Show HN: SineRider, a math puzzle game

Show HN: SineRider, a math puzzle game(github.com)

181 points by SigmaEpsilonChi 3 years ago | 23 comments

Messing with your TI-84 graphing calculator is a rite of passage for every teenager who has ever been bored in a math class. In 2013 I was that teenager, and it gave me an idea for a tiny game about sledding on graphs. This project grew into my white whale, and I spent my twenties trying and failing to finish it alone. I shelved the game when I started working for Hack Club in 2018—until last May, when a few community members took it off the shelf. The project took on a life of its own, and turned into a year of nights and weekends from a global team of 20+ teens in 8+ countries. Today SineRider enters public beta!

SineRider is literally an infinite universe of function composition puzzles, each with infinite solutions, that range from welcoming for 9th graders to difficult for even the most serious matlab user. And every day we tweet out a fresh one to be solved with your morning coffee.

We hope you enjoy playing SineRider as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. And we’re not done! Mobile support, polar coordinates, and a level editor are all on the roadmap. SineRider is a living project, to be continuously built and maintained as free OSS by the Hack Club community: https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider

The team that built the game will try to be in the comments today between high school classes and AP tests.

—chris walker, creative director

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nDYoIwiA8

Play now: https://sinerider.com

stevage 3 years ago |

I like the actual levels.

The bits between the levels...not so much. Just frustrating trying to work out what arrow I need to click to get to another level. Kept accidentally finding myself in the same level again. I just don't care about which meta-path to take, just give me the next level.

Also...those weird inter-level screens where you click or use arrows while the figures move glacially slow across the screen? ARGH. I lost patience after 30 seconds. So. Slow. And no way to skip it. And when I clicked the wrong thing I had to start over.

The actual levels were good though.

weeb 3 years ago | |

Agree on this. Also a bug report - I was getting bored of a story level and tried to find a shortcut to skip it or speed it up or something. Pressed a key (not sure which - was thinking about Esc/Tab/Enter type navigation at the time) and apparently copied a Reddit command, ending up stuck in the state shown in this screenshot. Can't get out to continue the level, the [X] button doesn't seem to do anything. I deleted the modal from the DOM and could not press either button on the dialog below.

https://ibb.co/rM2Swzq

I was actually thinking through accessibility considerations while playing as I want to recommend to a friend who would be using alternate input methods. Not being able to skip / speed up cut scenes is a pain. Even just being able to click through the dialog (without the slow travel in between) would be an improvement.

[edit: typo]

pmontra 3 years ago | | |

It happened to me too, because it's just natural to attempt to ESC to the next level. Eventually I uBlocked the Reddit dialog, then discovered that scrolling up brings back to the game.

hackersreboot 3 years ago | |

https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider/issues/548

We're working on this, you can follow development here.

gjm11 3 years ago | |

I went into the dev tools, searched around a bit, put a breakpoint in a promising location in Walker.js, hit the breakpoint, and changed the value of walkSpeed to something larger than its default of 1. I don't know whether I've now made some future thing break, but it makes the interminable cutscene a little more tolerable.

SigmaEpsilonChi 3 years ago | | |

Shouldn't break anything. We are adding a way to skip the cutscenes. That's been on the feature list for a while, but we've been rather buried just trying to get the rest of the game playable :')

pmontra 3 years ago | |

The game is great but yes, that inter level should be much quicker. I put a weight over the right key and came back later. There should be a skip button on those not playing levels or a fast forward.

SigmaEpsilonChi 3 years ago | | |

Skip button is coming!

xept 3 years ago | |

What's going on on that level? I don't see anything to change to make it faster. Any hints?

fishtoaster 3 years ago |

Well this is just beautiful! I'll be playing this later tonight when I've got some time. :)

mpalmer 3 years ago |

Wow!

I really like the way it encourages you to play with the equation UI early on, teasing how powerful the system is without pressuring the user to accomplish anything.

The interface is clean, but more to the point it's intentional and specific in its design. It's a great learning tool; it feels like my mental model is stretching already.

Home run across the board! I wonder if the creator has played or knows Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I see a similar attention to storytelling in a silly but melancholy vein.

Phreaker00 3 years ago |

Absolutely amazing! Having fun while learning math, who would've thought that's possible. And such cute characters.

dang 3 years ago |

Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521395 - Aug 2022 (49 comments)

mNovak 3 years ago |

Looks like this has advanced a lot since I last saw it, nice!

Y_Y 3 years ago |

I was able to solve the first puzzle by placing a 1/X singularity next to the snowball. It correctly rolled down but the just clipped through and blasted away. It is very hard to cover these sorts of cases with a naive physics model because the numerics get messy very quickly. Very cool project.

thealienthing 3 years ago |

Wow such a cool game. I thought I would play a few levels at work when it was time to take a break. I ended up taking an early lunch. This game is so addicting.

frognumber 3 years ago |

My child played through all the levels a while back.

This has positive impact on kids.

All I can say is thank you. That's really my only feedback. Thank you.

SigmaEpsilonChi 3 years ago | |

Glad to hear it!! If they were able to complete the game, I recommend they try the daily puzzles. These are generally much harder and IMO this is where the depth of the puzzles really opens up. We are still working on the leaderboard bot so I think it's not currently tweeting fresh puzzles, but there is a backlog of about 20 right now

bitwise-evan 3 years ago |

Roughly 7 years ago I made a Sine Rider Solver: http://theartbot.com/labs/SineRiderSolver.html No idea if it still works.

According to my page, you called it "Super Cool".

dang 3 years ago | |

This is unrelated, but http://theartbot.com looks great! Do you want to submit it to HN sometime? Something like "Show HN: TheArtBot - Semiautonomous drawing machine" would be a great title. It would also be great to include text that gives the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it (e.g. going into some of the details that you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27229274).

If you do ever post it please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), and it will get a random placement on HN's front page.

SigmaEpsilonChi 3 years ago | |

I remember it well!! Wow this brings back memories… :')

jsd1982 3 years ago |

Delightful!