Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#11

Post by diggan » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 10:25 PM UTC

Cool (and intense!) game :) Pretty impressive you had something like that running on a PDA 20 years ago, I was probably playing J2ME games on a Sony Ericsson at that point so don't know the performance of those.

This constraint + your solution was pretty interesting:

> Only use technologies that can be expected to still be present (and backwards-compatible) 20 years from now.

I'd bet on that in 20 years TypeScript will no longer be maintained and also no longer be the most popular transpilation source language for JavaScript. Seems the JavaScript ecosystem always eventually finds a new "source" language even though everyone at the time is certain it won't happen with this current one.

Probably still wouldn't be hard to get the game running though, will still be easy to install old TypeScript compiler and run it.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#12

Post by butz » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 10:34 PM UTC

Congratulations, looks great, and feels addicting. I wonder if keeping ship offset from touch point was intentional game design choice?

And regarding testing on Safari, if you have access to any Linux distribution, you can try testing on GNOME Web, it uses WebKit, same rendering engine as Safari (with probably some minor differences).

Finally, you should put this game up on itch.io, as I am sure some players might like to leave some monetary support.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#13

Post by duiker101 » Fri, Jan 03, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

Very cool! I'm actually curious to learn more about how the bin conversion works. The pack files are pretty interesting!

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#14

Post by 3willows » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 1:33 AM UTC

Good stuff! Is there any chance you could write some instructions on how to make "darklaga.bin" locally.

I ran "npm install" and then the build script, but then got a bit lost.

When I open dist/darklaga.html, my browser dev tools (correctly) tells me that I can't get at "darklaga.bin".

I worked around this by going on the live demo, grabbing the "darklaga.bin" from the dev tools "Networks" tab, and plugging it to the dist/ directory. But it would be even better if I could just download the repo and make the bin from there.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#15

Post by mmastrac » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 1:38 AM UTC

This is ridiculously fun, kudos. I could definitely waste a few lazy afternoons playing this.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#16

Post by pbalau » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 2:07 AM UTC

Addictive game, well done. But why do you think WebGL is going to still exists in 20 years? Flash seemed to be here to stay, considering how much content was made for it, then "suddenly" gone.

/edit:

Whether WebGL as a whole will be replaced by WebGPU remains to be seen, but the 1.0 feature set is simple enough that I can imagine web browsers implementing those in terms of WebGPU, whereas the 2.0 features are more likely to be dropped, because they were never expected to be universally supported.

Well, this is a possible reason, but I'm not sure I agree with.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#17

Post by ajnin » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

Good old shmup, that's a genre that is sadly fallen into disfavour these days.

I played a bit however after 2 minutes or so some enemy ships get stuck going in a square pattern across the edge of the screen where they are impossible to hit and the game stops progressing. I refreshed once and got the same issue after a few minutes (Firefox).

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#18

Post by purple-leafy » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 6:54 AM UTC

reallyh fun game, made it past the second boss then died. Was a bit confused about pickups and how they worked, there was so much happening on screen haha

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#19

Post by onehair » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 7:05 AM UTC

I'm currently thinking of rewriting a personal website from next.js to plain html/css/js. Just don't want no bundling no more. My reasons are similar to yours, but one that's been itching at me was the loss of clicking view source and learning about code directly from a page with ease.

Didn't know I could still do typescript and just have my workflow strip the annotations out though. That's really worth exploring.

Re: Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game

#20

Post by debugnik » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 1:04 PM UTC

pbalau wrote: post #16

Addictive game, well done. But why do you think WebGL is going to still exists in 20 years? Flash seemed to be here to stay, considering how much content was made for it, then "suddenly" gone. /edit: Whether WebGL as a whole will be replaced by WebGPU remains to be seen, but the 1.0 feature set is simple enough that I can imagine web browsers implementing those in terms of WebGPU, whereas the 2.0 features are more li…

Flash was a proprietary browser plugin that went out of support (although you can still play .swf files with the standalone projector or Ruffle), whereas WebGL is a web standard which is very easy to implement on top of OpenGL ES; and that one is also a standard with many implementations, both in drivers and as open source libraries on top of more modern APIs, like ANGLE.

So I think WebGL is not going away anytime soon.