Skyskraber

What it is#

Skyskraber is my hobby project: a real-time 2D chat world for Danish-speaking adults. You walk around as a pixel figure in themed rooms, talk in speech bubbles, put out furniture and meet whoever is on the same floor as you.

The models are Habbo Hotel, Netstationen and 3Dbyen, the chat worlds a lot of Danes grew up with. Skyskraber is my take on what a place like that looks like when it's built for adults today.

Why it exists#

I was eleven the first time I logged into Habbo.dk. My mother bought me a Habbo coin card from the kiosk on the corner, on the understanding that it was instead of a Christmas present. I spent the coins on a sofa.

The Danish chat worlds closed years ago, but people still miss them. Some remember them, and others just want a relaxed place to hang out in Danish that isn't Discord or Reddit. Skyskraber is my answer to that.

How it works#

• Floors. A skyscraper has floors, and each floor is a public room with its own theme. Your own flat sits on a floor of its own.

• Rooms. Isometric rooms in pixel graphics, with furniture you can move around and that stays put when you log off. Invite friends, set the mood or throw a party.

• Money. Payments go through Stripe, and nothing is designed to rush you. There are no loot boxes and no countdowns pushing you to buy. You buy a chair because you want the chair.

• Everything happens live. Chat, movement, furniture, who is in the room, friends, the marketplace and moderation all update in real time over WebSockets.

How it's built#

Bun on the server, Canvas in the browser, Postgres for everything that is saved, Redis for cache and queues, and Stripe for payments. It's the same stack as the rest of what MICCI makes, so switching between Skyskraber and the other projects is easy.

More than 160 tables in Postgres, one developer, and it runs on hoststack.dev.

Read more#

The whole story about the Habbo coins, and how the rebuild is put together, is in the blog post Rebuilding Habbo.dk for adults, ten years late.