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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Great job! Couple suggestions:

1) When roads twist around on themselves, draw a bridge or some other kind of hint to indicate the path invaders will follow (e.g. https://i.imgur.com/t3fuboT.png). In Wave 9 it wasn't clear they'd take the long way through the loop.

2) When the tab goes into the background, pause the game instead of erasing the user's entire tower layout and progress.

Also a general observation / opinion: Does anyone else feel like flexbox syntax is unintuitive? I feel like you could achieve the same thing without rotating axes, and with more consistent naming conventions.

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> Does anyone else feel like flexbox syntax is unintuitive? I feel like you could achieve the same thing without rotating axes, and with more consistent naming conventions.

I also think it is unintuitive. However, I'm pretty sure it was a conscious decision to not leave out non-left-to-right languages.

Notice that "flex-direction" depends on "dir" html attribute [1] and/or the "direction" CSS property. Hence, given the same flex definitions, the layout gets "mirrored" when you translate the page to a right-to-left language (such as arabic), which should work better for that language.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

I think the first suggestion is definitely a good idea for those who aren't as familiar with tower defence games, they're not necessarily the most intuitive of games.

Definitely think the second one is a must -- there were a handful of times where I tabbed out and lost progress towards the end of a wave.

I would say flexbox syntax is one of the least intuitive additions to CSS of late. The combination between some properties and values having `flex-` prefixed and some not is always a bit of pain when using it.

Overall though, a great game and a bit of good fun for a Sunday morning!

> for those who aren't as familiar with tower defence games

Is there some universal Tower Defense rule for how they should walk? In the TDs I've played they always take the shortest possible route.

There's usually two types of Tower Defence pathing as far as I've observed over my years (and many games of Tower Defence / Tower Wars!):

1) Large lanes to build in; mobs will take the shortest route from spawn to end point. You often end up making mazes with your buildings in these.

2) Single lanes to build around; mobs must walk the path laid out and these will often include loops where you've got opportunity to build in the centre of. You often end up building close to turns and loops to maximise opportunity for your tower to hit any given mob more than once.

Then some TDs will allow users to "block" the path -- usually in these instances a blocked path will result in mobs actively attacking the structures in the way.

There's also a variant of 1), in which you have a big open space and several waypoints that mobs will visit. The optimal strategy for these TDs is to create a maze, but one that will require the mobs to travel several times through the center of the arena where you place the strong/short distance towers. Gem TD is an example of such TD

If 2 isn't possible, a fast forward button would be a decent alternative.

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