternoon, well, that is extremely understandable and I’ll be back to working on games tomorrow.

It’s Pacman but you control it with your face. You look to steer and chomp your mouth to move faster. You look…pretty silly while you play.

It’s free, takes 30 seconds, and runs in the browser (it should (hopefully…) work on your phone just fine). You can play it here. And if you’re the type of person who wants technical details, I did a writeup here.

I’ve been working on this game on and off for about 5 months - I started it before One Million Checkboxes! But of course OMCB meant that I didn’t get much done on other projects for a while. It’s very nice to have the game out.

I hope you enjoy it!

DOOM in the iOS photos app

Over the summer I spent a day or two with my friend Adnan getting the classic game DOOM running in the iOS photos app. Kind of.

The whole project was pretty silly; we came out with a much better understanding of iOS shortcuts and a strong resolve to never try something like this again.

If you want to know how the project works, here's a writeup on the details.

Data and Code from One Million Checkboxes

I’ve released the code and data from One Million Checkboxes, along with some tools for recreating the images that teens secretly drew on the site.

Here are a few links for you:

• The data (hosted on the internet archive)

• Tools for working with the data

• Code for One Million Checkboxes

I’m very happy to have released the data, both because the story was so special to me but also because this is a nice way to officially close the OMCB chapter of my life.

Oh, wait, we got a dog

We got a dog! Her name is Gabby. Here’s a picture of her that I took just now while writing this post:

She’s 9 months old and named after Gabbro from Outer Wilds, the best game in the world. She’s very sweet and very smart and a whole lot of work.

It took me a bit of time to adapt to having a dog; sorry that I’ve been a little slower to release new things recently. I promise it’s worth it :)

I want to tell you my favorite story from running the site.

Note - this email contains gifs and is pretty long. I recommend you click through to read it your browser so that you can read all the content and view the gifs.

What was One Million Checkboxes?

One Million Checkboxes was a website with a million checkboxes on it. You probably coulda guessed that.

But the bit - the trick - was that all of those checkboxes were global. Checking or unchecking a box changed it for everyone in the world, instantly.

I thought the site wouldn’t get much traction but I was very, very wrong. Over 500,000 people visited the site in the 3 days after launch; folks checked 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.

It made the New York Times and The Washington Post; it’s on Know Your Meme and Wikipedia. I just spoke about it at XOXO Fest and the site won a Tiny Award. The whole thing was a wild ride.

I’ve written at length about the technical details behind the site - you can read about them here. And if you prefer to listen to the story I’m about to tell rather than read it, you can watch it on YouTube (it’s based on my talk from XOXO). This is my first video; I’m trying to figure out if it’s something I’d like to pursue.

Finally, this story is also available on my blog if you have trouble reading it here.

But let’s get into the story. To tell you this story, I need to give you some context.

Bit of context 1: OMCB made it hard to draw

I like to make games that help people interact on the internet. Some people are assholes when they interact on the internet. So when I make games like this I try to add constraints to make the average interaction a little more pleasant.

I’ve been around long enough to know what people will draw if you put an unrestricted canvas on the public internet, so for OMCB I wanted to constrain drawing.

To do this I scaled the number of checkboxes in a row to the size of the browser window. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

I’ve written “EXAMPLE” - but you can only see it if the browser is exactly the right width! As soon as the number of checkboxes in a row changes at all the message disappears.

This meant that if you drew something rude on your phone it wouldn’t show up for me on my laptop and vice-versa: your graffiti was only visible to people with the exact same display as your own. This constraint was particularly nice because it was subtle; you might never realize that your writing wasn’t visible to anyone else on the site!

I got a lot of comments asking for me to “fix” this so that people could draw. But the choice here was very intentional.

I’ve found that the best stories from my stranger-interaction games come from how people work around the constraints that I add.

That was foreshadowing.

Bit of context 2: how I stored state

OMCB had a million checkboxes on it. One million is a big number! So I wanted to store and transmit my state efficiently.

To do this I said - a checkbox has two valid states. It’s checked or it’s unchecked. That’s like a bit - a bit is either 0 or 1. So I just stored the state for each checkbox as a bit. Bit 3 was “1” if checkbox 3 was checked and “0” otherwise.

That’s a million bits. There are 8 bits in a byte, so that’s 125,000 bytes, which is 125KB - not even the size of an MP3! Totally workable.

I stored this data in Redis (an easy to use database) and base64-encoded it when transmitting it to clients.

I promise this matters. Let’s get back to the story.

Have I been hacked?

A few days after launching OMCB, I rewrote the backend in go (with the help of my friend Eliot) to keep up with the load. And then, for some reason, I dumped an ascii encoding of the raw bytes in my database. I don’t know why - I just did it.

The data I saw looked like this:

And my reaction to the data looked something like this:

I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.

I assumed I’d been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.

I couldn’t find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then - wait.

Wait!

I saw it.

The hidden message

I looked at the checkboxes that corresponded to the sketchy URLs in my database.

That H - it represented one byte. One byte represented 8 bits. 8 bits represented 8 checkboxes.

Those chunks of 8 checkboxes formed a repeating pattern that lined up with the URLs. And if I changed something - if I unchecked a box - the pattern immediately reappeared.

I hadn’t been hacked.

Someone was writing me a message in binary.

What does that mean?

When I dumped my database, Redis converted the data to ascii.

To do that, it read the data one byte - 8 bits/checkboxes - at a time. It converted that byte to a number between 0 and 255 (2^8 - 1). And then it checked whether that number was in the printable ascii character range (32 - 127). If it was, it printed out the corresponding character; otherwise it printed the byte’s hex representation (e.g. \x00 for 0).

So someone was:

• Checking boxes

• To flip bits

• To form numbers

• That formed letters

• That spelled out the URL

And they were doing that with thousands of other people on the site.

I was impressed.

Down the rabbit hole

So.

https://catgirls.win/omcb

catgirls dot win

I hemmed and hawed. I googled around. And then I clicked the link.

The link went to a discord! And the discord was called “Checking Boxes.” I joined the discord (it’s now hidden).

And someone was really excited to see me! We chatted for a bit. And then they asked me something that blew my mind:

I said no. They showed me what they were up to:

They were downloading data for all million checkboxes and rendering them as a 1000x1000 grid (the unchecked boxes are white; the checked boxes are black).

There’s a lot going on here! We’ve got “be gay do crime” - love that - but there’s some interesting technical stuff here too.

The repeated noise at the bottom is the binary message I found. Above that is a base64 version of the same message - remember that base64 is what I used for transport. And on the left side is a QR code (with full error correction!). All of these messages linked to the discord.

The discord was full of some very sharp teens, and they were writing these secret messages to gather other very sharp teens to talk about botting the site. Anyone who was writing a bot would probably be looking at either the base64’d version of the data, the binary version, or the the 1000x1000 image version; they were covering all the bases.

And this worked! The discord grew from under 20 people when I joined to over 60 by the time I shut the site down.

So what’d they do?

Well, they drew a whole lot! As they built better systems for drawing (and better reverse-engineered my rate limits) their drawings became more complex. They drew a windows blue screen of death on the site (pre crowdstrike!)

Over time they experimented with animations and even tried out some protocols for adding color - like treating adjacent cells as the red, green, and blue channels of a color and drawing to a smaller grid. The grid became chaotic - full of sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs and self-referential memes:

I gave the discord a warning before I sunset the site. The night before doing it I removed all my rate limits to see how much traffic the site could handle and what they could do. We ended up with some really cool animations - my favorite was a Rickroll (this clip is not sped up).

Is botting good?

Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link to anything here - I don’t want to direct negative attention at anyone - but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People…did not like bots.

And I get it! The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial.

And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial. Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they could - I know this because they excitedly told me.

I expected this - I’m a programmer! - but people told me that it ruined the site for them and I suppose I understand that.

So, sure. This drawing probably degraded the experience for “regular” users - although the botters did have some rules around where to bot, and I would occasionally chime in to ask them to dial things down.

So there are some caveats. I understand why people don’t like bots; maybe this wasn’t an unassailable good. But man…

I found this so moving!

In high school, I wrote a recursive mail rule that sent a friend of mine millions of messages as a joke. I (accidentally!) repeatedly crashed the school’s mail server.

The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.

What this discord did was so cool - so surprising - so creative. It reminded me of me - expect they were 10 times the developer I was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting to watch it live - getting to provide some encouragement, to see what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of anger - was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think about it.

I’m proud to have made something that this discord decided was worth playing with, and I’m even more proud of what they did with it.

I can’t wait to see what they go on to make.

Again - I’ve made my first youtube video to tell this story. Given how emotional I found the whole thing, I thought being able to use my voice would be nice. Check it out if you’re interested!

It has a million checkboxes on it. Checking a box checks it for everyone.

The internet has found it and is going ham on it. My poor servers are dying, but it’s pretty fun to watch.

I’m doing my best to keep my servers up. I hope you can play. And I’ll make a visualization of the checks that people did (over 250,000 so far!) when things calm down :)

I’ll be back soon with some more nonsense!

The game can actually (optionally!) decline your meetings after you play. You can install it from the Chrome Webstore or read about the gory details of creating it on my blog.

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Creating this was a ton of fun. I particularly enjoyed that while I was embedding a game in a surprising spot, the game made sense for the medium - unlike putting Flappy Bird inside MacOS finder.

I’ve got a ton of people to thank for this project - Ian Henry gave me the idea, Chana Messinger came up with the name, Kelin convinced me I could actually make a chrome extension for this, and I never would have made this without the help of Josh W Comeau's classes.

I hope you like it!

GDC and other work

I’ll be at GDC (the big game development conference) for all of next week to present on stranger video and to meet folks. If you’re going to be at GDC and want to meet up please reach out!

I also made a tool that converts blinks to morse code called telEyegraph. I didn’t think it warranted a full newsletter post, but I thought a few people here might enjoy it.

That’s all for now! I’ll be back in April with some new nonsense.

No, really. Dial 1-515-762-5762 (aka 1-515-ROCK-ROCK) to play. You’ll be paired with a stranger, asked to say rock paper or scissors, briefly put on hold, and then hear what your opponent said + whether you won or lost. Games are 3 rounds long.

Part of the goal here was to take the idea behind Stranger Video and recreate it in a new medium. I wrote more about how I’m thinking about stranger-interaction games on my blog, so check that out if it sounds interesting. The blog also has some technical details if you’re looking for that.

Building this was a ton of fun. It’s been particularly fun to test this with people in person, see them realize what the game is about, and then *run across the room* so that their opponent can’t hear their move.

If you want to see TPS in action I previewed it at Wordhack, a delightful tech/language event at Wonderville in New York.

Greg was an incredible collaborator on this project and had his hands on the keyboard for 95% (at least) of the code. Thanks Greg :)

And, uh, that’s it! I hope you enjoy the game. This is my first post - let me know if you’d like to see something different (in particular I’m not sure how to balance linking to my blog with embedding it here).

My most recent game is stranger.video - it’s a website that matches you and a stranger up for a video-only face-only no-audio “call” that ends as soon as one of you blinks. I also enjoy building games with unusual mediums like macos finder, google sheets, or an extension of the opensearch spec.

I’ll email this list about the things that I build and write. I’ll immediately email about the big things (e.g. stranger.video) and occasionally aggregate the smaller things (e.g. wub).

Thinking about audience-building and engagement makes me feel gross. I’ll do my best to never pass that grossness on to you.