Canal Boat Simulator | Hacker News Reader

Canal Boat Simulator

jacobfilipp.com

132 pointssurprisetalk38 comments

Cute. Shame the basic physics are wrong; a narrowboat is tiller driven (you push the controls left to go right) and rotates about its center, whereas this is closer to the front. Also reversing flips the dynamics, is much less directionally stable than forward motion, and introduces the Fun of both prop walk and potential cavitation.

Plus a real canal boat simulator would put a weed hatch incident well before a tidal wave.

Can’t believe I’ve been living on one of these things since before we discovered we were in the mirror timeline.

There is a more simulatory simulator linked at the bottom of the post, narrowboat simulator by Michael Donning.

Yeah, my complaint is more that ChatGPT hasn’t been trained enough on my YouTube channel.

Also no one yelling at you for going too fast next to docked boats :)

Moored, technically… docked requires a dock.

Got to have the effect of squat slowing you down any time you try to move too fast on a canal too, and then that remarkable difference when you get out onto a decent sized river.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to want to load for me so I can't see whether it's simulated the fun of single-handing locks...

(Bought mine because I was living in the mirror timeline, now on sale so I can stop acting like I'm retired and do some actual work rather than pootling about at 2mph all day...)

Still pootling, me, though hopefully next year I finally reach the end of the last remaining miles of unvisited canal and river.

Shame about the timeline.

Speaking of: Who played Ports of Call in the 80s? I recently learned that the game is still maintained with a release in 2024.

https://portsofcall.de

I did. Oh the memories!!

Reading this I totally feel the hacker vibes that carried me through my teens. Just sitting down and building something cool for the fun of it. Nice work! I once did something similar in C to create a 2d isometric training campus where I could teach others C on a whiteboard. I made the walls in Paint, just like you mentioned! One of the most fun things I ever made.

Excellent! I lived on a boat like this for many years and never knew about the risk of sudden tsunamis.

I like that you can go under the trees.

Thank you for adding a finish point, I was getting anxious and started to hope that the tsunami would get me so that the game is over. Great idea and great implementation.

In case people are confused (like I was) when starting the game,

use arrow keys

Thank you!

I was desperately trying to click Start thinking it's a button. Thanks

Slightly reminiscent of the canal boat chase in Wallace and Gromit's 'Vengeance most fowl' (which is a great parody of Hollywood action sequences).

Enjoyed taking a canal boat and treating it like a Bangkok Longtail speedboat !

This brings me back to hacking quirky GameMaker games together after school as a kid, just for the joy and creativity of it. I miss how the internet used to feel back then. Thanks for the reminder :)

That's surprisingly controllable for what looks like about twice the width of the boat.

I basically never lifted the finger of the throttle and still came in at about 60% health on my first try.

I played it yesterday, and IMHO, the visual appearance looks a bit inconsistent. On the one hand, you have the satellite, high-detail top-down landscape view and on the other hand, you have the very basic, geometric, small and uni-color shape of the boat. I would try to reduce the level of detail of the environment, so the overall scene gets easier to observe /understand visually. Can you zoom in on the boat a bit?

It just screams as the start of joke but end up finding it's a quick quirky game you wanna share with ppl. Great job!

Glorious! I was also temporarily trapped by the intuitive “Start Game” UI. After that, it made me think of a weird version of Spy Hunter on a canal. I had to experiment to see if I could ride the tsunami all the way to the end.

Port it to the ZX Spectrum and it would be a classic CSSCGC entry.

This is fun and addictive! Feature request: Bonus points if you know where you are (geo-guesser-like)

Hey, I really like it. I lived on a canal boat for a few years, the map looks familiar. Except the tsunamis which I couldn't get past. Maybe some sharks and crocodiles would add some adventure. Sent this to my family who are living on a boat now.

Thanks! This is the Kennet and Avon canal, right as it turns into Bath

This is a surprisingly fun little game. Reminds me of the stuff I made in Flash back in the day.

I don't even want to know how long it took to make the tree layer above the boat.

this is completely amazing. well done Jacob

I'm not a fan of touchy games like this. Did anyone try Irritating Stick? This reminds me of that.

Kids and I had a blast with it!

Heh, very fun :) I've not come across any locks yet thankfully, in it!

Doesn't work using Chrome on Windows. Start button does nothing.

That isnt a button. It is an instruction, a sign on the map. Push forwards.

I made the same mistake.. Its perfect user feedback ;)

Aaah, I was ready to just close it and murmur that they didn't even test if the thing can be started on Ubuntu. That "start" totally looks like a button. And after reading your comment I tried WASD first, which doesn't work.

Is it trying to be cute through subversion? Like that one puzzle in Braid that nobody could figure out. If not, then it's just bad design; press "Start" is as old as game themselves, no design pattern more deeply ingrained in players minds.

getting killed by a canal tsunami is peak gaming !

Nice real life experience :)

Massive canal boat fan here. Massive. You've done great work.

If I may suggest a game dynamic: having a busy body yell at you "no public moorings!" when you pass a private mooring.

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