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Show HN: QBasic Gorillas (Repeeled) (gameswithtony.com)

31 points by TonyAlicea10 ↗ HN
I've found the most engaging way to practice techniques for AI-assisted development and test models is to build fun side projects in vanilla JS.

I spent many hours playing (and studying and editing) QBasic Gorillas, and this is a vanilla JS implementation using Fable and Opus.

Play 1-on-1 hotseat or against the computer. A bit of extra camera snazz as well.

13 comments

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vunderba
As somebody who grew up in the era of MS-DOS and QBASIC - it's pretty amusing to see two AI-assisted GORILLA.BAS web games in the past week.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856350

Can also play the original as well online

https://classicreload.com/play/qbasic-gorillas.html

Feedback

- the wind/round text should NOT be placed over buildings because.... one of the buildings is gray thus making it almost impossible to read.

- I'd honestly get rid of the pseudo-CRT scanline filter - it looks grainy more than anything. For a better reference see https://github.com/gingerbeardman/webgl-crt-shader

- When implementing camera follow one thing you need is a sort of "grace window". Right now it's so tightly coupled to the movement of the banana it practically gives you whiplash.

pimlottc
The arrow length does not represent power accurately, There's a minimum arrow length even when power is nearly 0, which means when the arrow is twice as long, the power is actually almost 50 times higher! It should be directly proportional. Perhaps there should be different indicators for "power" and "direction" -- maybe a fixed-length dotted line arrow for direction? And/or a power bar that is not anchored to the player position?

The arrow for wind strength also seems to be a different scale, making it hard to judge how much to compensate.

netsharc
Trying to aim with the mouse immediately shows me "made by a fucking clanker"...
elsig60
I like it. I know it's silly, but I could clearly waste time on this. BTW great idea to build fun stuff to practice new tools.
Dwedit
How much is yours, and how much is the LLM's?
disillusionist
holy gorilla! i think QBasic Gorillas is the first graphics game i have memory of playing as a child. i remember attempting to read the code as a kid and being wildly confused by it. thanks for the brief trip down memory lane.
jsmo
Amazing, better than when I was a kid
BrunkenClaas
Gorillas was the first game I "learned" programming on as a kid. Fun times going through the source code without understanding anything and inferring it by my self. Well, sort of. :)
fragmede
There's a different input type for numbers, which power and angle are going to be, vs full text input.
rjh29
"practice techniques for AI-assisted development"

I guess people don't like to admit that AI is doing 95% of their job so they pretend they are "practicing techniques" or "experimenting with new models", or "heavily planning the spec"

Writing what you want in English and having the AI spit it out does not take any skill anymore, it's not 2022.

bhu1st
I was at awe when I ran MARIO.BAS on QBasic back in 1998. Probably I got the code from a QB forum. It kept me glued to screen for weeks.
ggoforth
This took me back. I used to build little text based choose your own adventure games in QBasic. Very fun (I won my first game!)