
Show HN: Tiny game made overnight for the 2020 Blender 24hr art competition - pengaru
It was Saturday night, deep into a dark chocolate bar and well-paired Cabernet, when Cranksy [0] pinged me on IRC gauging interest in collaborating on this year&#x27;s Blender [1] competition.<p>&quot;Would it be too much work to just throw an ANSI on the screen and play an ogg file?&quot; he asked.<p>Inebriated enough to get a little enthusiastic about something like this, I joined #blender on efnet, and noted this year&#x27;s words had already been chosen.<p>&quot;Damn, we&#x27;ve got a late start.&quot; I thought as I read the channel&#x27;s topic:<p>Monkeys &#x2F; Rescuing &#x2F; Between Realities<p>It must have been all the COVID-19 news I&#x27;ve been endlessly assaulted with, because it was immediately clear that these words would fit perfectly with a game of monkeys saving other monkeys from viruses by transporting them to another reality.<p>A bottle of wine and one sleepless night of drunken coding later and a tiny game [2] is born.  WARNING: there&#x27;s a potentially NSFW ANSI graphic in-game, if ANSI can possibly be considered NSFW.<p>Unusual for these kinds of things, I&#x27;m also releasing the entire C source code [3] of everything needed to rebuild and fork&#x2F;hack if desired.  The only external dependencies are SDL2, SDL_Mixer, whatever those pull in like libvorbis&#x2F;libogg, and OpenGL.<p>If you clone the repository, be sure to use a recursive clone as there are submodules.<p>Also, if you&#x27;d like to be notified via email of interesting creations like these, you can submit your email address in the text box @ http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pengaru.com.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in collaborating on making demos, intros, or video games, reach out - I prefer email, Cranksy is on twitter.<p>Please be kind to my server, hopefully it doesn&#x27;t get hugged to death, thanks!<p>[0] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cranksy.net<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mistigris.org&#x2F;blender&#x2F;blend.html<p>[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pengaru.com&#x2F;~vc&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;hungrycat-sars-rev1.zip  (Includes native OSX&#x2F;Windows&#x2F;Linux executables)<p>[3] git:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.pengaru.com&#x2F;sars
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optymizer
Here's some constructive feedback, since you seem surprised you didn't get
much love here:

1\. If you're going to show a game, show screenshots and videos.

2\. You start with the backstory. I'm not invested enough to sit through your
memories of wine and cransky. Who's cransky? Why should I care? I'm here to
see the game.

3\. Speaking of game links, it's your 3rd link! Link [0] is to some the site
of some random guy. You'd think that for a 'Show HN', the first link is of the
thing you're trying to show.

4\. The link is to a zip file with the executable. People on this site are
technical enough that they are not going to download random executable files
from a temporary folder on pengaru.com.

5\. I figured maybe I'll browse some code on github. Nope, I have to clone
your repo and open up files in the editor. I could be clicking on some links
on github instead.

Basically, your presentation makes people work more than expected of 'news',
and maybe you think it's all worth it because you're obviously invested and
proud of your own work, which you should be, but strangers on the internet
need a reason to be invested in order to exert more than the minimal effort
justified by curiosity.

Think of it this way: if you didn't care enough to spend your time to make
your product presentable and attractive - you just threw some things together
in a zip file and wrote some stuff in a text box on HN - why would anyone else
care to spend their time on it?

~~~
pengaru
Fair, I had assumed it went unnoticed due to poor timing then getting buried.

------
pengaru
Tough crowd!

Highest score for me is 36120, a session which uncovered an interesting
emergent phenomenon in the gameplay. Much higher scores are likely attainable
once the playfield gets divided into a large cleared area and all infections
and vulnerable are concentrated in a small region. At that point respawns into
the accessible space slow down significantly and you just have to liesurely
dodge viruses... but it gets pretty boring. Adding a new element to spice
things up would be nice.

Also added a Raspberry Pi build to the zip last night, tested to work fine on
an RPi4.

