Cursor Camp

19 hours ago (neal.fun)

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.

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  • Why not encode the badge names as well in rot13?

    • 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.

  • 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

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    • 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

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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".

I'm really watching 12 Angry Men through a small window in a wonderfully cute browser game, I love it!

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.

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.

  • I seem to remember some similar discussion about when google put pacman in the google doodle.

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.

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 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!

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 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.

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.

I saw this experiment decades ago on the internet and it was to a music concert, i always wanted to do a cursor moshpit

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.

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.

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.

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.

Incredibly well done by Neal as usual!! Always has new fun experiments that are always completely new concepts

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.

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

For the beach volleyball, aim to click only when the ball is in its downward trajectory.

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.

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!

  • except thats the whole point of this game. mouse movement needs to be controlled by the game here!