188 points by jimbooonooo10 days ago | 54 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
I love the idea, but the moon has too much gravity and moves too fast, and the missiles too slow, which makes it impossible to aim. There's a fine line between complexity and chaos and this is on the wrong side of it right now.
Does the original's appeal survive the orbital twist, though? Scorched was about dialing in angle and power by feel. With gravity curving everything and a wraparound world, I'd guess most shots become trial and error, or hitting yourself.
- dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
- how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
- the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
- the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed
one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?
I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.
Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
Strafing works because the shells are slow, but the enemy seems to lead its shots a bit. Once I started reversing direction at random intervals instead of sweeping back and forth, I stopped getting hit nearly as much.
Point blank plus any netcode latency means whoever has the lower ping wins every time. Wait till the leaderboard goes up and people start scripting the movement. Then you're doing anti-cheat at 3am.
- moon moves too fast and has too strong of an influence. The aiming line that supposedly shows the path of your projectile is misleading, since by the time the projectile gets there, it's out of date.
- moons speed makes it impossible to put anything in orbit, or slingshot around it (it just throws stuff out into space)
- already said many times, but you can just drive up to the other player and shoot them point blank
did you actually try playing it yourself before posting about it?
It's obvious pretty quick that you use the prediction line to inform what to do on the next pass, and you have to time it. It would be too easy if it was just "wait for the projection to point at the other player and hit fire".
Being able to shoot the other player is a minor quibble for this kind of web minigame. It's still fun and interesting.
this guy gets it! as I mentioned in another post, yes the trajectory line is instantaneous, and you need to rely on your internal electrical meat estimator to predict how that trajectory evolves.
Feels wrong because we picture the moon as slow. Tank guns are faster than a howitzer anyway. APFSDS sabot rounds from a 120mm smoothbore leave at 1.5-1.7km/s, so the moon is the slow one here.
The orbital curvature is the interesting part, since it makes the direct shot nontrivial. But as far as I can tell, the point-blank problem is a balance issue. Scorched Earth's wind and terrain cost made closing distance risky; here it seems free.
in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.
I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.
some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.
enjoy!