I’ve been MIA for a while, I know. I haven’t stopped working on SnailLife - I just wanted to get to some sort of completion with the brain refactoring phase before talking about it. Now, however, I realize there won’t be any completion for a long while and I may as well post an update.

• I did some research on snail ailments. This particular page was especially useful. Though SnailLife snails are not aquatic, some of these still seem very relevant: http://applesnail.net/content/various/snail_disease.php
• Also did research on inbreeding in snails and complications it could cause. Apparently one commonly observed side effect is shell thinning. I then did some reading on finding the inbreeding coefficent and how to calculate it.
• Looked into Google Visualization API to display the family trees and started a test implementation.
• Started actually using Taiga.io, I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while.

Snaily Updates are going to be really brief posts with some short “daily” updates on SnailLife. I haven’t updated in a while because I’ve mostly just been refactoring and bug fixing. But it’s important, and even though I’m not working on new features right now I still want to document some of my progress and what I do each day.

Update 3, Nov 2 2015 (PM): Well, it’s been…strange. First, it seems my account was finally deleted by Livecoding.tv (thank you!) After being up all night with libel posted all over it, hours after Jamie Green (the other Livecoding co-founder) and Sam Altman (Y Combinator president) replied to the Hacker News thread claiming they were trying to do something, something finally happened. I have heard nothing from either of them since their original comments and am not sure exactly what spurred the removal of slander from the profile and its eventual deletion. I know some other Livecoding users quit and had a discussion with the CEO in live chat also.

Organs! Immune systems! Old age! Dying from old age!

I’m super excited. I was thinking: “How do I implement old age and death, and health in general? Is health just energy? When the snail is out of energy, it dies? But that seems too simplistic.”