Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen.
I've gotten really good at drawing on these eggs
The thesis of Marc Andreessen Egg Game is that the world has dramatically underestimated demand for images of eggs that look like Marc Andreessen. To help, please play the game and submit your drawings to the gallery.
Why?
I’m so glad you asked. Marc Andreessen Egg Game comes with a manifesto.
I know I'm right about this
Here's that text for you if you want it
It’s Time to Build EggsGlobal institutions have dramatically underestimated demand for eggs that look like Marc Andreessen. This failure will reverberate through the rest of the decade and beyond, but it’s not too late to roll up our sleeves and start fixing it.
We have enemies. Our enemy is inertia. Our enemy is regulatory capture. Our enemy is that Googling “Marc Andreessen Egg” barely returns any results - a damning failure of the media that is as much a generational indictment as it is a call to action.
If drawing eggs that look like Marc Andreessen were easy, we’d already be doing it. And doing it will take builders of all types: builders that use Speedrun Mode to ship 3 eggs at maximum velocity, and builders that use Creative Mode to painstakingly produce 1 egg of generational quality.
As you draw eggs, ask yourself: “is this egg so good that I want to see it every time Marc posts on Twitter?” And when the answer is yes, you should contribute to the Egg Gallery - a by-founders-for-founders global registry of the best that we all have to offer.
You’re still early. Ship the eggs. Save the world.
I think it’s not too late to make up for our embarassing institutional failures, roll up our sleeves, and draw some Marcs.
For the most part, building Marc Andreessen Egg Game was surprisingly simple. There were two challenges that I found interesting:
- Lighting the egg
- Scoring “speedrun” mode
Lighting The Egg
Marc’s head looks like an egg - we all know this.
But a thing that you might not appreciate if you haven’t looked at dozens of photos of Marc’s head is how shiny it is.
look at that!
I found it impossible to concentrate on drawing my eggs when they weren’t correctly lit.
To address this, Marc Andreessen Egg Game estimates a normal map for the egg - basically a way to answer the question “how would light bounce off of this object?” for any point along its surface. This is pretty easy to do with egg-like surfaces.
That allows me to hand-choose default lighting for each Marc - although you can play with those choices yourself in Creative Mode, as I do here:
Thank you to my friend Henry for this idea - I think it really ups the quality of the Marcs that we can draw in a major way.
Evaluating Speedruns
Marc Andreessen Egg Game has two modes: Creative Mode (draw one outstanding egg with unlimited time) and Speedrun Mode (draw three eggs quickly).
Figuring out how to “grade” speedrun mode was a challenge. Comparing your drawing to the raw pixels in an image of Marc seemed hard and arbitrary. But having no rules at all about what I considered a “completed” Marc seemed like a mistake.
What I ended up doing was drawing “reference” Marcs for each image that I found of him (you can see the interface that I use for this by looking at the author interface, which is public).
I take these reference drawings and break them down into groups of colored pixels, and then hand-label them.
my labeling interface. There's his beard!
This allows me to give you prompts like “draw his beard” or “draw his nose” - and to automatically pick a reasonable color for you.
Then I compare what you draw against my reference regions. There’s a lot of flexibility here, and that flexibility changes based on region size. It’s reasonable to say “marc’s sweater should be pretty big and in the right spot” - but it turns out that it’s much harder to guess where to draw his eyebrows on an egg.
Wrapping Up
That’s it! I’m really excited about this site, and I hope that we can make up for our past failures by delivering some great eggs.
Happy drawing.