This looks great—feels very polished. I love the "hack club" concept :)
Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#32Fun!
...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
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#33i 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 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?
Good 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!
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#34i 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 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?
Good 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,…
that'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!
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#35The core game code is remarkably compact. I'm not familiar with game development, but is this usually the case? Very impressive.
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#36Looking 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?
Very 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.
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#37[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.
Actually 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.
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#38The core game code is remarkably compact. I'm not familiar with game development, but is this usually the case? Very impressive.
Not 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).
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#39Please please change the text bubble font. Comic Sans (and derivatives) in this age is just..no.
It'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/
Re: Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers
#40If you're into this, you may also be into Graphwar https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899700/Graphwar/
Built by my buddy Zane! Back in 2014 we were making these games simultaneously and trading notes!