Show HN: Stacky – certain block game clone

3 points

4 months ago

As a long-time programmer this all just feels all sorts of wrong, but also invigorating. Vibe "coded" the whole thing from 0-100 over the course of few days, on and off. I have no intentions of developing it further since it's obvious what it is; I would absolutely love to work on a licensed game and do it proper with all the various ideas I have, since this is maybe 10% of what I want in such a game, but I heard somewhere licensing is cost-prohibitive.

Putting AI shame aside, it really allowed me to explore so many things in a short amount of time that it feels good, almost enough to compensate the feeling of shame using AI to begin with.

WebGPU isn't in there, although it's in another experimental version, part are indeed written in Rust (game logic).

It has:

- lock delay / grace period (allowing for 15 moves)

- DAS (Delayed Auto Shift) and ARR (Auto Repeat Rate for continuous movement) for horizontal and soft drop movements

- SRS wall kicks (Super Rotation System) to rotate pieces in-place

- Shift+Enter "hidden" level select on the main screen

- Shift+D for debug/performance indicator panel

- Several ranodmizers including 7-bag and NES ones

- combo system with difficulty (time) modes (easy by default) - x2: DOUBLE STRIKE, x5: CHAIN REACTION, x7: MEGA COMBO, x9: PHOSPHOR OVERLOAD, x10+: CRITICAL MASS

- backgrounds which change over time or you can change them with SHIFT+B (B turns it off/on) which react both to music (FFT!) and to your game play when you clear lines

- normal and two phosphor rendering modes of game field (R to toggle)

- CRT Filter (shift+c to toggle)

- F for full screen toggle

- A for previous song, S for pause song, D for next song (all songs made with Suno, of course)

and many more. It was a fun experience for sure, just not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I understand it wouldn't look like it does without my input, and it was a lot of what felt like work (intense sessions looking over the output, correcting etc), yet it doesn't feel like I really made anything by myself. I had fun though.

While at it, created a small demo as well which isn't a game yet: https://www.susmel.com/rolly/ and also something to play with parametric curves here: https://www.susmel.com/graphy/

all within a span of a couple of days while we were having our third baby. The future is weird, and I'm still not sure whether I like it or not. One thing is sure - it's here to stay. Peace out, my friends!