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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 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!
- unconed 4y ago[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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoActually 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.
- unconed 4y agoBut how is the user supposed to see that if the rendering is arbitrary and misleading? Seriously this is the kind of bullshit that makes normal people hate programmers because you miss the point entirely while thinking you're on it.
- qbasic_forever 4y agoWow this is beautiful! I love the concept and execution. Great job!
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoWe really appreciate you saying that!!
- herpderperator 4y agoSurprisingly low CPU usage for such high frame rate action! Nice work :)
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoWow, 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 ^_^
- tejasag 4y agoThis is awesomeee
- ziddoap 4y agoExcruciating 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?
- jordanwallwork 4y agoTook about 4 seconds for me. Still, regardless of load time I found it annoying that that was all that happened
- ziddoap 4y agoI might of had unlucky timing with an influx of other HNers.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoSorry, didn't mean to disappoint :[ I'll tell you a secret though, there's a playable alpha at https://sinerider.hackclub.dev https://sinerider.hackclub.dev sssshh don't tell anyone
- jxf 4y agoIt looks like you'll edit equations with some kind of periodicity to produce curves, which your character must then navigate to some destination.
- andai 4y agoHave 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/ https://www.linerider.com/ ( Press the "Play" link on the right, it runs right in the browser, just like in the old days :)
- 4y ago
- devenj 4y agothis is soo cool!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stevewatson301 4y agoI get TLS alerts for some weird reason when connecting to the website. $ curl -i https://sinerider.com/ https://sinerider.com/ curl: (35) error:1404B410:SSL routines:ST_CONNECT:sslv3 alert handshake failure
- ClaireBookworm 4y agoOops, sorry! We're fixing that right now :D
- eatonphil 4y agoThe screen captures in the README look awesome! Unfortunately it looks like you're having some SSL issues on the site right now.
- ClaireBookworm 4y agoIt should be fixed now!
- kalid 4y agoCongrats on the prototype! Signed up and looking forward to checking it out once it's launched =).
- ankaAr 4y agoSo nice
- fullstop 4y agoIf you're into this, you may also be into Graphwar https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899700/Graphwar/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899700/Graphwar/
- jamal-kumar 4y agoThat's hilarious, like scorched earth on a cartesian plane. I hope math teachers catch on to this.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoBuilt by my buddy Zane! Back in 2014 we were making these games simultaneously and trading notes!
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y ago(sorry Zain, if you're reading this, I just noticed I misspelled your name)
- antman 4y agoI remember someone posting years ago an online version of this,been searching for it!
- jamal-kumar 4y agoLooking 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 4y agoVery 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.
- paxys 4y agoPlease please change the text bubble font. Comic Sans (and derivatives) in this age is just..no.
- sureglymop 4y agoCan't you just change it yourself? Change the stylesheet in your web browser.
- paxys 4y agoYou can also code the entire game in your web browser yourself, but that wasn't the point of the comment.
- sureglymop 4y agoThat's true. At the same time, what if everyone requested the creator to change the font of their game? I don't have a problem with it at all, i was just thinking maybe for a simple change like the font it would probably easier just to do it for yourself.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoIt'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/ http://comicsanscriminal.com/
- personjerry 4y agoI think the Show HN is a bit premature, you won't get much useful feedback when it's not really playable yet
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoYeah, we maybe should've launched the internal alpha for HN :/ If you want to play, it's live at https://sinerider.hackclub.dev https://sinerider.hackclub.dev!
- whoibrar 4y agoLooks really cool. Love to play.
- Denisos 4y ago
- keerthiko 4y agoi 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 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 4y agoGood 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 4y agothat'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!
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoOh hey, I remember you!! I really appreciated your comment, that one in particular stuck with me. And yeah, it's so much fun. It's a real privilege to work with such motivated, optimistic, hard-working students. They have all the energy that's been knocked out of me since 2014!
- westoncb 4y agoThis looks great—feels very polished. I love the "hack club" concept :)
- SigmaEpsilonChi 4y agoThank you so much!
- meltyness 4y agoFun! ...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 4y agoLooks 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.
- rebelos 4y agoThe core game code is remarkably compact. I'm not familiar with game development, but is this usually the case? Very impressive.
- keerthiko 4y agoNot 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 4y agoThis 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 4y agoThanks! 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!