The parts I still can't crack
An honest list of what's still broken or unsolved on Six Degrees. Three of them are engineering problems. The fourth one is me.
In the spirit of not pretending everything is finished, here is what I still haven’t worked out.
The people. The map connects games, but it can’t really show you the humans behind them: the designers, the directors, the composers who carried ideas from one project to the next. That is the connection I want most, and it is stuck behind a boring data problem. Credits just are not sitting anywhere I can reach in a clean, linkable form.
Everything at once. You can’t see the whole sky in one shot. The catalog is too big to throw at a browser without it grinding to a halt, so the map only loads the slice you are looking at. It feels complete. It is a magic trick.
VR. There is a VR mode and it is half finished. Not because some hard problem beat me. I didn’t know enough about WebVR at the time, and stopping the whole project to go wrestle with the technical hurdles wasn’t the right call at that point, so it turned into a dangling nice-to-have that I walked away from. PolyFish ended up being my first real WebVR project, so I actually know how to finish this now. I should go do that.
And then the real one. I don’t know who this is for. I made a thing I genuinely think matters, and I keep hearing Indy’s voice in the back of my head going “this belongs in a museum.” I have no idea where to start with that. Who wants it, how you reach them, what you even do with a strange, half-finished map of game history. That is not a problem I can grind down with another forty commits.
So that’s the list. Three problems I can probably code my way out of eventually, and one I need to talk to people for. Not knowing how to do something hasn’t stopped me before, and I’m not about to let it start now.
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