Show HN: TapToyPia | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TapToyPia

memalign.github.io

19 pointsmemalign9 comments

My wife started playing Pokopia and told me it's the best game she's ever played. I watched her play for 10 minutes and thought that a simple demake inspired by Pokopia could be satisfying to play. TapToyPia is the result, playable in your web browser.

In TapToyPia, you are an explorer sent on a one-way mission to a new planet. Your mission: build a settlement that can serve as a new home for humanity. While you explore, you discover flora and fauna to help you.

The game mechanic is inspired by clicker games and maybe also Minesweeper though that wasn't a conscious influence.

I tried to build a game that captures the zen of Pokopia's world rehabilitation and the building-up-to-greater-complexity of clicker games (such as my favorite, Universal Paperclips).

As usual for projects aided by generative AI, I found myself building something more ambitious. The biggest example in this project is that you can zoom out from the 2D map to seamlessly transition to an interactive view of the 3D planet. Without genAI, I wouldn't have the time to figure out how to build this myself for a side project like this.

Like my projects without generative AI assistance, I found unit test coverage to be key to moving quickly and trusting that changes were safe. I made sure tests could be run both in the browser and with node at the command-line. The AI tools can run tests with node, which makes for very effective and fast iteration.

More development details here:

https://memalign.github.io/p/taptoypia.html

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Neat! That was fun and satisfying. I beat with with only discovering 2% of the map apparently.

This was a lot of fun! I beat it in just under 30 minutes but lost to the new settlers.

Thanks for sharing!

As usual for projects aided by generative AI, the user experience is lacking due to a failure of basic considerations on the part of the human prompting.

Clicking is so overloaded I found myself getting motion sickness just trying to click squares. Why? Because when I click, I do not perfectly release the button when I am moving through a grid and clicking. This causes the entire canvas to be dragged while I click each grid. Sometimes that led me to tilling a square, because the grid moved and the next click was the square I just clicked. Then I do that again and I wasted a resource.

Would be great if you had hijacked right click, or left dragging to be handled by Ctrl+LMB.

The zoom out to the pixel globe was neat. That doesn't make up for the fact that this was painfully frustrating to use. I only cleared a 5x10 area before I couldn't take it anymore.

Wood was so hard to come by I never even made it to crafting anything.

Thanks for playing!

I spent several weeks worth of nights on this project and put a lot of thought into the experience, though I exclusively played it on touch devices.

I need to test the mouse user experience.

Precision matters less in this game than it may seem. It’s ok to spam clicks because there are no resource constraints. It might mess up the layout of the build you were planning, but it will not impact completing the story. In fact, I imagined this game as a sort of clicker game where the progression and scaling up matters more than precision.

>I spent several weeks worth of nights on this project and put a lot of thought into the experience, though I exclusively played it on touch devices.

I really didn't play, I suffered. I got motion sickness.

The core of your game is clicking, and the default action is unusable on the main platform from which HN is browsed. I would contend that since you did not even once open it in a desktop web browser, you cannot claim to have thought about the experience.

"Works on my machine" is a failure response, and is typically unacceptable. Part of software engineering (really the core of all engineering) has long been to think deeply about where and how an output will be used and by whom.

In the 80s-90s that was making sure your software was portable to different processor architectures you might not use. Sparc, PowerPC, ARM, Itanium, x86, z80, 68K. Devs would have multiple PCs at their workstation for testing different machines. In the late 90s-early 00s, it was all about making sure your site worked across Opera, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Amaya, Konqueror and Safari. Then once again with apps across phone operating systems.

Especially in the responsive web era since 2012, it has been vitally important to make sure your site works with both desktop and mobile web browsers.

You can make a farm and then you get wood a lot.

The mechanics are a little painful though, I've got horrible cramp from playing on a trackpad, and the fact that scrolling around on the trackpad zooms instead of moving the viewport eventually became too frustrating.

Thanks for checking this out! I need to fix the mouse/trackpad user experience.

If anyone wants to see more of the game in the meantime, this link exposes the debug menu where you can advance pretty quickly by cheating to get more resources:

https://memalign.github.io/m/taptoypia/index.html?debug=1

I love the zooming 2d to 3d feature. I do not fully understand the goal and rewarding system yet - maybe this aspect can be better indicated somewhere in the GUI

Nevermind, the more I play, the more I actually understand it :)

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