out now
Six Degrees of Play
Fifty years of video game history as a galaxy you fly through. Grab one game and everything connected to it comes drifting along behind.
How it's made
- I almost charged for it
My first instinct was a subscription fee. Then I showed it around, and every time I pictured a paywall in front of it the fun drained out.
- I just wanted to see what it looked like
I wondered what a map of game influences would look like, and then almost twenty years went by with nothing happening, because I had the idea and no way to build it.
- The parts I still can't crack
An honest list of what's still broken or unsolved on Six Degrees. Three of them are engineering problems. The fourth one is me.
- Built in the cracks
This didn't get built with tidy daily discipline. It got built in bursts, around a job and a long stretch of being sick, so I picked tools that could survive me disappearing for two weeks.
- Why a galaxy, not a graph
The first version was a flat 2D graph. It held up fine until I kept adding games, and then flat space just ran out.
- The nostalgia I didn't see coming
I added box art to the map mostly to make it look finished. The nostalgia hit way harder than I was expecting.