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Show HN: made a game you can play safely at work

williame.github.com

49 pointswillvarfar28 comments

I'd also offer up schemaverse https://schemaverse.com/

That could actually be used to improve your SQL knowledge!

Of course, we Emacs users have always had that sort of thing. That's why Agile folks at Lean startups tend to favor Vim these days. True story.

When I first used Emacs, unsure what it was for, I spent all my time playing games. Took me ages to realise it was a text editor.

There's a text editor in there? I've always thought it was a great operating system but it's annoying to fire up vim every time I need to throw together a few lines of text.

Well, this part might certainly attract attention.

http://i.imgur.com/l9KHT.jpg

Partially, because I'm on a mac.

Does Windows Eclipse then show letters like that?

I really liked it. I understand the point is not to actually play this game at work (what if you use a Linux distribution or Mac OS?), but to have some fun playing it :)

Just to add some background (I'm not the author!) this game was made for Ludum Dare 23, an awesome 48 hour game development contest that takes place 3 times a year. There were over 1000 entries this time :-) Learn more at http://ludumdare.com/ (I don't represent LD or anything but am just an avid participant.)

Link to your entry?

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=rate...

I didn't come up with an idea till the last few hours, sadly, so it's super simple and super rough :-) (And has music.. so not one for the workplace!)

While I do enjoy the odd game from time to time, I do have a penchant for using IRC at work. This game reminded me of an old irssi theme I used to use: http://irssi.org/themefiles/c0ders.png

... what do you mean I can't take the hedgehog?

That music is super annoying and there's apparent way to turn it off (without playing the SFW version)

Does the tracker not appear bottom right? Which browser and OS?

It does, I just didn't see it since it's a similar colour to the background and tucked away right in the corner.

most interactive fiction clients run in a terminal and already look like work, no?

This is really cool, thanks for sharing. I will have to try to get ye flask.

The illustrated version is much prettier - switch between them with ctrl-b

Not only is it prettier, but it is also more functional, helping you navigate the world.

I think this is the first time I've seen a text adventure illustrated like this (although perhaps it is not the first), and to me it makes the game more noteworthy than the 'boss mode' which I've seen many games have.

While it isn't a game, the boss mode reminded me of Facebook in a spreadsheet: http://hardlywork.in/

Glad you liked it! Yes the spatial thing in the illustrated version is deliberate. It is possibly unique - we certainly haven't seen it before; but then, we haven't played text adventures since we had 286s.

(Never played Myst neither; didn't have CDROM drives either...)

I started out in boss mode, making it 90% of the way diligently plotting the locations I had been to as nodes on a graph, before realizing I could switch mid-game to the illustrated mode.

What really slowed me down was getting to the right page in the Moby Dick Novel. The note in WingDings, when transliterated correctly, reads: "The secret is in Moby Dick on page 102". However, whenever I entered 102 after being asked "Which page?" when trying to read Moby Dick, I was told "Trust me, that isn't the page you're looking for!"

This left me very confused thinking I had missed something (though in retrospect that seems silly considering the note couldn't have been more straightforward). Eventually, I gave in and looked at the source code to discover that the number being sought was 120.

thanks for the bug report, it got fixed :)

an ahem miscommunication between coder and artist...

Neat! Had fun trying it out.

Now if you could choose for a Windows 7 skin, or even multiple editors...

Fork it on github!

Also, fun to try and make it indent and look like code so it even better at the bosses squint test..

Wanted to add a classic "boss" hotkey too - a dialog saying "compiling" pops up and when dismissed its one of these new html5 code editors instead... but ran out of time

I wonder how hard would it be to do it "the other way round", i.e. embed it into eclipse...

Make that OSX and Linux aswell. Screenshots aren't that hard to come by ;)

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