Show HN: Neil the Seal Game

3 days ago (neiltheseal.app)

Neil the seal now has a game to destroy Battery Point.

Cute! But the car challenges in Tier 8 feel undoable -- they're a bear to "steer" and can't seem to go more than a short distance before bursting into flames.

  • I am thinking of changing that cars only explode on slams, so it is easier to nudge on mobile. Desktop is much easier.

    • I played on desktop and it seemed pretty impossible tbh. They veer around unpredictably when bumped, and explode long before you can plausibly bump them into a pool. Limiting that to slams would definitely help though!

      1 reply →

  • I nudged a car exactly into the pool and got no credit for it. It had exploded already though, so perhaps that was the problem?

On my desktop, On Firefox, I just got a uniform blue screen. On Chrome, I could turn left or right, but that was all. The W, S, and C keys didn't work.

I can tell this is at least partially vibe coded... Out of curiosity, how much did you use AI for this?

  • I have been building games since the late 90's, this is the first one I used AI Assisted coding, I wouldn't call it vibe coded as I am in control of the code, the implementation, the decisions, and approval.

    I am using Codex GPT-5.5 $20p/m.

Sound isn't working in Firefox on Linux, but otherwise very fun. The only thing it's missing are Neil's favorite traffic cones ;)

Also glad that Neil is getting the protection he needs (and the public as well) despite the media attention.

This is pretty hilarious. :D Feels like a combination of Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator. Vibe-coded? It's pretty impressive.

  • I have been occasionally building indie games since the 90's, so a bit of experience mixed with AI coding Assistant. Some things AI really struggled on, others it blitz.

Cars are driving on the wrong side of the road - presumably in terror of His Neilness!

  • Completely correct! It was late, I even checked with my wife, she told me the left. Darn, I went the wrong way. Will fix it.

    • Now driving on the correct side of the road, but wrong side of the roundabout!

      Neil’s reign of terror knows no limits.

haha this is cool :) What made you choose to code this as a webgame? In either case, good idea much easier to share

  • I wanted to create a proof of concept and used three.js a few years ago, Codex made the POC much easier and faster to build.

Well I was deemed to have pushed 1 car. Pushing them slamming 5 more didn't get me past the first level.

I wanted to like it but found it immediately frustrating on mobile:

* The joystick is too sensitive, so it’s hard to keep a straight line, wobbling everywhere instead. The camera makes it worse. I felt that if I kept going I might get motion sickness.

* Despite moving both cars out of the way and getting through, it always marked just one. Took me three resets and had to move Neil back to properly push them and get that done.

* I have played other browser 3D games on mobile but this was the fastest my phone has ever heat up. I didn’t even know it could become this hot this fast, to the point it’s uncomfortable to hold.

  • Joystick has been improved, I just dampened it down a little. I will look at the cars, I deliberately added the back and front sensitivity in an early version, it is okay on desktop horrible on mobile. Battery improvements implemented dropping the load by 90% with a minor change :)

i love this. i don’t understand why web games like this aren’t more prevalent

  • They are. There's a LOT of web games on itch.io. It's just the typical challenge with over saturated markets: publicity.

    • They are incredibly hard to market, I built a web game and it’s so hard to get traction lol

      And it’s quite a bit more polished than most web games. Too complex though so I’m fixing that.

  • Competition. Marketing. Expectations.

    In the 1990's and early 2000's I loved building web and flash games, people had lower expectations, getting notice was easy (StumbleUpon etc) and there wasn't a lot other choices.

Fun game! One quick piece of UX feedback: when adjusting the direction, the entire screen rotates along with it, which makes me feel a bit dizzy. It might be helpful to have an option to lock the screen orientation or smooth out the rotation. Great work overall!