from Hacker News

Show HN: WallSmash – An Infinite Brick Breaker Game

by bijection on 1/16/22, 8:30 PM with 32 comments

• by colinmcd on 1/16/22, 11:34 PM

  Co-creator here. Perhaps the most interesting part of this project is how the traffic to the site seems to correspond to the number of students slacking off. Traffic increases monotonically Monday to Friday (though occasionally Thursday beats out Friday), and drops off big over the summer and weekend. Guess we found a niche.

• by junon on 1/17/22, 5:03 AM

  Not as fun as the original. I have way, way too many hours in the original and this one annoys me a bit.

  - The purple "beam" throws any strategy out the window. Aiming at a specific corner to try to get the stream into a loop or something is almost completely mitigated by the purple beam and it's a toss up what the bricks will look like before any balls are actually shot

  - The patterns are so thin and erratic that finding good places to make loops is annoyingly difficult. My runs on average hit maybe 10 times. With a skilled enough shot, it should be one or two orders of magnitude more than that.

  - The aiming angle is min'd out at what looks like 30 degrees or so, making dire life saving shots impossible.

• by prawn on 1/17/22, 1:23 AM

  I like it. Not everyone might agree, but if you haven't already, find and watch the classic talk about juicing your game. Just a few subtle things would lift it further.

  Why do some bricks disappear before contact with the pellets? If a brick has a two on it, I would expect two pellets to bounce off?

• by bijection on 1/16/22, 11:07 PM

  Hi HN! A few friends and I created WallSmash years ago for our own amusement. We've been occasionally tweaking it ever since, and recently it has picked up a few regular players.

  Probably the most interesting parts were working out the collision physics to be frame-rate-independant, making the drawing loop, and playing with the particle effects on collisions. Happy to answer any questions or entertain feature requests here :)

• by edoceo on 1/16/22, 11:57 PM

  How to find out what those different power ups do? What are the bars? Blue dots add pellets.

• by airstrike on 1/16/22, 9:11 PM

  There goes 30 mins of my day... I'm happy with 14,805

  Would be great to be able to keep track of how many hits you had per shot vs. how many new hit points (new blocks * block #) were added in the last [10] rounds

• by lelanthran on 1/17/22, 8:37 AM

  I applaud the design decision to allow high scores but not require account creation.

  Too often I click on "try my online game" in forums like r/programming and similar only to be greeted with "sign in using [google/facebook/whatever] and grant this app access", or account creation.

• by Xevi on 1/17/22, 1:21 AM

  Nice game, I almost got to 20k in score.

  Are these games viable financially nowadays? It feels like most people don't play games in the browser anymore, and those who do don't spend much money, and often run ad blockers. Can you live off of making web games?

• by shawnz on 1/16/22, 11:00 PM

  A strong strategy seems to be to always aim at the steepest possible angle.

• by isaec on 1/17/22, 7:09 PM

  Does not seem to authenticate scores in any way - I observed this yesterday in the network tab, but it seems someone else has taken advantage of it, and spammed the leaderboards with political messages and a rickroll.

  I am curious what the best way to prevent this is without account creation? Maybe store all the data of the run, so it can be simulated serverside and have its score validated?

• by notnaut on 1/17/22, 3:25 AM

  Reminds me of an old favorite that I also used to waste a lot of company time playing! https://www.crazygames.com/game/99-balls

• by russellbeattie on 1/17/22, 9:41 AM

  This version of the same game isn't multiplayer, but has much nicer sounds and graphics: http://99balls.buyhtml5.com/

• by dmitriid on 1/17/22, 6:55 AM

  I managed to get two balls flying in a horizontal line, so now the game is stuck.

  To avoid this, the game needs to have some gravity or walls that are ever so slightly not vertical

• by inatreecrown2 on 1/17/22, 2:02 AM

  really nice game, and very addictive! I imagine that an "AI" would excel at this game by calculating the most efficient trajectory.

• by jrace on 1/16/22, 11:47 PM

  I love it!

  No BS, Click the link...and get smashing!

  Controls and rules easy to figure out after a few plays, and just addictive enough.

  Thank!

• by NateEag on 1/17/22, 3:41 AM

  I really enjoyed playing this for a few minutes.

  Nice work!

• by savolai on 1/17/22, 10:24 AM

  In iphone zooms in the ui randomly, can't zoom out, unplayable