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Show HN: TitleRun – The game that only exists in your title bar (titlerun.xyz)
245 points by janniks on June 4, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments



Someone needs to make a list of all of these one-line text games. Here goes:

ABaroids: http://www.thegillowfamily.co.uk/

Blob jump¹²: https://gist.github.com/bsawyer/bc0cb3ec3a86b29e76a23104fc44...

Glutton C¹: https://gluttonc.chesterdoran.com/

Bonus: Defender of the Favicon³: http://www.p01.org/defender_of_the_favicon/

[1]: Available as a bookmarklet! (see respective sites for details)

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420528

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19262529

Title run has ushered in a new age with a second dimension!


Inspired by this and Defender of the Favicon, I created a hangman game that uses the favicon and title bar: https://desmondw.github.io/tab-hangman/index.html


Nice!

Might just be my weird browser (Palemoon, originally a fork of Firefox) but the favicon doesn't change from the initial gallows, though everything else in the game, and all of the other games except blob jump work for me (including Defender of the Favicon).


Reminds me a bit of Defender of the Favicon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19262529

Really clever concept, and I like the ease of building levels for it.


Feels similar to NeXTSTEP-style "dockapps"; my desktop (running openbox) is full of 'em, and they're delightful. Something about squeezing as much functionality as possible into a 64x64 space just makes my desktop feel so alive and cozy.


It's obvious: The next step will be a combination of both concepts!


Nice. I want something like this but running in an iOS desktop icon.


Very cool! Didn't know this one either xD


I just released TitleRun on ProductHunt. Let me know what you think! (and go easy on me, it's the first game that I developed)

Feel free to share or upvote if you like it! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/titlerun


Curious: Isn't it considered bad to link directly to the product like that?


I loaded it up and it was in a tiny tab. I played and won on my first try.

Then I expanded the title bar so I could see the whole level at once. Now I can't win.

For some reason being able to only see the next box in the tiny tab makes it way easier for me!

Cool game, I kind of want to steal this for my webpage, but at least on my system, it spikes the CPU, so maybe not.


I wonder if there's a metaphorical lesson here. If you focus on the immediate obstacles in front of you and don't worry too much about what's coming next, you'll probably do better.


Feel free to grab what you need - it’s all open-source!

Yeah, it’s quite heavy... I’ll have to do some research on potentially more efficient implementations.


This is so pointless and I love every bit of it. Perfect Easter egg for the Chrome dinosaur game or something similar.


Someone with more skills than me should make a PR to include this in Firefox, it would provide ∞ times more entertainment than the little unicorn and about:robots easter eggs they have now.


Thanks for the kind words :)


Reminds me of the great Line Wobbler game: https://wobblylabs.com/projects/wobbler

Still need to make one of these using the Twang code https://github.com/Critters/TWANG


Is there any way to buy or otherwise play line wobbler?


This is super cool! With fast games like this it's often nice to be able to start playing again quickly - maybe consider making space restart the game instantly rather than having to press R and wait for the page to reload.


Thanks for the feedback - you are completely right! This will go into the next version.

I was just too lazy to reinitialize the game state/map. That’s why R simply does a page refresh ;)


I want this but in an Xterm.

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Xterm-Title-3.html


I remember about 20 years ago my brother made ASCII Street Fighter with all of the characters and special moves. It was kind of insane.


Lol - didn't think it would work in firefox on android, but it does - kudos!

This takes me back, as the gameplay is almost exactly the same as the game for the Psion Organiser II (which had a 2 line screen) which you had to laboriously key in from the back of the manual. Except in that one, IIRC (err, 30 years ago) you could choose when to move back from the top line, and the missiles gradually came faster and faster.


Which browsers still have title bar enabled by default? I'm on Firefox and this game actually is played in tab, not actual window title bar.


You are totally correct! Honestly, I didn't even think of that - nowadays, tab-bar might make more sense.

In my head it was always title, because the HTML/DOM element is also called title: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ti...


Firefox allows you to show the title bar (View -> Customize, the checkbox is at the bottom left corner). I always have it enabled since it makes it easier to resize and move the browser window around without accidentally moving/tearing off a tab. Also it shows more of the title. In general i prefer having the title bar there.

FWIW i also have the menu bar always visible :-P.


Browser's (FF incl.) tabs are their title bars. Before tabs, the titles would appear above the address bar. They still do, but are truncated to the length of the tab, and hovered over to see the full title.


On the landing page you might want to add a couple screenshots of how it looks on different browsers to help the clueless (me included)


The animation seems jerky in the sense that the character seems to skip past obstacles. There's never a frame where it's vertically aligned.

For an obstacle positioned at 0, it appears to jump like this.

[... -2, -1, 1, 2, ....]


Has this been shared already?

http://www.thegillowfamily.co.uk/


This is the sort of thing that I see and I feel disappointed that I didn't come up with the idea myself. Great work.


Would anyone like to see Doom (1) running in a favicon? For a high enough resolution screen, it could be possible.


Oh man...this would make a great easter egg.


If you change the characters to not have any reference to vertical placement, this could be a one-dimensional game.


That actually made me laugh. Thank you!


Nice! Is it a bit laggy to control?


It should work fine on most browsers. But it depends on the browsers allocation of cycles for the tab, because it‘s only JavaScript. Closing other tabs may help.


Is is extremely laggy in my FF.


cool! just made one for the URL bar: https://gist.github.com/bsawyer/bc0cb3ec3a86b29e76a23104fc44...


Might just be my weird browser (Palemoon) (or a mistake in making it into a bookmarklet), but this does nothing other than log "SyntaxError: identifier starts immediately after numeric literal" in the developer tools console. The other url-bar games mentioned in this thread all work (at least normally on their websites).


Thanks for trying it! I commented on the gist with the bookmarklet version I'm using in chrome.


Very cool! But not at original idea anymore.


I liked. More 1000 levels, please.


In a word. FUN!


Something like this was posted here before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206922

It even have a bookmarklet that allow you to play on any webpage

https://gluttonc.chesterdoran.com


Sadly doesn't seem to work on Firefox, unless I'm doing something wrong. My address bar looks like this:

https://gluttonc.chesterdoran.com/#%E2%A0%80c%E2%A0%80%E2%A0...


Oh my bad this one runs on the title bar while the other one on the address bar


Awesome! Love the simple page design - almost went for something similar. I found a few games that work in the address bar, but I didn‘t know this one yet, thanks.

P.S. you can add TitleRun as a bookmarklet as well ;)


Didn't know that's great to hear! it's fun to play ^^


Be careful the address bar games don't spam your browser history, it can be a mess.




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