Play Breakout while you pull to refresh | Hacker News Reader

Play Breakout while you pull to refresh

github.com

195 pointsjulee0433 comments

When working on an early version of http://recent.io/, I added a physics animation of bouncing/falling balls during the network request to the server. When the network request completed, gravity pulled all the balls off the bottom of the screen.

Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the physics animation has gone away. :)

I can't tell if this is madness or genius.

Whats the use case? If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX? If it doesn't, then you won't get a good game in?

> If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX?

If that's an open question, then this is the one thing that makes the answer a resounding YES.

In other words, it is a both/and :).

I'm the author. The control has a bool property, `forceEnd`. If this is set to false (the default value) the game doesn't end until the user lifts the finger. But the label tells the user that the loading has finished. If the property is set to true the game ends when the loading finishes.

Coming soon. "Watch an ad while you pull to refresh"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tOvOMbizBs

To be fair, if that's used instead of a traditional ad banner, then I think it's a great step forward. It's intrusive as it doesn't take up your operational screen real estate, however it is still extremely visible. And it's impact is when you're bored waiting for a sync which means the ad is more likely to get read than a traditional banner would.

Sadly though, I could see this being used in addition to traditional banners. :(

It does say "Let's kill the banner" at the end, so that seems to be the intent, but you're probably right…

The first thing a client will ask is "Can we have a minimum delay".

And they pitch it like it's a great thing...

Coming sooner now that you posted this comment on HN.

Google has a patent on this: http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632

It's Bandai Namco that has the actual patent, but what's really interesting is the fact that it is is set to expire in November of this year.

Since installs have become so prevalent in console games, I would love to see these sort of mini-games be used to ease the wait.

I recall some minigame-esque loading screens in some old Dragon Ball Z games and wondering why more games did do something similar. It's interesting to see there was actually a reason beyond simply missed opportunity.

This was awesome on some PS1 games. Ridge Racer had Galaxian during loading screens.

It only applies to mini games on the loading screen of other games. It doesn't apply to mini games on the loading screen of non-games.

Wow, the first time I actually played Breakout was during the loading of a C64 game from its cassette drive. As there wasn't even a guarantee that that succeeded, I think I played the loading game more than the actual one.

Plus ca change…

(And it had parts of the theme from One Man and his Droid as the sole background music. So it's going to take a while until I can scrub that out of my hearing canal now…)

I want to make a pull-to-refresh that smiles while it's being revealed or during its refresh animation and frowns/cries when it scrolls away.

A saw an app a few months ago that did almost exactly that. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it was.

That sounds adorable/heartbreaking.

Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at a time (the longest was the migration that allowed us to break free of this pattern, ironically). During the downtime we had a breakout game load instead of the site.

The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we could direct those people to it.

The logical result is to add a 10 second delay to all your requests. It's the right thing to do.

the UI did appear to show that you can stay in play after the request has been completed. - letting to of scroll to exit Im assuming.

however, consider the ramifications where losing a life on breakout drops your requests and makes you try again ...

might be a cool option for a 'youve refreshed too many times, beat this level or wait 10 seconds' scenario?

If the property `forceEnd` is set to false (the default value) the game ends when the user lifts the finger. The label tells the user when the loading finished.

My cassette tape copy of Ghostbusters for the Commodore 64 lets me play Space Invaders while loading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load

I love this. Beats a boring ol' spinner any day of the week. Keeps my attention on the app and is just plan delightful.

I wonder the first app to add something similar?

My bet is Snapchat. They always have fun pulldown animations.

I would probably never implement this, but this looks like an awesome proof of concept. Very creative!

If your users have time to play a game while data is loading, you're doing it wrong.

I get the impression this is "just for fun" and not seriously meant to be implemented out of need.

If your users are willing to play a fun game that is unexpectedly presented to them, you're doing it right.

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-P5drxuiJkM/maxresdefault.jpg

http://www.vandaliersheart.com/keenfaq/KeenPage2g.html

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