[HN Gopher] Show HN: Video Game in a Font
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Show HN: Video Game in a Font
Author : ghub-mmulet
Score : 578 points
Date : 2021-03-17 18:29 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coderelay.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coderelay.io)
| MattRix wrote:
| Great project! I love the idea of extending Blender to use it as
| a custom game engine.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| So do I! It saved me a lot of work. I started making it as a
| web-based react component, and I got to the part where I was
| doing custom bezier curves and keyframe based animation, and I
| was like "ah, I'm reinventing the wheel here!" So I switched.
| The only (possible) downside is that the addon has to be GPL3.
| I always intended on licensing the engine as GPL3, so it wasn't
| a problem for me.
| colinchartier wrote:
| This is really cool, I love these little tech experiments that
| keep the "hacker" in "hacker news" :)
| anthk wrote:
| Uh, that code looks a lot like PostScript.
|
| Call me crazy, but you would write a Z-Machine on that.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| I believe it's a derivative of PostScript (mostly as subset),
| and as far as I know, it's not Turing complete.
| anthk wrote:
| That's sad :( But understandable.
| achairapart wrote:
| Can I save my game by copy/pasting what I typed?
|
| [Edit]: Yes, it seems. Very cool!
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| > you have chosen... unwisely. This is the worst one.
|
| Not only is this a brilliantly hilarious piece of tech, the
| humour in the game ain't bad either.
|
| Great job!
| barosl wrote:
| This is crazy. I can feel the immense possibility from this. I
| especially like the "feature" of this game, where you can save,
| load, and even share the game progress just by copying the plain
| text.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I feel the immense possibility of security vulnerabilities from
| this, but I assume it's just a font, so, I suppose anything
| that looks like scripting can't access any outer API.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Me too! One day I want to make a multiple game where you have
| to copy/paste text between two different fonts to solve
| puzzles!
| jonahss wrote:
| Amazing! God Tier! I love it and thanks for the articles to go
| with it!
| m463 wrote:
| Back in my day, all we had was a pixel.
|
| (seriously, very fun!)
| tribby wrote:
| this is a great abuse of GSUB tables
|
| just van rossum's rubik's cube is another recent example of font
| layout gone too far:
| https://twitter.com/justvanrossum/status/1340960087750402048...
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| That's sweet! Is it open source? I would love to take it apart
| and see what makes it tick!
| mzs wrote:
| tic-tac-toe font:
| https://twitter.com/mekkablue/status/997063440270352384
| fractallyte wrote:
| And that tweet led me down a rabbit hole, to this:
|
| https://www.darkmoondice.co.uk/collections/handmade-dice-set...
|
| Sorry, waaay off-topic, but I've never seen such incredible D&D
| dice!
| PhillyG wrote:
| Very pretty and very expensive dice! Possibly a good present
| for a Tabletop RPG fan
| [deleted]
| wheybags wrote:
| Amazing! I absolutely love projects like this, where you put a
| game in somewhere it clearly wasn't meant to be. I made a game
| you play in your file browser[0] before, and I have another idea
| planned using windows error dialogs.
|
| 0: https://wheybags.com/dungeons_and_directories/
| Lorin wrote:
| You're following someone's footsteps and don't even know it.
|
| This is years beyond the statute of limitations so I can
| finally talk about it - in my youth I broke into one of LANL's
| servers for kicks; some Lotus/IBM Domino machine, saw nothing
| of interest except for a project directory which even the admin
| didn't have access to... I didn't want to escalate privileges
| any further because it'd require permanent changes and would
| probably trip a flag - but then I found a bizarre folder.
|
| Someone coded a series of directories within Domino and made a
| maze game, maybe a Zork 'lite'. I spent a few minutes exploring
| and got bored.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Sounds like the plot to WarGames! Be glad you didn't cause
| WW3!
| wheybags wrote:
| Ha, interesting! Would you be interested in sharing more
| details? (How you got in, for exwmple)
| hoten wrote:
| Adding to the theme of games where there shouldn't be: I had a
| bit of fun adding the Chrome dino game to DevTools a couple
| years ago:
| https://twitter.com/cjamcl/status/1143725364553764864?s=20
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| A kindred spirit! Dungeons and directories is great! I've only
| played the beginning so far[Edit I've beat the game now and
| joined the secret club!], but I really laughed at the "You walk
| through the southern door, and straight into the chasm you saw
| earlier..." Picture : "you walking straight into the chasm with
| a smile on your face".
|
| I ran into the same problems you did, any variable leads to an
| exponentially large state. Other than, "scoping" as you put (or
| branch merging as I put it), the most space-efficient way I
| found to keep state was to ask the player to remember a
| passcode. So the player can keep track of the state, but I
| don't have to (ie. exponential space savings!). Even when
| entering the password, you can keep the space small (n*2 rather
| than 2^n) see [0]. Players used to retro PC games will remember
| entering passwords found in their instruction manual, so it's
| an added nostalgic appeal.
|
| Let me know when your error dialogs game is done. If you want
| to collaborate on some games, hit me up, I too love games where
| they shouldn't be.
|
| 0: https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/how/...
| SamBam wrote:
| I had a similar "variables" problem when designing a choose-
| your-own-adventure book with my kids. I wanted your character
| to be able to reach the same pages but have state -- e.g.
| have a key or not have a key. I didn't want to have to
| duplicate pages with different state (which I kind of
| remember from old CYOA books -- there's be pages with almost
| the same thing, but now slightly different because you
| entered the room with a sword or whatever).
|
| In the end, because it's a book and not a computer game, we
| could just ask the user: "If you have a key, turn to page
| 43..." and it just depends on the user being honest (or as
| honest as any reader of a CYOA book is, with nine fingers
| stuck between pages).
|
| I assume there were similar books in the past that used the
| same mechanic -- maybe the Fighting Fantasy books? I forget.
| jfengel wrote:
| Could you have used the key as a simple crypto-key? As in,
| give them the two digit number, and tell them "Turn to page
| 17+the number of the key".
|
| Or if you wanted to make them work a little harder and
| maybe teach a little math, "17 times the number mod 47".
|
| Of course they can still be dishonest, but it gives them an
| opportunity to have solved a simple puzzle. They get to the
| correct page because they "won".
| SamBam wrote:
| Yup, could do that, that's a good idea.
|
| The other thing we did, slightly simpler, was introduce a
| plethora of choices where only prior knowledge would get
| you (easily) to the page.
|
| E.g. You can land on page A a number of different ways,
| but only from one path do you find out the suspect is in
| a certain city. Then from page A you're asked if you want
| to go to B, C, D, E or F. Without the prior knowledge
| there are too many choices.
| Hextinium wrote:
| This is exactly how the game Seventh Continent works, its
| just a collection of 1000 cards and if you have a symbol
| then you sometimes draw a different card for if you have
| key items.
| wheybags wrote:
| Thanks! Just played through fontemon now (I think, the final
| battle _is_ unbeatable right? I think I tried every move
| combo). Had a bit of trouble getting it to work in system
| programs, but on your site it worked just fine (in
| libreoffice it would just repeat the intro if I changed the
| font size, and gimp would shift things up and down depending
| on the highest pixel in the frame).
|
| Overall, awesome stuff :D Ever since I read [0], I knew you
| could do some funky stuff with ligatures, but I never
| imagined you could take it this far :D
|
| 0: https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-
| everywhere...
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Maybe my in game hints were too subtle. You can beat it,
| but _spoilers_
|
| You have to keep going past the ending (GameOver) keep
| typing. You'll revive and beat the boss.
| MaXtreeM wrote:
| I beat it but at the end it said that I got the "bad
| ending". Is there really a good ending?
|
| Amazing project BTW, had a lot of fun!
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Thanks! There are 3 endings in fact. Checkout the secrets
| guide [0]
|
| 0: https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/Secr...
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Yeah it still has a lot of quirks. On libre office, you
| have to change the font size to size 2px (and zoom in) or
| so to play the game all the way through without resetting.
| Same thing happened to me in gimp, it's annoying but
| playable.
| _def wrote:
| I love it! The dialog idea is genius too.
|
| This week I stumbled upon John Robertson for the first time. He
| made an choice based Adventure game called The Dark Room, which
| (in its first iteration) was realized with YouTube Annotations,
| then performed live, and now he streams it on Twitch. It's an
| interesting combination of preparation and improvisation
| bashmelek wrote:
| I wasn't able to get it to run on Microsoft Word or Adobe Flash
| CS5, but finally got it running on paint.net, and have to say I
| am amazed!
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| I should build a list of places where it works or doesn't. Some
| places will work if you set the right options, enable the right
| ligatures. Which version of Word did you use?
| bashmelek wrote:
| I'm using Word Version 2102 Build 13801.20294, with Microsoft
| 365 Apps for Enterprise
| bogwog wrote:
| That was amazing, and I managed to get all three endings :D
|
| Now I gotta try shoving it into various programs to see if it
| works.
|
| Great job!!!
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| I wrote a an article going into the technical details here:
| https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/tree/main/markdown/HowI...
|
| I also released the code for the game engine. Available here:
| https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/tree/main/markdown/Tuto...
| bogwog wrote:
| I just looked into that code relay thing, and it sounds really
| cool. Do you have any examples of contributions or things people
| accomplished with it yet? I'm finding it hard to imagine what
| could be accomplished in just 5 minutes a day.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| For all intents and purposes, Code Relay literally just
| launched today, so I don't have any examples, yet. 5 minutes a
| day is a matter of scale.
|
| If we can get 10% of programmers to devote 5 minutes to open
| source a day, we can help a lot of people (maintainers and the
| open source community as a whole).
|
| Obviously, not everything can be broken down into 5 minute
| tasks. But, I believe there are enough things that can be
| broken down. That Code Relay is worth pursuing.
|
| Maybe, it will only work for functional programming languages
| where there is a strict way to divide code into smaller and
| smaller functions.
|
| Or maybe it will only work for crowdsourcing documentation.
| Most projects need better documentation, badly. So, this would
| be a worthwhile goal in and of itself.
|
| The approach I'm taking now is to try everything and see what
| sticks.
| exikyut wrote:
| Hmm.
|
| This seems interesting and compelling, but I think encoding
| "this specific time at this specific timezone" into the
| foundation of the system will exclude a potentially
| significant number of people that may otherwise contribute to
| its success.
|
| First of all, let's see how far away I am from PST... okay,
| 7AM PST is 1AM the next morning in AEST (in Australia).
| Imposing a globally-fixed time across the world, irrespective
| of timezone, falls on the suboptimal side of exclusive for a
| lot of people, since there are always going to be more people
| outside of any given timezone than within.
|
| Secondly, I look at 7AM a bit deer-in-headlights: I'm
| incidentally temporarily using an offset sleep schedule at
| the moment while I rectify some environmental issues, so that
| time happens to be just about the mathematically least
| optimal moment in the day for me to approach a conveyor belt
| of unexpectedness with anything resembling interest. Most
| likely I would instead demonstrate the fastest possible
| method ever seen of permanently disassembling the conveyor
| belt, then go back to sleep :)
|
| The above two points are my reasons why this approach would
| not be ideal for me. I suspect that a lot of other people
| would probably present unique anecdotes of their own with
| vaguely similar sentiment.
|
| I would recommend a call waiting-like architecture instead.
| Have a giant queue of things on the server. Offer some small
| percentage of available tasks to a given user*, then hide
| those from everyone else. When the first user picks the
| thing(s) they want**, re-mark the unselected things as
| available. Do this for everyone at once.
|
| * It will both be technically easier and socially more
| interesting for users to list their experience then get
| delivered a precomputed list of tasks, than simply go "ok
| here's _everything_". The 'everything' approach has terrible
| UX, with tasks disappearing as others "steal" them, but the
| precomputed ideology of "this list was calculated before you
| arrived" feels more like TV - the list of things the user can
| see is all there is. This architecture should age very well,
| too, allowing you to do all kinds of optimizations over time
| in terms of figuring out who visits and when and what tech
| they like and whatnot, then precalculate optimized views for
| each user before they arrive. You'd need a few hundred people
| before you'd be able to build that correctly though.
|
| ** Definitely let users pick more than one thing to add to
| their local queue. That way they can headscratch about (or
| get their brain into the zone for) complicated thing #2 while
| breezing through trivial thing #1. If someone queues a task
| they decide is actually too hard, make it feel like it's not
| at all the end of the world for the user to release the task
| back into the queue. This covers queuing up multiple things
| as well.
|
| Also, make it possible for users to see all tasks they ever
| selected, including what they didn't complete or immediately
| released without starting - the user might have fat-fingered
| their mouse (or brain) and might want to go manually complete
| (or help completing) the task outside of the website.
| (Completely +1 avoiding the rabbithole of "wait, no, I
| actually wanted that task, yank it off of whoever is doing
| it")
|
| In practice (from an architecture-design perspective) I
| reckon about 50 things and 3 or so users would probably look
| pretty similar to 1000 users and 150 things and 5000 users
| and 500 things.
|
| In closing, even with the queue approach described here, I
| see the fundamental idea as very distinctly different from
| the asynchronicity and absolutely-unbounded-complexity of
| Stack Overflow. Here are 5 things. Which can you do ** _right
| now_ ** in 15 minutes? That does not exist. It sounds
| awesome.
|
| Also, SO's success, _despite_ the unboundedness issues,
| absolutely proves that there are people out there who will
| literally spend hours and hours figuring out other people's
| problems for free. The idea of making this process
| ADHD/anxiety-friendly, unintentionally or not, is why I
| initially said this was compelling. May you scale well :P
|
| NB. Have you thought about supporting collaboration? That
| would be the next logical step for something like this - and
| it's so logical, it's unfortunately what everyone using the
| platform would likely clamor for. I recognize that it's
| extremely hard to even just collaboratively edit
| documentation etc, let alone work on solving open-ended
| problems with arbitrary tooling. Precisely figuring out and
| publishing your stance on this - eg, "nope, not interested",
| "sounds interesting, patches welcome", "sounds interesting,
| patches welcome if maintenance on offer", etc - from the
| start might be a good idea. (FWIW "patches welcome" can often
| come across as very unempathetic and ivory-towered, if you
| will, especially when it sticks around for a long time and
| gives the impression progress isn't happening. Articulation
| is hard, etc...)
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I'm in shock and awe. I knew GSUB can computationally do such
| things, but didn't know there is no defined maximum substitution
| limit even in practice and it is only limited by the table size.
| Amazing!
| chaosmachine wrote:
| Perhaps the most interesting consequence of this game design is
| that you can edit the past, changing a single decision while
| leaving your other choices in place.
|
| For example, it's possible to go back to the beginning of the
| input box and edit your character selection while keeping the
| rest of your gameplay in place.
|
| Seems like this could have a lot of potential as a puzzle game
| mechanic.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| At least on work, they already blocked at least some Egyptian
| Hieroglyphs even in the standard fonts.
| oceliker wrote:
| Somebody should do a speedrun of this game. Is copy pasting
| considered tool assist?
| stevewodil wrote:
| The copy paste exploit was banned in official speedruns by the
| committee. Macros are still allowed though and there is a lot
| of community backlash because of this being so similar to copy
| paste in practice.
| paraknight wrote:
| Is it just me or is the game unwinnable?
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| I posted a guide here 0
|
| [0] https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/Secr...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I couldn't figure out how to help missINGDINGno from that
| guide
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| After the seventh gym, when you get your gym badge, the
| meat. Look at the text. At some point you'll see a : that's
| when you enter the passcode
| schoen wrote:
| After you ybfr gb gur svany obff, lbh'er fhccbfrq gb xrrc
| glcvat naq gura lbh "jva" naq trg n uvag sbe fbzrguvat
| qvssrerag gb qb ng gur ortvaavat.
|
| (However, I haven't figured out exactly what to do after that!)
| e1ghtSpace wrote:
| I got the bad ending. But still trying to find out the place
| for abaa if thats actually what the key is.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| You have the right key. Check out the secrets guide [0] if
| you get stuck.
|
| 0: https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/Secr...
| nabakin wrote:
| ~~I've tried a bunch of different things but I can't
| figure out where to enter the code. I looked at the hint
| too but it didn't help in my case.~~
|
| Edit: Figured it out
| [deleted]
| podiki wrote:
| Wow! That's all I can muster to say. I always knew fonts and font
| rendering was tricky business....
|
| (And you are making the rounds on gaming sites [0])
|
| [0] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/fontemon-is-a-pokemon-
| parod...
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Thanks! There's a lot of room for unexplored creativity in
| fonts. Fonts are everywhere, but they are so complex so no one
| tries. And thanks again, for the link, I didn't see that!
| MadMatt13 wrote:
| Amazing project! Had fun in the web version, although I didn't
| manage to make the game font work on any of my available text
| editors on Mac. (I tried in Pages, TextEdit, Sketch, and I broke
| Sublime trying to use the font in there).
| PhillyG wrote:
| (edit, typing into the box where the pictures happen is easy
| enough, it's just typing in the bottom box that is very awkward
| because of constantly scrolling back up to see tiny changes.)
| Sadly this is very difficult to play on mobile.
| PhillyG wrote:
| Loving some of the puns: Helvetikhan lol
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Hello everyone! A lot of people are getting stuck, so I wrote a
| guide [0] to the game's secrets. I saw that this got posted to
| lobste.rs, can someone post this link there, too, I don't have an
| invite to that site.
|
| 0: https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/Secr...
| chaoticmass wrote:
| Best quote from the author's article explaining how it was done
| (even though by his own admission he didn't follow his own advice
| in the case):
|
| "If you want to make a game, make a game. If you want to make a
| game engine, make a game engine. But never, ever, make a game
| engine to make your game!"
|
| I spent a good five+ years working on my own game engine to make
| my own games with it. Never finished a single game, or the
| engine-- but it was a fun learning experience so there's that.
| Bekwnn wrote:
| It's a much better quote than the annoyingly common, "Don't
| write a game engine!"
|
| If you work in games or want to work in games, writing a game
| engine is a very valuable experience. Probably the best thing
| you can work on for personal growth.
|
| That said, I think you get substantially more value out of the
| experience if you've already gotten your feet wet making games
| with a commercial engine.
| kragen wrote:
| Well, one day last week I wrote this game
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/invaders without a game
| engine. Then I decided that it would be a lot better _with_ a
| game engine, so I wrote a game engine for it
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qj2d.js and rewrote the
| game over the next couple of days with the engine
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qvaders. Then during the
| rest of the week I used the engine to write
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qabbits and
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/offscreen + but both of
| which were a lot easier to write with the engine than they
| would have been without it, and for which I had to improve
| the engine, which also improved the Invaders game.
|
| Now obviously QJ2D is not going to replace Godot or even
| LOVE2D or TIC-80. It's a couple of days' worth of work, less
| than 200 lines of code; anyone could have done it. And nobody
| else is going to use it unless they have Greek letters on
| their keyboard. But not only did I learn a lot, it's also a
| substantial improvement for this kind of thing over the raw
| browser. I think I'll probably rewrite it differently for the
| next project, though...
|
| I don't want to "work in games", but of course I enjoy
| writing games. I mean that's all computers are good for,
| really!
|
| ______
|
| + not really games
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| I have a question regarding how you render "gray" pixels. You
| said that you use rectangles, because "dithered" pattern had low
| performance. But the rectangles cause "scanlines", which I
| presume are because of imprecise mapping to physical pixels.
|
| Have you tried other shapes? Dividing the square by the diagonal
| should not have this problem, and you're even drawing a simpler
| shape (triangle vs rectangle).
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| I have tried other shapes at the pixel level, but not at the
| sprite level. Example: I draw from the top left pixel, draw the
| whole row of pixels (use the run length encoding), Then I draw
| the next row and so on. I haven't tried drawing the top left
| pixel and then drawing the to the bottom right corner, then
| moving up/down a diagonal row. You're right that might make it
| look a lot better, I will have to try it later. I stopped after
| I got it "good enough", because I wanted to finish the game.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| I was specifically referring to the "sub-pixel" level:
| https://github.com/mmulet/code-
| relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Oh yeah. In that case, I did try that, but for whatever
| reason it didn't perform well or I wasn't happy with the
| look. (It was probably performance). You can play around
| with the sprite rendering in the code. This [0] is the line
| for each individual pixel. And this[1] is where I generate
| the repeated pixel subroutines.
|
| 0: https://github.com/mmulet/font-game-
| engine/blob/e92a97ecbf8c...
|
| 1: https://github.com/mmulet/font-game-
| engine/blob/e92a97ecbf8c...
| CryZe wrote:
| They could use the CPAL and COLR tables to turn each glyph /
| frame of the game into multiple RGBA layers.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Are CPAL and COLOR supported by chrome?
| CryZe wrote:
| Chrome definitely supports them on Windows at least, I
| don't know if it supports them on other operating systems.
| Here's a test page for the various kinds of color font
| tables: https://yoksel.github.io/color-fonts-demo/
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Sweet! I might make a FontKid Color!
| skrebbel wrote:
| Absolutely awesome! I'm impressed by the level of polish, this is
| waay beyond the usual POCs you see for hacks like this.
|
| For me, the tl;dr from the technical explanation was this:
|
| > Now, everything in fontemon is baked
|
| Just reading that made me laugh out loud. It's so simple and so
| ridiculous, i love it.
|
| I recommend reading the entire blog post btw, it's very
| thoroughly explained and it assumes no knowledge of either fonts
| or gamedev.
| ghub-mmulet wrote:
| Thanks! For better or worse, I'm a perfectionist with deadlines
| (to steal django's slogan) . I tried to make everything as
| accessible as possible, because I know 12 year old me would
| want to make his own font-game. I spent a lot of time, adding
| guard rails to Blender so you can't get lost (I made it
| impossible to change the camera, to dismiss the side bar menu,
| I also made it so you never have to go into a sub-menu.
| Everything you need is available in one central location.)
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(page generated 2021-03-20 23:02 UTC)