Here’s my progress log for this week!

racing

This is the big one! I made a huge amount of progress. It was one of those things where I knew what the architecture was going to look like in my head from the very start, and I just kind of had to knock it out.

  • Built the race back-end physics sim with:
    • agentic slime behaviour based around their stats and personality (oh yeah slimes have personalities now)
    • slime-on-slime violence
    • slipstream and drafting mechanics
  • Also built the race replay front-end with:
    • visual effects for their progress through the race in the form of goo trails
    • visual effects for collisions
  • a fun little countdown

slime traits

I did some foundation work on slimes themselves too:

  • Gave slimes some stats that are on sliding scales, not just “number go up”, to make them different from each other even at max level
  • Gave slimes a personality as well using the sliding scales system
  • Extracted existing genetic traits that seemed to fit into this new sliding scale system to keep things nice and consistent
  • Started adding a “biography composer” and “notability” system that should hopefully make any text written about slimes automatically look fun and variable, instead of just being a list of stats. (No LLM usage, just pure unadulterated obsession on my part)
  • Redid the “view slime” page to account for all these new stats. Lots of work to go on this

boring techncial stuff

  • Wired up transactional email delivery, allowing for password resets
  • Also cleaned up the new account and lost password pages while I was there, since they were basically completely unstyled
  • Added a security feature to force-logout all your active sessions in case your account gets stolen
  • Cleaned up and renamed a lot of stuff internally (a lot of old references to other pets from when I wasn’t sure what kind of pet site I wanted to make)
  • Made hubs for the laboratory page and contests page to prep for future functionality
  • Wired up bug report and feedback links to a survey

upcoming this week

I feel REALLY good about this last week, it was extremely productive. There is one major change I want to make to slime racing visually and mechanically before I show previews, and I’ve got some other little polish to add to it, mostly around colours. After that I have some backend work to do on the slime racing as well to allow for scheduling and persistence: as it is right now it’s one real slime versus four slimes from a set roster, but on the real site my intention is for all slimes racing to be from the database if possible.

I think that’s going to be most of the week. I might poke away at other cleanup items while I’m at it, like writing more biography details and working a bit on the lab landing pages, but the racing is going to take up 90% of my time for sure.