Yixboost Games V2 is in early alpha

https://version2.yixboost.eu

I started working on Yixboost Games V2 about a month ago. Since yesterday, there is a public testing instance available for games-v2. It’s still in early alpha, so a lot of things are not finished yet. Some features are not implemented yet, these are marked with “N/I”. You can view the project’s kanban board here .

If you find bugs, missing features, or other problems, please report them here . You can login using Hack Club Auth. This games-v2 testing instance is hosted on Hack Club Nest .

The goal of this project is to create a faster, less bloated, and more secure version of Yixboost Games. The original version of Yixboost Games is closed-source and made with PHP. There is a reason why it’s closed-source, the codebase is a mess. Over time, it became harder and harder to maintain and add new features.

With Yixboost Games V2, I’m trying to build it again from the ground up and make it a good, clean, and working platform. This version is open-source ( source code ) and is made with Python’s FastAPI instead of PHP. It is not a fork or an update of the old version, it is a complete rewrite.

Right now, I’m focusing on building a good plugin infrastructure. I want it to be easy to add new features without having to modify the entire core of the application. A good plugin system should make it possible to extend Yixboost Games while keeping the main codebase clean.

Later, I want to add support for custom themes, so people can customize the look of their own instance. When the project reaches beta, I want to create an easy self-hostable Docker container, so anyone can run their own Yixboost Games instance. After that, I hope to add more features like a community plugin store and other improvements.

One of my main goals with V2 is to make it better than V1 without making it more bloated. I want to avoid the Second-system effect. As Wikipedia states:

“The second-system effect (also second-system syndrome) is the tendency for a successful first system (often small and relatively elegant) to be followed by a second system that becomes over-engineered or bloated. The effect is commonly attributed to increased confidence after the first success and to accumulated ideas that were deferred from the first system and then added en masse to the second.”

This phrase comes from Fred Brooks’ book The Mythical Man-Month . I think this is something that can easily happen when rewriting a project. You start with a simple idea, then you keep adding features because you have more experience and more ideas, and before you know it the new version becomes bigger and harder to maintain than the original.

With Yixboost Games V2, I want to keep the good parts of the original idea, while fixing the problems that came with the old codebase. The goal is not to create a giant platform with every possible feature, but a fast and reliable games platform that can be extended when needed.

This project is submitted to Hack Club’s Stardance event. You can also follow development progress and devlogs there:

https://stardance.hackclub.com/projects/17189