Show HN: MazeBattles.com – Race to solve generated mazes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MazeBattles.com – Race to solve generated mazes

mazebattles.com

63 pointsferarri48840 comments

Love the idea! Execution could be much better:

1. Don't make people watch the generation of the maze. Why on god's green earth do I need to wait a full minute to play the game? It takes less time to solve the maze.

2. Allow for random matchmaking

3. Let me hold down a directional key to move multiple steps in the same direction. Feels like a lot of button mashing without this functionality.

Hope to see this grow!

Thank you so much for the feedback!

On the other hand, carefully watching the maze generation helps while trying to solve it. SO I'd actually leave that, it's part of the game

I think it helps too much, so I vote to remove it!

Agreed with the button presses, would also like arrow key support.

I would like it if the arrow keys worked, in addition to WASD, and if holding a key down would continue to move the avatar.

That said, nice project!

Yes, WASD is great if you have a QWERTY keyword, not really if you have anything else.

Qwerty is the standard. Especially for any type of game. I don't think it's constructive to try to get developers with limited time to cater towards a minscule portion of the population who has self selected into using nonstandard layouts. Also most people in that population have the knowledge to adjust their settings to work with was.

your excluding left handed people, people with non latin keyboards... maybe not that minuscule

Qwerty is not the standard of anything except the US. In fact, qwerty is not even a standard, there are many different qwerty layouts.

Do you know that UK and US keyboards are completely different, for example they have all the punctuation characters in different places.

By the way, people don't select their keyboard layouts, they just happen to have whatever they have and I guarantee you that hardly anybody knows how to change settings or want to.

Completely different is a bit of a stretch. I'm pretty sure the WASD keys are the same in both, coincidentally those are the four keys this game uses.

And some people do select their layouts. Dvorak, Colemak etc

Yes. For reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-mua/test/kbd-...

If only keywords had a standardised set of keys that are used to express direction, something like up-down-left-right.

Thank you for the feedback :D.

HJKL or GTFO

I find GTFO to be rather awkward, requiring two hands on the keyboard.

would be almost just as nice if there was something on the screen indicating what keys to use.... :/

EDIT - nevermind - at the bottom of the screen, which was off the desktop on my initial load.

Same here! Can't play because of my AZERTY layout ...

Maze generation animation in Chromium takes multiple minutes. It was almost bearable in Firefox but still longer than it needs to be. Seeing the generator "solve" the maze and then having to wait multiple seconds while it generates other branches doesn't seem right.

I'm not sure if it was just my particular game, but I did find it very very simple. There weren't a lot of avenues to 'mess up', so to speak, and the algorithmic generation of the maze, while sorta cool to see, could stand to be sped up (if possible). Perhaps there was a way to skip it I didn't see.

Overall, though, pretty cool! :)

This was ok but as a single player the maze generated was mostly about wasting the user's time rather than make the player make significant choices; Red herrings need to be more challenging imho.

Also having to press multiple time to head in the same direction was painful.

Quit took me to localhost:3000 ;)

Appreciate the feedback :D.

Nice project, enjoyed a quick game!

Heads up, when I clicked quit, it redirected me to localhost:3000, might not be the intended behavior?

I could create a maze much more quickly on a Z8000 in the 80s. How can this be so slow? I remember I used the maximum spanning tree algorithm because I had to learn it. Not optimal for this problem but it yields nice mazes.

From a previous submission I see it's open source (under ISC license) https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com

This pretty neat. I liked the visual aspect of the maze generation but how annoyingly long it is depends on random chance. For me it was just a little too drawn out (Firefox). Anyway this is a good implementation of a cool concept. Matchmaking over socket would be cool but I have a feeling that's not what you're trying to show off here.

Good work, I'd be very curious to see the code.

Cool concept but when you see the maze being generated you get to see the path drawn between start and finish right in front of you? So it's less of a maze and more of a memory exercise to me

I clicked "single player", watched "generating maze.." screen for 10 seconds, closed the tab. Not willing to wait that much just to try something out.

Not sure what's up for me...on Chrome and ended up only being able to use W+S. A+D didn't work, so I wasn't able to try the entire game out.

The github repository is: https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu

https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com

Add a python interpreter. Let me code-solve it. haha!

What's an open source python interpreter you can add in this case?

D key doesn't work on my Pixelbook. W and S work as expected, moving up and down, but D does nothing.

Never mind, it works flawlessly. A Chrome addon was causing the problems.

What's the average completion time of a singleplayer maze?

Share it on /r/WebGames, they enjoy games like this.

These DFS-type mazes are pretty easy to solve...

click quit -> http://localhost:3000

This is great. Thank you!

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