lastlife.lol
What If a Listing Had a Life Bar?
A living leaderboard where links have HP, visitors can feed or cut, and expired lives enter a graveyard.
Ian Gabriel Agujitas
lastlife.lol was inspired by outbid.lol, built by Jonathan Wilke (@jonathan_wilke). The starting point was the appeal of a public board with a simple, visible rule. My version changes the thing people compete over: a listing has a life to keep alive.
A life begins with HP. Visitors can feed it, cuts reduce it, and a top-up adds more. The board tracks living entries, while the graveyard gives expired ones a place in the story. Those states turn a directory into something that changes while you watch.
Design process
The game rule comes before the decoration. The opening screen explains starting HP, feeding, cutting, and top-ups near the form. The board then repeats the same vocabulary through health bars, numbers, and actions. The interface needs to teach the mechanic through use instead of relying on a separate explanation page.
Each row balances identity and state. The product name, description, and favicon tell you what the life represents. Its HP bar and remaining state explain what is happening to it. Feed, cut, details, and top-up actions sit with the entry they affect. Country filters and the top, trending, and recent views provide different ways to read the same board.
The full lifecycle
Zero HP is not just an empty meter. The implementation distinguishes a dying life from one that has fully entered the graveyard, and exposes the remaining time in the interface. That transition gives the experience continuity instead of making a listing abruptly disappear.
Feedback needs similar clarity. Cooldowns explain when an action is available again, and number transitions help connect a tap with a changing value. Animated emoji give the page some personality, while the entrance animation respects reduced-motion preferences.
The frontend uses React and Vite with Cloudflare Workers behind the board. The interesting design work is the connection between those live rules and the visible interface: the health bar, the countdown, the action state, and the graveyard all need to describe the same life.
Outbid deserves the credit for the spark. Lastlife explores a different constraint: attention as something you keep alive.
