I like that this is on the front page and there are no comments. I imagine because everyone is busy exploring and didn't yet go back to the comments to see what people think. Good sign!
There's mention of the cave and a "convergence point". I tried looking all around the cave, but there doesn't seem to be anything there (although you can find the drawings on the walls)
Edit: I looked at the source though and I don't see anything else clickable in the cave... No hidden secret badge either, maybe it is just for ambiance.
Turning the antenna in the treehouse gives different messages of about two minutes each. It’s a bit hard to listen to the whole thing without someone else interrupting by changing the antenna, so here are the audio files:
There’s talk of the tent near the beach, the gong, and gathering at the big fire once you hear the call. There’s also talk of the cave, the star map, trusting the bats, and reading the right side of the book carefully. Though it seems to me the audio may be outdated and that the star map was initially in the book and was since moved to the telescope.
The right side of the book mentions the time 8:47.
If we look at the star map, only two of them are pointing inwards. If we consider that a “convergence point”, it should be around the area of the big fire and tent.
There's also a locked door in one of the buildings, but I couldn't figure out what either mean if anything. It would be cool if the radio was used for something though
Because then you’d need to decode the full message and might read something you didn’t mean to. This way you can decode just the individual ones you want.
The badge names aren’t secret, they’re available in the book in the house even before you unlock them.
With Firefox, moving the cursor is really unresponsive and difficult, at least with my touch-pad. Taking many swipes to move even a little bit in each direction. It's a much more enjoyable experience with Chrome.
I've used Firefox as a daily driver for 20 years now (that's terrifying to say). I have to switch to another browser about once a month (although at a previous job I had to use $INTERNAL_WEBSITE in edge permanently). I have 0 issues with daily sites
I was indoctrinated as a teenager. A friends older brother was using it when he showed me World of Warcraft (not a euphamism) and I went home and downloaded it and never looked back.
I've contributed to a bunch of OSS, but for some reason never firefox.
Haha, this is hardly a daily site, is it? I can't remember the last time I experienced a firefox-specific browser issue before this. 95%+ of my issues usually come from ublock
No doubt, OP’s site is niche (and very cool!), but between weird graphical rendering I’ve experienced in the past with Firefox and WebGL, among a number of just flat out broken forms - I just gave up.
I want Gecko to succeed as Chromium being a bully in the web space has been unfortunate, though I’m even more rooting for Ladybird.
This is so good! Using mouse motion as a control scheme is particularly genius - how did no one think of this before? I particularly like the points where the mouse control is taken away from you, i.e. when you float downstream, or when you go down a slide. It's also particularly genius how the mouse can 'teleport' around the screen (i.e. when you go into a door and come out somewhere else).
This idea could even be taken further - it would be really cool to have terrain that is more difficult to traverse. I'm also intrigued by the lack of walls. I think something like a hedge maze would be really fun!
It was fun rick rolling you all on the piano. Vibe coded a little script that would play all kinds of melodies including rick roll. I eventually attracted a whole audience of cursors emoji reacting to it.
Brilliant. If you needed proof the internet is still alive, here you go. I feel like Neal's creations are the result of creatively iterating on "what if" and "why not".
> There is an urban myth that the release of Dragon Quest III caused a law to be passed in Japan banning the sale of Dragon Quest games or video games in general except on certain days such as weekends or national holidays. When III was released in Japan, over 300 schoolchildren were arrested for truancy while waiting in stores for the game to be released. The rumor claims there was a measurable dip in productivity when a Dragon Quest game was released and although muggings of Dragon Quest titles became so widespread that there were hearings in the Japanese Diet, no law was ever passed.
Kamala Harris bragged about enforcing this law against parents in California. That’s the only way that I know that it’s an actual law that gets enforced because I had never heard of laws like this before, and I grew up in US public schools in the South.
I think it's incredible that you can feel a human connection with someone on the other side of the world purely by moving your cursors together. Just had a "game" of soccer with random people.
Well this is one of the most adorable things I've seen in a while. Thank you for sharing a little joy. So many little details I love, falling off the waterfall, the cursor size fading into the background, the flashlight in the cave. Haven't explored it all but going to share this right away.
I got taken back to Club Penguin as well. Especially clicking into the cave or treehouse and getting transported into a little side pocket of the map. Amazing work!
This is so well made! In the car racing track there's an overpass, and the cursor correctly Z-orders depending on whether you're coming from the upper or lower part of the track. Respect.
Strangely enough, when I enter the "convergence point" book, my cursor gets an American flag, even though it wasn't American before. Has anyone else seen this?
Does anyone know how he is implementing country detection? I'm certain it's not GeoIP since my current IP address (and physical location) is different than the country it's showing me from.
GeoIP services can sometimes be wrong, they are essentially just lookup tables for IP subnets. I have a VPS in the Netherlands which most GeoIP providers detect as being in Czechia, for example. I assume whichever one the site is using just has the wrong country listed for your IP.
It's the same for me. I'm in Australia and on my work laptop I'm connected to an American VPN. It's showing my location as USA. I was wondering how it's detecting the country.
When I see the domain of a post is neal.fun, I instantly get a huge grin because I know I am about to be delighted. Thank you Neal! The beach yurt with the mushroom soup was a hilarious touch.
Clearly it is working for many people. Perhaps if you share your setup and what exactly is the issue you’re facing, someone may have a suggestion. “It doesn’t work” is just about the worse “bug report” one can make.
pretty hard to click through the cookie consent form because the browser hijacks the mouse and doesnt let it move to the right place. ended up using tab to click through it.
And the cookie consent form is one of those that require you to click a gazillion toggles. Hasn't it been established now that opt-out must be no harder than opt-in?
the law unambiguously says that, yes. However, companies these days seem to respond to enforcement, not the text of the law. They are all using the same few cookie banner libraries/providers, so that they have herd protection (if the eu wants to crack down on it, it has to do it to hundreds/thousands of companies simultaneously). It seems neal chose that route also.
I really had fun with this one. You know what would make it even cosier? Being able to choose a small avatar for ourselves. The mouse pointer as your icon feels a very impersonal at the moment. Having avatars would make it feel more like we're all hanging out together in this wonderland.
One is kinda half hidden behind a tree on the far right and another one is next to the starting sign. The rest are on the beach area and very slightly off the beach area
When I was a teenager we had the Living Books edition of Arthur's Teacher Trouble on CD-ROM as part of a "multimedia kit". Every page had short animations that would play by clicking on random things with your cursor, in addition to following along with the story, clicking on single words to hear them pronounced and spelled, etc. It was incredible and paved the way for similar phenomena like clickable Easter eggs in Homestar Runner cartoons.
please don't re-implement mouse movement, this would work perfectly fine without and now it just feels really bad to use because my sensitivity is fucked
My mouse is set to 400 DPI, acceleration off (libinput flat profile), and default (0) sensitivity (range -1.0 - 1.0, no change at 1.0). Had similar settings on Windows, games have crazy high default sensitivity but websites like this have extremely low sensitivity. I had to crank my DPI up to 2000 to make it usable and 4000 to be comfortable and roughly match desktop settings, but this also made the cursor extremely unwieldy when pausing the game.
This and volume control are my biggest gripes.
The soul of this game requires that your cursor can go "behind" things (like trees, or partially submerged in water), can have subtle nudges to keep you on paths and add friction when in water, and also to be able to take full control of your cursor for the lazy river etc!
I like that this is on the front page and there are no comments. I imagine because everyone is busy exploring and didn't yet go back to the comments to see what people think. Good sign!
Well, clearly you and I have made it out alive :)
I only managed to get out once I had earned all 9 badges...
ah so you havent discovered the secret 10th badge yet, have you
Where I can see the badges
clearly xD
Badge Guide (to avoid spoilers, encoded with rot13¹):
* Cannonball!: Tb ba gur qvivat obneq va gur cbby. Fbhgurnfg sebz gur fgnegvat cbfvgvba.
* Treasure Hunter: Teno n zrgny qrgrpgbe gura frnepu arne gur yrsg fvqr bs gur ibyyrlonyy svryq. Abegujrfg sebz gur fgnegvat cbfvgvba.
* Goal!: Fpber n tbny jvgu gur fbppre onyy. Fbhgurnfg sebz gur fgnegvat cbvag.
* S'more Please: Teno n znefuznyybj sebz gur ohpxrg naq chg gurz va gur ovt sver. Gnxrf nobhg gra frpbaqf. Abegurnfg sebz gur fgnegvat cbvag.
* Cat Person: Crg gur png va gur ubhfr. Abegujrfg arne gur fgnegvat cbvag.
* Take a Seat: Fvg ba gjb punvef.
* Slide!: Tb ba gur ovt fyvqr. Rnfg sebz gur fgnegvat cbvag.
* Beachcomber: Svaq nyy gur frnfuryyf.
* Green Thumb: Jngre gur irtrgnoyrf. Fbhgujrfg arne gur fgnegvat cbvag.
¹ https://rot13.com
Is there anything to the weird book in the treehouse or is it just for flavor? It seems to be alluding to something but I can't figure it out.
There's mention of the cave and a "convergence point". I tried looking all around the cave, but there doesn't seem to be anything there (although you can find the drawings on the walls)
Edit: I looked at the source though and I don't see anything else clickable in the cave... No hidden secret badge either, maybe it is just for ambiance.
Turning the antenna in the treehouse gives different messages of about two minutes each. It’s a bit hard to listen to the whole thing without someone else interrupting by changing the antenna, so here are the audio files:
https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/sounds/harold-1.mp3
https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/sounds/harold-2.mp3
There’s talk of the tent near the beach, the gong, and gathering at the big fire once you hear the call. There’s also talk of the cave, the star map, trusting the bats, and reading the right side of the book carefully. Though it seems to me the audio may be outdated and that the star map was initially in the book and was since moved to the telescope.
The right side of the book mentions the time 8:47.
If we look at the star map, only two of them are pointing inwards. If we consider that a “convergence point”, it should be around the area of the big fire and tent.
That’s as far as I’ve got with this.
There's also a locked door in one of the buildings, but I couldn't figure out what either mean if anything. It would be cool if the radio was used for something though
The radio in the treehouse might be relevant. See my sibling comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961275
Yeah I saw that too, but the list of all accessible rooms is also in the code and the only scenes I see are
It would be really cool if there were some secrets, but alas it appears not (unless it's obfuscated in the source as well)Why not encode the badge names as well in rot13?
They've been encoded twice for extra protection.
Because then you’d need to decode the full message and might read something you didn’t mean to. This way you can decode just the individual ones you want.
The badge names aren’t secret, they’re available in the book in the house even before you unlock them.
The encoding is too advanced
Thank you for productivity loss, Neal!
With Firefox, moving the cursor is really unresponsive and difficult, at least with my touch-pad. Taking many swipes to move even a little bit in each direction. It's a much more enjoyable experience with Chrome.
This is why I could never commit to a Gecko based browser. There’s just too many daily sites I don’t have the patience to debug if it’s me or them.
I've used Firefox as a daily driver for 20 years now (that's terrifying to say). I have to switch to another browser about once a month (although at a previous job I had to use $INTERNAL_WEBSITE in edge permanently). I have 0 issues with daily sites
20 years of Firefox consistent use is actually impressive. Thank you for your service!
I was indoctrinated as a teenager. A friends older brother was using it when he showed me World of Warcraft (not a euphamism) and I went home and downloaded it and never looked back.
I've contributed to a bunch of OSS, but for some reason never firefox.
Haha, this is hardly a daily site, is it? I can't remember the last time I experienced a firefox-specific browser issue before this. 95%+ of my issues usually come from ublock
No doubt, OP’s site is niche (and very cool!), but between weird graphical rendering I’ve experienced in the past with Firefox and WebGL, among a number of just flat out broken forms - I just gave up.
I want Gecko to succeed as Chromium being a bully in the web space has been unfortunate, though I’m even more rooting for Ladybird.
No issue on FF Macos with a touchpad
Designed For Chromenet Explorer 6.0
Me too, mouse.
This is so good! Using mouse motion as a control scheme is particularly genius - how did no one think of this before? I particularly like the points where the mouse control is taken away from you, i.e. when you float downstream, or when you go down a slide. It's also particularly genius how the mouse can 'teleport' around the screen (i.e. when you go into a door and come out somewhere else).
This idea could even be taken further - it would be really cool to have terrain that is more difficult to traverse. I'm also intrigued by the lack of walls. I think something like a hedge maze would be really fun!
Reminds me of the era of flash games/applets. People were building lots of cute, interactive stories back then.
I love this! It reminds me of https://cursordanceparty.com/ which was built by a friend about 15 years ago and is still online :)
I had fun on the internet again. Thank you internet people <3
This is such a breath of fresh air. I feel like I'm back on Club Penguin!
It was fun rick rolling you all on the piano. Vibe coded a little script that would play all kinds of melodies including rick roll. I eventually attracted a whole audience of cursors emoji reacting to it.
Brilliant. If you needed proof the internet is still alive, here you go. I feel like Neal's creations are the result of creatively iterating on "what if" and "why not".
Nice one. Pleasantly surprised that this has nothing to do with Cursor the IDE
Lol Zed > Cursor but this Cursor > Zed
That's brilliant, at first I thought it was about with Neal Wu's site. but nah actually it turns out that it's just a cursor game!
I'm really watching 12 Angry Men through a small window in a wonderfully cute browser game, I love it!
The most unrealistic thing is that the cat doesn't chase the mice around.
I think there's a case for a corporate class action lawsuit against Neal for employee productivity loss every time every time a new game is published.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest
> There is an urban myth that the release of Dragon Quest III caused a law to be passed in Japan banning the sale of Dragon Quest games or video games in general except on certain days such as weekends or national holidays. When III was released in Japan, over 300 schoolchildren were arrested for truancy while waiting in stores for the game to be released. The rumor claims there was a measurable dip in productivity when a Dragon Quest game was released and although muggings of Dragon Quest titles became so widespread that there were hearings in the Japanese Diet, no law was ever passed.
Arrested for truancy?
Truancy is a crime in many countries, including the USA.
An offense, sure. But it’s not a “crime” in the US.
Not for the student. But at least in some states, parents can potentially face jail time if their children miss enough school.
Kamala Harris bragged about enforcing this law against parents in California. That’s the only way that I know that it’s an actual law that gets enforced because I had never heard of laws like this before, and I grew up in US public schools in the South.
I seem to remember some similar discussion about when google put pacman in the google doodle.
Lmao it's blocked on my corporate wifi
That's a crime. Your HR/IT are certifiably not fun.
dont make them the scapegoats. who was it that said "behind every rule on that wall is an idiot who made it necessary"
Found the manager
Never Let common sense and trust do the job when another policy in the employee handbook can do the job!
I think it's incredible that you can feel a human connection with someone on the other side of the world purely by moving your cursors together. Just had a "game" of soccer with random people.
Well done, Neal!
Well this is one of the most adorable things I've seen in a while. Thank you for sharing a little joy. So many little details I love, falling off the waterfall, the cursor size fading into the background, the flashlight in the cave. Haven't explored it all but going to share this right away.
I'm a huge neal.fun fan but I still worried that this was some scammy LLM coding YouTube clickbait.
Love the joystick for mobile users.
SO much better than the metaverse, at 1/1000000th the cost!
Really cool. Sucks that they have to have the cookie banners though. I feel like this could have been done without user tracking in that way.
I absolutely love this. Kind of gives me Club Penguin vibes.
I got taken back to Club Penguin as well. Especially clicking into the cave or treehouse and getting transported into a little side pocket of the map. Amazing work!
100%, briefly playing this brought me right back to that for a second. I'm glad others felt that same vibe.
So much fun! I ended up playing beach volleyball with a bunch of people from around the world! :D excellent!
This is so well made! In the car racing track there's an overpass, and the cursor correctly Z-orders depending on whether you're coming from the upper or lower part of the track. Respect.
Best cursor camp ive seen!
Strangely enough, when I enter the "convergence point" book, my cursor gets an American flag, even though it wasn't American before. Has anyone else seen this?
I did something similar https://github.com/skorotkiewicz/proximity-explorer
Reminded me of Club Penguin days.
I saw this experiment decades ago on the internet and it was to a music concert, i always wanted to do a cursor moshpit
Does anyone know how he is implementing country detection? I'm certain it's not GeoIP since my current IP address (and physical location) is different than the country it's showing me from.
IP location, browser's locale, or combination of both: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
GeoIP services can sometimes be wrong, they are essentially just lookup tables for IP subnets. I have a VPS in the Netherlands which most GeoIP providers detect as being in Czechia, for example. I assume whichever one the site is using just has the wrong country listed for your IP.
It's the same for me. I'm in Australia and on my work laptop I'm connected to an American VPN. It's showing my location as USA. I was wondering how it's detecting the country.
That's awesome! It seems like all the rooms are accessible, but the football area is a bit laggy; the interaction feels like there's a lot of delay.
When I see the domain of a post is neal.fun, I instantly get a huge grin because I know I am about to be delighted. Thank you Neal! The beach yurt with the mushroom soup was a hilarious touch.
This probably would have been fun if it worked.
Clearly it is working for many people. Perhaps if you share your setup and what exactly is the issue you’re facing, someone may have a suggestion. “It doesn’t work” is just about the worse “bug report” one can make.
I love the cave paintings of cursor cavepeople
genuinely had a blast,felt like being a kid on a playground again.
pretty hard to click through the cookie consent form because the browser hijacks the mouse and doesnt let it move to the right place. ended up using tab to click through it.
And the cookie consent form is one of those that require you to click a gazillion toggles. Hasn't it been established now that opt-out must be no harder than opt-in?
the law unambiguously says that, yes. However, companies these days seem to respond to enforcement, not the text of the law. They are all using the same few cookie banner libraries/providers, so that they have herd protection (if the eu wants to crack down on it, it has to do it to hundreds/thousands of companies simultaneously). It seems neal chose that route also.
Incredibly well done by Neal as usual!! Always has new fun experiments that are always completely new concepts
A really enjoyable journey ;) Felt like a kid again, cheers!
Well, lads, 10 laps, been a day, going to sleep.
He's done it again folks
Anyone else having performance problems?
Well, that was absolutely delightful. What a tonic.
I really had fun with this one. You know what would make it even cosier? Being able to choose a small avatar for ourselves. The mouse pointer as your icon feels a very impersonal at the moment. Having avatars would make it feel more like we're all hanging out together in this wonderland.
It's not what you asked for, but right click to choose an enhanced icon. (EDIT: Oops that appears to just be a temporary emoticon)
You can put the hat on. It's in the main camp building in a bedroom. Your cursor will be wearing a hat from then on.
You can also put other clothes on, like sunglasses and shorts.
Can you don multiple items? Didn't try.
Yeah you can. You buy them with seashells.
Weirdly, this seems to kill my wifi connection after a minute or so (Firefox on Linux).
Nice game this is my first if able to add name that will be grate
This is utterly delightful. Thank you.
Just spent 20 minutes of my life, I don't want them back, was worth every second.
The depth of this project is amazing. So many details that you can click into!
Bug report. If i click a book on the phone my pseudo cursor goes away! :(
I thought cursor.com camp :)
NO AI !
I loved the impromptu dance party I had in this with a bunch of people just bouncing on the stage.
This reminds me of the old internet for some reason I can't really nail down, but maybe the club penguin-ess of it.
Came to say the say thing. Strong Club Penguin feeling as soon as I saw that “off duty” sign on the lifeguard tower
Well this is incredibly joyful, well done.
For the beach volleyball, aim to click only when the ball is in its downward trajectory.
I love Neal's creations so much !
That is so interesting!
Ok, that's super cute. Dance on the dance floor!
Any tips for getting the right-click menu to work with a touchpad?
I two-finger tap, but the menu immediately disappears.
Click + hold. Then move onto an option
Argh. No luck.
:(
This is awesome! Where can I find the music from the DJ booth? I can listen to that all day
The art style here is really charming. Thanks for the whimsy today!
I don't usually like my cursor to be hijacked but man, I like this one.
coolest website i've seen in a while! absolutely loving this!
I wonder whats the multiplayer stack here. I haven't looked yet.
Legit first post I've wanted to upvote in a long time.
Cool, but wow - my iPhone heats up super fast while on that site.
That was a lot of fun. Brought back some nostalgia :)
The last seashell is eluding me. Otherwise I got all the badges.
Near the title sign, on the center of the camp, is where I found the last one I missed
Touch virtual grass
Really love all his work!
Check out the Space Elevator or Size of Life too.
That was delightful, what more can I say?
We have achieved world peace, fanks Neal :)
I thought its the 60 billion dollars one.
Nice use of Rive!
Sorry, what's Rive?
Interactive engine for building apps, games, products with lots of motion https://rive.app
Thanks! Didn’t know about it, looks fun
neal.fun is the bestest place on the internet
It even works on mobile, brilliant.
So engaging! Made me smile the entire time
I can't get the 17th shell :(
SPOILER
the two that are hard to find are 1. by the river on the far left and 2. at the main spawn point
One is kinda half hidden behind a tree on the far right and another one is next to the starting sign. The rest are on the beach area and very slightly off the beach area
This is so neat!
Absolutely incredible. Well done Neal
This is great
Remember to have fun, people!
Genuinely amazing!
When I was a teenager we had the Living Books edition of Arthur's Teacher Trouble on CD-ROM as part of a "multimedia kit". Every page had short animations that would play by clicking on random things with your cursor, in addition to following along with the story, clicking on single words to hear them pronounced and spelled, etc. It was incredible and paved the way for similar phenomena like clickable Easter eggs in Homestar Runner cartoons.
This reminded me of that.
Cursor brethren, why y u no join me on my pink flamingo expedition
This was fun!
nice fun game
I'm happily disappointed this has nothing to do with a certain electron based code editor fork.
Weirdly i got slight motion sickness from this
Yeah same here - unexpected!
Fun! Thanks!
awww man that was fun!
Really putting the "fun" in "Neal.fun." Yet another amazing work by Neal Agarwal.
firefly! iykyk
This is the reason I love Hckrnews.
please don't re-implement mouse movement, this would work perfectly fine without and now it just feels really bad to use because my sensitivity is fucked
My mouse is set to 400 DPI, acceleration off (libinput flat profile), and default (0) sensitivity (range -1.0 - 1.0, no change at 1.0). Had similar settings on Windows, games have crazy high default sensitivity but websites like this have extremely low sensitivity. I had to crank my DPI up to 2000 to make it usable and 4000 to be comfortable and roughly match desktop settings, but this also made the cursor extremely unwieldy when pausing the game. This and volume control are my biggest gripes.
The soul of this game requires that your cursor can go "behind" things (like trees, or partially submerged in water), can have subtle nudges to keep you on paths and add friction when in water, and also to be able to take full control of your cursor for the lazy river etc!
Yeah, whatever bug they have with this affected me two, was swinging my mouse across most of my desk to move any distance whatsoever.
I noticed this on Safari, but when I switched to Chrome it seemed fine.
except thats the whole point of this game. mouse movement needs to be controlled by the game here!