Brickception

[stevage]

Wow, this is clever. And for once, it's cleverly weird in a way that is interesting to play.

Not only do you have to deal with playing two games of breakout at once, but the same mouse controls two paddles simultaneously, but at different scales.

The interesting challenge is when the two balls are briefly in sync but you can't hit them at once. You have to move the window paddle up so you hit its ball earlier, then go and get the tiny ball. Easier said than done though...

[passion__desire]

Reminds me of Gettier Problems in Epistemology :

A desert traveller is searching for water. He sees, in the valley ahead, a shimmering blue expanse. Unfortunately, it’s a mirage. But fortunately, when he reaches the spot where there appeared to be water, there actually is water, hidden under a rock. Did the traveller know, as he stood on the hilltop hallucinating, that there was water ahead?

Here's a real world example :

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzWlxkbp0vT/

Imagine a video feedback loop version of gettier problem where the problem is resolved only at the Nth nested level.

Sort of like this short story : https://qntm.org/responsibility

[iamgopal]

Once I changed half my working code ( and wasted an Hour of time ) before realising that I was testing different code. On the other hand, now newer code had 10 times more testing points.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I'm going to say no, he didn't know. But I don't think I can properly articulate why which just get me into trouble with an even more nuanced variant of that question.

[jstummbillig]

The amount of anxiety that imagining playing this game gives me is considerable. Very cool idea though.

[mck-]

Reminds me of a thread on HN from 2013 that turned tic-tac-toe into something much more interesting and in a same way meta [1]

I made a simple online playable game of it back then: http://mck-.github.io/T3/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5898506

[edfletcher_t137]

Frustratingly difficult: I love it! The cleverness here is excellent. Well done!

[ranting-moth]

Linux/Firefox: Paddle doesn't move and the paddle popup doesn't bounce the ball.

Linux/Chrome: Paddle doesn't move but the paddle popup does bounce the ball.

[Jnr]

Linux/Wayland/Firefox: it doesn't interact with the window since wayland probably doesn't provide location data.

Linux/Wayland/Chromium: chromium crashes as soon as I click "launch game" :))

[focusedone]

Linux/Firefox: Works fine here. KDE Neon 5.27

Only issue is the low resolution screen on my old Thinkpad makes it difficult to see the entire game area.

Super cool game! Plays great on higher res screens, just wanted to test on Linux.

[Retr0id]

Same Linux/Firefox experience here, and I'm on Wayland, which I have a feeling might be relevant.

Edit: also GNOME 45

[Self-Perfection]

Linux/Xorg/Firefox/KDE Paddle coordinate gets updated only when I release the paddle window.

[jcovik]

Game is working fine for me.

Linux/Chrome on gnome with enabled wayland ozone.

[smittywerben]

This game is so silly it makes me laugh. It works great on Windows 10. I don't have that fancy trimmed chrome titlebar just the regular box style.

It reminds me of a program my brother wrote in high school that would spawn invading spaceships (Java Triangles) onto your desktop and they would bonk your mouse around.

Meanwhile, I was in the corner of the lab playing Starcraft.

[alt227]

This idea is amazing yet completely evil at the same time.

[sva_]

It is rather difficult with a tiling window manager

[kderbe]

If this gives you an appetite for more block-breaking, check out Pippin Barr's BREAKSOUT, a collection of 36 wacky variants of Breakout: https://pippinbarr.com/breaksout/info/

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pippinbarr.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pippinbarr.github.io

[tibanne]

Only one level deep?

Does time go faster in the smaller one?

[bestouff]

Doesn't work here (Firefox 115.2)

Paddle doesn't move.

[xlogout]

I think it might be a Xorg vs. Wayland thing rather than browser version. IIRC Wayland does not report coordinates of the window relative to screenspace.

[alt227]

Works fine for me on firefox 120 on windows

[shmde]

The inner browser top(acting like a paddle) is not detecting collision with the ball

Firefox Version 120.0

[pedrogpimenta]

Same here. On Linux with KDE, if it matters.

[omnibrain]

Reminds me of reYal, a game with "recursive" controls a friend of mine created: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1080780/reYal/

[olejorgenb]

Cool concept. As a reviewer said - if you get into the flow it's interesting. But the chunkiness of the controls kinda ruins the experience and make it harder than necessary to get into that flow.

[riwsky]

Reminds me of one of my favorite games of all time: The Mountain and the Motorcycle: https://achewood.com/2004/07/13/title.html

[dragontamer]

The paddle seems buggy.

It seems like the "right" side of a paddle always increases the speed, while the "left" side of the paddle always decreases the speed.

This behavior should be direction dependent: ie: the left-side of the paddle should push the ball to the left, while the right-side of the paddle should push the ball to the right. Classic breakout controls.

For the first 2 or 3 games, I thought you couldn't control the speed. I was wrong, its just that the speed-control in this game is very small (it requires about 6 or 7 bounces to go from minimum speed to max speed), while also having a very non-intuitive speed/direction control scheme for the paddle.

[mft_]

Great idea!

(It doesn't seem to allow 'steering' of the ball by varying where it hits the bat, though?)

[Uptrenda]

I love it, OP. Really creative take on the original game and this is a totally unique use of windows as an input. It's smart on many levels.

I wonder if this game could be used as a benchmark for alternating attention (switching between tasks.) People with disorders like ADHD and others that effect executive function are supposed to have difficulty with this. So it would be interesting to see if ones score increased off medication vs on medication. Or even if a healthy person saw an increase with stimulants.

Psychologists love games like this because it lets them study isolated aspects of cognition in a standardized way. It's honestly a cool project.

[metabagel]

> It's smart on many levels.

Two levels. ;-)

[SamBam]

I tried changing the size of the smaller window, and it worked briefly to allow the ball to bounce off the now-larger size, before the game snapped the window size back to the original.

It made me think that changing the window could be part of the game somehow. Perhaps as you drag it bigger the playing field of the smaller game increases in width, so that game becomes harder (and also you can't move the paddle as far because your new window is too big to drag).

Or maybe you should be able to capture the ball in the big window into the smaller window, and the size and position of the smaller window determines its entry point.

[chungy]

The ball in the lower window only bounces off the browser's chrome and not the title bar. This is making the game harder than it could be (and possibly an unfixable problem?).

Also I have wobbly windows and that makes the game hard too.

[nialv7]

Why stop at depth 2? ;-)