Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers

[ClaireBookworm]

Hello everyone! It was so fun working on this project for the past few months with some of my fellow high school students :) I am so excited to share our first prototype and hopefully we'll be done with it all soon! <3

(ofc, it's open source, contribute here: https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider)

The goal of the game is to slowly teach function composition that get progressively more complex while you also help the ghosts ski on the slopes and explore the entire map!

[fullstop]

If you're into this, you may also be into Graphwar

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1899700/Graphwar/

[jamal-kumar]

That's hilarious, like scorched earth on a cartesian plane. I hope math teachers catch on to this.

[antman]

I remember someone posting years ago an online version of this,been searching for it!

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Built by my buddy Zane! Back in 2014 we were making these games simultaneously and trading notes!

[ziddoap]

Excruciating 3 minute load time just to press one button and then be shown a YouTube video.

It would be amazing to share the link to the YouTube trailer before the 3 minutes of loading.

Otherwise, it looks sort of interesting. I'm definitely a fan of the art/color-palette. The demo doesn't really give any clue to what the gameplay will actually be like though, which is unfortunate. Even after watching the trailer, I'm not positive what the core gameplay features and loop is supposed to be?

[andai]

Have you ever played LineRider? [0] In LineRider there is no destination, only the joy of sledding.

Re: "just to press one button and then be shown a YouTube video": Instead of pressing "Next" at the end, press "Stop" and you can go back and edit the formula.

[0] - https://www.linerider.com/

( Press the "Play" link on the right, it runs right in the browser, just like in the old days :)

[ClaireBookworm]

Ooof I think the reason was an issue with compression between our teaser branch and the main branch, so everything was loading with full size png/mp3/wav files—it should be fixed soon!

[jxf]

It looks like you'll edit equations with some kind of periodicity to produce curves, which your character must then navigate to some destination.

[jordanwallwork]

Took about 4 seconds for me. Still, regardless of load time I found it annoying that that was all that happened

[keerthiko]

i recall seeing something similar a long time ago, with a very similar name, and found it via HN search: sineridergame.com — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615416

and it looks like you own the domain and route it to sinerider.com now? Are you affiliated with the creater from 8 years ago or did they abandon it? The game seems somewhat distinct though obviously similar. Did you ever interact with that game?

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Good memory! Yes, there is a connection here. I originally built sinerider when I was just out of high school. My ambitions were much bigger than my skillset, so I never really finished it. I started working for Hack Club a few years ago, and this summer we decided to turn our students loose on an old half-baked alpha I had on the shelf. Honestly I thought they might just fix the bugs and touch up the sprites a bit, but they ended up doing a top-to-bottom renovation with all this crazy new original art and sound and shader effects. I honestly truthfully pinky-swear never ever thought it would look and sound and feel this good. Watching this happen has been one of the greatest joys of my life!

[qbasic_forever]

Wow this is beautiful! I love the concept and execution. Great job!

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

We really appreciate you saying that!!

[personjerry]

I think the Show HN is a bit premature, you won't get much useful feedback when it's not really playable yet

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Yeah, we maybe should've launched the internal alpha for HN :/

If you want to play, it's live at https://sinerider.hackclub.dev!

[stevewatson301]

I get TLS alerts for some weird reason when connecting to the website.

$ curl -i https://sinerider.com/

curl: (35) error:1404B410:SSL routines:ST_CONNECT:sslv3 alert handshake failure

[ClaireBookworm]

Oops, sorry! We're fixing that right now :D

[westoncb]

This looks great—feels very polished. I love the "hack club" concept :)

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Thank you so much!

[herpderperator]

Surprisingly low CPU usage for such high frame rate action! Nice work :)

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Wow, thank you!! We have a lot of optimization work left haha so it's a pleasure to hear it's working smoothly for you! I'll admit I'm a bit surprised ^_^

[jamal-kumar]

Looking forward to seeing the final result, looks very interesting so far.

How complex do the functions get, does it end up getting into (pre)calculus or anything like that?

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Very complex! I'm not exactly sure what the boundaries of pre-calc graphing are but I routinely see professional mathematicians and computer scientists stumped by the more advanced puzzles.

[rebelos]

The core game code is remarkably compact. I'm not familiar with game development, but is this usually the case? Very impressive.

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Thanks! I don't know if it's unusually compact for web game dev, but I will take a victory lap on the vanilla JS "game engine" we built for this project. We get a lot of very Unity-like behavior in a much smaller package!

[keerthiko]

Not usually, but there is a peculiarity with making (effectively) 2D browser games in vanilla-ish HTML/CSS (no react etc) and canvas JS (max jquery) — the UI can be nearly code-free, and significant game graphics logic can be hooked up to HTML/CSS as well, and so the js can focus on actual core mechanic logic, + hooks into HTML events. Accomplishing the equivalent in a native game engine (Unity) or non-HTML rendering platform can take up several hundreds of additional lines without the addition of a bunch of frameworks perfectly suited to your game's UI and game-world organization (or vice versa).

[eatonphil]

The screen captures in the README look awesome! Unfortunately it looks like you're having some SSL issues on the site right now.

[ClaireBookworm]

It should be fixed now!

[tejasag]

This is awesomeee

[kalid]

Congrats on the prototype! Signed up and looking forward to checking it out once it's launched =).

[meltyness]

Fun!

...but there's layer after layer of this not working, haha:

3\cos \left(\frac{1}{x\cdot 0.0001}\right)+1.2^{-x+12}-10

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Looks to be calculating fine, but the limited sampling resolution we can achieve for the graph means that "high-resolution" functions like this will look… strange. Effectively what you are seeing is one-dimensional aliasing. Unfortunately we're stuck with it until we optimize well enough to achieve full per-pixel graph sampling. We have plans for this, but it's… complicated. It involves transpiling latex to GLSL, which I'm sure will be a super fun task for some motivated student and not at all a massive headache.

[unconed]

[cowboy bepop theme music plays]

It's not obvious you can just go back and edit the formula already. Also it will be hard to do neat tricks if the sampling positions are not fixed on the x axis in world space.

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

Actually the visible sampling positions are a visual artifact independent of the physics, which samples the graph directly rather than using a polygon collision test. So neat tricks are very possible! The game should (should!) produce deterministic results independent of screen size or computer speed.

[whoibrar]

Looks really cool. Love to play.

[ankaAr]

So nice

[devenj]

this is soo cool!

[paxys]

Please please change the text bubble font. Comic Sans (and derivatives) in this age is just..no.

[SigmaEpsilonChi]

It's not a Comic Sans derivative, it's Patrick Hand. Literally just some guy's handwriting. Hating on Comic Sans (and derivatives) in this age became a meme because people use these silly comic fonts for serious non-comic uses. But this game is literally rendered as a comic strip. What else are we gonna use?

We are in full compliance with http://comicsanscriminal.com/

[sureglymop]

Can't you just change it yourself? Change the stylesheet in your web browser.