[HN Gopher] Cirkoban: Sokoban meets cellular automata written in...
___________________________________________________________________
Cirkoban: Sokoban meets cellular automata written in Scheme
Author : davexunit
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-06-03 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spritely.institute)
(TXT) w3m dump (spritely.institute)
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I got thoroughly sucked into this game after the jam, then showed
| it to a couple friends while over at their house. Nice way to
| spend an evening :)
| jsnell wrote:
| Congrats on finishing and releasing the game. Some feedback:
|
| - The game crashed during load on Chrome on Android.
|
| - The undo feels really slow. Is is intentional for some kind for
| artistic effect, or is it related to the tech stack? It feels
| like a full second, with a really distracting screen fade effect.
| From the article it seems that the rollback support is one of
| your core features, but an instant undo is table stakes for this
| kind of puzzle game. It's not something you should be showcasing
| by making it slow and have graphical effects.
|
| - Games like this should have a restart level button, not just
| undo. That'd be the case even if the undo was faster.
|
| - I think the genre convention is that invalid moves don't
| advance time, but there's a "wait" input. Having to run at walls
| to get the timing parity right feels just wrong.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Crashes on Chrome on MacOS too. And this has WASM GC and
| Tailcall support.
| davexunit wrote:
| Any error message? Chrome version? I'm surprised none of the
| players during the jam rating period ran into this.
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| I'm at the smartphone right now, but on the screen I've
| just seen the x( smilie - on M1, btw. I'll check the dev
| console and version tomorrow (it's 23:00). But I did play
| with WASM (GC) myself, so it could be that some
| experimental flag that I've set triggered the error.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I can actually reproduce this right now in Chromium on
| arm64 Linux. Chromium 125.0.6422.76, no error messages in
| the developer console when this happens. Still, interesting
| that (I think?) all these reports have been from Chrome/ium
| on arm64 platforms... I wonder if we're triggering some
| architecture-specific browser bug?
| davexunit wrote:
| - Hmm, first I've heard of it crashing. I tested on Chrome and
| Firefox while developing. Sorry about that! Any error message
| that you can see?
|
| - Curious, this sounds like local machine slowness. Undo is
| basically instantaneous under the hood, and there's a quarter-
| second screen wipe effect for fun, but you can mash "undo" as
| much as you want and it interrupts the animation so you don't
| have to wait. On my laptop and Android phone I feel no slow
| down nor have I heard of this from anyone else who played the
| game.
|
| - Fair point. On a keyboard you can just hold the Z key and it
| zips back pretty quick. Less fun on mobile since I didn't
| implement repeat on the touch controls.
|
| - That may be a convention but it was a deliberate choice not
| to implement it. I was inspired by Void Stranger which does not
| have an idle. At least in the levels I designed, I tuned the
| timing so if you do the optimal solution there's no time spent
| walking into walls.
|
| Thanks for the feedback!
| jsnell wrote:
| No message, just a gray background with a pixelated frowny
| face. Not sure if it's coming from your game or from itch.io.
| Chrome 125.0.6422.147. (I don't have the phone set up for
| developer tools, so can't tell if there's something in the
| developer console. Sorry.)
|
| Holding Z down to roll back everything is near instant, so I
| think it's purely a presentation thing then. Both the screen
| wipe and the sound effect are very obtrusive. I spot-checked
| a random puzzle game (Monster's Expedition) with higher than
| average production values for the genre, and the undo is
| instant with no transitions or animations, and a sound effect
| so subtle it took me a while to realize it was even there.
| paroneayea wrote:
| Well I'm "glad" it's a presentational issue rather than a
| performance issue then. Baba is You takes a similar
| approach in that holding undo takes a while, so we're not
| completely alone. :)
|
| In our case the choice to have undo be very visible, well
| it may be a bit overdone, but I think it's partly because
| in some ways this is a showcase of Goblins' time travel
| feature, and so we wanted to add some juice to the effect
| to highlight it. It would definitely be better if we had a
| "level reset" feature, which would make us comparable to
| Baba is You: holding undo takes a bit if you did a lot of
| things, but you can also just start over.
|
| The other thing I really wished we had added was a level
| select menu but... all this stuff was accomplished in a
| week and two days; game jams are intense, there's always
| things you wish you had gotten done. Now that the jam is
| over, it might be worth adding some quality of life
| improvements, but of course now that the jam is over we are
| back to working on the core tech again instead of the demo.
| :)
|
| But also, hi jsnell, nice to see you again! Glad you got to
| play the game, and hope you had fun. :)
| paroneayea wrote:
| Also, I just tried opening with Chrome 125.0.6368.2 on
| Linux, and things ran fine... I wonder if this is a
| Chrome on Mac OS issue specifically. Would love to know
| what caused that, let us know if there's anything in the
| developer console. You can file issues here:
| https://gitlab.com/spritely/cirkoban
| mcguire wrote:
| I recently decided to try to actually learn to use Scheme,
| really, in at least a practical sense. I had previously never
| gotten too far into it.
|
| I ran into the System Crafter's Spring Lisp Game Jam livestream
| (https://www.youtube.com/live/n-4kZhvkK4M?si=YPCSElylTLeSDcCN)
| and I'm rather impressed with Hoot, the Scheme -> WASM compiler.
| Still an early release, but it seemed stable and reasonably
| featuriferous.
|
| On a different note, I also ran across WASM compiles of z3 and
| minizinc recently. (File under "It's Not How Well The Elephant
| Dances, But That It Dances At All," I guess.)
| sitkack wrote:
| Don't leave us hanging, how well does wasm z3 and minizinc
| work? How many times slower are they?
| constantlm wrote:
| Supaplex vibes also
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-03 23:00 UTC)