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Show HN: Virtual Corn Maze

29 points| jtolmar | 5 years ago |noisyowl.com | reply

28 comments

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[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
My friends and I have a tradition of visiting a corn maze every Halloween season, but can't this year due to quarantine, so I made this. Now that we've all had our corn maze gathering, I'm sharing it with the rest of the world. I recommend picking a specific time and going with a bunch of friends while also on voice/video chat.

Also happy to answer questions about the implementation here.

[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
Shoutouts to whoever named themselves "<b>corn</b>", that's a much kinder way than usual to probe at whether I have HTML injection vulnerabilities.

edit: Un-shoutouts to whoever named themselves a racial slur. If you experienced a network outage and the maze re-randomizing, that's because I had to reboot the server to add an admin panel.

[+] kroltan|5 years ago|reply
Is the perspective artistically intentional? It feels like there's a lot of distortion at the edges of the screen. Sort of nostalgic, but also a bit dizzying.
[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
I'm going to pretend it was artistic.

In truth, I did it from memory and my first guess was close enough that I didn't feel like sitting down and working out the math correctly.

I'm sorry if it's making you nauseous.

[+] coding123|5 years ago|reply
True story - I proposed to my (now) wife in a "haunted" corn maze right after the chainsaw guy started chasing us. I knelt on one knee but she didn't know what I was doing and she started dragging me with her as she ran because she was so scared of the chainsaw guy. Random people kinda re-aimed her and she realized what I was doing.
[+] ralfd|5 years ago|reply
Was this planned by you or did you just randomly get the idea "Jesus, if I would be really murdered right now by a psychopath with a chainsaw I couldn't imagine a better woman to painfully die beside me"?
[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
That's touching.

Weirdly enough, I've gotten multiple requests to put a chainsaw murderer in my corn maze. Apparently the current surprises aren't enough.

[+] tolbish|5 years ago|reply
This is very fun and creative, although I did start getting a bit disoriented and had to exit after a few minutes.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

[+] gandalfian|5 years ago|reply
Missed opportunity for the Maize Maze joke.
[+] zck|5 years ago|reply
Cool! It might be fun to show, at the end, the path you took through the maze on a map.
[+] minikomi|5 years ago|reply
I like that you can just go back out the entrance and walk around to the finish line
[+] jjnoakes|5 years ago|reply
Have you considered making a maze that can not be solved by the follow-the-left-wall or follow-the-right-wall strategies?

I think it'd be fun to send anyone following one of those into an inescapable large loop of some kind.

[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
Have you tried it? Because you're very likely to get stuck ;).

If you strictly follow a wall from the start (or any of the checkpoints), you'll find your way to the end. However, most walls are on loops. The style of maze I used is called a braid maze, and replaces all dead-ends with loops. (The maze algorithm considers a 2x2 square a loop though, while the renderer doesn't fill anything in the center, so those still look like dead ends.)

[+] gus_massa|5 years ago|reply
[Hi from Argentina!] I found a signal say 1/4, what does it mean?
[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
Hi from the US!

It means you're one quarter of the way through the maze.

[+] milkrocks|5 years ago|reply
Left hand path seems to be the fastest way to solve this.
[+] quickthrower2|5 years ago|reply
Nice. Do the scare crows do anything?
[+] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
Those are the other players! You were the scarecrows all along!
[+] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
Awesome.

Spoiler: Press 'm' for a clue.