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jimbooonooo 18 hours ago [-]
I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
enjoy!
zug_zug 7 hours ago [-]
The shot timeout is the biggest issue for me. There's nothing worse than lining up the most crazy indirect shot and have it just disappear as it comes in.
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
alexpotato 25 minutes ago [-]
> I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago,
I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.
This would have been the mid 1990s.
ulrikrasmussen 9 hours ago [-]
Really fun idea. Some immediate feedback:
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
SubiculumCode 16 hours ago [-]
Loved that game...and there is definite potential here. It seems like a player can just move right next to opponent and fire? That doesn't seem right?
jimbooonooo 15 hours ago [-]
good catch, thank you. I will update so that you're limited to like one to two tank lengths per turn.
pjc50 6 hours ago [-]
Original Scorched Earth (which I also loved!) let you choose whether movement was allowed in the ruleset, and it was quite slow so you'd be up against the turn timer. Similar for Worms. I think it's a viable part of the game if nerfed or made riskier (mines?)
skewbone 3 hours ago [-]
Driving also had a fuel cost, so couldn't be done arbitrarily depending on the economics settings.
rikschennink 11 hours ago [-]
I think the moon gravity is a bit much. It would be cool to use the gravity of the moon in your attack, but I think that would require it moving slower and perhaps some prediction logic where you can see where the moon will be if you fire now?
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)
stevage 12 hours ago [-]
On mobile it doesn't seem to be possible to decrease power?
lebuin 11 hours ago [-]
It's possible but it took me a while to find the butten as well. It's to the left of the "increase power" button, with quite a low opacity.
I think it might be better to use the empty areas in the corners for the controls.
empath75 3 hours ago [-]
I love the idea, but the moon has too much gravity and moves too fast, and the missiles too slow, which makes it impossible to aim. There's a fine line between complexity and chaos and this is on the wrong side of it right now.
WhiteNoiz3 16 hours ago [-]
I also grew up playing Scorched - love this twist on the old idea.
datadrivenangel 14 hours ago [-]
How long did it take to make this with Qwen?
shoo 13 hours ago [-]
cool, i played a fair bit of scorch
misc feedback
- dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
- how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
- the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
- the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed
one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?
isoprophlex 10 hours ago [-]
You can just roll up to the other player and shoot them in the face?!
rossy 9 hours ago [-]
I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.
Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
jerf 4 hours ago [-]
I see so many posts on programming reddits now asking for "brutal feedback" (which I see so often I suspect it must also be a 2nd-tier Claudism that only comes up in this context) with a commit history an hour and a half old, and my "brutal feedback" I want to give is have you actually tried using your code?
I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.
This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you. This program does not correlate with my own experience with one-shot vibe coding, which is that I generally can't go literally 5 seconds without hitting an issue of some sort. I've spent weeks on an app for my kids and I started to measure my progress by "how long I can use it before I hit an issue". I considered it a bit of an event when I hit five minutes. It's hovering around 15 to 20 right now, but I've still got a ways to go before it is "indefinite".
bruce343434 5 hours ago [-]
Took the words out of my mouth. The trajectory indicator isn't predictive either, making it pointless. A single playtest would have made this obvious and maybe even a single prompt would have solved it.
MarcScott 5 hours ago [-]
I think it was on the Astra launch site, they had a car racing game authored by codex. I played it once and was quite impressed. I played it a second time and realised that I could just hold down the accelerator, not bother steering at all, and beat all the AI opponents every time. The game was pretty but pointless.
philipallstar 10 hours ago [-]
Real-life tank tactics are very viable in this game.
mozzaa 8 hours ago [-]
Player 2 hates this one simple trick
Bigpet 7 hours ago [-]
Player 2 probably also hates that he can't switch weapons unlike Player 1.
olliepro 16 hours ago [-]
Moving L/R is OP
ivanech 16 hours ago [-]
Yes you can drive up to your opponent and hit them point blank
jimbooonooo 15 hours ago [-]
Good catch, fix in progress. I am also working on adding a single player version and a leaderboard.
dvh 13 hours ago [-]
Also there is no way to lower power on mobile
Arn280 12 hours ago [-]
Its hidden in the texture of the battleground, took me a while to see too!
stephbook 11 hours ago [-]
I've always enjoyed "Space Tanks." Beyond the whole gravity stuff, it was FUN. Silly designs, bouncy weapons, upgrading tanks..
Well it's plain HTTP. No certificates to get wrong or impersonated I guess lol.
ryankrage77 1 hours ago [-]
mechanics are completely and utterly broken.
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
marcy_74 13 hours ago [-]
Bet this one has fascinating edge cases involving armor plating and projectile trajectories. Makes dining philosophers look easy.
foo12bar 13 hours ago [-]
You should make it so you can coerce the moon to fall out of orbit, crash into the planet and destroy half of it.
thih9 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing and nicely done, I enjoyed it.
Feature request: no shake effect after victory.
datadrivenangel 14 hours ago [-]
Very cool! it seems like the first player can't switch weapons though.
alienbaby 7 hours ago [-]
was fun, but disappointing the projected trajectory does not match the final trajectory
bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago [-]
the moon moving as fast as the projectiles is bs
womble2 58 minutes ago [-]
The moon has an orbital velocity of ~1km/s, an M777 howitzer has a muzzle velocity of ~0.8km/s
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
enjoy!
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.
This would have been the mid 1990s.
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)
I think it might be better to use the empty areas in the corners for the controls.
misc feedback
one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.
This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you. This program does not correlate with my own experience with one-shot vibe coding, which is that I generally can't go literally 5 seconds without hitting an issue of some sort. I've spent weeks on an app for my kids and I started to measure my progress by "how long I can use it before I hit an issue". I considered it a bit of an event when I hit five minutes. It's hovering around 15 to 20 right now, but I've still got a ways to go before it is "indefinite".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Tanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8yvSl9j9yU
I would love to play it tho and submit it to https://hnarcade.com
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
Feature request: no shake effect after victory.