It took me a few times to realize that I could do bombs or slingshots by clicking in empty space. The tutorial makes it look like you have to click on a bubble. Maybe the black circle in the tutorial should be removed?
I also got a little confused in the beginning about par vs lives. At first it seemed like par was the only important thing, since that's what pops up after the level. The lives icon at the bottom wasn't particularly noticeable to me. I just kind of figured there were only N levels, until I finally realized that dropping bubbles was making me lose lives.
Edit: Oh, and you can multi-touch and set off multiple slingshots at once! Secrets secrets...
megadata 8 hours ago [-]
I had exactly the same experience.
4b11b4 7 hours ago [-]
Same, thought I had to hold or pull back on a ball
lukevp 8 hours ago [-]
Same as well! Game is fun once you get it
dothack 4 hours ago [-]
Same
stevage 3 hours ago [-]
Really well built, and I love the tutorial...
BUT
Jeepers, it starts off so hard compared to the tutorial.
1. I was not expecting bubbles to move (since they are all static in the tutorial).
2. I wasn't expecting a golf/par scoring thing.
3. I didn't realise you could (and should) start powering up during the countdown at the start.
4. Took me a long time to realise you can just click quickly to create bubbles, without having to do the aim-and-shoot thing.
5. Straight away I felt like I was being insulted by having my score described as "Disaster" etc.
6. There's no way to get back to the tutorial.
So overall, I'd say:
- there are fun mechanics here
- it's good there is a tutorial
- but the tutorial did not prepare me for the game
- the game felt too hard too quickly and mean
megadata 8 hours ago [-]
Slick as silk! But too fast too quickly. Gimme some easy endorphin in the first few levels before I start struggling.
t0k0l0sh 8 hours ago [-]
Agreed, perhaps it's easier on a mobile device but I found the first two levels after the tutorial way to fast using a touchpad and left a little frustrated :-(
Easing into the difficulty slower sounds like a good plan!
al_borland 7 hours ago [-]
I was on mobile and it felt like by the time I saw what was happening I was already losing. Very little reaction time available. I thought maybe it would be easier on a desktop, but I guess not.. maybe with a mouse instead of a trackpad.
Or maybe the author is going for the flappy bird effect. Make it punishingly hard, so players celebrate hitting level 4. But I didn’t have the same intant addiction as I did with Flappy Bird. Probably due to more complex gameplay and each level having 3 ways to play it.
ehmorris 6 hours ago [-]
Yes if you don’t already know where the bubbles are gonna fall it’s very hard to get to them in time with a trackpad. Although I play with a trackpad myself and can beat most levels.
I had a friend suggest a “course preview” during the countdown screen so that users can anticipate the bubbles without memorizing them.
al_borland 3 hours ago [-]
I replayed it some more and I improved with each go. It’s kind of like older games, where the levels have to be learned over time to get good. I think we’ve forgotten about that with the more gentle on-ramp most games give these days.
megadata 7 hours ago [-]
I was on mobile, too much cortisol vs endorphin.
putzdown 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, as other commenters have said, this game is a great example of the design error where the tutorial careful prepares the player for not-this-game. There’s another game out there somewhere that the tutorial has made us competent to play. Meanwhile we need a different tutorial for this game.
mjburgess 9 hours ago [-]
A touchpad seems to really cripple the gameplay -- one idea could be to ask what device players are using and make slight adjustments. For touchpads, moving the cursor is slower, and the drag-pull mechanism doesnt really work -- and its easy to misclick a drag.
Some rougelike mechanics would also make it possible to naturally level the gameplay -- ie., the more failures a person has the more metaprogression they get, so worse players unlock a natural easy mode.
flanbiscuit 8 hours ago [-]
> and the drag-pull mechanism doesnt really work
Doesn't work for me at all on both Firefox and Chrome (latest versions for both) on MacOS using the touch pad. I can't get past that screen on my laptop. Had to open it up on my phone to see what comes after.
Otherwise it's a fun challenging game
dylan604 8 hours ago [-]
I walked through the demo thinking that was a decent demo. Then round 1 and nothing was the same.
I was playing with a magic touch mouse, and have decided it was not designed for that interaction. Assuming designed for mobile and us desktop users are just square pegging a round hole.
ehmorris 8 hours ago [-]
It’s easier on desktop if you stick with slingshots and make your window fairly narrow
ehmorris 9 hours ago [-]
Yes desktop is extra challenging. On mobile you can spam slingshots with all 10 fingers but on desktop you’ve got to be leet fast.
mjburgess 9 hours ago [-]
Perhaps create mirrored slingshots with keys?
ie., if I hold a,s,d,f,g then I get 5 mirrors of my touchpad, and holding eg., a/g places two at the edges?
EspadaV9 56 minutes ago [-]
Fun little game. As others have said, the tutorial is nice, but very misleading compared to the actual game, and the game starts way too hard.
Having to restart over and over kills it for me. I’d much rather be able to repeat a level until I got it perfect then move on.
zakki 5 hours ago [-]
In my phone, Samsung A14 5G, I have to touch screen below falling bubble to blow it. If I touch the exact location, it is too late.
ehmorris 4 hours ago [-]
Oh no. That will make the whole game frustrating. I actually recently made a change to try to mitigate this so I’m sad to hear it’s still an issue. I take the pointer position on pointerdown and pointerup, and do collision detection both times. Then I pop the underlying bubble in either case, giving you the benefit of the two possible pop locations.
simbas 4 hours ago [-]
Same on pixel 6a
jsherwani 1 hours ago [-]
it would be nice if i could save my progress at every level so i could just keep working on one level at a time.
herczegzsolt 6 hours ago [-]
Way too hard for me to be enjoyable.
IshKebab 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's kind of laggy too.
ricardobeat 4 hours ago [-]
Really nice interactions. A bit too fast paced for my iPhone Mini, and I have no idea what this “par” and “bogey” stuff means (is it golf lingo?), but looks promising!
simpaticoder 9 hours ago [-]
Really cool stuff, ehmorris. Your work harkens back to the early days of the web when bundlers and minifiers were the exception, rather than the rule. Work like this can really help beginners understand how powerful vanilla JavaScript can be by just looking at your source!
One neat thing you can do is embed an SVG favicon in your html page, which will be properly rendered at all resolutions on all major browsers - plus it saves another sub-resource request. Here is the favicon at https://simpatico.io/svg
(shameless plug) Another JavaScript you might like https://make210.com/ (I'm the author). Do "Restart -> Hard" for a challenge.
hakaneskici 3 hours ago [-]
Your code is such a fresh air after being subject to a decade of bloat. Thanks.
fyrn_ 3 hours ago [-]
I want to be able to replay a level, don't force me into the next level.
Minor49er 6 hours ago [-]
Kind of makes me think of the trip-out sequence you get on https://packardbell95.com/fortune/ after you drink the soda, if you pop all of the carbonation bubbles on the page by clicking on them, you get made fun of in a pop-up for wasting your time
neogodless 8 hours ago [-]
I really don't understand the 4th level. Is it much easier on a touch screen? With a mouse I can't seem to intuitively set off a rocket or whatever that can get the cascading falling balls!
ehmorris 8 hours ago [-]
Oh, this one is one of my favorites. If you time it right, you can get all six with a slingshot of the right speed.
daniel_iversen 6 hours ago [-]
Wow, incredible work! It seems quite novel to me and was super fast to learn and instantly fun to play! Did you consider wrapping it in a mobile mobile app to try and make a few bucks?
ehmorris 6 hours ago [-]
This is my “finally try to make something real with AI” project that I have yet to do. I have no native experience. Both for this and ehmorris.com/lander.
daniel_iversen 56 minutes ago [-]
Oh don't misunderstand me, the game is really amazing and I don't think it has to be actually native at all - just pondering whether you might want to get it in the hands of more people and get some economic benefits from the great work you've done is all! :)
boutell 9 hours ago [-]
Looks neat... can't drag the ball in linux chrome (dragging works for me elsewhere), maybe I'll try later on my phone.
ehmorris 9 hours ago [-]
You've gotta move your mouse at least 36 pixels within the first ~200 ms. You might be pulling it too slowly.
Your source is nice and clean[1]. No dependencies is a wonderful goal. Status quo is inherently always against innovation. I like the approach the Go team took of rethinking new solutions from first principles, and I hope you got to experience the joy of that in this project.
Thanks! Writing the game has been really fun and I’m proud of the codebase. It’s therapeutic to work on it because I get to skip all the frustrating parts of web dev like writing config files.
mjburgess 9 hours ago [-]
I think you'd gain clarity from `export function` and `function` over the anonymous fn + const style -- which seems a little like zig?
And the getter/setter system: I dont see a reason for over `{getHeight: () => height}` over `return {height, weight}` ?
Since canvasManager is mostly just data properties, you could also destructure those inline to funciton parameters, ie., function drawX({ctx, height, width, scale}) etc.
wkirby 8 hours ago [-]
Absolutely love the sound design on this.
ehmorris 7 hours ago [-]
Me too. They’re all by my friend Max Kotelchuck. He made the sounds for /lander too.
bosky101 9 hours ago [-]
Great onboarding. Super smooth.
Why isn't there a try again even if you succeed. Congrats
hyperfuturism 5 hours ago [-]
beat the game with 31 over par overall. im on an iphone 16 pro.
touchscreen users have huge edge over desktop for sure.
jeffd 6 hours ago [-]
Pretty slick experience from Mobile Safari!
bryzaguy 7 hours ago [-]
This game is so good! Played on my iPhone
jrks11o 5 hours ago [-]
input delay heavy on mobile browser, otherwise nice!
ehmorris 5 hours ago [-]
Ah bummer. Some phones struggle because the bubbles are pre-generated bitmaps drawn each frame.
higgins 9 hours ago [-]
Good old fashioned addiction
owebmaster 9 hours ago [-]
Beautiful JS code, happy to see this after people started to create DOOM using TypeScript types.
Edit: yay, beat all levels after learning I can use slingshot multiple times
Rendered at 03:42:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It took me a few times to realize that I could do bombs or slingshots by clicking in empty space. The tutorial makes it look like you have to click on a bubble. Maybe the black circle in the tutorial should be removed?
I also got a little confused in the beginning about par vs lives. At first it seemed like par was the only important thing, since that's what pops up after the level. The lives icon at the bottom wasn't particularly noticeable to me. I just kind of figured there were only N levels, until I finally realized that dropping bubbles was making me lose lives.
Edit: Oh, and you can multi-touch and set off multiple slingshots at once! Secrets secrets...
BUT
Jeepers, it starts off so hard compared to the tutorial.
1. I was not expecting bubbles to move (since they are all static in the tutorial).
2. I wasn't expecting a golf/par scoring thing.
3. I didn't realise you could (and should) start powering up during the countdown at the start.
4. Took me a long time to realise you can just click quickly to create bubbles, without having to do the aim-and-shoot thing.
5. Straight away I felt like I was being insulted by having my score described as "Disaster" etc.
6. There's no way to get back to the tutorial.
So overall, I'd say:
- there are fun mechanics here
- it's good there is a tutorial
- but the tutorial did not prepare me for the game
- the game felt too hard too quickly and mean
Easing into the difficulty slower sounds like a good plan!
Or maybe the author is going for the flappy bird effect. Make it punishingly hard, so players celebrate hitting level 4. But I didn’t have the same intant addiction as I did with Flappy Bird. Probably due to more complex gameplay and each level having 3 ways to play it.
I had a friend suggest a “course preview” during the countdown screen so that users can anticipate the bubbles without memorizing them.
Some rougelike mechanics would also make it possible to naturally level the gameplay -- ie., the more failures a person has the more metaprogression they get, so worse players unlock a natural easy mode.
Doesn't work for me at all on both Firefox and Chrome (latest versions for both) on MacOS using the touch pad. I can't get past that screen on my laptop. Had to open it up on my phone to see what comes after.
Otherwise it's a fun challenging game
I was playing with a magic touch mouse, and have decided it was not designed for that interaction. Assuming designed for mobile and us desktop users are just square pegging a round hole.
ie., if I hold a,s,d,f,g then I get 5 mirrors of my touchpad, and holding eg., a/g places two at the edges?
I beat Bubbles! 1951 over par overall
https://ehmorris.com/bubbles
Tapped 90 times: 0 hits, 90 misses Launched 2202 slingshots Detonated 1 blast
One neat thing you can do is embed an SVG favicon in your html page, which will be properly rendered at all resolutions on all major browsers - plus it saves another sub-resource request. Here is the favicon at https://simpatico.io/svg
This can help you make your already clean source even cleaner and delete some subresources. Cheers!I wonder how you would fix this, I think you could "capture" the cursor, and use esc to return it, not sure if that works in the browser.
Another fun game from the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
https://ehmorris.com/bubbles
Tapped 8 times: 2 hits, 6 misses Launched 444 slingshots Detonated 55 blasts
[1] https://github.com/ehmorris/bubbles/
And the getter/setter system: I dont see a reason for over `{getHeight: () => height}` over `return {height, weight}` ?
Since canvasManager is mostly just data properties, you could also destructure those inline to funciton parameters, ie., function drawX({ctx, height, width, scale}) etc.
touchscreen users have huge edge over desktop for sure.
Edit: yay, beat all levels after learning I can use slingshot multiple times