@Alan

devlog #6 of The Void: NO WAY IT WORKS

Hello, Stardancers. I’m sure the three or four people following this project will be very glad to know that, as of today July 23rd, The Void is officially open to beta!!!!!!!

It’s a rough draft of the eventual thing. Missing art, sound, music, and basically everything that would make it feel polished. But right now, with this build, it is everything I could have asked for and more.

So now, what was so revolucionary that it finally is on a beta status?

On a very short tl;dr, the thought and delivery system finally came to life.

The gist of it is as follows. You open The Void. You type something, anything, what’s weighing on you, what you can’t say out loud, whatever. You hit release. It drifts into the database, tagged with the color you chose when you first arrived.

Somewhere, another Stardancer opens The Void. A small button appears in the corner of their screen. “[ void speaks ]”. They click it. Your words materialize on their screen, glowing in your color.
They have two choices: dissolve it forever, or release it back into the void for someone else to find.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it’s so awesomesauce omg.

what is happening behind the scenes:
The moderation system runs every thought through Groq’s AI before it reaches anyone. If it contains hate speech or harmful content, the void rejects it. It took an embarrassingly long time to get working, mostly because the model I was using got decommissioned mid-development and nobody told me.

The delivery system picks a random Stardancer from the database every time a thought is released. If they release it again, it goes to someone new. A thought that keeps getting released glows a little brighter every time, though most people won’t notice that yet.

So… what’s next? Well, really glad you asked random person idk anything about! What I’m planning for the roadwork ahead is to add sound design, some visual polish, and Supabase Realtime so you actually get notified when a thought arrives without having to refresh.

I just can’t believe that this idea is finally coming to life. I’ve been wanting to make it for a while, but between some complications and going to places with no way of working in, I took a long 21 day break. But now, finally, I’m ready to make my actual first project and ship it!

devlog #5 of The Void
She star on my dance till I say hello everyone new devlog woo.

Ok, so the flow of how the void works has now been updated! To keep things short, I will assume that the other devlog has already been read, and I will just add on on the new stuff. But, for a really basic tl;dr:

When you press enter, the void opens the HCA login website, where you… well login. This is to both keep track of the users in the users table of data, and to know if you are a certified Stardancer™ or not. Then, it’ll promptly take you to the callback site, where it uses a code that the HCA gives in order to identify you. If succesful, the page will say “the void recognizes you” as per the video, and you will log into the void. If not, it will say “something went wrong. the void rejects you.” Simple enough.

Now onto the new stuff that was added:
When the callback website successfully registers your HCA code, it will take you back to The Void, now new stuff appears. You are able to choose your name, 6 characters only, and your thought color, which will be the color that your… well thoughts are in. Really self explanatory. All that info is saved in the Supabase table of users, just for a more simpler way of being able to save all the data.

Now, whenever you enter the main site, it’ll check if you are already logged in. If you are, you will automatically be thrown into the main page of the void (which is the one that just says phase 5 coming soon for now).

So, to summarize the technical side of stuff about what everything is doing so far:
The Void itself runs on HTML, CSS and JS.
Supabase is used for the database.
Vercel is used for its serverless functions for the auth backend.
And finally, HCA (Hack Club Auth) api is used for the login.

And that’s all folks. Honestly, all of this was more easily said than done. I spent like at least 40 minutes trying to fix the connection issues between the sites. But, in the end, it worked as intended, and that’s the best I can hope for.

As of moving forward, the next phase will definitely be the hardest one, which is to make the entire thought and delivery system as well as finding a way of testing it with another person. So, yeah thats cool. If anyone is reading to the bottom of this, and is cool with testing, stay updated for the next devlog where I think I will finally be able to post and ship the beta of The Void!

Sleep tight everyone, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

The voices in my head say hi stardancers.

So, this is kind of a big one. Basically, the hardest problem right now was understanding how to use the HCA (Hack Club Auth) to make it so that the website recognizes that you are indeed a Stardance member. To basically skip all the hassle, it works like this:

The moment you press enter, the button opens the HCA website. In my case, I was already logged in, but in browsers without a yet known Hack Club acc it will prompt to log in and use the verification code and what not.

Then, when you do all that, it goes to the window in the video, where it tells you if you are sure to give that info to the website. What the website does with said info is it sends you to a callback website with a temporary code in the URL. Then, it sends said code to HCA, where it gives back a verification code that this user is indeed a hackclub certified member, more specifically, a Stardance member.

After that, it uses that token to ask who is said user, where HCA responds with their ID and verif. status. If the account exist, and it’s a Stardance member, they will be let in. Otherwise, the page says “the void doesn’t recognize you” (I don’t really have a “way” of testing this, so just trust me on this one that it exists). Finally, the website saves said info, and lets you in The Void.

That was more easy said than done, but with good work and like 3-4 hours later, it got done. But, on a really bad turn of events, the stardance timer didn’t get all that time, and instead logged in 2 hours only. But, it ain’t about the time spent (It actually is but what can i do honestly), but about it working, and if it works, then that’s a job well done (I guess).

Oh yeah I forgot but I switched from github Pages to Vercel in order to hide my Client Secret from being pushed into the repo, which I… almost did. Like 3 times.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe for future devlongs.

What’s cooking my stardancers.

I was able to put the vortex shader on the main file, so now the background for The Void is basically complete! Pure frontend as of now, so now I think it’s time to finally start working on the actual website instead of js vibes.

My fellow stardancers.

I humbly present my small grain of sand to an endless beach of shaders. Its basically just a vortex that just goes endlessly into the nothingness. Not really that cool, but its for my other project, The Void, so I thought I could share the shader as it’s own project.

Hi hello hi stardancers.

Just made a very simple text sequence in a div with a button that does nothing at the bottom, nothing too fancy really. I’m just trying to get ideas captured instead of writing since I don’t really remember most of the time I write stuff?

This is theorically just the intro the user would see only the first time they enter The Void. And, it’s still missing the sort of space vortex shader on the background, which I am learning to make as we speak.

What is up my fellow awesomesauce stardancers.

So, I’ve been working on this thing for a while now, and I simply just forgot to post a devlog for it. I got the hang of how to use the curses library in python, so I was able to create this UI, which in its own is based around an old bulletin board systems kinda vibe. Really interesting to research and learn how to use.

Right now the UI doesn’t do anything, just buttons that say “launching x”, so now I’m going to be focusing on implementing some action for each of the buttons.

Furthermore, the fake boot sequence is more refined and uses a print and delete loop to create the effect of the “press Enter to continue”. It’s worth noting that the logo is not centered “in” the center of the screen, so I’m gonna try and fix that for the next devlog.

So, I had a thought.

Started really simple with a small idea of making a way for people to talk with each other, but as it has developed, it has become more and more interesting and intricate.

There isn’t much yet, just wanted to get an early devlog, so enjoy this simple particle code as the project goes on.

Oh wow, my first devlog. Cool.

So, I’ve had this idea in my mind for a while of building my own cyberdeck. I wanted something simple. Like, just a Pi connected to a monitor in a basic case, enough to scratch the itch. But then I kept adding ideas on top of ideas, until eventually I thought: what if I just built a Python program that made the terminal look and feel like a fake operating system?

And thats when TonalliOS was created, or, at least, that’s what I want it to be. Right now it’s nothing really, but I plan to keep expanding it with cool stuff like a weather app, a news reader, and even a local AI chatbot if the Pi I end up getting can handle it. We’ll see.

The name comes from wanting to connect this project to my country, México, and to the color of the terminal itself, which is this warm amber that everything is written in.

Tonalli is a word from Nahuatl, which is a language that dates back to around 2000 B.C. and is still spoken today by over a million people in México. Like a lot of Nahuatl words, Tonalli carries more than one meaning depending on context. But, the one that really tied the name together was this one:

“The tonalli was a sort of soul, located in the crown of the head, that regulated body temperature and growth and played a major role in determining a person’s character and fate. Tonalli loss resulted in illness and, if healing ceremonies were not performed, death.”

In simpler terms, Tonalli was the flame inside a person. A solar-driven life force that gave them vitality, and, in a way, I liked that concept. An OS named after something that keeps you alive, running warm, glowing amber. Something that fades and cools off when you shut it down, like, let’s say, i don’t know… a computer?

So, now that the lore behind the name was cleared up, now it’s time to get into what I actually built this week, which it’s basically just a wall of fake system messages that scroll rapidly before the OS loads, ending with a blinking “Press ENTER to continue” prompt. When you do, the screen clears and the TonalliOS logo reveals itself line by line before a progress bar loads the launcher. Really simple. It actually took me more time to figure out what I wanted to name the program than to build it.

Fun fact: Tonalli’s Aztec visual lexicon is a star, which directly ties to it’s more literal meaning, the sun. So for them, in a way, the sun was the thing that gave you power and vitality. So maybe, adding a couple solar panels to the eventual cyberdeck build wouldn’t be so bad of an idea…