I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
Original Scorched Earth (which I also loved!) let you choose whether movement was allowed in the ruleset, and it was quite slow so you'd be up against the turn timer. Similar for Worms. I think it's a viable part of the game if nerfed or made riskier (mines?)
I think the moon gravity is a bit much. It would be cool to use the gravity of the moon in your attack, but I think that would require it moving slower and perhaps some prediction logic where you can see where the moon will be if you fire now?
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
yeah, a friend of mine and I were kind of laughing about how difficult the moon made things. on the opposite side of the pendulum, without the moon gravity, it would only take two or three terms to defeat the opponent, but I agree, toning down the moon a bit and coming up with future artillery path prediction might be more fun
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
The shot timeout is the biggest issue for me. There's nothing worse than lining up the most crazy indirect shot and have it just disappear as it comes in.
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
I love the idea, but the moon has too much gravity and moves too fast, and the missiles too slow, which makes it impossible to aim. There's a fine line between complexity and chaos and this is on the wrong side of it right now.
- dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
- how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
- the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
- the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed
I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.
Selfishly, I think my greatest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
Took the words out of my mouth. The trajectory indicator isn't predictive either, making it pointless. A single playtest would have made this obvious and maybe even a single prompt would have solved it.
I think it was on the Astra launch site, they had a car racing game authored by codex. I played it once and was quite impressed. I played it a second time and realised that I could just hold down the accelerator, not bother steering at all, and beat all the AI opponents every time. The game was pretty but pointless.
I see so many posts on programming reddits now asking for "brutal feedback" (which I see so often I suspect it must also be a 2nd-tier Claudism that only comes up in this context) with a commit history an hour and a half old, and my "brutal feedback" I want to give is have you actually tried using your code?
I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.
This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you.
this was a known feature actually, to allow me to rapidly gain XP and unlock additional weapons, although I agree it shouldn't have made it to the " production" version, whose phrase I am using very loosely here.
that said, I strongly agree about the AI slop sentiment, the lack of thinking on the Creator's part. I am a huge type II fun person who generated a lot of personal satisfaction by struggling through software, hardware, and mechanical development throughout my career, and it is pretty disappointing to see what looks like the loss of that due to AI. I have great concern for the long-term stability and growth of our civilization to be honest. it reminds me of hg well's journey to the center of the Earth talking about the morlocks who are maintaining machines that they no longer understand how to build, or for what purpose they actually exist..
diatribe aside, I do appreciate all the feedback and I acknowledge I sent this out early, and without comprehensive testing.
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
It's obvious pretty quick that you use the prediction line to inform what to do on the next pass, and you have to time it. It would be too easy if it was just "wait for the projection to point at the other player and hit fire".
Being able to shoot the other player is a minor quibble for this kind of web minigame. It's still fun and interesting.
this guy gets it! as I mentioned in another post, yes the trajectory line is instantaneous, and you need to rely on your internal electrical meat estimator to predict how that trajectory evolves.
54 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadin the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
enjoy!
I think it might be better to use the empty areas in the corners for the controls.
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.
This would have been the mid 1990s.
misc feedback
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Tanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8yvSl9j9yU
Feature request: no shake effect after victory.
Selfishly, I think my greatest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.
This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you.
that said, I strongly agree about the AI slop sentiment, the lack of thinking on the Creator's part. I am a huge type II fun person who generated a lot of personal satisfaction by struggling through software, hardware, and mechanical development throughout my career, and it is pretty disappointing to see what looks like the loss of that due to AI. I have great concern for the long-term stability and growth of our civilization to be honest. it reminds me of hg well's journey to the center of the Earth talking about the morlocks who are maintaining machines that they no longer understand how to build, or for what purpose they actually exist..
diatribe aside, I do appreciate all the feedback and I acknowledge I sent this out early, and without comprehensive testing.
I would love to play it tho and submit it to https://hnarcade.com
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
Being able to shoot the other player is a minor quibble for this kind of web minigame. It's still fun and interesting.