Lately I've been thinking about PESOS, the Indieweb's approach to owning your own data on platforms that don't support it. "Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site."

I did a great job last week of not building one idea that snuck into my brain, but another crept in and I succumbed…

Steam's header image for Slay the Spire 2; various characters brandishing their weapons and looking up at the fiery spire towering into the sky.

What if Slay the Spire 2, the outrageously fun deck-builder/rogue-like game from , published the details of your games ("runs") to your Atmosphere account?

"We can just do things, together" is a common refrain among atproto developers (as we call ourselves), and this experiment definitely stood on the shoulders of giants:

  • Slay the Spire 2 uses , so modding is pretty easy and lots of folks have talked about how

  • Publishing to your Atmosphere account (where your Bluesky posts, Tangled source code, Leaflet posts like this, and much more lives) is easy; has great documentation

  • The excellent exists as a deep games database with a data model I can hook right into

  • You can host websites directly from your Atmosphere account with

  • And looking up any StS2 runs an account has posted, no matter where their account lives, is easy thanks to 's Slingshot

An in-game screenshot of a new dialog: the atproto-tracker "Publishing your run data to your Atmosphere account: @byjp.me"

So I had a crack at it! I learned a lot about developing game mods and writing C# from Claude (first time with both for me) but I've ended up in a place I'm very happy with as an experiment.

  1. 1.

    🧑‍💻 Download the mod or the installer (installers on the site, details on Github)

  2. 2.

    🔑 Get an app password & configure the installer/your config.json

  3. 3.

    🎮 Play!

  4. 4.

    🤩 Visit my site to see your run (you can see mine here)

That's it! The data is yours, and in your Atmosphere account. If you move providers (Bluesky -> Eurosky anyone?) it'll move with you and Just Work™.

You can even build your own site that's better than mine, and it'll work with everyone's StS2 runs, automagically. Hell, could build an official one & it'd be instantly compatible!

The joy of building in the Atmosphere ☺️ What do you think? What would you add?

A screenshot of the website showing a run of mine; Act 3, floor 39 — showing all the cards in my deck and relics I've collected.