Show HN: Classic Video Poker

[appstorelottery]

I'm a Unity 3D refugee, certified expert, started in 2005 when it was a two man-band with Joachim and David.

I've been lucky enough to make a good living out of Unity with my own consultancy over the years making data visualisation applications (Wind Energy) and innovation projects (Visualising accounting data for Wolters Kluwer etc.).

Godot is pretty amazing in my opinion. Wrote this game over a few days and was productive in Godot basically instantly. I couldn't get up and running in Unreal despite trying a few times.

It's my ambition to start a niche agency developing 80's style games of skill and chance for the corporate world.

So... If anyone has any leads for making Space Invaders for Nike - please help! Happy to pay 5% on whatever work I get.

[tyingq]

The visuals are perfect, looks very much like a CRT...nicely done.

I think I found a bug though...pair of Aces doesn't pay as "Jacks or Better": https://imgur.com/a/78B3oPV

[hunter2_]

Indeed, I encountered the same. Rock solid otherwise, so far!

Something at the end (bankruptcy) besides just locking up (other than the mute button) would be a nice touch.

[yohannparis]

Okay, I though I was getting something wrong there.

[appstorelottery]

Aces are the low card in the game. You are not the first person to say this! I need to look at the math again to make them high cards...

However in my opinion (at risk of getting everyones ire) - I think the ace is the "1" card.

[appstorelottery]

Thanks for the feedback :-) Aces are low.

[njn]

I imagine it would be disorienting to actually play this on a CRT.

[tspike]

Aces low?

[jonathankoren]

Honestly, I've never seen a CRT fisheye as bad as someone aping the aesthetic.

I also have a similar rant about VHS video filters.

[phcreery]

I think it found an infinity money gltich. I held a 2 of hearts and a 3 of clubs on the far left and far right and it glitched out and did not give me 3 cards. Instead it gave me 3 black boxes, a royal flush and says I won "$"aHROcHM6Ly".... Now my cash keeps counting up, it is at over $2,000 now.

[CrociDB]

I feel the same. I've worked with Unity for quite some time (though gladly don't anymore), but always had trouble trying to learn Unreal. Recently I tried godot and I found it quite easy to get started!

I love the game. Had a lot of fun playing for some time. but just one question, shouldn't pair of A be considered "higher than jacks"? Because it looks like it's not: https://imgur.com/a/ov2UP1D

[appstorelottery]

Happy that you like the game :-) Aces are low in this version.

[krenzo]

Ended on a hand of: K J A A Q and did not receive the Jacks or Better $1 payout. According to a brief search about the rules of video poker, a pair of aces is considered better than a pair of jacks.

[helloplanets]

Awesome.

I remember when everybody played basically this exact machine in middle school when we used to sneak to the market during recess. There used to be all kinds of different varieties of slot machines at basically every market and gas station in Finland, regulated by a sanctioned monopoly called RAY. Nobody really cared if you played one at whatever age, especially in the 90's. Wild times.

[4hg4ufxhy]

People cared even less on cruise ships. Those were mainly using paf machines though, probably for legal reasons. Search "paf joker poker" for images of the classic machine. Nice features was the joker and double or nothing.

I played this kind of games a lot since I was 7 years old because we used to travel a lot. One time I made a win sharing deal with my brother to reduce risk of an unlucky streak, but I immediately hit the jackpot after that. Good times.

[CSSer]

This is more a question of curiosity than one of judgment: why does it take so long to load? I guess I expected it to be very fast because of the relative simplicity. Forgive me, I know nothing about Godot or Unity. This is still very cool.

[Tiberium]

Godot packs the whole engine runtime when packing the game no matter the platform, but in this case it's also probably because the internet connection on the server is slow - https://lfgslots.com/classicvideopoker/index.wasm (26MB, main engine runtime) took me 22s to load, and https://lfgslots.com/classicvideopoker/index.pck (16MB, game resources) 34s.

[danielheath]

Cross-compilation to webassembly doesn't typically produce small binaries at this point (although it's possible to make small webassembly programs, compiling arbitrary C code to wasm results in large binaries).

[mentos]

As a gamedev in Unreal Engine since 2014, this is my only feedback. The demo took way too long to load I almost gave up.

[gamblor956]

It took less than a second to load for me (on Firefox). I was actually impressed with the loading speed since it usually takes 10-15 seconds for Unity's Webplayer to load.

[ajdegol]

looks like the loading is the 45mb download it needs to do.

[zestyping]

I wondered this too. 45 MB is a huge download for a poker game, even with nice graphics.

[dvngnt_]

took < 5 secs for me

[paulusthe]

This is fun, but the game doesn't seem to accept that a pair of aces is a winning result. Aces specifically, other face cards work as intended.

[appstorelottery]

Aces are low :-)

[calini]

Lovely game and art style, and the idea of 80s style games is great!

I would throw in my two cents with the following idea: I would love a modern, well made collection of classical games such as the one linked, available on many platforms, with cloud saves, even to the point of which game was picked. I would love to decompress by playing Solitaire for 5 mins in my lunch break on my iPhone, come home, open the computer and finish the game up on the big screen and enjoy the cards jumping all over the place.

[loufe]

I really like Godot so far but the debugging tools are massively inferior to any other IDE and language I've ever used. I waste so much time trying to track down bugs. Proper variable inspection would be a life saver, for instance.

[razodactyl]

And this is the magic of open source and the current situation. There will be many like you and a few with the dedication and skills to make that happen for the benefit of us all.

The Unity move was VERY silly considering the state of Godot and Unreal.

Literally treating your entire user base like that.

I spent $400 for the Pro license when I was a poor Uni student back in '09 and it didn't translate to the newer versions - I just cut my losses and never looked back.

[HideousKojima]

If you're using C# instead of GDScript you can use Visual Studio (or VS Code or Rider) and get access to all the debugging tools available in those IDEs. You can also use VSCode for GDScript but I've never tried it so not sure how the debugging experience is with that.

[akudha]

I have no clue about game development, apologies for the basic question. When does one use Unreal and when does one use Godot? Or does it not matter?

[palavrov]

AH, memories. Card faces are from real machine - Novomatic American Poker 2 - back in time did lot of hacks on this platform. Even wrote a emulator in x86 assembly to speedup the development.

This Godot game is quite good to recreate the atmosphere of the ancient video poker machine. Lacks only cards autohold and sound could be a bit more polished, but these are minor things that could be easily improved.

[boredhedgehog]

It's remarkable how divisive CRT shaders are. Some love them, some hate them, very little middle ground.

[wiz21c]

depends on your year of birth maybe ? Mine allows me to appreciate them much!

[andy800]

There are alternatives to Godot, in particular I'll mention ZimJS https://zimjs.com/about.html#features

Like you, I recently created an online casino game, Cheat at Blackjack https://play.cheatatbj.com/

and used ZimJS for all of the animation. I considered Godot but found it simpler to do everything in client-side JS.

Zim's web site is definitely a bit "out there" but the animation features are quite good and it allowed me, a terrible artist, to program my game quickly and add a lot of visual flair -- dealing the cards, the dealer checking for blackjack, chips sliding, the bouncy result status, etc.

[WA]

Fun game, but I might have encountered a bug. I played fair and were allowed to split 3 times. This made the UI crash after I won so that I couldn't continue. The buttons "repeat bets" and "collect" wouldn't show anymore:

https://imgur.com/TcpHzT5

Checked the console, not sure if this caused the error, but here's an error trace: https://imgur.com/g75OXgJ

[ipsin]

Interesting idea. Is this being played at any casinos yet? I'm curious how you sell them on the house advantage being real (e.g. a white paper, or some kind of insurance guarantees?).

One thing your game could use is a "repeat bet" button.

[hn8305823]

This is amazing! Thank you for building it.

Please fix the bug with a pair of Aces. I fell like I'm getting robbed each time it happens.

Also, here's the correct payout odds and basic strategy for "full pay" jacks or better that most people are familiar with: https://wizardofodds.com/games/video-poker/strategy/jacks-or...

An option to reload/restart without having to hit browser refesh would be nice.

An option for basic strategy hints might also be cool but certainly not original/authentic.

[cableshaft]

Looking good, except no payout on a pair of Aces like others mentioned.

I'm in the market to learn Godot, and have already done a couple tutorials. What did you find was the best resource for learning Godot? And do you code in C# or GDScript while using it?

[g051051]

I can't vouch for the quality, but Humble Bundle has a Godot bundle up now, a mix of Godot 3 and 4 stuff (and Blender), for literally whatever you want to pay for it: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to...

[mplewis]

Thanks for sharing! This is really well done.

I was wondering if you would be willing to put the source code for this on GitHub? I've been meaning to learn Godot for a while for a simple 2D RPG and I'd love to see how you did things here.

[msla]

All that's missing is the cigarette smoke and the sense of small-town desperation.

[nologic01]

Side remark, but it is always intriguing to see what can be achieved with wasm technologies. There seems to be still significant potential in this direction and Godot's html5 export gives a good example of how to tap it.

[m000]

Lol. Awesome theming. For a minute I was stuck wondering "why is there a link to a screenshot on the HN frontpage"?

[werdnapk]

The CRT looks really good. Definitely a good reproduction of classic video poker.

[appstorelottery]

Thank you!

[grej]

This is amazing work, well done! I haven't seen such a great CRT effect but I would love to see that kind of effect available as something you could overlay on old retro arcade games.

[ericskiff]

This is available! Check out retroarch (or retropie if you have a pi 3 or 4 laying around) - it’s pretty great! Lots of shaders to choose from but pi-crt has a similar look to this and performs well