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Comment by mattmoss | Hacker News Reader

Cool… the fog color matching the gate color often makes it difficult to discern which section is the opening.

As did I. It's not fun when I don't even know what I did wrong. Sometimes even after I fail I can't really tell how I was supposed to know what the proper path was because it all looks so similar.

Totally agree, I couldn't tell where the holes were. Made it very, very frustrating. Instead of making it a skills game, it made it more of a luck game. I'd rather play slots than this.

I guess to make it more interesting, there had to be some patterns. I.e. the gates aren't completely random.

This. The game would at least be reasonably fun with wireframe options, or some way to kill the fog effects. But certain combos, like green with green fog, just become a big haze of green. Also, an option to show you where your hitbox is in relation to the gate alignment would do wonders. When you're going down stairs, trying to figure out where the heck you are, and then hit a complete reset, this game loses its fun. Also, holding shift results in what looks like me selecting the entire <canvas> window, as everything gains a blue highlight in Firefox 23.0.1

I came to the comments to say exactly that.

It's supposed to be challenging. You will learn to discern.

I agree—this game is really frustrating because it's difficult to see the barriers. Challenging games are often frustrating, don't disagree with you there - but this particular flavor of challenge isn't really fun. I'd prefer "it came too fast" or "it was moving and hit me" to "the wall looked just like the opening." I definitely got better after my first few plays at discerning the walls from the openings, but it took me a few tries to even realize that that's why I was dying. I imagine many people will give up before I did.

Just chiming in to agree with this. Games that are difficult because of their UI usually aren't very fun.

Also, it seems important for the game to quantize input. I.e. right now you can occupy a continuous height anywhere from "0.0 to 1.0", but it would be much more fun if the game would automatically snap your height to either "bottom, middle, or top." It's quite frustrating to lose because you just barely clip a gate.

I didn't realise it was a continuous range of heights, 3 set heights would definitely be better as the holes are at set heights. Fantastic game and music, though. Really demonstrates how capable WebGL actually is.

Even worse. I found myself in situations where I cleared the middle section of one gate and, without any movement on my part at all, hit the next gate even though it also had an open middle section. This happened to me twice with a gate at the top of a ramp.

I'm confident that I didn't move the ship because I used the arrow keys and positioned myself well before reaching the first gate. I was close enough to missing the opening that I would understand hitting the first gate, but hitting the second gate is uniquely frustrating.

Try using arrow keys, it does exactly that.

No, I won't, because when frustration_value > fun_value I stop playing immediately and never come back.

Failing because I wasn't quick enough can be fun. Failing because your overly-clever graphics engine requires me to distinguish "fog" from "glass in fog" in 0.5 seconds is never fun.

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