Show HN: I made an Animal Crossing style letter editor | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made an Animal Crossing style letter editor

acmail.idreesinc.com

203 pointsIdreesInc32 comments

I made a simple open-source letter editor inspired by Animal Crossing NH. Took me forever to look over each card, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. You can even click the bottle in the bottom right to see a random letter design shared by other users! Now to see how long it stays up...

Check out the source code here: https://github.com/IdreesInc/Animal-Crossing-Letter-Generato...

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For a full experience, you could combine this with animalese! A library that makes animal crossing talking sounds in the browser. https://github.com/jeff-hykin/animalese

Wait that is actually brilliant, great idea!

I was just able to write a thank you letter to my sister for having me over to her house last night using this and having sent her that letter I leave very impressed.

I know she will enjoy it because we both have loved animal crossing since the original US version came out and we were given a copy in 2005.

Thank you for making such a delightful tool that both works with the nostalgia of those game consoles, yet has a much better UX for mobile phone use!

Thank you! Especially for noticing the mobile UI, I'm always the worst at those so I'm glad to see it worked out!

Is dropping cr's on the floor when compressing it into a link deliberate or accidental? 'Save as image' keeps them.

https://acmail.idreesinc.com/#/share?card=Beach&start=BYUwng... vs https://bsky.app/profile/urnash.com/post/3lxmz6vpcy22g

I don't know what I was expecting but this cracked me up

So that's what's happening, thanks for the heads up! I wonder why it's working on my machine, maybe the whole Mac vs Windows line breaks thing. Made a ticket for it, thanks again: https://github.com/IdreesInc/Animal-Crossing-Letter-Generato...

This was really fun, and instantly brought me back to my island. The share message function is also super cute, but looking at the code, all the bottle messages seem to be preprogrammed in bottles.json?

I guess moderation would be a nightmare. Are the bottle messages actually stored or sent anywhere?

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! And yes the messages are sent to me, no worries. Submitted messages are sent to an AWS API Gateway endpoint for rate limiting and then to me. I then manually commit the ones that are not rude and don't include identifying info/don't seem to have been submitted by mistake! I have a couple of reasons for manually committing them rather than using a simple DynamoDB database or something. First, since I have to moderate through the messages manually anyways, it's about the same amount of effort tbh. Second, I wanted the messages to be available forever and having them committed allows for people to save them in the future should they wish to!

The messages are suspiciously wholesome, I don’t think they are from other users at all.

Yeah all the messages you get are preprogrammed from a bottles.json file. At first I was pleasantly surprised at how wholesome the messages were..

An older version (and lots of other pixel-perfect customisable screens) is also available from the Death Generator: https://deathgenerator.com/#acww

Thank you for sharing that! I had originally started this project with the intention of making an editor for the "mail" from Pokémon G/S/C before I decided to focus on Animal Crossing instead. It's cool to know that I'm not the only one interested in that sort of thing, but shame that they never added the mail from that game.

To be fair that's not the same at all. This one looks like the message boxes that appear during gameplay, while the submission is only about the letters you can send/receive in the game.

They complement each other nicely though.

stationary means not-moving

stationery means envelopes and letters and stuff. you can remember this as "E for envelope"

Funnily enough, I think this is because in Medieval times the most common state for traders and merchants was to be mobile and traveling. It was only the guys selling stuff to universities (like the medieval equivalents of ink, pens, paper, envelopes) who had such a valuable and regular customer that they could afford to set up a station[ae]ry shop!

Now I write it out sounds unbelievable, and I can't think of a reputable source, but I've been telling this story for years.

Does this make a mailed letter “nonstationary stationery”?

Only while in transit. Otherwise, it’s stationary.

Oh thanks for the heads up, never knew that. Now to fix all the places I misspelled it...

I irrationally abhor a lot of what Animal Crossing is. The aesthetic is really cute and charming, but it's the closest thing to a real work simulator I've played. It is at least partially responsible for making me aware that all game loops are essentially just busy work masquerading as dopamine and cognition sinks.

All of that said, I absolutely love what you've done here. I said all of that negative stuff in preface because what you've done is provided the missing element Nintendo is too afraid to -- other people! The fact that you're sharing these anonymous notes with other people is incredibly charming and it's what Animal Crossing desperately needed.

This looks incredibly slick too. Your design skills are top notch!

(The fact that Animal Crossing asks you to write letters to the dumbest NPC AI and gives you occasional token rewards is downright depressing. It's cookie clicker level stuff.)

Hello all! I posted this last week and didn't realize it would stay in the moderation queue for so long, so imagine my surprise when I started getting notified for so many messages today! Thanks for all of the lovely messages thrown into the sea, I've parsed through today's batch and pushed through the moderated ones. Hope you all continue to enjoy the project!

The buzz is so well deserved – congratulations! I love it, such a fun project.

How Animal Crossing letters work:

https://youtu.be/8VbwWVvw-zI

Fantastic work! I briefly explored poking around NDS roms to get the fonts and images out to build something like this.

Nice! It seems it would be more likely to stay up if it wasn't called "Animal Crossing" Letter Generator and if it didn't have "Tom Nook" all over it.

In any case, thanks. I sent me sister a letter as she loves Animal Crossing

this is super cute. i’m going to use it for notes to my kids. thanks for creating it!

Such a fun project! ACNH's font is so pleasing to look at. Also, thanks for linking to the source code.

Love this ♡ Thanks for building it.

Your designs are so god damn beautiful. Thanks a lot for this.

I can ear the Nintendo lawyers...

the style is nice... my sister will absolutely love it.

love this,thank you for your work on this project

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