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Comment by iceberger2001 | Hacker News Reader

iceberger2001

Hey HN, I built STARFLING, a simple hyper-casual space game you can play right in your browser.

You orbit a star with a ball. Tap anywhere to release and sling it through space. Catch the next star to lock in orbit and keep going. Miss and it's game over.

The whole thing is just one HTML file with vanilla JS, Canvas, and Web Audio. No frameworks, no build step. Loads in under 2 seconds on phone or desktop.

There's a combo system if you release quick, a skip bonus for jumping over stars, and it gets harder the longer you last. When you die you get a cool trail art picture of your whole run that you can share.

Audio is all generated on the fly and it has haptics too. Pretty satisfying once you get the timing down.

Play it here: https://playstarfling.com?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=showhn

Would love your thoughts on the feel, difficulty, and whether the trail art is fun or not.

Thanks!

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I really like it. Here is my 2 cent:

- the gravity is weird in my opinion. There is basically a gravity going down the screen. I would have expected there to be some "pull" towards the planets. I get why though, you try to prevent mega-long straight shots upward. Perhaps experiment with some drag, where the ball slows down over time. Or perhaps have the walls be gravity points, pulling the ball towards them.

- i would add a long- press to restart immediately, so restarting is faster.

Maybe add blackholes to prevent cheesing too hard. I found the downwards gravity unexpected too.

Weird and unexpected doesn't mean bad for a game.

The gravity mechanic works in the game.

If anything the surprise makes people play a few times to understand it which is a really important thing for onboarding gamers (not user sin general of course).

I liked this game a lot!

One thing I noticed is that I found the game to be pretty hard if I just tried to tap based on where I thought was a good "launching point". But then I realized I could use the dashed lines in the orbit circle as basically "arrows" pointing to where the ship would go if launched at that point in the orbit, and I instantly got much better if my strategy was (a) pick the dash in the orbit circle that points to the next planet, and (b) just then only focus on tapping when the ship hits that dash in the circle.

I think a "hard mode" would be to get rid of the dashes in the orbit circle and just make it a solid line.

This comment instantly made me 10x better player

I did something similar, tried to click when the ship was at an 90 degree angle to the line connecting the planet to the next.

I still can't figure it out. It just seems to randomly curve away from where I want it to go. It gets boring to lose every time, so I just gave up. Could use a difficulty setting.

I cannot express to you how much fun this simple little game is! I'm really enjoying it!

If I got to work on this game for 90 seconds, I would move the "bonus text" down to the bottom. It gets in the way of tviewing the literal most important thing SO MUCH!!!

Really like this game. A few bits of feedback:

- Can you add a keyboard key that also launches, rather than always have to be a click - Can you make it so it restarts without having to click the play again button? Maybe use the same keyboard button as above? - When fail, why does the ship fall to the floor? Maybe a gentle curve away would be more "realistic" - Why is the bg squares? Maybe it should be more of a subtle space bg

Thanks for making it!

+1 on keyboard to launch and restart!!

I noticed that gameplay speed depends on the window size. I'm assuming that larger canvas takes longer to render. It seems too fast at small window sizes and maybe too slow at 4K, not sure what is the intended speed.

This is a really nice little game. My feedback is that on mobile at least, the text that pops up often blocks vision of the ball, which is quite frustrating. I would move it down a bit

The "better than X%" of players seems way off. If I get zero, somehow still better than 32% of players? and 25 planets is >99% of players?

The dotted line starting wide and slowly shrinking to the real orbit is a great touch. It makes the quick/fast/blazing/insane moves harder and more satisfying when they work. The angles encourage skips frequently enough to feel good.

I think the only improvement I would make to the look is perhaps the background. I still think the cyberwave aesthetic works and isn't played out quite yet, especially on mobile. But maybe instead of a boring flat grid, some very faint parallax points moving across the background might work better to give the game a bit more depth.

The pause->restart flow is way faster than clicking the restart button at the bottom of the screen. If your intent is to capture the end of every game to advertise the upcoming mobile game, then you might want to capture that method of restart as well.

Great game, thanks!

> and 25 planets is >99% of players?

That doesn't sound so strange because the presumably the majority of visitors are going to try once or twice and then carry on, and it's actually pretty difficult to get even 25 points in this game.

It’s great but the animations when catching a new orbit (sparks and combo announcements) is making hard to follow the ball, I realized I missed many shots due to this after some games.

Nice work! Really low frame rate on Firefox on Android (pixel 10), might be something worth checking.

On a Pixel 10 Pro with Firefox it's not too bad but it's definitely a touch less responsive than on Chrome also on that same phone

Thanks for making this, fun game, but the contrast is too low for my old eyes. I can't see the orbit most of the time. Maybe add options to make the orbit more visible?

Lush, perfect to take my mind off existing for a few minutes. Always a strong sign of a winning concept. Kudos :)

Oh, and it’s completely different on mobile. Game is slower and much easier to score well.

My feedback above was on desktop.

Love this. Hit me up if you want a chill soundtrack for it, I can make something for free.

This game is so fun, great job.

Love it! Thanks for sharing!

There was an old flash game called, I think, curveball that was kind of like 3d perspective, 2d plane Pong. I could play that gave for so, so long and not get tired of it. This might end up being a replacement.

EDIT: Uh oh. I found it again. I'm screwed.

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