Why I Built a Game Where You Pay to Exist

nicho1991 — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:05:20 +0000

We’re surrounded by gamification.

Steps walked. Tasks checked. Duolingo owls. Productivity streaks. Fitness rings.

So I built the dumbest one I could think of:

A leaderboard where you pay daily to stay alive.

No rewards. No second chances. If you miss a day, you die. That’s it.

You get moved to a public RIP Wall. Everyone can see you didn’t make it.

It’s called PayToStay.

And yes, it’s real.

💡 Why?

Part of it was the absurdity.

I wanted to parody the obsession with streaks, dark UX, and the meaningless pressure of being “active” online.

But the deeper reason?

I wanted to learn how to take a product from start to finish.

That meant:

Building with the latest Rails tech stack
Learning how to ship fast, mobile-friendly layouts
Setting up proper SEO, performance tuning, and hosting
Gaining confidence in paid features like Stripe integration
Running something in production over time — and keeping it alive

PayToStay is minimalist on the surface, but behind it is a full-stack learning ground disguised as an existential joke.

Sometimes the best way to learn is to build something weird — and see if it survives.

🔨 How It Works

You choose a username.

You pay to summon yourself into existence.

And every day, your existence is extended — or it isn’t.

Payments are available in bundles (7, 14, 30 days).

But here’s the catch: the longer you pay for, the more expensive each day becomes.

No discounts. Just escalation.

Absurdity by design.

Everyone else can see your streak.

The top survivors are honored (mocked?) on the leaderboard.

The dead? Remembered forever on the RIP wall.

🧱 Tech Stack

Ruby on Rails 8
Stripe (live mode)
Bootstrap 5 (dark mode)
Cronjob executioner 💀
No frontend frameworks. Just speed and existential pressure.

🧩 What's Next?

PayToStay will remain minimal and pure.

It’s meant to feel like a joke, a ritual, and a little bit of digital art.

But I’m already working on a second project — a much stranger, more expansive game that draws from this one.

In that game, PayToStay becomes a kind of source. A tether. A heartbeat.

The longer you survive here, the more power you feed… something else.

That’s all I’ll say for now.

💀 Join In

If you’re into weird web projects, minimalist UX, or existentially gamified nonsense:

👉 paytostay.app

You’ll either survive.

Or you won’t.

Either way, the wall is waiting.

How to - Rails turbo

nicho1991 — Tue, 10 May 2022 19:24:55 +0000

Why turbo

NO JS ?!

When your application needs to be more 'dynamic' than the simple old school 1 request 1 view, you would typically use javascript, or a complete javascript framework like React to turn the page into a Single Page Application, however this is cumbersome, especially in the rails spirit of the ability to maintain the stack as one developer.

Turbo reduces the requirements for javascript in your rails application, and makes it more like a single page application ( although, this is by far not a replacement for that )

This a quick 'how to' run and use turbo in a rails application
How to use turbo on rails, credit goes to https://hotwired.dev/, you can also checkout https://turbo.hotwired.dev/handbook/introduction for the documentation on turbo

Requirements

Minimum rails 6 app ( it is installed automatically on a rails 7 app ), to install on rails 6 refer to https://github.com/hotwired/turbo-rails#:~:text=Add%20the%20turbo,Turbo%20Stream%20broadcasting.

Step by step process from scratch in a rails 7 app.

Prerequisites
rails -v Rails 7.0.2.4
and
ruby -v ruby 3.0.0p0
Otherwise refer to https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html for getting set up with rails on your machine

run rails new turbo-example

Make sure it works by cd turbo-example and running rails s
You should see something like Listening on http://localhost:3000/items
Next, let's make a simple model 'item'

rails g scaffold Item title:string description:text and rake db:migrate

navigate browser to http://localhost:3000/items or whatever url you have, and you should be able to see the very empty item list.

Turbo_frame

go to app/views/items/index.html.erb and wrap the last line 'new item' to be

<%= turbo_frame_tag "new_item" do %>
  <%= link_to "New item", new_item_path %>
<% end %>

now go to app/views/items/new.html.erb and wrap the form render like this

<%= turbo_frame_tag "new_item" do %>
  <%= render "form", item: @item %>
<% end %>

We now have a turbo frame on our items list in the index, you can see that the page does not reload on clicking new item, or on create. However, you have to refresh to actually see the new item.

for that we can use turbo_stream

Turbo_stream

go to app/views/items/index.html.erb
and add <%= turbo_stream_from @items %> above the items div
so it looks like

<h1>Items</h1>

<%= turbo_stream_from @items %>

<div id="items">
  <% @items.each do |item| %>
    <%= render item %>
    <p>
      <%= link_to "Show this item", item %>
    </p>
  <% end %>
</div>


<%= turbo_frame_tag "new_item" do %>
  <%= link_to "New item", new_item_path %>
<% end %>

next go to app/models/item.rb and add broadcasts

This lets the model broadcast everything happening to it (create update and delete) Note that this is regardless of any authorization rights, so keep that in mind.

now go to app/controllers/items_controller.rb#create
and add format.turbo_stream to the successful save render
it should look like this

  def create
    @item = Item.new(item_params)

    respond_to do |format|
      if @item.save
        format.turbo_stream
        format.html { redirect_to item_url(@item), notice: "Item was successfully created." }
        format.json { render :show, status: :created, location: @item }
      else
        format.html { render :new, status: :unprocessable_entity }
        format.json { render json: @item.errors, status: :unprocessable_entity }
      end
    end
  end

lastly create app/views/items/create.turbo_stream.erb with the content <%= turbo_stream.prepend "items", @item %>

Notice the form is still the same, we can fix this by adding
<%= turbo_stream.replace "new_item", partial: 'items/form', locals: { item: Item.new } %>
in the app/views/items/create.turbo_stream.erb

the file will look like this

<!-- Refresh preview list -->
<%= turbo_stream.prepend "items", @item %>

<!-- Reset form -->
<%= turbo_stream.replace "new_item", partial: 'items/form', locals: { item: Item.new } %>

You can find an example project of this exact step-by-step guide on https://github.com/nicho1991/turbo-example

Forem: nicho1991