Tank Body Problem
jimsitu.com
jimsitu.com
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
enjoy!
I think it might be better to use the empty areas in the corners for the controls.
I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.
edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)
* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.
* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.
* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.
The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.
I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.
This would have been the mid 1990s.
misc feedback
- dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
- how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
- the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
- the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed
Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.
This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you. This program does not correlate with my own experience with one-shot vibe coding, which is that I generally can't go literally 5 seconds without hitting an issue of some sort. I've spent weeks on an app for my kids and I started to measure my progress by "how long I can use it before I hit an issue". I considered it a bit of an event when I hit five minutes. It's hovering around 15 to 20 right now, but I've still got a ways to go before it is "indefinite".
that said, I strongly agree about the AI slop sentiment, the lack of thinking on the Creator's part. I am a huge type II fun person who generated a lot of personal satisfaction by struggling through software, hardware, and mechanical development throughout my career, and it is pretty disappointing to see what looks like the loss of that due to AI. I have great concern for the long-term stability and growth of our civilization to be honest. it reminds me of hg well's journey to the center of the Earth talking about the morlocks who are maintaining machines that they no longer understand how to build, or for what purpose they actually exist..
diatribe aside, I do appreciate all the feedback and I acknowledge I sent this out early, and without comprehensive testing.
I would love to play it tho and submit it to https://hnarcade.com
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
Being able to shoot the other player is a minor quibble for this kind of web minigame. It's still fun and interesting.
Feature request: no shake effect after victory.