u/petertheill

I have too many side projects. Each one has a domain and a favicon I fussed over, and none of them has a marketing budget. I wanted somewhere to line them all up next to each other, cheaply, with a click count so I'd know which ones strangers actually touch.

So I built Square Town (square.pov.town). It's a grid. Each square is 1×1 and costs $1, one-time. You paste a URL, it fetches the favicon, you click the cell you want. No accounts, no uploads.

Then I gave it rules so it's a game and not a JPEG:

• Anyone can evict any square by paying double what its owner paid. Then double that.
• The 4×4 dead centre is a Throne. $100 to start, doubles on every eviction.
• Icons nobody kisses for 90 days fade to grayscale. Anyone can kiss any icon, free.
• No favicon? Clown emoji and a public Hall of Clowns until you fix it.
• Only the central 16×16 is live. When it's 70% full it grows 8 cells per side, up to 1024×1024.
• Everything is pushed live to every open browser over WebSockets.

Ctrl+drag tilts it into 3D. Tower height = clicks. There's a sun that follows your local time, birds, a hot-air balloon and a tortoise. None of that was necessary.

Stack: one Cloudflare Worker, D1, one Durable Object, Stripe, three.js. Runs on the free tier, which is why "$1 forever" isn't a lie — there's no hosting bill to lapse. Forever still has an asterisk. The asterisk is evictions.

Built the rules in a day, been tuning since. Happy to answer anything about the mechanics or the build. Rules: https://square.pov.town/how-it-works

Whenever I try to edit my profile I'm getting a "We had a server error..." or "We had some issues saving your changes. Please try again.". It almost seems like my account has been "disconnected" from my profile or something. If that even makes sense.

I've tried to log out and back in, I've tried to reset my password, tried to use a custom avatar, etc.

Any ideas?

What would be the best way to move one of my server into a new account I created? Any tips?

I would like to generate dynamic frames for use on images. For that I would love to get some generative transparent PNGs. What model/prompt would be good for that use case? I've tried to make have models such as nano banana 2 generate images where I nudge it to use a fixed "green" color and then I post-process that but it's never really good.

Any tricks for me?