
Show HN: MazeBattles.com – Race to solve generated mazes - ferarri488
http://www.mazebattles.com/
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guiscreenshots
Love the idea! Execution could be much better:

1\. Don't make people watch the generation of the maze. Why on god's green
earth do I need to wait a full minute to play the game? It takes less time to
solve the maze.

2\. Allow for random matchmaking

3\. Let me hold down a directional key to move multiple steps in the same
direction. Feels like a lot of button mashing without this functionality.

Hope to see this grow!

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IMTDb
On the other hand, carefully watching the maze generation helps while trying
to solve it. SO I'd actually leave that, it's part of the game

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anonfunction
I think it helps too much, so I vote to remove it!

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presidentender
I would like it if the arrow keys worked, in addition to WASD, and if holding
a key down would continue to move the avatar.

That said, nice project!

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hk__2
Yes, WASD is great if you have a QWERTY keyword, not really if you have
anything else.

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danaur
Qwerty is the standard. Especially for any type of game. I don't think it's
constructive to try to get developers with limited time to cater towards a
minscule portion of the population who has self selected into using
nonstandard layouts. Also most people in that population have the knowledge to
adjust their settings to work with was.

~~~
user5994461
Qwerty is not the standard of anything except the US. In fact, qwerty is not
even a standard, there are many different qwerty layouts.

Do you know that UK and US keyboards are completely different, for example
they have all the punctuation characters in different places.

By the way, people don't select their keyboard layouts, they just happen to
have whatever they have and I guarantee you that hardly anybody knows how to
change settings or want to.

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rapnie
Yes. For reference:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout)

[https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-
mua/test/kbd-...](https://www.terena.org/activities/multiling/ml-mua/test/kbd-
all.html)

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Karliss
Maze generation animation in Chromium takes multiple minutes. It was almost
bearable in Firefox but still longer than it needs to be. Seeing the generator
"solve" the maze and then having to wait multiple seconds while it generates
other branches doesn't seem right.

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lostgame
I'm not sure if it was just my particular game, but I did find it very very
simple. There weren't a lot of avenues to 'mess up', so to speak, and the
algorithmic generation of the maze, while sorta cool to see, could stand to be
sped up (if possible). Perhaps there was a way to skip it I didn't see.

Overall, though, pretty cool! :)

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keyle
This was ok but as a single player the maze generated was mostly about wasting
the user's time rather than make the player make significant choices; Red
herrings need to be more challenging imho.

Also having to press multiple time to head in the same direction was painful.

Quit took me to localhost:3000 ;)

~~~
ferarri488
Appreciate the feedback :D.

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eapartridge
Nice project, enjoyed a quick game!

Heads up, when I clicked quit, it redirected me to localhost:3000, might not
be the intended behavior?

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pmontra
I could create a maze much more quickly on a Z8000 in the 80s. How can this be
so slow? I remember I used the maximum spanning tree algorithm because I had
to learn it. Not optimal for this problem but it yields nice mazes.

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mtmail
From a previous submission I see it's open source (under ISC license)
[https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com)

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porphyrogene
This pretty neat. I liked the visual aspect of the maze generation but how
annoyingly long it is depends on random chance. For me it was just a little
too drawn out (Firefox). Anyway this is a good implementation of a cool
concept. Matchmaking over socket would be cool but I have a feeling that's not
what you're trying to show off here.

Good work, I'd be very curious to see the code.

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horyd
Cool concept but when you see the maze being generated you get to see the path
drawn between start and finish right in front of you? So it's less of a maze
and more of a memory exercise to me

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golergka
I clicked "single player", watched "generating maze.." screen for 10 seconds,
closed the tab. Not willing to wait that much just to try something out.

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froindt
Not sure what's up for me...on Chrome and ended up only being able to use W+S.
A+D didn't work, so I wasn't able to try the entire game out.

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ferarri488
The github repository is:
[https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu)

~~~
ferarri488
[https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com](https://github.com/HenryDavidZhu/MazeBattles.com)

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pj_mukh
Add a python interpreter. Let me code-solve it. haha!

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jhwang5
What's an open source python interpreter you can add in this case?

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dktp
D key doesn't work on my Pixelbook. W and S work as expected, moving up and
down, but D does nothing.

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dktp
Never mind, it works flawlessly. A Chrome addon was causing the problems.

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rockyex
What's the average completion time of a singleplayer maze?

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slig
Share it on /r/WebGames, they enjoy games like this.

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aaaaaaaaaab
These DFS-type mazes are pretty easy to solve...

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pizza
click quit -> [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000)

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thoughtstheseus
This is great. Thank you!

