Able Spaceperson; The Opposite Of Idle; Access Granted

Today began with the introduction of yet-another one of the “joys” of home ownership, so I pulled a short, fun Drop out of the Drafts bin, spiffied it up a bit, and will hopefully bring some either mindless or engaging fun your way this day.

Aside: Chicago/Illinois/pretty much anyone in the U.S.: Illinois’ governator posted some helpful “Know Your Right” resources that would be good for all of us to keep handy in these troubled time.

Programming Note: I’m getting the COVID booster and seasonal influenza jabs this afternoon, which may put me out of commission for a ~day. I’m going to try to scrounge time for the Tuesday Drop before then, though, since there’s a cool font I’m eager to share.

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TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using SmolLM3-3B-8bit via MLX and a custom prompt.)

• Able Spaceperson is an idle game where players manage a fleet without instructions, designed to be a minimalist web app example, with the source available at https://github.com/cfjedimaster/IdleFleet.
• The Opposite Of Idle is an idle game creation tool called Idle Game Maker, which allows users to build games using resources, clickables, buildings, upgrades, and achievements, accessible at https://orteil.dashnet.org/igm.
• Hacker Typer simulates hacking by typing randomly, creating a visual illusion of cybersecurity work, and is available at https://hackertyper.com.

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Able Spaceperson

Idle games (also called incremental or clicker games) are games that require players to be idle to advance, though clicking often accelerates progress.

Yes, they’re games that — if you so choose — you can just experience without [much] interaction.

I came across Idle Fleet as I was learning Alpine.js, which means the source is available (though I encourage holding off reading it before playing the game to avoid spoilers).

In it, you are an aspiring merchant captain (I imagined it was space-based, but I don’t think you need to be locked into that frame), though you have to prove yourself (by amassing a fleet) to attain that title.

There are no instructions save for a clickable button to “Send Ships”. As noted by the creator, the mechanics are not spelled out in the game, and that’s on purpose so as you play, things open up and surprise you.

It was a delightful distraction, and is a great example of the power of a simple, build-free, vanilla JS (+ Alpine) web app/game. It is just begging for someone with design chops to clone it and add some killer UX (though, that would make you un-idle, if you do so).

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The Opposite Of Idle

Idle Game Maker is a web-based tool/game creation engine created by Orteil (Julien Thiennot, the French developer behind Cookie Clicker) that lets us create our own idle/incremental games without coding experience. It provides a structured way to create games using an assortment of building blocks:

• resources, which are currencies or items that accumulate (like cookies in Cookie Clicker)
• clickables, such as buttons, that players click/tap to manually increase resources
• buildings or structures that automatically generate resources
• upgrades that provide improvements that enhance efficiency
• achievements/goals that reward players

One thing that I like about it is that it does not adopt any modern, minimalist UX idioms. Another is that it is 100% “AI”-free. We need more democratizing tools like this that let anyone create something fun/useful.

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Access Granted

One does not have to “click/tap” to be idly-engaged.

Hacker Typer is a fun novelty website[/game?] that creates the illusion you’re doing sophisticated l33t h@x0ring by displaying realistic-ish-looking code and terminal output as you randomly mash keys on your keyboard.

The site has been around for ages and has spawned many similar “fake hacking” simulators. It taps into the colloquial perception of what hacking looks like (lots of green text scrolling rapidly) versus the reality of actual cybersecurity work, which is usually much less visually dramatic.

Sadly, given the types of vulnerabilities and breaches we’ve had so far, in 2025, it sure feels like “real” hacking isn’t exactly much harder than this.

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FIN

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