Over Christmas break, I built GLITCH - a first-person survival shooter where you play as a "glitch" fighting debugging agents in a neon-lit spherical arena.
The stack:
React Three Fiber for 3D rendering
Zustand for state management
PostgreSQL for the global leaderboard
Hosted on Replit
What I built in ~40 prompt iterations:
- Full 6-DOF movement (fly in any direction)
- 4 enemy types with unique AI behaviors (rushers, floaters, brutes, glitchers that teleport and drop mines). If it's interesting, I have plans to expand.
- Shield ability with knockback physics
- Wave-based progression system
- Global leaderboard with nickname entry for top 10 scores
- Prodigy-style electronic soundtrack with random track rotation
- Visual effects: chromatic aberration on damage, scanlines, vignette
Interesting challenges we solved with AI assistance:
- Elastic boundary system to prevent players getting stuck at arena edges
- 3-meter knockback limit so enemies get pushed back but resume chasing
- Mine cleanup system with proper TTL handling
- The entire game loop - from concept to playable with leaderboards - was built conversationally with an AI coding assistant. Each prompt built on the last, iterating on mechanics until they felt right.
I actually wanted to build something I like to play instead of "consuming" others' games.
note: I'm passionate about this too. We're building https://fairlight.app/ as a successor to https://moneyflow.camplight.net/ (an internal tool that helps accounting and book-keeping we use to power our venture studio and agency as it's a real hell)
There's no extensive research on this topic. I really doubt coops are paying more than FAANG and if the only thing that you're after is money then coops are surely not your thing and that's OK ;)
In tech though, money is not the main unique value proposition and I would suggest getting curious about investing in happiness[1] so one can increase it's baselines[2]
Working at Google for a few years made me lots of money so now I don't need to work for many years. Working a lower paid job means I would need to waste more time working and less time doing what makes me happy.
I have the money and left the shitty organization that produced it, and now I don't have to work, and find after some time of happy relief, all my hobby interests do not provide enough sense of purpose.
I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now.
If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true.
I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price)
There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig.
But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected.
I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it.
Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.
I think coops are meant to be the thing that makes you happy. Obviously it's not for everyone, but a lot of people really want that sense of community.
not the OP, but a second opinion from someone with the same reaction -
1) "safe spaces" for emotions is inherently at odds with corporate culture, point blank. They exist to use you. They pay you, you provide them a service and/or your time as written in the contract. It is in your best interest to not be the nail that sticks out from the wood if you wish to keep the money coming because ultimately the power exchange lies heavily with them.
2) I don't do support groups, though this is more of a personal decision. Keeping vulnerable facets of my life completely air-gapped from cash flow and from other untrusted and un-vetted individuals has never failed me.
Now - water cooler-ish 1:1's a la "hey, you hanging in there?" can be done with tact and sincerity by select individuals if there's a previous rapport. But there is an art to sniffing out whether it's meant with a sincere no-bullshit-humanity-centric angle, versus "can we optimize this individual's output" angle. It's demeaning to think one can be the other.
Thanks for the eye-opener! :bow: I'm far away from corporate culture as I'm part of a cooperative[1] so I appreciate your knowledge and your time to share it ️
Information about the private emotional states of my team members is precisely the sort of information I'm supposed to be guarding, and work is not a safe space for opening up. If they wish to share frustrations with process, the state of their morale, etc, in a group setting, there is no problem. But frankly, if they found out I was keeping a log of how they were feeling day to day over the course of working with me, I would hope they would have the self-respect to confront me and then leave.
It's inappropriate to keep emotional dossiers on your co-workers and I can't imagine that "for their benefit" is anywhere near the median use case for a tool like this.
What guarantees would someone have that this information would not be shared, intentionally or not, with interested third parties in the future?
Thanks for taking the time to write and authentically share your point-of-view :bow: ️ I deduce that you don't have some process in your team for increasing the team's EQ other than 1:1 conversations? But you have a process for sharing frustrations/morale/etc. in your group? Do you do it usually in your weekly meetings or it piles up and it's discussed in some kind of reflection meeting?
for the record: I agree that if there's no consensus from the team to volunteer to create habits for psychological safety, it will become a recipe for disaster if it's made mandatory. People will leave, lie or disengage totally.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with this as well. I've struggled with my mental health and had days where I could barely drag myself into the office. If this were implemented at my company, I would have spent the better part of a month beginning these meetings with 'well, I'm experiencing near-constant despair.'
Afraid of guarding? My mental state is my own business. I may choose to share it with my manager or my coworkers (in fact, I have), but to have it become a required part of a meeting? No. No. No. Especially on a remote team where I just don't know the other people. This is not the right way to build rapport.
It's telling that so many of the comments on this post at the time of my writing are negative. Please heed them.
And please keep in mind that as the team lead, or manager, or whatever your role is, there is a power imbalance. People will not have an easy time saying no to this activity, even if they want to.
I think that this angle can't be stressed enough. People's emotional state is part of their health, and, like any other health-related issue, it is never appropriate for one's employer to ask about it.
I would honestly feel more comfortable with my employer taking everyone's vitals at the start of a meeting, because physical health is so much less stigmatized than mental health.
Yup, I've read every semicolon in this thread, very thoughtful comments and I'm deeply grateful for people sharing their experiences. I couldn't ask for more :pray:
It struck me that you don't know your remote peers. In what setting are you working? I suppose you have a physical office with colleagues and a remote extension of teams with whom you occasionally collaborate?
about my role: I'm part of a digital cooperative and we too have power imbalances but not that direct as in a hierarchy. Our power dynamics stem from seniority but we all volunteered 2-3 years ago to do something about our team mental state and we're continuing to do it. Now it's part of the culture and this, of course, will alienate newcomers who dislike deeper harmonization but at the same time, it's strengthening the core team. Like everything, it has pros and cons :D
Consider also: I might feel a certain way and not want to let people know; but my face / expression / other nonverbal cues might let people know that's the situation without giving them further information. How can you convey a feeling of guardedness without declaring it? Declaring it would violate your own feeling of not wanting to declare your feelings.
Also, when you've declared something explicitly, you're now tied to it. Emotions are fluid and changing; nobody wants to have to establish some artifact, some fencepost of where they're at and then be tethered to it for the entire conversation.
You cannot make a "safe space" just by declaring it. You have to actually do the emotional labor of visibly understanding someone's individual perspective and building over time a particular type of trust: The trust that you are going to gracefully handle even their unreasonable emotions.
Expecting to do that before every meeting with your employees just makes you sound like an aerospace engineer who's never hear of "O-rings".
Those groups are voluntary, which you join if you are in the need for opening up, and you know everyone else joined for the same reasons. It's totally different from a work team.
A support group will always be at odds with an employment situation, the motives are inherently disaligned. "Not being emotionally overexposed" absolutely does not equate to "hiding information", that's ridiculous.
If my boss would arrive in a support group or some other psychologically safe space for "opening up" then that would be a gross violation of the environment prerequisites that's required for that group/space to function properly - one of us would have to leave.
It would be like like bringing a parent or spouse to psychotherapy (pair/relationshop therapy is structurally different) - that simple presence automatically destroys the possibility to "open up" properly.
Imho, The long term goals may be similar to what "normal" companies may have. Cooperatives are just means to an end but generally one may achieve lofty ambitions in any type of organization. The document sums up very nicely the pros and cons of cooperative targeting freelancers. The only thing one has to decide is wether one will reach sustainability in a normal company or in a cooperative - the journeys are two different wild adventures.
I've battled severe burnout after my first startup :( Almost 8 years down the road and numerous other startup fails now I believe teams can do a better job with burnout symptoms within colleagues [1]. Please be mindful for your buddies. They may not have the energy to pull out themselves \/
disclaimer: I've been involved in https://www.rulerapproach.org/ (as part of the development team from www.camplight.net)
It's interesting that the news release from gov.uk[1] focuses that they are doing one of the largest studies in the world with 370 schools... Looking today at our RULER statistics we now have almost ~900 enlisted USA schools.
Combining those will definitely become one of the largest, unless there's something similar in other parts of the world :O Have anybody heard something like this in other countries?
I hope all these initiatives lead to less bullying and aggressive behavior :))
I don't know if we practice "Agile Manifesto" or not but with our current flow[1] of collaboration and partnership we're pretty agile and able to respond to business reality within hours. Sometimes it's minutes depending on the complexity of the required "pivot" / refactoring. edit: also the team has no hierarchy and information silos. This trust builds a good rhythm.
I'm also trying to find and collaborate with a team which can do the same.
Our remote stack is based on: gitlab/github, skype, trello, google docs (we shifted from dropbox) and that's it. We don't need persistent chat because we're not big and we have a habit to use trello A LOT (we have like ~20 boards) :)
Over Christmas break, I built GLITCH - a first-person survival shooter where you play as a "glitch" fighting debugging agents in a neon-lit spherical arena.
The stack:
React Three Fiber for 3D rendering Zustand for state management PostgreSQL for the global leaderboard Hosted on Replit
What I built in ~40 prompt iterations:
- Full 6-DOF movement (fly in any direction)
- 4 enemy types with unique AI behaviors (rushers, floaters, brutes, glitchers that teleport and drop mines). If it's interesting, I have plans to expand.
- Shield ability with knockback physics - Wave-based progression system - Global leaderboard with nickname entry for top 10 scores - Prodigy-style electronic soundtrack with random track rotation - Visual effects: chromatic aberration on damage, scanlines, vignette
Interesting challenges we solved with AI assistance:
- Elastic boundary system to prevent players getting stuck at arena edges
- 3-meter knockback limit so enemies get pushed back but resume chasing
- Mine cleanup system with proper TTL handling
- The entire game loop - from concept to playable with leaderboards - was built conversationally with an AI coding assistant. Each prompt built on the last, iterating on mechanics until they felt right.
I actually wanted to build something I like to play instead of "consuming" others' games.
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