Comment by iceberger2001
3 days ago
Hey HN, I built STARFLING, a simple hyper-casual space game you can play right in your browser.
You orbit a star with a ball. Tap anywhere to release and sling it through space. Catch the next star to lock in orbit and keep going. Miss and it's game over.
The whole thing is just one HTML file with vanilla JS, Canvas, and Web Audio. No frameworks, no build step. Loads in under 2 seconds on phone or desktop.
There's a combo system if you release quick, a skip bonus for jumping over stars, and it gets harder the longer you last. When you die you get a cool trail art picture of your whole run that you can share.
Audio is all generated on the fly and it has haptics too. Pretty satisfying once you get the timing down.
Play it here: https://playstarfling.com?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=showhn
Would love your thoughts on the feel, difficulty, and whether the trail art is fun or not.
Thanks!
I liked this game a lot!
One thing I noticed is that I found the game to be pretty hard if I just tried to tap based on where I thought was a good "launching point". But then I realized I could use the dashed lines in the orbit circle as basically "arrows" pointing to where the ship would go if launched at that point in the orbit, and I instantly got much better if my strategy was (a) pick the dash in the orbit circle that points to the next planet, and (b) just then only focus on tapping when the ship hits that dash in the circle.
I think a "hard mode" would be to get rid of the dashes in the orbit circle and just make it a solid line.
This comment instantly made me 10x better player
I noticed that gameplay speed depends on the window size. I'm assuming that larger canvas takes longer to render. It seems too fast at small window sizes and maybe too slow at 4K, not sure what is the intended speed.
The "better than X%" of players seems way off. If I get zero, somehow still better than 32% of players? and 25 planets is >99% of players?
The dotted line starting wide and slowly shrinking to the real orbit is a great touch. It makes the quick/fast/blazing/insane moves harder and more satisfying when they work. The angles encourage skips frequently enough to feel good.
I think the only improvement I would make to the look is perhaps the background. I still think the cyberwave aesthetic works and isn't played out quite yet, especially on mobile. But maybe instead of a boring flat grid, some very faint parallax points moving across the background might work better to give the game a bit more depth.
The pause->restart flow is way faster than clicking the restart button at the bottom of the screen. If your intent is to capture the end of every game to advertise the upcoming mobile game, then you might want to capture that method of restart as well.
Great game, thanks!
Really like this game. A few bits of feedback:
- Can you add a keyboard key that also launches, rather than always have to be a click - Can you make it so it restarts without having to click the play again button? Maybe use the same keyboard button as above? - When fail, why does the ship fall to the floor? Maybe a gentle curve away would be more "realistic" - Why is the bg squares? Maybe it should be more of a subtle space bg
Thanks for making it!
+1 on keyboard to launch and restart!!
Nice work! Really low frame rate on Firefox on Android (pixel 10), might be something worth checking.
This is a really nice little game. My feedback is that on mobile at least, the text that pops up often blocks vision of the ball, which is quite frustrating. I would move it down a bit
It’s great but the animations when catching a new orbit (sparks and combo announcements) is making hard to follow the ball, I realized I missed many shots due to this after some games.
Oh, and it’s completely different on mobile. Game is slower and much easier to score well.
My feedback above was on desktop.