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49 comments

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jcullen
Nice simple game, I wish longer chains gave you more points, doesn't seem to be any reason to go for them.

At some resolutions the Time/Score/Best text gets cut off. http://i.imgur.com/fbE3eCb.png

Also completing a game adds it to your browser history, a bit non-intuitive when the url isn't changing.

austinhallock
My high score is 353. The key is to connect your lines (eg making a square), which is way quicker than trying to do a long line.

Thanks for pointing out the screen resolution and browser history things.

audiodude
Oh wow, I didn't know that there was timing or scoring. Just suddenly it told me I had 61 points. It was very jarring and confusing.

Thumbs down.

corobo
I was set up for a massive yellow line and it did this. Had a minor rage moment there I've not had in years!
chrisan
> Nice simple game, I wish longer chains gave you more points, doesn't seem to be any reason to go for them.

Ya this looks like just make as many 2-dot connections as possible

pavel_lishin
Seems to hijack the back button.
jobposter1234
I notice a non-standard behavior of inserting his homepage before redirecting, and was wondering what HN thought. Is that the behavior you mean? Because the back button works fine, it just has another stop along the way.

Part of me thinks this is genius. Sure, users have to click back twice to get back to HN, but from his perspective, it exposes a lot of people to other content of his in a relatively harmless way.

TBH, I assumed I had clicked through to the game from his home page until I took the time to investigate.

Interesting use of a 302!

pavel_lishin
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. It doesn't work fine, it's hijacking the back button behavior to not take me back to where I was.

And yeah, it's pretty harmless, and a neat hack, and I'm not trapped, but it seems a little scummy to me.

minot
Yup. I wonder how people would like it if I rewrote history to send people to bing or pornhub or something when they clicked back once and made them click back twice to get back to hn...
eos_styx
I somehow remember websites that hijack the back button (probably because it one of my larges annoyances). I don't click on links to websites that do it unless I open it in a new tab. It's extremely annoying if someone wanted to see your homepage they would have clicked in the banner at the top of the page. Obviously I wanted to go back, that's why I clicked the "back" button, its not called a "homepage" button. /rant
bbcbasic
It's grey hat, and a mild example of fuck the user for profit you see all over the web. That sort of thing doesn't go down well anywhere, but especially on HN.
vhf
Is there a color-blind mode available?
Jamie452
This looks identical to "Dots", an app on the app store, but I guess there could of been versions of the game before that.

I'd be interested to know who created the original.

resu_nimda
I am tempted to call this a shameless rip-off. Dots is a popular game that has been around for some time, the gameplay is exactly the same, and looking at the github I see no attribution. I find it pretty unlikely that the creator purely coincidentally made an identical game.
Jamie452
I wonder if the gameplay in Dots was already taken from something that was open source?

If not, I agree completely - the whole "make a square to remove all of a colour" mechanic is in there too..

EC1
Connecting similar items vertically and horizontally to form combos isn't novel at all. He could have easily come up with this. Who gives a shit?
Igglyboo
The gameplay is extremely simplistic and not novel in any way, it's entirely possible this was made without knowing what Dots is.
yincrash
The behavior of removing all the dots of the same color when you make a square is definitely novel.
pavel_lishin
Nope, dots does the same thing, and more.
yincrash
I know that dots does the same thing. I'm refuting the GP who says the game implements no novel behavior (implying that dots has no novel behavior, and that it isn't ripping anything it off). The box behavior is novel and proves that it is ripping dots off since it isn't a rule that you find obvious.
ardemue
You can make "loops": link at least four squares of the same color in a loop and it will remove all the squares of that color on the board. This seems to be a quite unique feature that you find in both Dots and Zop.
pavel_lishin
Dots goes further; if you encase some other circles in Dots, they turn into "explosives"; this does not.
Raphael
It's similar to SameGame, which traces back to a Japanese game from 1985. The only difference with Dots is that you have to trace a path through the connected blocks, so you can't disappear quite as many.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SameGame

ggreer
This fails to load in Chrome due to an uncaught security error. It looks like it's trying to access window.localStorage in a weird way. Also, the clay.io link hijacks the back button, inserting their main site in the history. I think a better link would be the original, which does not have these problems and works in Chrome: http://zop.zolmeister.com/

Edit: It looks like the Chrome error has been fixed. Still, I'm not a fan of the history hijacking.

jsprogrammer
Yeah, that history revisionism is BS.
etcet
It's totally BS but also put a smile on my face. It's pretty crafty and I can imagine this technique being used for humorous effect :)
iamdave
No issues here, Chrome 41.0.2272.89 on OSX 10.10, if it helps the devs at all. I like this game!
Zolmeister0
Fixed the history issue. Though I guess I was too late, already buried.
ewillbefull
While we're on the topic of Dots, my favorite way to learn a new programming language lately has been to implement a clever "solver" for this game in the language (to maximize score). I wrote one in Go a while ago, and Rust recently.

Also in my opinion this game is more fun when you're working with a finite number of moves rather than time.

balls187
> Also in my opinion this game is more fun when you're working with a finite number of moves rather than time.

Great. Look at Two Dots, by the folks who made Dots.

andoma
Funny how moving a few colored squares requires the fan in my laptop to spin up. A right, it's HTML.
fiatjaf
Making a big line has the same value of making several small lines. Bad.
KamiCrit
Could we have the timer start on first click rather than on webpage load.