Hacker News Reader

Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

19:50 Put codex and claude (thinking high) to work in parallel to see who could come up with the better physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.

20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.

20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).

https://coezbek.github.io/orbital-tap/

View on HN

It's still pretty far physically accurate because there is infinite acceleration the moment a ship reaches the target orbit.

True. Hard to square it being a game, fast-spaced and accurate.

That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.

Yeah, I want to enter weird orbits around the planets.

Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.

Unfortunately it doesn't let you skip planets.

I tried it, but it doesn't make for good gameplay, it just gets too easy. Could maybe subtract points, but that also feels strange. I updated gravity to do things, but orbiting isn't permitted.

i love the gravity. but sometimes the orbital speed is to fast to be able to make the next jump. that's frustrating.

a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment

the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.

If the physics were accurate enough, I don't think it'd be easy - you'd get constant elliptical orbits in most cases, right? making the timing much harder going forward

I like this version of the game more, keep at it!

Nice! For my taste you could remove the TAP OR PRESS bar after some time, maybe after score 3 or so including restarts.

This version is better than OP’s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com