[HN Gopher] Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: A remake of my 2004 PDA video game
My background project for the last two years has been re-
implementing my 2004 C++ shoot'em up game in TypeScript + WebGL,
and it's finally done (just in time for the 20th anniversary!)
Play the game online:
https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/darklaga.html Technical article
about the remake: https://nicollet.net/blog/darklaga/remake.html I
have tested Firefox, Chrome and Edge on desktop and mobile (no
access to a device capable of running Safari). It's amazing how
much difference 20 years makes: the hardware is so much more
powerful, the web as a deployment platform is so much easier than
side-loading onto a PDA through a serial cable or sharing .exe
files through e-mail, and my experience as a professional developer
makes almost everything so much easier... but at the same, it
didn't feel that the language, editor or debugger (TypeScript on
Visual Studio Code) were significantly better than good old Visual
C++ 6. Repository with the code of the remake:
https://github.com/VictorNicollet/Darklaga (sadly, I cannot provide
the video and audio assets themselves under any open license).
Author : victorNicollet
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-12-31 10:55 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nicollet.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (nicollet.net)
| npalli wrote:
| Congrats!. Curious if you tried to run your game in C++ of 2024.
| What kind of improvements did you see (speed, performance, etc..)
| compared to doing it in 2004.
| victorNicollet wrote:
| Sadly I could no longer build the C++ version of the game
| because of some missing proprietary dependencies, but I don't
| expect there would have been noticeable improvements: it was
| already running at 60FPS on computers from the time, even in
| PocketPC emulation mode.
| theogravity wrote:
| This is pretty fun! There's an annoying issue when playing from
| mobile safari on iOS where the canvas scrolls along with your
| finger. I think there's an HTML directive that can probably fix
| that but the name escapes me at this time.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I didn't understand how the pick-up system worked nor how to
| trigger the progress bar once it filled up. But I made it to the
| end on Normal with 3.7 million points.
|
| Nice work. Loved these sorts of games as a kid.
| Tor3 wrote:
| It works fine in Opera on an old Android tablet.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Maybe by 2045 AI will be sufficiently advanced to simply say
| "make this old game run on my new PC", and the AI will read
| through every line of code, pixel of textures, and make a
| faithful playable reproduction in seconds.
|
| If that's the case, it really doesn't matter what technologies
| you use.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Great stuff! Amazing that playing a game written in 2004 which
| follows the style of games written in 1994 feels current in 2025
| just because it runs in my web browser. But nonetheless it did
| feel modern and it was also really good fun.
| diggan wrote:
| Cool (and intense!) game :) Pretty impressive you had something
| like that running on a PDA 20 years ago, I was probably playing
| J2ME games on a Sony Ericsson at that point so don't know the
| performance of those.
|
| This constraint + your solution was pretty interesting:
|
| > Only use technologies that can be expected to still be present
| (and backwards-compatible) 20 years from now.
|
| I'd bet on that in 20 years TypeScript will no longer be
| maintained and also no longer be the most popular transpilation
| source language for JavaScript. Seems the JavaScript ecosystem
| always eventually finds a new "source" language even though
| everyone at the time is certain it won't happen with _this
| current one_.
|
| Probably still wouldn't be hard to get the game running though,
| will still be easy to install old TypeScript compiler and run it.
| butz wrote:
| Congratulations, looks great, and feels addicting. I wonder if
| keeping ship offset from touch point was intentional game design
| choice?
|
| And regarding testing on Safari, if you have access to any Linux
| distribution, you can try testing on GNOME Web, it uses WebKit,
| same rendering engine as Safari (with probably some minor
| differences).
|
| Finally, you should put this game up on itch.io, as I am sure
| some players might like to leave some monetary support.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-03 23:00 UTC)