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Show HN: SineRider, a math puzzle game

Messing with your TI-84 graphing calculator is a rite of passage for every teenager who has ever been bored in a math class. In 2013 I was that teenager, and it gave me an idea for a tiny game about sledding on graphs. This project grew into my white whale, and I spent my twenties trying and failing to finish it alone. I shelved the game when I started working for Hack Club in 2018—until last May, when a few community members took it off the shelf. The project took on a life of its own, and turned into a year of nights and weekends from a global team of 20+ teens in 8+ countries. Today SineRider enters public beta! SineRider is literally an infinite universe of function composition puzzles, each with infinite solutions, that range from welcoming for 9th graders to difficult for even the most serious matlab user. And every day we tweet out a fresh one to be solved with your morning coffee. We hope you enjoy playing SineRider as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. And we’re not done! Mobile support, polar coordinates, and a level editor are all on the roadmap. SineRider is a living project, to be continuously built and maintained as free OSS by the Hack Club community: https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider The team that built the game will try to be in the comments today between high school classes and AP tests. —chris walker, creative director Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nDYoIwiA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nDYoIwiA8 Play now: https://sinerider.com https://sinerider.com

jsd1982 3y ago
Delightful!
thealienthing 3y ago
Wow such a cool game. I thought I would play a few levels at work when it was time to take a break. I ended up taking an early lunch. This game is so addicting.
cytronicoder 3y ago
[dead]
pranavnt 3y ago
[dead]
dang 3y ago
Related: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521395 - Aug 2022 (49 comments)
fishtoaster 3y ago
Well this is just beautiful! I'll be playing this later tonight when I've got some time. :)
mNovak 3y ago
Looks like this has advanced a lot since I last saw it, nice!
bitwise-evan 3y ago
Roughly 7 years ago I made a Sine Rider Solver: http://theartbot.com/labs/SineRiderSolver.html http://theartbot.com/labs/SineRiderSolver.html No idea if it still works. According to my page, you called it "Super Cool".
- dang 3y ago
  This is unrelated, but http://theartbot.com http://theartbot.com looks great! Do you want to submit it to HN sometime? Something like "Show HN: TheArtBot - Semiautonomous drawing machine" would be a great title. It would also be great to include text that gives the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it (e.g. going into some of the details that you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27229274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27229274). If you do ever post it please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), and it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago
  I remember it well!! Wow this brings back memories… :')
frognumber 3y ago
My child played through all the levels a while back. This has positive impact on kids. All I can say is thank you. That's really my only feedback. Thank you.
- SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago
  Glad to hear it!! If they were able to complete the game, I recommend they try the daily puzzles. These are generally much harder and IMO this is where the depth of the puzzles really opens up. We are still working on the leaderboard bot so I think it's not currently tweeting fresh puzzles, but there is a backlog of about 20 right now
mpalmer 3y ago
Wow! I really like the way it encourages you to play with the equation UI early on, teasing how powerful the system is without pressuring the user to accomplish anything. The interface is clean, but more to the point it's intentional and specific in its design. It's a great learning tool; it feels like my mental model is stretching already. Home run across the board! I wonder if the creator has played or knows Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I see a similar attention to storytelling in a silly but melancholy vein.
Phreaker00 3y ago
Absolutely amazing! Having fun while learning math, who would've thought that's possible. And such cute characters.
stevage 3y ago
I like the actual levels. The bits between the levels...not so much. Just frustrating trying to work out what arrow I need to click to get to another level. Kept accidentally finding myself in the same level again. I just don't care about which meta-path to take, just give me the next level. Also...those weird inter-level screens where you click or use arrows while the figures move glacially slow across the screen? ARGH. I lost patience after 30 seconds. So. Slow. And no way to skip it. And when I clicked the wrong thing I had to start over. The actual levels were good though.
- xept 3y ago
  What's going on on that level? I don't see anything to change to make it faster. Any hints?
- weeb 3y ago
  Agree on this. Also a bug report - I was getting bored of a story level and tried to find a shortcut to skip it or speed it up or something. Pressed a key (not sure which - was thinking about Esc/Tab/Enter type navigation at the time) and apparently copied a Reddit command, ending up stuck in the state shown in this screenshot. Can't get out to continue the level, the [X] button doesn't seem to do anything. I deleted the modal from the DOM and could not press either button on the dialog below. https://ibb.co/rM2Swzq https://ibb.co/rM2Swzq I was actually thinking through accessibility considerations while playing as I want to recommend to a friend who would be using alternate input methods. Not being able to skip / speed up cut scenes is a pain. Even just being able to click through the dialog (without the slow travel in between) would be an improvement. [edit: typo]
  - pmontra 3y ago
    It happened to me too, because it's just natural to attempt to ESC to the next level. Eventually I uBlocked the Reddit dialog, then discovered that scrolling up brings back to the game.
    - SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago
Y_Y 3y ago
I was able to solve the first puzzle by placing a 1/X singularity next to the snowball. It correctly rolled down but the just clipped through and blasted away. It is very hard to cover these sorts of cases with a naive physics model because the numerics get messy very quickly. Very cool project.

jsd1982 3y ago

Delightful!

thealienthing 3y ago

Wow such a cool game. I thought I would play a few levels at work when it was time to take a break. I ended up taking an early lunch. This game is so addicting.

cytronicoder 3y ago

[dead]

pranavnt 3y ago

[dead]

dang 3y ago

Related: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521395 - Aug 2022 (49 comments)

fishtoaster 3y ago

Well this is just beautiful! I'll be playing this later tonight when I've got some time. :)

mNovak 3y ago

Looks like this has advanced a lot since I last saw it, nice!

bitwise-evan 3y ago

Roughly 7 years ago I made a Sine Rider Solver: http://theartbot.com/labs/SineRiderSolver.html http://theartbot.com/labs/SineRiderSolver.html No idea if it still works. According to my page, you called it "Super Cool".

dang 3y ago
This is unrelated, but http://theartbot.com http://theartbot.com looks great! Do you want to submit it to HN sometime? Something like "Show HN: TheArtBot - Semiautonomous drawing machine" would be a great title. It would also be great to include text that gives the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it (e.g. going into some of the details that you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27229274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27229274). If you do ever post it please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), and it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago
I remember it well!! Wow this brings back memories… :')

frognumber 3y ago

My child played through all the levels a while back. This has positive impact on kids. All I can say is thank you. That's really my only feedback. Thank you.

SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago
Glad to hear it!! If they were able to complete the game, I recommend they try the daily puzzles. These are generally much harder and IMO this is where the depth of the puzzles really opens up. We are still working on the leaderboard bot so I think it's not currently tweeting fresh puzzles, but there is a backlog of about 20 right now

mpalmer 3y ago

Wow! I really like the way it encourages you to play with the equation UI early on, teasing how powerful the system is without pressuring the user to accomplish anything. The interface is clean, but more to the point it's intentional and specific in its design. It's a great learning tool; it feels like my mental model is stretching already. Home run across the board! I wonder if the creator has played or knows Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I see a similar attention to storytelling in a silly but melancholy vein.

Phreaker00 3y ago

Absolutely amazing! Having fun while learning math, who would've thought that's possible. And such cute characters.

stevage 3y ago

I like the actual levels. The bits between the levels...not so much. Just frustrating trying to work out what arrow I need to click to get to another level. Kept accidentally finding myself in the same level again. I just don't care about which meta-path to take, just give me the next level. Also...those weird inter-level screens where you click or use arrows while the figures move glacially slow across the screen? ARGH. I lost patience after 30 seconds. So. Slow. And no way to skip it. And when I clicked the wrong thing I had to start over. The actual levels were good though.

xept 3y ago
What's going on on that level? I don't see anything to change to make it faster. Any hints?
weeb 3y ago
Agree on this. Also a bug report - I was getting bored of a story level and tried to find a shortcut to skip it or speed it up or something. Pressed a key (not sure which - was thinking about Esc/Tab/Enter type navigation at the time) and apparently copied a Reddit command, ending up stuck in the state shown in this screenshot. Can't get out to continue the level, the [X] button doesn't seem to do anything. I deleted the modal from the DOM and could not press either button on the dialog below. https://ibb.co/rM2Swzq https://ibb.co/rM2Swzq I was actually thinking through accessibility considerations while playing as I want to recommend to a friend who would be using alternate input methods. Not being able to skip / speed up cut scenes is a pain. Even just being able to click through the dialog (without the slow travel in between) would be an improvement. [edit: typo]
- pmontra 3y ago
  It happened to me too, because it's just natural to attempt to ESC to the next level. Eventually I uBlocked the Reddit dialog, then discovered that scrolling up brings back to the game.
  - SigmaEpsilonChi 3y ago

Y_Y 3y ago

I was able to solve the first puzzle by placing a 1/X singularity next to the snowball. It correctly rolled down but the just clipped through and blasted away. It is very hard to cover these sorts of cases with a naive physics model because the numerics get messy very quickly. Very cool project.