Show HN: Tiny Humans

tinyhumans.vercel.app

13 points·thesephist··4 comments

Hey HN! Quick weekend hack (I did a Twitter thread of me building this [0]) that seemed fun and interesting. Apparently a lot of people were having fun seeing some of the images I could create with it [1], so I thought I'd drop it here to share some fun!

Quick tutorial:

- Click anywhere to drop new humans

- Shift-click to delete the closest human

- The other buttons do what they say

In my experience, it works best on large screens when you can really put together a crowd. Check out some of the screenshots on [1] if you're stuck on mobile.

[0] https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1449609097632964608

[1] https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1449948181559713798

This was really fun to play around with.

Are the new humans with postures randomly created? Why does it get so slow after 10-15 iterations?

Yep! They're completely procedurally generated to be random (within some anatomically possible range). It does get slow if you really crowd up the map (or you're on a large large screen) because I didn't particularly optimize for that case that much (and it's written in a slower compile-to-JS language I'm working on). If this was a part of something more serious I'd go back and optimize it more, but for fun, it was good enough for me.

To be more specific -- the slowness comes from the fact that the entire scene is redrawn (React-style) on every change or click, instead of incrementally updating the canvas. This makes things like resizing and removing speech bubbles easy but makes other things more expensive.

I like the fact that you're avoiding placing new humans automatically behind the title and the links.

The small details. Looks neat. Glad you had fun doing this.

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