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Show HN: WallSmash – An Infinite Brick Breaker Game

114 points by bijection 5y ago

Xevi 5y ago
Nice game, I almost got to 20k in score. Are these games viable financially nowadays? It feels like most people don't play games in the browser anymore, and those who do don't spend much money, and often run ad blockers. Can you live off of making web games?
- _3n6v 5y ago
  There's still a small market for licensing web games to the remaining aggregator sites. Addicting Games, Armor Games, and CoolMath Games all have some form of paid, non-exclusive licensing deals. I only learned about this when CoolMath Games reached out to me about licensing a game I had released. There's an article here [1] that goes into detail. The author was averaging $1900 per game, releasing one every other week. [1] https://github.com/nyunesu/web-games/ https://github.com/nyunesu/web-games/
  - Xevi 5y ago
    Thanks. I think it would be difficult for me to live off of that amount of money, considering that taxes would eat up over half of it. But it's cool to see that some are able to do it. I think the dream of most people is to not sell the game to someone else, and instead create their own revenue stream from it. But that's probably much harder. I also found it interesting that they were using Unity for web games. I would have thought it would be best to use a JavaScript framework to reduce file size, and gain extra performance.
- bijection 5y ago
  No idea if this could be financially viable. It’s essentially free to host so profit hasn’t mattered much so far.
jrace 5y ago
I love it! No BS, Click the link...and get smashing! Controls and rules easy to figure out after a few plays, and just addictive enough. Thank!
edoceo 5y ago
How to find out what those different power ups do? What are the bars? Blue dots add pellets.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  AFAICT the bars add a kind of "laser" that immediately inflicts damage on all bricks in your initial selected trajectory (penetrating all bricks that intersect the dotted line representing your initial trajectory). The more bars you collect the more damage this laser does. This provides a counterbalance to only blindly selecting the trajectory that has your dots hitting the most bricks. Sometimes you're willing to have a poor trajectory that results in your dots immediately hitting the "ground" after only one or a few bounces if the "laser" can do enough damage, or sometimes the laser can "carve" a better path.
  - prawn 5y ago
    OK, that makes sense. I thought the bar just set the shooting position for the next turn. Laser didn't occur to me at all.
  - droidist2 5y ago
    How do you know when you have the laser, and can you choose whether or not to use it?
    - dwohnitmok 5y ago
      I think the answers are respectively "there's no explicit indication, just remember when you've collected a bar powerup and also you'll see the laser beam on-screen when it fires" and "no you cannot choose whether to use it, once you have it it always fires."
savolai 5y ago
In iphone zooms in the ui randomly, can't zoom out, unplayable
airstrike 5y ago
There goes 30 mins of my day... I'm happy with 14,805 Would be great to be able to keep track of how many hits you had per shot vs. how many new hit points (new blocks * block #) were added in the last [10] rounds
- prawn 5y ago
  I've played a few times and got just over 95,000 on my recent attempt. Feels like there's a tipping point after the first few minutes (which occasionally trip you up) where the lasers/balls give you a bit of an edge until the bricks eventually get up around the 200 range.
shawnz 5y ago
A strong strategy seems to be to always aim at the steepest possible angle.
bijection 5y ago
Hi HN! A few friends and I created WallSmash years ago for our own amusement. We've been occasionally tweaking it ever since, and recently it has picked up a few regular players. Probably the most interesting parts were working out the collision physics to be frame-rate-independant, making the drawing loop, and playing with the particle effects on collisions. Happy to answer any questions or entertain feature requests here :)
colinmcd 5y ago
Co-creator here. Perhaps the most interesting part of this project is how the traffic to the site seems to correspond to the number of students slacking off. Traffic increases monotonically Monday to Friday (though occasionally Thursday beats out Friday), and drops off big over the summer and weekend. Guess we found a niche.
- infamousjoeg 5y ago
  Yes, well, now I'll be slacking off at work due to it... so you'll continue to see that trend. Thanks for this!
prawn 5y ago
I like it. Not everyone might agree, but if you haven't already, find and watch the classic talk about juicing your game. Just a few subtle things would lift it further. Why do some bricks disappear before contact with the pellets? If a brick has a two on it, I would expect two pellets to bounce off?
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  They may be getting destroyed by the "laser" you get from the bar power-ups. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962376
- asicsp 5y ago
  >classic talk about juicing your game This one? "Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
  - prawn 5y ago
    That's the one. Obviously they go a bit crazy at the end, but you can get ideas on subtle tweaks you can make to embellish a game. For something like WallSmash, I'd also suggest picking a stronger visual theme for the brick/ball/etc elements. e.g., this game has a retro thing going on: https://retrogram.app/ https://retrogram.app/ With the one game I've been involved with making (https://hexiled.com/ https://hexiled.com/ from years ago), the juicing video motivated us to spend time on sound, explosions, bit of shake, etc. One day during development, we tested the hexabomb explosion with a phone connected to the office speakers and it was room-shakingly awesome.
  - wayvey 5y ago
    Making a game myself right now and this was such a great watch. Thank you! :)
inatreecrown2 5y ago
really nice game, and very addictive! I imagine that an "AI" would excel at this game by calculating the most efficient trajectory.
notnaut 5y ago
Reminds me of an old favorite that I also used to waste a lot of company time playing! https://www.crazygames.com/game/99-balls https://www.crazygames.com/game/99-balls
NateEag 5y ago
I really enjoyed playing this for a few minutes. Nice work!
junon 5y ago
Not as fun as the original. I have way, way too many hours in the original and this one annoys me a bit. - The purple "beam" throws any strategy out the window. Aiming at a specific corner to try to get the stream into a loop or something is almost completely mitigated by the purple beam and it's a toss up what the bricks will look like before any balls are actually shot - The patterns are so thin and erratic that finding good places to make loops is annoyingly difficult. My runs on average hit maybe 10 times. With a skilled enough shot, it should be one or two orders of magnitude more than that. - The aiming angle is min'd out at what looks like 30 degrees or so, making dire life saving shots impossible.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  Keep playing, it gets better. The purple laser diminishes in importance - you get more balls faster than you get more lasers. And the bricks get stronger with more opportunities to find loops. By the time you're at level 30 or so, the lasers are doing about 15 damage, and the bricks are strong enough to start planning your routes.
dmitriid 5y ago
I managed to get two balls flying in a horizontal line, so now the game is stuck. To avoid this, the game needs to have some gravity or walls that are ever so slightly not vertical
- memco 5y ago
  There is an end turn early button in the top right corner of the page visible after you make a shot.
lelanthran 5y ago
I applaud the design decision to allow high scores but not require account creation. Too often I click on "try my online game" in forums like r/programming and similar only to be greeted with "sign in using [google/facebook/whatever] and grant this app access", or account creation.
russellbeattie 5y ago
This version of the same game isn't multiplayer, but has much nicer sounds and graphics: http://99balls.buyhtml5.com/ http://99balls.buyhtml5.com/
isaec 5y ago
Does not seem to authenticate scores in any way - I observed this yesterday in the network tab, but it seems someone else has taken advantage of it, and spammed the leaderboards with political messages and a rickroll. I am curious what the best way to prevent this is without account creation? Maybe store all the data of the run, so it can be simulated serverside and have its score validated?

114 points by bijection 5y ago

Xevi 5y ago

Nice game, I almost got to 20k in score. Are these games viable financially nowadays? It feels like most people don't play games in the browser anymore, and those who do don't spend much money, and often run ad blockers. Can you live off of making web games?

_3n6v 5y ago
There's still a small market for licensing web games to the remaining aggregator sites. Addicting Games, Armor Games, and CoolMath Games all have some form of paid, non-exclusive licensing deals. I only learned about this when CoolMath Games reached out to me about licensing a game I had released. There's an article here [1] that goes into detail. The author was averaging $1900 per game, releasing one every other week. [1] https://github.com/nyunesu/web-games/ https://github.com/nyunesu/web-games/
- Xevi 5y ago
  Thanks. I think it would be difficult for me to live off of that amount of money, considering that taxes would eat up over half of it. But it's cool to see that some are able to do it. I think the dream of most people is to not sell the game to someone else, and instead create their own revenue stream from it. But that's probably much harder. I also found it interesting that they were using Unity for web games. I would have thought it would be best to use a JavaScript framework to reduce file size, and gain extra performance.
bijection 5y ago
No idea if this could be financially viable. It’s essentially free to host so profit hasn’t mattered much so far.

jrace 5y ago

I love it! No BS, Click the link...and get smashing! Controls and rules easy to figure out after a few plays, and just addictive enough. Thank!

edoceo 5y ago

How to find out what those different power ups do? What are the bars? Blue dots add pellets.

dwohnitmok 5y ago
AFAICT the bars add a kind of "laser" that immediately inflicts damage on all bricks in your initial selected trajectory (penetrating all bricks that intersect the dotted line representing your initial trajectory). The more bars you collect the more damage this laser does. This provides a counterbalance to only blindly selecting the trajectory that has your dots hitting the most bricks. Sometimes you're willing to have a poor trajectory that results in your dots immediately hitting the "ground" after only one or a few bounces if the "laser" can do enough damage, or sometimes the laser can "carve" a better path.
- prawn 5y ago
  OK, that makes sense. I thought the bar just set the shooting position for the next turn. Laser didn't occur to me at all.
- droidist2 5y ago
  How do you know when you have the laser, and can you choose whether or not to use it?
  - dwohnitmok 5y ago
    I think the answers are respectively "there's no explicit indication, just remember when you've collected a bar powerup and also you'll see the laser beam on-screen when it fires" and "no you cannot choose whether to use it, once you have it it always fires."

savolai 5y ago

In iphone zooms in the ui randomly, can't zoom out, unplayable

airstrike 5y ago

There goes 30 mins of my day... I'm happy with 14,805 Would be great to be able to keep track of how many hits you had per shot vs. how many new hit points (new blocks * block #) were added in the last [10] rounds

prawn 5y ago
I've played a few times and got just over 95,000 on my recent attempt. Feels like there's a tipping point after the first few minutes (which occasionally trip you up) where the lasers/balls give you a bit of an edge until the bricks eventually get up around the 200 range.

shawnz 5y ago

A strong strategy seems to be to always aim at the steepest possible angle.

bijection 5y ago

Hi HN! A few friends and I created WallSmash years ago for our own amusement. We've been occasionally tweaking it ever since, and recently it has picked up a few regular players. Probably the most interesting parts were working out the collision physics to be frame-rate-independant, making the drawing loop, and playing with the particle effects on collisions. Happy to answer any questions or entertain feature requests here :)

colinmcd 5y ago

Co-creator here. Perhaps the most interesting part of this project is how the traffic to the site seems to correspond to the number of students slacking off. Traffic increases monotonically Monday to Friday (though occasionally Thursday beats out Friday), and drops off big over the summer and weekend. Guess we found a niche.

infamousjoeg 5y ago
Yes, well, now I'll be slacking off at work due to it... so you'll continue to see that trend. Thanks for this!

prawn 5y ago

I like it. Not everyone might agree, but if you haven't already, find and watch the classic talk about juicing your game. Just a few subtle things would lift it further. Why do some bricks disappear before contact with the pellets? If a brick has a two on it, I would expect two pellets to bounce off?

dwohnitmok 5y ago
They may be getting destroyed by the "laser" you get from the bar power-ups. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962376
asicsp 5y ago
>classic talk about juicing your game This one? "Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
- prawn 5y ago
  That's the one. Obviously they go a bit crazy at the end, but you can get ideas on subtle tweaks you can make to embellish a game. For something like WallSmash, I'd also suggest picking a stronger visual theme for the brick/ball/etc elements. e.g., this game has a retro thing going on: https://retrogram.app/ https://retrogram.app/ With the one game I've been involved with making (https://hexiled.com/ https://hexiled.com/ from years ago), the juicing video motivated us to spend time on sound, explosions, bit of shake, etc. One day during development, we tested the hexabomb explosion with a phone connected to the office speakers and it was room-shakingly awesome.
- wayvey 5y ago
  Making a game myself right now and this was such a great watch. Thank you! :)

inatreecrown2 5y ago

really nice game, and very addictive! I imagine that an "AI" would excel at this game by calculating the most efficient trajectory.

notnaut 5y ago

Reminds me of an old favorite that I also used to waste a lot of company time playing! https://www.crazygames.com/game/99-balls https://www.crazygames.com/game/99-balls

NateEag 5y ago

I really enjoyed playing this for a few minutes. Nice work!

junon 5y ago

Not as fun as the original. I have way, way too many hours in the original and this one annoys me a bit. - The purple "beam" throws any strategy out the window. Aiming at a specific corner to try to get the stream into a loop or something is almost completely mitigated by the purple beam and it's a toss up what the bricks will look like before any balls are actually shot - The patterns are so thin and erratic that finding good places to make loops is annoyingly difficult. My runs on average hit maybe 10 times. With a skilled enough shot, it should be one or two orders of magnitude more than that. - The aiming angle is min'd out at what looks like 30 degrees or so, making dire life saving shots impossible.

vikingerik 5y ago
Keep playing, it gets better. The purple laser diminishes in importance - you get more balls faster than you get more lasers. And the bricks get stronger with more opportunities to find loops. By the time you're at level 30 or so, the lasers are doing about 15 damage, and the bricks are strong enough to start planning your routes.

dmitriid 5y ago

I managed to get two balls flying in a horizontal line, so now the game is stuck. To avoid this, the game needs to have some gravity or walls that are ever so slightly not vertical

memco 5y ago
There is an end turn early button in the top right corner of the page visible after you make a shot.

lelanthran 5y ago

I applaud the design decision to allow high scores but not require account creation. Too often I click on "try my online game" in forums like r/programming and similar only to be greeted with "sign in using [google/facebook/whatever] and grant this app access", or account creation.

russellbeattie 5y ago

This version of the same game isn't multiplayer, but has much nicer sounds and graphics: http://99balls.buyhtml5.com/ http://99balls.buyhtml5.com/

isaec 5y ago

Does not seem to authenticate scores in any way - I observed this yesterday in the network tab, but it seems someone else has taken advantage of it, and spammed the leaderboards with political messages and a rickroll. I am curious what the best way to prevent this is without account creation? Maybe store all the data of the run, so it can be simulated serverside and have its score validated?