I came across the "What did your 'Show HN' project turn into?"[1] thread today and was blown away by how many projects were able to launch and become successful just from posting here on HN. I imagine a lot of us are looking forward to the day we can post our own Show HN thread about a project we are launching, but maybe we're a ways off, need a little inspiration, or could use some feedback.
What are you currently working on?
Who is the target audience?
What technology are you utilizing?
Are you working on this full time? Part time?
Do you have funding? Bootstrapping?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030863
My colleague and I have been working on https://armoredbits.com a little over a year now.
To describe it as simply as possible: Armored Bits is a realtime multiplayer mech game, except as the player rather than control your mech via standard gaming controls, you write a predefined AI "player" which you upload to our service, and in turn when you start a game talks to our server over a protobuf API.
Our target audience is anyone interested in games and programming, be they beginners or advanced users. A longer term goal is to slowly build it up into a recruiting service for programmers.
Our tech stack is a bit broad. The core game server is written in Haskell. We use Unity3d for the visual client. Our first SDK is in JavaScript (node.js), although we're looking forward to the community making SDKs for their favorite languages. Our web and game coordination services are being written in Elixir. Everything, including the user code wrapped in containers, runs on top of a kubernetes cluster.
We work on this part time while juggling our $DAY_JOBs, although I took a few months off earlier this year to hack on the core game server and push us forward.
We are effectively bootstrapping, although a handful of gracious donations via our web page have helped offset some of our minor development costs.
I don't have a target, I doubt many people will even like it or be interested in it. I needed to have more VM knowledge for employment reasons, and I wanted to play around with Hack for a while but couldn't follow tutorials for Windows without knowing Vagrant, so I decided to scratch two itches by teaching myself both Vagrant and Hack with a single project.
Technologies: HHVM, Hack, XHP, MySQL. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere to host it, but I will probably post it either way once the code looks presentable.
Also, I've been teaching myself the fundamentals of game development in C++ and SDL. I started in January but progress on what is in theory a bog-standard 2d shooter is incredibly slow, because I take tangents for weeks working on all of the SDL and vector related libraries I've written around it. I recently got a camera and scrolling working[0], which I'm actually proud of (although admitting that here just shows what a novice I am.)
Technologies: C++
Target Audience: People who like simple, sprite based games. So probably no one.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxluEUEp_Po