[HN Gopher] Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and gr...
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Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by
teenagers
Hello everyone! It was so fun working on this project for the past
few months with some of my fellow high school students :) I am so
excited to share our first prototype and hopefully we'll be done
with it all soon! <3 (ofc, it's open source, contribute here:
https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider) The goal of the game is to
slowly teach function composition that get progressively more
complex while you also help the ghosts ski on the slopes and
explore the entire map!
Author : ClaireBookworm
Score : 189 points
Date : 2022-08-19 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sinerider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sinerider.com)
| kalid wrote:
| Congrats on the prototype! Signed up and looking forward to
| checking it out once it's launched =).
| whoibrar wrote:
| Looks really cool. Love to play.
| ankaAr wrote:
| So nice
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| I get TLS alerts for some weird reason when connecting to the
| website.
|
| $ curl -i https://sinerider.com/
|
| curl: (35) error:1404B410:SSL routines:ST_CONNECT:sslv3 alert
| handshake failure
| ClaireBookworm wrote:
| Oops, sorry! We're fixing that right now :D
| westoncb wrote:
| This looks great--feels very polished. I love the "hack club"
| concept :)
| fullstop wrote:
| If you're into this, you may also be into Graphwar
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899700/Graphwar/
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Built by my buddy Zane! Back in 2014 we were making these games
| simultaneously and trading notes!
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| That's hilarious, like scorched earth on a cartesian plane. I
| hope math teachers catch on to this.
| meltyness wrote:
| Fun!
|
| ...but there's layer after layer of this not working, haha:
|
| 3\cos \left(\frac{1}{x\cdot 0.0001}\right)+1.2^{-x+12}-10
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Looks to be calculating fine, but the limited sampling
| resolution we can achieve for the graph means that "high-
| resolution" functions like this will look... strange.
| Effectively what you are seeing is one-dimensional aliasing.
| Unfortunately we're stuck with it until we optimize well enough
| to achieve full per-pixel graph sampling. We have plans for
| this, but it's... complicated. It involves transpiling latex to
| GLSL, which I'm sure will be a super fun task for some
| motivated student and not at all a massive headache.
| eatonphil wrote:
| The screen captures in the README look awesome! Unfortunately it
| looks like you're having some SSL issues on the site right now.
| ClaireBookworm wrote:
| It should be fixed now!
| paxys wrote:
| Please please change the text bubble font. Comic Sans (and
| derivatives) in this age is just..no.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Can't you just change it yourself? Change the stylesheet in
| your web browser.
| paxys wrote:
| You can also code the entire game in your web browser
| yourself, but that wasn't the point of the comment.
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| It's not a Comic Sans derivative, it's Patrick Hand. Literally
| just some guy's handwriting. Hating on Comic Sans (and
| derivatives) in this age became a meme because people use these
| silly comic fonts for serious non-comic uses. But this game is
| literally rendered as a comic strip. What else are we gonna
| use?
|
| We are in full compliance with http://comicsanscriminal.com/
| personjerry wrote:
| I think the Show HN is a bit premature, you won't get much useful
| feedback when it's not really playable yet
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Yeah, we maybe should've launched the internal alpha for HN :/
|
| If you want to play, it's live at
| https://sinerider.hackclub.dev!
| ziddoap wrote:
| Excruciating 3 minute load time just to press one button and then
| be shown a YouTube video.
|
| It would be amazing to share the link to the YouTube trailer
| _before_ the 3 minutes of loading.
|
| Otherwise, it looks sort of interesting. I'm definitely a fan of
| the art/color-palette. The demo doesn't really give any clue to
| what the gameplay will actually be like though, which is
| unfortunate. Even after watching the trailer, I'm not positive
| what the core gameplay features and loop is supposed to be?
| jxf wrote:
| It looks like you'll edit equations with some kind of
| periodicity to produce curves, which your character must then
| navigate to some destination.
| andai wrote:
| Have you ever played LineRider? [0] In LineRider there is no
| destination, only the joy of sledding.
|
| Re: "just to press one button and then be shown a YouTube
| video": Instead of pressing "Next" at the end, press "Stop" and
| you can go back and edit the formula.
|
| [0] - https://www.linerider.com/
|
| ( Press the "Play" link on the right, it runs right in the
| browser, just like in the old days :)
| jordanwallwork wrote:
| Took about 4 seconds for me. Still, regardless of load time I
| found it annoying that that was all that happened
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Sorry, didn't mean to disappoint :[
|
| I'll tell you a secret though, there's a playable alpha at
| https://sinerider.hackclub.dev
|
| _sssshh_ don 't tell anyone
| ziddoap wrote:
| I might of had unlucky timing with an influx of other HNers.
| ClaireBookworm wrote:
| Ooof I think the reason was an issue with compression between
| our teaser branch and the main branch, so everything was
| loading with full size png/mp3/wav files--it should be fixed
| soon!
| tejasag wrote:
| This is awesomeee
| unconed wrote:
| [cowboy bepop theme music plays]
|
| It's not obvious you can just go back and edit the formula
| already. Also it will be hard to do neat tricks if the sampling
| positions are not fixed on the x axis in world space.
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Actually the visible sampling positions are a visual artifact
| independent of the physics, which samples the graph directly
| rather than using a polygon collision test. So neat tricks are
| very possible! The game should (should!) produce deterministic
| results independent of screen size or computer speed.
| [deleted]
| devenj wrote:
| this is soo cool!
| Denisos wrote:
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Looking forward to seeing the final result, looks very
| interesting so far.
|
| How complex do the functions get, does it end up getting into
| (pre)calculus or anything like that?
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Very complex! I'm not exactly sure what the boundaries of pre-
| calc graphing are but I routinely see professional
| mathematicians and computer scientists stumped by the more
| advanced puzzles.
| keerthiko wrote:
| i recall seeing something similar a long time ago, with a very
| similar name, and found it via HN search: sineridergame.com --
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615416
|
| and it looks like you own the domain and route it to
| sinerider.com now? Are you affiliated with the creater from 8
| years ago or did they abandon it? The game seems somewhat
| distinct though obviously similar. Did you ever interact with
| that game?
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Good memory! Yes, there is a connection here. I originally
| built sinerider when I was just out of high school. My
| ambitions were much bigger than my skillset, so I never really
| finished it. I started working for Hack Club a few years ago,
| and this summer we decided to turn our students loose on an old
| half-baked alpha I had on the shelf. Honestly I thought they
| might just fix the bugs and touch up the sprites a bit, but
| they ended up doing a top-to-bottom renovation with all this
| crazy new original art and sound and shader effects. I honestly
| truthfully pinky-swear never ever thought it would look and
| sound and feel this good. Watching this happen has been one of
| the greatest joys of my life!
| keerthiko wrote:
| that's amazing, i recalled greatly enjoying and also seeing
| the potential from your original prototype when i saw it in
| 2014 (my comment from back then says so)!
|
| sounds incredibly gratifying to bequeath it to a new gen of
| devs and see them exceed your expectations for it, especially
| as an educator. great job!
| [deleted]
| rebelos wrote:
| The core game code is remarkably compact. I'm not familiar with
| game development, but is this usually the case? Very impressive.
| keerthiko wrote:
| Not usually, but there is a peculiarity with making
| (effectively) 2D browser games in vanilla-ish HTML/CSS (no
| react etc) and canvas JS (max jquery) -- the UI can be nearly
| code-free, and significant game graphics logic can be hooked up
| to HTML/CSS as well, and so the js can focus on actual core
| mechanic logic, + hooks into HTML events. Accomplishing the
| equivalent in a native game engine (Unity) or non-HTML
| rendering platform can take up several hundreds of additional
| lines without the addition of a bunch of frameworks perfectly
| suited to your game's UI and game-world organization (or vice
| versa).
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| This is very true! We try to lean hard into the unique
| strengths of browsers. We have a reasonably sophisticated
| custom engine managing all the game state stuff but the UI is
| basically just one HTML/CSS file. Implementing this fairly
| basic UI in Unity would be a headache, especially because of
| the nightmare that is mathematical function input. We just
| use Mathquill to solve that problem, the same library Desmos
| uses for their graphing stuff. Thank you open-source <3
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Thanks! I don't know if it's _unusually_ compact for web game
| dev, but I will take a victory lap on the vanilla JS "game
| engine" we built for this project. We get a lot of very Unity-
| like behavior in a much smaller package!
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Wow this is beautiful! I love the concept and execution. Great
| job!
| herpderperator wrote:
| Surprisingly low CPU usage for such high frame rate action! Nice
| work :)
| SigmaEpsilonChi wrote:
| Wow, thank you!! We have a lot of optimization work left haha
| so it's a pleasure to hear it's working smoothly for you! I'll
| admit I'm a bit surprised ^_^
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(page generated 2022-08-19 23:00 UTC)