Memorial seal
A compact marker for footers, sidebars and archived landing pages.
Community obituary
Star Sailors
“A complex and hard to enjoy game that had potential and taught lessons”
Here liesStar Sailors2020 · 2025“A complex and hard to enjoy game that had potential and taught lessons”
0 roses left
The postmortem
What lived. What died. What stayed.
- The original bet
- That I had the ability to build a game by myself, that the original promise of "contribute to real and meaningful science by playing games" would be enough to cover for my lack of time spent marketing, outreach, etc
- The first warning
- After 18 months, I realised I'd never had a single user, because I'd spent more time building procedural generation kits and blockchain integrations/backend toolkits than something users could actually interact with. I began to fix this after participating in Buildspace Nights & Weekends - building something that could be used, rather than being perfect - and I'm trying to do this for the "do-over" for SS.
- Cause of death
- Too many ideas, with too much time spent on building every game and feature and not enough time on community outreach
- Lesson left behind
- Keep it simple. Focus on gamification. Improve onboarding. Make it exciting. Provide incentives to come back. Separate concepts and scope into cycles rather than build the first version for everyone
- If we started again
- Well, I kind of am doing it again now. But rather than building one big game that touches every scientific discipline, I'm building smaller games that touch one citizen science mechanic, getting a few dozen users for each, and going from there. Maybe they'll be combined one day.
The estate survived
Adopt this build.
The project stopped. Some of its useful parts did not. The founder is open to a serious new steward.
- 01CODECode availableThe repository or codebase can change hands.Available
- 02AUDIENCENewsletter or community availableA surviving audience can move with the right steward.Available
Leave a marker behind
Mark the old homepage.
Choose a badge, copy its HTML and paste it anywhere on the project’s site. Every badge links back to this obituary, so the final lesson stays one click away.
260 × 72
Obituary plaque
A wider marker for replacing the final call to action on the old homepage.
The tribute book · 0 signed
Signed by the people who showed up.
Every new flower and adornment can carry a name, a link and a few words from the person who left it.
Leave something for Star Sailors ↑The book is open.
Earlier flowers remain on the plot. The next gift will be the first one signed here.
Keep clicking
The build ended. The builder did not.
Your turn
Give a dead project one last launch.
Keep the honest lesson, preserve the link, and introduce the internet to whatever you are building next.
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