Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back (playlinex.com)
I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.
It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.
The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.
Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.
You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.
To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:
1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.
2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.
The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.
In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.
Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.
I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
16 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadUnfortunately, I (and likely many others on HN) am pretty sign-up adverse, and since this game seems like it should be perfectly playable 100% client-side, I think this is going to really hurt adoption.
It might improve the flow to first letting them play a challenge (does not have to be daily challenge, e.g., just the demo tetris-like game from the starting page) and then introduce the account sign up afterward.
Edit: never mind! Already done! https://hnarcade.com/games/games/linex
I'd love to be able to play by dragging. On mobile it would be really nice if I could draw the shapes with my finger
If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing piece generation? Is it random%7, drawing from a bag, or something else?
One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!
Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
It took me a surprisingly long time to break out of the tetris gravity mindset and start attaching pieces to the bottom of existing blobs, rather than on the lowest possible position on the board!
Maybe put the instructions you listed here on the site. I tried before reading the comments and got nowhere.
(Edit:I just noticed the instructions on the page bottom… move them up)
For me the symmetric pieces and the ability to just draw on any square on the grid to highlight it (even those that aren’t part of the shape you have to draw) was at first confusing (some Tetris pieces are symmetrical and you can’t flip)
it took some getting used too but it is oddly satisfying.
That’s my feed back. Well done.
Some feedback/thoughts:
1. I don't think the current approach to difficulty is fun, its just feels limiting without any interaction or ways to turn it into an advantage. Some other ideas would be to have non-tetris pieces that are more difficult to place (but might be very good if you find agood placement), or temporary board obstacles that you can work around until they are gone/removed. Or pieces that do something else when placed like become obstacles until adjacent pieces are cleared. There are many ways to find a more fun difficulty approach :)
2. As others have pointed out it's frustrating to lose when you have "powers" left
3. The difficulty progression vs leaderboards are not clear to me. Am I only competing against players in the same difficulty? Can I choose a lower difficulty? (I would rather get the difficulty from competition than the fixed blocks on board)
4. Getting "holes" in normal tetris feels a lot less punishing than in your game. Here it almost feels unrecoverable at times. I don't have suggestion, and maybe it's not even a problem. Just wanted to mention it.
5. The powers feel a bit "meh". They are useful sure, but seem pretty similar in a way.