Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

astro.golf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#11

Post by seanwilson »

mrspatula wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I just launched this little game of mine - Astro Golf. You can think of it as Desert Golfing but in space, where the gravitation pull of the planets create some interesting levels. I think it was on an HN comment that I first heard about Desert Golfing many moons ago, so it felt fitting to post this back here. All the levels are procedurally generated, and are guaranteed to be hole-in-one-able. I did this by c…

Great job on completing it - looks fun! Any comments on troubles you ran into and surprises on the way?

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#12

Post by mrspatula »

azhenley wrote: post #9

This is a lot of fun and so simple! Congrats on the release. What was your experience with using Unity? I have been dabbling with Game Maker for the last few months and find it fairly easy to work with, but I haven't attempted anything for mobile.

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want total control over when stuff is allocated and deallocated. Even in a simple game such as Astro Golf, I spent ages tracking down silly allocations that lead to stutter-inducing GC. Unity physics is also a right PITA - I could go on and on..

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#13

Post by mrspatula »

azhenley wrote: post #10
zubi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share the tech stack behind the game? Seems that you used a cross-platform technology to make it runable on several OSes.

The splash screen says Unity on it.

Yes, exactly. Have to pay $$ to remove that splash screen logo!

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#14

Post by asdf21 »

mrspatula wrote: post #12
azhenley wrote: post #9

This is a lot of fun and so simple! Congrats on the release. What was your experience with using Unity? I have been dabbling with Game Maker for the last few months and find it fairly easy to work with, but I haven't attempted anything for mobile.

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want tota…

Wow, surprised to hear this! I had assumed in a project that large and longstanding, most of the bugs would have been smoothed out.

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#15

Post by metabagel »

mrspatula wrote: post #12
azhenley wrote: post #9

This is a lot of fun and so simple! Congrats on the release. What was your experience with using Unity? I have been dabbling with Game Maker for the last few months and find it fairly easy to work with, but I haven't attempted anything for mobile.

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want tota…

What platform would you consider using in the future, rather than Unity?

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#16

Post by mrspatula »

seanwilson wrote: post #11
mrspatula wrote: post #2

Hi HN, I just launched this little game of mine - Astro Golf. You can think of it as Desert Golfing but in space, where the gravitation pull of the planets create some interesting levels. I think it was on an HN comment that I first heard about Desert Golfing many moons ago, so it felt fitting to post this back here. All the levels are procedurally generated, and are guaranteed to be hole-in-one-able. I did this by c…

Great job on completing it - looks fun! Any comments on troubles you ran into and surprises on the way?

Thank you.

Lots of interesting troubles - quite a few surrounding Unity itself. E.g. they have a physics API that gives different results when run automatically by the engine at 1x speed and when you run it manually as fast as it can go. This came up because I wanted to test every level automatically offline, using the exact same physics simulation as the player would experience.

The procedural generation of the levels was also an interesting problem. I used rejection sampling to basically place non-overlapping circles in a box, but when you want to create quite a dense level this becomes very inefficient (it can be very hard to slot the final few circles in). I tried a number of heuristics and other methods to speed this up, but none of them actually improved over brute force. One of the most interesting was using Gibbs sampling - i.e. generate an initial valid level configuration, then move one planet at a time and sample from the ensuing Markov chain (basically sampling from the marginal distribution of each planet given all the others). This ~kind of worked, but was annoying for a few reasons so in the end I just brute forced rejection sampling on a beefy AWS server :)

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#17

Post by mrspatula »

metabagel wrote: post #15
mrspatula wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want tota…

What platform would you consider using in the future, rather than Unity?

I've been looking more and more at Godot, and I really like it. Open source, you can script in C++, and it seems to have most of the features necessary for a simple 2d game like this (perhaps not for some AAA 3D game of course).

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#18

Post by mrspatula »

asdf21 wrote: post #14
mrspatula wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want tota…

Wow, surprised to hear this! I had assumed in a project that large and longstanding, most of the bugs would have been smoothed out.

So had I :(

A lot of these bugs seem to also go unfixed, I think with the intention that you pay for Unity Pro which gives you source code access to the engine and you can work around them / fix them yourself.

Re: Show HN: My first game, minimal procgen gravity golf inspired by Desert Golfing

#20

Post by gorgoiler »

Finished the demo and enjoyed the experience. Fun! Thank you!

Some ideas that would have made it even more fun for me, though which might change the game too much from your original vision:

Ghost arrow: show what shot I played last time, so I can tweak my strategy.

Reset: some sort of gesture to quickly go back to the start, so I can tweak based on the ghost arrow.

Escape velocity: a fun part of orbital mechanics, and a way to penalize me for just using a “hit as hard as I can” strategy where the only changes I make are shot direction.

Hard mode was the most fun because getting a cool hole-in-one felt really fun. I almost missed that hard mode was even an option — the help screen says “hard mode” so I assumed that was the mode I was in, but it turns out it was the button to play in hard mode, which turned out to be a lot more fun because of the reset mechanic.

Post reply on HN