Galaxy Progress Update 1
Apologies for any formatting issues. I wrote this in a text editor.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope this holiday season is treating you better that it’s been treating me.
I lost power the last few days, and as a result, didn’t quite get this finished to the level that I wanted. But, I’ve still made a ton of progress, and this should make for a nice little read. Even if you’re not interested in any of the specifics, you can still scroll through and take a gander at all the screenshots of the site so far.
Before I get into any of the specifics though, I should explain to the uninformed what this project is.
What is Galaxy?
In short, Galaxy is a website for incremental games. Game developers can publish their games on Galaxy, and then players can find said games, comment, rate, and chat with other people who are playing in real-time. It’s free, and has no ads, no paid perks, and it never will. Nor is it some weird reptillian ploy to harvest all of your data. I’m just a guy who likes incrementals, and wanted to put my coding skills to use.
Hey wait, you’re not using any shady money-gaining practices! How will the site stay afloat in this competitive and rapidly inflating economy?
Donations.
That’s not enough!
Yes it is.
Prove it!
- https://lichess.org/, the world’s second largest Chess website
- https://mspfa.com/, a compendium of user-created webcomics, mostly related to Homstuck
- I can’t think of any more examples off the top of my head, but I’m sure there’s dozens more similar sites for their respective niches
Oh.
Refactor (nerd stuff)
I was pretty deep into writing Galaxy when I had an epiphany that the code I was writing was absolute garbadge. So, a few months ago, I completely rewrote the site in Astro (along with some Svelte), and I can confidently say that I made the right choice. The site is much more performant, and now it (will be) compatible with SEO!
Beyond that, I was still using the same database (Mongo), so I didn’t completely replace my tech stack. But since the refactor, I’ve caught up and gone beyond the original version! If you’re curious, you can take a look at the new and old code. And maybe even make some contributions? Haha, just kidding… unless?
Why is Galaxy?
Two thoughts you may have had are: “Hey, that’s Kongregate!” and “Hey, that’s dSolver’s Plaza!” And yes, it’s both! I like the concept of the plaza, but, to put it bluntly, it may have fallen off (warning: NSFW) a little bit.
Differences (vs Plaza)
- No big banner ads for my $10 Steam game that hasn’t been updated in over 4 years.
- Developers are the ones who upload their games, not players.
- Live chat!
- Only web games
Differences (vs Kong)
- I’m not doing this for money (no ads, no premium)
- It’s not dead!
Where is Galaxy?
It’s not available yet. No ETAs, sorry :(
Screenshots
Homepage (Ignore how all the thumbnails are my profile picture! They make decent-ish testing images. Also ignore how all the games are games that I didn’t make. I haven’t made enough to make it easy to test everything.)
Game page (Chat is semi-working, just not on gamepages yet)
User page (something with the styles got borked… It used to look a bit better, I promise!)
An… inbox?
“Explore” pages
Search
Galaxy Plus
Despite the name, it’s not a subscription service. I promise. Instead, it’s a way to get more out of Galaxy, by cramming multiple games on screen at once. The UI isn’t fully done yet, and it’s a little buggy, but it still looks really cool!
fin
That’s it for now! Thanks for checking this little thing out. If you liked it, consider joining my discord for updates. And if you know how to code, you could help with development, if you feel like it.
Feel free to reach out on my discord (linked above) if you have any questions or feel like I missed anything.