Zop | Hacker News Reader

Zop

zop.clay.io

120 pointsrazgriz9449 comments

This looks identical to "Dots", an app on the app store, but I guess there could of been versions of the game before that.

I'd be interested to know who created the original.

I am tempted to call this a shameless rip-off. Dots is a popular game that has been around for some time, the gameplay is exactly the same, and looking at the github I see no attribution. I find it pretty unlikely that the creator purely coincidentally made an identical game.

The gameplay is extremely simplistic and not novel in any way, it's entirely possible this was made without knowing what Dots is.

You can make "loops": link at least four squares of the same color in a loop and it will remove all the squares of that color on the board. This seems to be a quite unique feature that you find in both Dots and Zop.

Dots goes further; if you encase some other circles in Dots, they turn into "explosives"; this does not.

The behavior of removing all the dots of the same color when you make a square is definitely novel.

Nope, dots does the same thing, and more.

I know that dots does the same thing. I'm refuting the GP who says the game implements no novel behavior (implying that dots has no novel behavior, and that it isn't ripping anything it off). The box behavior is novel and proves that it is ripping dots off since it isn't a rule that you find obvious.

Connecting similar items vertically and horizontally to form combos isn't novel at all. He could have easily come up with this. Who gives a shit?

I wonder if the gameplay in Dots was already taken from something that was open source?

If not, I agree completely - the whole "make a square to remove all of a colour" mechanic is in there too..

It's similar to SameGame, which traces back to a Japanese game from 1985. The only difference with Dots is that you have to trace a path through the connected blocks, so you can't disappear quite as many.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SameGame

This fails to load in Chrome due to an uncaught security error. It looks like it's trying to access window.localStorage in a weird way. Also, the clay.io link hijacks the back button, inserting their main site in the history. I think a better link would be the original, which does not have these problems and works in Chrome: http://zop.zolmeister.com/

Edit: It looks like the Chrome error has been fixed. Still, I'm not a fan of the history hijacking.

Sorry, it's a 'feature' of Zorium: https://github.com/Zorium/zorium/issues/21

Should be fixed soon

Ah, I'm glad it's an honest mistake and not intentional behavior. Apologies for thinking ill of clay.io.

Yeah, that history revisionism is BS.

It's totally BS but also put a smile on my face. It's pretty crafty and I can imagine this technique being used for humorous effect :)

No issues here, Chrome 41.0.2272.89 on OSX 10.10, if it helps the devs at all. I like this game!

Fixed the history issue. Though I guess I was too late, already buried.

Nice simple game, I wish longer chains gave you more points, doesn't seem to be any reason to go for them.

At some resolutions the Time/Score/Best text gets cut off. http://i.imgur.com/fbE3eCb.png

Also completing a game adds it to your browser history, a bit non-intuitive when the url isn't changing.

My high score is 353. The key is to connect your lines (eg making a square), which is way quicker than trying to do a long line.

Thanks for pointing out the screen resolution and browser history things.

> Nice simple game, I wish longer chains gave you more points, doesn't seem to be any reason to go for them.

Ya this looks like just make as many 2-dot connections as possible

Oh wow, I didn't know that there was timing or scoring. Just suddenly it told me I had 61 points. It was very jarring and confusing.

Thumbs down.

I was set up for a massive yellow line and it did this. Had a minor rage moment there I've not had in years!

Code for it is up on GitHub: https://github.com/Zolmeister/Zop

It started out as a js1k entry (https://github.com/Zolmeister/Zop/blob/35a428661320ba9ad8e5e...)

Not only is this a rip-off of Dots, it's also a rip-off of another game that is on Clay.io

http://connectmania.clay.io

Seems to hijack the back button.

This is a 'feature' of Zorium: https://github.com/Zorium/zorium/issues/21

Should be fixed soon

I notice a non-standard behavior of inserting his homepage before redirecting, and was wondering what HN thought. Is that the behavior you mean? Because the back button works fine, it just has another stop along the way.

Part of me thinks this is genius. Sure, users have to click back twice to get back to HN, but from his perspective, it exposes a lot of people to other content of his in a relatively harmless way.

TBH, I assumed I had clicked through to the game from his home page until I took the time to investigate.

Interesting use of a 302!

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. It doesn't work fine, it's hijacking the back button behavior to not take me back to where I was.

And yeah, it's pretty harmless, and a neat hack, and I'm not trapped, but it seems a little scummy to me.

I somehow remember websites that hijack the back button (probably because it one of my larges annoyances). I don't click on links to websites that do it unless I open it in a new tab. It's extremely annoying if someone wanted to see your homepage they would have clicked in the banner at the top of the page. Obviously I wanted to go back, that's why I clicked the "back" button, its not called a "homepage" button. /rant

Yup. I wonder how people would like it if I rewrote history to send people to bing or pornhub or something when they clicked back once and made them click back twice to get back to hn...

It's grey hat, and a mild example of fuck the user for profit you see all over the web. That sort of thing doesn't go down well anywhere, but especially on HN.

There is one in 1k here: http://js1k.com/2015-hypetrain/demo/2130

http://imgur.com/VFcngCE

Is there a color-blind mode available?

While we're on the topic of Dots, my favorite way to learn a new programming language lately has been to implement a clever "solver" for this game in the language (to maximize score). I wrote one in Go a while ago, and Rust recently.

Also in my opinion this game is more fun when you're working with a finite number of moves rather than time.

> Also in my opinion this game is more fun when you're working with a finite number of moves rather than time.

Great. Look at Two Dots, by the folks who made Dots.

Funny how moving a few colored squares requires the fan in my laptop to spin up. A right, it's HTML.

What am I supposed to look?

http://imgur.com/hzbZYSI

Sorry about that. Should be fixed now (assuming it was a localStorage issue) if you refresh.

Similar in WebGl (Points are exp to number of bubble in the line) http://playwebgl.com/games/glubble/

Actually pretty fun! Is this game based on a preexisting game? (Not that it matters, an HTML implementation is better than anything else.)

In terms of gameplay, it is exactly the same as Dots https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nerdyoctop...

Candy Crush: Minimalistic version

Very snappy, I wonder which framework it uses ;)

Mostly vanilla JS/canvas + a bit of https://github.com/Zorium/zorium

if it's something higher level it's probably clay.io- haven't seen that sort of performance from anything else

Could we have the timer start on first click rather than on webpage load.

Making a big line has the same value of making several small lines. Bad.

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