// the take
A solo-developer retro FPS where real daily quotes from the Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and oil drive which side (bulls or bears) is winning, built to run as a Tauri desktop app, in-browser, and as actual firmware on an M5Stack Cardputer. It's for people who want a weird, novel hobby project to poke at more than a game to seriously play — one person, one star, very early days.
Genuinely unusual concept executed across three very different runtime targets (Tauri desktop, browser, ESP32 firmware via PlatformIO) from a shared core instead of three separate half-finished games. LAN multiplayer ships with a real embedded Rust server in the desktop build (server.rs), and online play is backed by its own Cloudflare Worker + D1 stack rather than a bolted-on third-party service. Privacy handling is better than most hobby projects: live quotes, leaderboard uploads and online multiplayer are all explicit opt-ins with clear notices, not silent defaults. CI builds and signs all four platform binaries automatically (build.yml + SignPath), so releases aren't manual zip uploads.
Zero stars, zero forks, single contributor — there's no evidence the netcode or the Cardputer firmware has been exercised by anyone but the author. The entire 'real market data' hook depends on Yahoo Finance's unofficial quote endpoints, which Yahoo doesn't document or guarantee and has throttled or changed without notice in the past; if that breaks, the core gimmick breaks with it. Online multiplayer shares one free-tier Cloudflare quota across every player worldwide and just stops working once it's used up for the day — fine at zero users, a real ceiling the moment it isn't. There are two parallel server implementations to keep in sync by hand: a Python dev server (pc/server.py) mirroring the Rust production server's behavior, which is exactly the kind of thing that quietly drifts. macOS builds also aren't notarized despite the signing setup, so users still have to manually `xattr -cr` the app before it'll launch.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →