Yeah, impressive project, but I had the same thought.
My LGS recently got me in to have a look at building some custom systems for them. I looked at what they needed and was like:
> Hold up. You can pay me thousands of dollars to build something custom, and it will inevitably have on-going maintenance costs and high associated monthly costs for hosting + third-party API access (not amortized across multiple stores/clients), OR I could set you up on Shopify and a bunch of well maintained plug-ins.
It's extremely useful if your distribution platform is the web. However, I find it much more valuable as a type checker than a compiler. I use TypeScript extensively (in several projects) for defining schemas types.
For example, in the Breaka Club (https://breaka.club/) editor, which is not presently exposed to kids yet, we define behaviors for characters, props, mosaics (terrain tiles) and items in JSON. But the JSON has type checking and real-time completion as you type. Not naive property auto-suggestion, we have effect types and they're context aware in that you can refer to targets introduced higher in parent constructs of the JSON — and they're fully type checked. If you refer to a target that does not exist in a context, it won't validate and you cannot save the schema.
We use tsgo for development, but the editor (runtime schema validation) is presently stuck on TypeScript 6 because there's no WASM support.
Now, is it nutty that we're using TypeScript for JSON validation? A little. But it's extremely powerful. We're going far beyond what's capable with Zod or ArkType.
Professional looking product / page. However, the shaders themselves are extremely odd. They're just swirling patterns. I think the creator of this would do well to look at games for inspiration. Games use shaders for all sorts of effects, for a reason.
In particular, I'd expect there to be shaders making use of textures. I was expecting buttons with a laser finished metallic look that actually changes with lighting on the page. Or hero images that combine photography with masks to produce interesting effects highlighting products with auras etc. These all appear to be screensavers.
I'm definitely getting more than 4 hours of Astra usage (medium or high, typically). However, I predominantly use Sol or Luna because Astra simply isn't (or shouldn't be) necessary for every task.
That said, I'm not able to get anything useful done in those hours. The exception is when I swap back to 5.6 Sol/Luna, which seem to be working as they used to.
Mostly, I've just given up and am using Opus 5.5 for all the important tasks now. Which is odd for me say, because I cancelled my Anthropic sub a few months back because I couldn't stand Opus 4.6 < x < 5.5. 5.5 feels great though, like Astra did when it first released.
Yeah, I tried to read this because I'm genuinely interested in this topic. I assumed going in LLMs would be involved, and I don't mind at all. But my gosh reading the article is such a slog. I couldn't do it
They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts. I went straight from an Oculus account to Meta account. Might be location based, but I most certainly haven't been asked to upload any ID.
And I was pointing out that they are one and the same but the "Facebook" name was so tarnished by their terrible privacy practices they had to change it to save face.
But I guess if people like you are able to ignore that to make yourself feel better about giving your personal information to Zuckerberg's advertising company then anything is possible.
Phwoar! Thank you. It's 2026, and had it not been for your high quality informative comments. I would have not known anything about this them there Facebook. You saved me.
I don't know what conversation you think you're having here, but it's not that.
If you'd bothered to read... and then ready for it... stop, take a breath, and process the information. You'd have noticed I was pointing out you can use a Quest headset WITHOUT providing them your personal ID OR having a Facebook account. Almost as if, you know, I was highlighting that giving the company your personal info isn't required. Woe me though for pointing that out.
I'm sorry for interrupting the indignant rants. Please continue.
Have been running an in-school pilot over the last school term. Has been super insightful and led to a heap of changes to optimize UX. However, the biggest challenge has been delivery in this environment.
Trying to run a game in a browser on school iPads powered by really locked down networks has been challenging. Some school iPads will crash (out of memory) when launching the camera view, whilst others run flawlessly. We use a fork of Godot, and are constantly fighting to strike a balance between UX (increased parallelism) and browser device constraints i.e. a limit on how many web workers we can fit in memory.
In addition to our main (build and play your own RPG) experience, we also stream games direct to iPad. In particular a modded version of Overcooked! 2 that teaches kids to code — Overcooked itself was never even released on iPad. We've built our own Kubernetes system that spins up (a license limited number of) games/pods on demand backed by (time sliced) NVidia GPUs. This is literally running out of my home office. Despite the complexity of building all that, the Kubernetes and GPU time slicing wasn't even the largest hurdle. Turns out UDP is a no-go on the school network, so direct WebRTC was out the window. Instead we're using Cloudflare's TURN relay with TCP. Which much to my surprise, is holding up quite well.
Definitely a learning experience. However, kids are having a blast. Can't wait to roll this out further!
This is extremely interesting to me. I also have an 8 year old daughter who inspired me to build tooling for kids to create their own games. However, what I've come up with is quite different than this.
The primary mechanism through which kids create their game worlds is taking photos of their own hand drawn artwork.
I found traditional game dev tooling was far too technical and verbose for my daughter to stay interested. Honestly, it's not just a matter of her losing interest due to the complexity. Frankly, I don't want her sitting in front of a screen that long. She's a kid and I want her doing typical kid stuff. She and her younger sisters play sports, draw, paint, perform magic shows, and sing and dance around the house like complete nutbags — and I love it!
So whilst what I've built is highly technical for me to maintain, I'm not trying to expose all that complexity to kids. At least, not yet. I'm mostly interested in fueling creativity and letting kids explore. That's not to say kids that want to dive deep can't — we offer visual coding experiences etc. The intent is kids gain access to new features through self directed exploration and play. If some kids stop at just play, that's OK. The primary game mechanics (drawing and building worlds) are still inherently creative.
Although my approach is different, there is a heap in this article I resonant with. The hacking mentality, and letting kids go beyond the artificial constraints in particular. There's still much of Breaka Club that I can improve on. I'm running a limited in-school pilot at present and that's already yielded some really interesting insights. I'm really keen to continue to see what others put out in this space. I think it's drastically underserved and there's plenty of room for multiple approaches.
This looks really nice. Given the target age I imagine there's not a heap of text, so you could probably get away with LLM translations. Be sure to share it again in the coming months if you add English :)
My LGS recently got me in to have a look at building some custom systems for them. I looked at what they needed and was like:
> Hold up. You can pay me thousands of dollars to build something custom, and it will inevitably have on-going maintenance costs and high associated monthly costs for hosting + third-party API access (not amortized across multiple stores/clients), OR I could set you up on Shopify and a bunch of well maintained plug-ins.
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