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Show HN: Halloween game to show off my new Terminal (joel.tools)

173 points by JoelEinbinder ↗ HN
Hi hi,

I made a little Halloween themed game this week to show off my new terminal. You can play it in the browser. at https://joel.tools/halloween/

Two years ago, I started building an experiment tracking tool for myself as I have been venturing into ai research, and it has morphed into a terminal with rich content support and a bunch of fancy features. https://github.com/JoelEinbinder/snail/

I can't recommend people start using snail for important stuff today, but I think the game is fun and it shows off a lot of the capabilities of the terminal.

Joel Einbinder

31 comments

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willk
This is extremely cute. Great work! I had a lot of fun playing around for a few minutes. Only input I would give is that ability text can be way oversized for its textbox.
JoelEinbinder
Was it "high jump kick"? That's the longest move name. I'll probably just abbreviate it instead of measuring the text :)
jachee
Despite the warning that it might not work on mobile, it works quite well on my iPad… that said, a few of the monster fights happened at just over postage-stamp resolution.

Super fun little game.

JoelEinbinder
Thanks!

I don't have an iPad to test on but I'll try it out in the simulator. I assume you were using an attached keyboard? I would guess that the soft keyboard would not appear in the monster fights.

jachee
Correct, I was indeed using an attached keyboard. And I also wouldn’t expect the soft kb to behave properly either on the iPad or a phone.
_m_benjamin
My first commands: >> ls -a >> cat help.txt >> pushd neighbors_house I got back: "pushd not found." >> cd ..

I'm a total scaredy cat.

JoelEinbinder
TIL pushd. I should go add that to snail.

There is no bash running here, but I can promise nothing in the game is scarier than JavaScript!

sn41
Great game! I am a fan of text-based adventures. This is a nice mix of text-based commands, and a GUI.

Wondering out loud: is it possible to generate an atmospheric horror tale like "Anchorhead" via prompts? Perhaps it's already possible.

Buckaroo9
You should add the fact that you can search with ⌘P to the help.
Torien
Nice way to get me to look up your docs on how to search files! My first attempt managed to hardlock the game:

for(let i=0; i<=8; i++) for(let j=0; j<=8; j++) for(let k=0; k<=8; k++) for(let l=0; l<=8; l++) ls ${i}/${j}/${k}/${l}

JoelEinbinder
:O yeah I should fix that. That is going to create 6000 <iframe> elements. I don't think your web browser would be happy.
hfuaiobfa
Sadly that is exactly my case where it stopped responding. I thought it was your design goal! And I don't want to walk through the adventure again, especially after I jumped off the platforms twice.
JoelEinbinder
Well I fixed it for the next person at least. It is still a bit laggier than it should be but it will no longer crash your browser. Thanks for playing!
smaudet 

  for(var i=0;i<8;i++) ls ${i}
^ this made some odd looking number folders. No idea which folder was in which folder, but, ok...

for(var i=0;i<2;i++) for(var j=0;j<2;j++) for (var k=0;k<2;k++) for (var l=0;l<2;l++) ls ${i}/${j}/${k}/${l}

This did nothing, so I'm not sure if you fixed it or just placed a cap on how much js you are executing... (should have at least shown 16 frames)

for(var i=0;i<8;i++) for(var j=0;j<8;j++) for (var k=0;k<8;k++) for (var l=0;l<8;l++) open ${i}/${j}/${k}/${l}

Is/was producing a nice log of things not opened...of course my browser tab is busy logging 6 GB+ of history (does your terminal have a scrollback limit?)

Cute game, maybe I'll try to open the box later after I get some sleep. Not sure what I would use the terminal for, though - is basically what you're trying to do an interactive scratchpad with history?

If that's the case, I would look into Jupyter e.g., I'm not sure I get the point otherwise.

JoelEinbinder
I made it so that it short circuits the frame creation of if there aren't going to be any files to show in that directory.

I'm honestly not sure if the web sandbox I made has enough realism to solve that puzzle though programming. There is a feature of snail that I was using to get past it.

nubela
Wow, what a way to get me to check out your terminal. I love such demos! Thank you!
encore2097
Fun. took a few tries to beat the boss

lags after the second fight at fullres on firefox, maybe its my plugins?

Had to use CTRL + P on mac for search to pop up vs CMD + P

ReDeiPirati
Love it! such a nice way to showcase what you built, really great work Joel!
SpaceNugget
I'm not sure how you are supposed to search with cmd+p, cmd+p just opens the print dialogue? I just got the password from the dev tools. Cool game.
kedean
Really cool idea! I didn't get very far though, as the precarious pathway slowed to a complete crawl with heavy input lag, so I couldn't make any of the jumps (Firefox on an M1 MBP)
addandsubtract
FF and M1 here too. The game stops as soon as the ghost pops out in the /cramped_hallway.

Ninja edit: zooming in and out once gets the window to fill the screen. I can continue from there...

enoch2090
This is cool! Reminds me of that old iOS game Hacker Run :)
veganjay
This was a lot of fun. Thanks for making and sharing.

The "find" command would be very helpful for the last step (to get the passcode).

I found that you can do "ls 0/0/0/0 0/0/0/1 ..."

So I wrote a python program to print out the ls command that shows all directory contents :)

raldi
I just see a blank screen. I’m on mobile; if it’s not supported, maybe detect that and put up a message with the GitHub link?
JoelEinbinder
I tried my best to. What is your user agent?
raldi
Chrome on iPhone. Looks like Safari does the right thing, though!