hackernews client

Tank Body Problem

119 pointsposted 11 hours ago

26 Comments

jimbooonooo

11 hours ago

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.

enjoy!

zug_zug

26 minutes ago

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.

ulrikrasmussen

2 hours ago

Really fun idea. Some immediate feedback:

* 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.

SubiculumCode

9 hours ago

Loved that game...and there is definite potential here. It seems like a player can just move right next to opponent and fire? That doesn't seem right?

jimbooonooo

8 hours ago

good catch, thank you. I will update so that you're limited to like one to two tank lengths per turn.

rikschennink

4 hours ago

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.

edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)

stevage

5 hours ago

On mobile it doesn't seem to be possible to decrease power?

lebuin

4 hours ago

It's possible but it took me a while to find the butten as well. It's to the left of the "increase power" button, with quite a low opacity.

I think it might be better to use the empty areas in the corners for the controls.

WhiteNoiz3

9 hours ago

I also grew up playing Scorched - love this twist on the old idea.

datadrivenangel

7 hours ago

How long did it take to make this with Qwen?

shoo

6 hours ago

cool, i played a fair bit of scorch

misc feedback

  - 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

one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?

isoprophlex

3 hours ago

You can just roll up to the other player and shoot them in the face?!

rossy

2 hours ago

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 biggest 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.