I would make restarting much much faster than it is now. That's the most annoying part and it breaks the satisfying chain completely for me. I miss and then have to watch it slowly fall, or struggle to find the reset button. And even if I hit the reset, I have to go through the menu.
At the very least, put the reset and play again buttons in the same spot, so I can just keep tapping/clicking there.
Super Meat Boy is how all games like this should be.
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.
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.
I cannot express to you how much fun this simple little game is! I'm really enjoying it!
If I got to work on this game for 90 seconds, I would move the "bonus text" down to the bottom. It gets in the way of tviewing the literal most important thing SO MUCH!!!
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.
- 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
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.
I am completely confused about the orbital mechanics in this game. They seem completely broken; at any rate they do not work remotely like any other simulation I've played with (e.g. Gravitation or Kerbal Space Program). The bodies other than the first body appear to actively deflect the spacecraft away!
19:50 Put codex and claude (thinking high) to work in parallel to see who could come up with the better physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.
20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.
20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).
I tried it, but it doesn't make for good gameplay, it just gets too easy. Could maybe subtract points, but that also feels strange. I updated gravity to do things, but orbiting isn't permitted.
i love the gravity. but sometimes the orbital speed is to fast to be able to make the next jump. that's frustrating.
a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment
the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.
That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.
Wonder if I can turn this into browser-playable version with just LLMs.
EDIT: Put Claude Code on the task (reason for choice: Claude Desktop lets me just throw it at a folder with unzipped bundle of sources and assets I found laying around my blog archive).
EDIT2: Holy shit it worked. Will upload it somewhere soon.
Then after verifying it matches what I remembered and clarifying some decisions (section 4 and 5), just told it to make a static client-side no-build-step no-webshit-frameworks game deployable to github.io, and it did it in a single shot (+ a second small request to add a fix to transparency of some assets). Personally, I'm impressed at how well it went, what a nice highlight of the weekend for me.
Yup. I figured it out and went from zero to five immediately when I figured out it wasn't in the least orbital, but rather it was Undertale: you had to click when it was exactly tangent to the target, and then hitting anywhere within the target area was a win.
That's also when I lost all interest, which isn't quite fair in that it's still a slingshot game, just not in the least orbital. It's just a slingshot. No stars required.
This is an excellent and distinctly frustrating game Echo comments on restart being faster; maybe having the % stats in the main ui somewhere. Will be recommending this to some friends.
I've been looking for a game from the "flash era" that's incredibly similar to this one! It was "fling-this-wad-of-duct-tape-to-clog-the-black-hole" as a metaphor, but I forget the name. It had similar "orbit" dynamics, but the entire game was setting the initial angle/velocity and then the orbits just 'did their thing' from there.
This looks really cool! I'm already up to 11 as my best!
If you like this, you will for sure love the game "12 Orbits"!
Fun. Not sure if this applies on desktop, but on mobile the quick/fast/blazing/skip text often blocks vision of the ball making it harder than it should be to make combos
Very much applies on desktop. The restart button is also strange on desktop, it plays animations instead of restarting. I recommend pressing pause and restarting from the pause menu, which is instant.
I like it! One complaint is that if you are going fast it starts to display a "Quick!" (or something like that) message on top of the middle of the screen. This makes me want to continue going quickly, but the message is blocking me from properly seeing the orbit, so I end up trying to keep the streak going and most often launch and miss cause I can't see. Maybe display it off to the side in empty space?
Fun, but dark grey text on a dark background? Bit hard to read a bunch of the text.
It also seems like there's gravity coming from off screen assets (or maybe it's the bottom of the screen?) causing the projectile to curve in unexpected ways, and not be captured as strongly by the gravity of the visible objects as I'd expect.
Fun, but the way they fly doesn't quite match my intuition. Why would an object curve when I send it out on the tangent? Wouldn't that be a straight line unless it's affected by a different gravity well?
Neat, and nice audio, but I wish it were a little more forgiving. Eg. Combos or surviving several jumps might collect "lives" that recover your last orbit if you screw up.
Might also be fun if you encountered powerups as you explore deeper into the map (eg. gravity attraction, project path, etc), or even got to pick between forks in the route. The trail art reminds me of Out There.
Reminds me a little of an old game called Slingshot[0], I think it implemented the idea much better as you actually had to slingshot and consider gravity. Someone should turn it into a browser game, would be much more fun than this.
Drag on the red circle to set angle and velocity, let go to launch it, try to hit the green circle, avoid the blue circles (planets with gravity). To try again hit "r" or reload the page to create a new random set of planets. Doubt it works at all on mobile, only tested it in desktop firefox.
Its a nice start, but there is a certain irritation in that the popup text is directly over the puck.
I felt like I was losing more because I couldn't see the puck under the combo counter than anything in the game.
Seriously fun! A first it felt frustrating but it was interesting that at a certain point (after about 10 minutes) I suddenly got an intuitive feel for the ball’s trajectory and it became addictive at that point.
My only gripe is you render the bonus notification too near the ball and it distracts me and makes it harder to keep a combo going.
I actually love the idea of opening the game and then not playing resulting in a negative score. To quote Garfunkel & Oates, "It's better to be a loser than a spectator."
The text that pops up in the middle obscures the current position making it hard to immediately launch again. Maybe it should be closer to the bottom of the screen?
Really nice and very fast becoming addicted :D.
Feedback from my side:
- on desktop (tested in Brave Browser) the speed is faster than on mobile (is this supposed to be ?)
- on desktop would be nice to have a short cut to instantly start a new game (may be on mobile you could calculate early on if the balls curve would have a collision and show a button to directly restart)
I love this and it’s very clean. Only piece of feedback, put the play again button where the scores are as that is where the thumb sits on the phone to do the tapping. Mind numbingly groovy
Love this! Only request is don't display Godlike etc where you are because I've found when it comes up, you can't see where you are and so miss the next first-chance
This is neat, but the tap to release controls are unintuitive for me. I much prefer the variant of this game that uses hold, drag and aim as input. This allows much greater control, is more engaging, and thus feels more rewarding and fun. Plus, there's no waiting period for the ball to circle back to where you want it to be.
Tangentially, this is also why I dislike the modern trend of auto-shooters and idlers. The twin-stick shooter is by far the superior control scheme for this type of game, yet for some reason people enjoy having less control and engagement. I never got the appeal.
The single HTML file as a distribution format is really underrated. No server, no CORS issues, no CDN — just open the file. It works offline, you can email it, and it'll still work in 10 years.
I ship self-contained HTML files for a different project and the sneakiest gotcha is </ sequences inside inline <script> tags — the browser sees </ and tries to close the script tag prematurely. You have to escape them as <\/. Curious if the author ran into that one.
Fun concept for the format too — games are the perfect use case.
At the very least, put the reset and play again buttons in the same spot, so I can just keep tapping/clicking there.
Super Meat Boy is how all games like this should be.
```javascript
```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!
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.
If I got to work on this game for 90 seconds, I would move the "bonus text" down to the bottom. It gets in the way of tviewing the literal most important thing SO MUCH!!!
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!
- 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!
My feedback above was on desktop.
20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.
20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).
https://coezbek.github.io/orbital-tap/
a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment
the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.
I made https://github.com/TeMPOraL/cloze-call a little over 16 years ago, and this itself was inspired by something then at least that much old.
Screenshot: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/old-blog/download/projects/ClozeCal...
Wonder if I can turn this into browser-playable version with just LLMs.
EDIT: Put Claude Code on the task (reason for choice: Claude Desktop lets me just throw it at a folder with unzipped bundle of sources and assets I found laying around my blog archive).
EDIT2: Holy shit it worked. Will upload it somewhere soon.
EDIT3: Here it is, in its full 800x600, 30 FPS cap glory: https://temporal.github.io/ClozeCall-Web/
The process I used was, have CC run over the original sources and create this document:
https://github.com/TeMPOraL/ClozeCall-Web/blob/main/design.m...
Then after verifying it matches what I remembered and clarifying some decisions (section 4 and 5), just told it to make a static client-side no-build-step no-webshit-frameworks game deployable to github.io, and it did it in a single shot (+ a second small request to add a fix to transparency of some assets). Personally, I'm impressed at how well it went, what a nice highlight of the weekend for me.
https://temporal.github.io/ClozeCall-Web/index-ng.html
https://dan-ball.jp/en/m/pc_lim/
That's also when I lost all interest, which isn't quite fair in that it's still a slingshot game, just not in the least orbital. It's just a slingshot. No stars required.
If you like this, you will for sure love the game "12 Orbits"!
It also seems like there's gravity coming from off screen assets (or maybe it's the bottom of the screen?) causing the projectile to curve in unexpected ways, and not be captured as strongly by the gravity of the visible objects as I'd expect.
Might also be fun if you encountered powerups as you explore deeper into the map (eg. gravity attraction, project path, etc), or even got to pick between forks in the route. The trail art reminds me of Out There.
Small idea for improvement: the "fast" text is often over the same space as the ball, which makes it harder to see where the ball would be going.
[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/slingshot-game/
Drag on the red circle to set angle and velocity, let go to launch it, try to hit the green circle, avoid the blue circles (planets with gravity). To try again hit "r" or reload the page to create a new random set of planets. Doubt it works at all on mobile, only tested it in desktop firefox.
Doesn't seem that hard, just a boredom endurance
I've made a similar little web game based on Lunar Lander, check it out!
https://landed.theelderscripts.com/
Looks at imports
>Google Tag Manager
-_-
My only gripe is you render the bonus notification too near the ball and it distracts me and makes it harder to keep a combo going.
Very fun.
Ok on touch gravity of the orbiting takes off. And if I don't land the next I start again and get prompted for my email each time.
It reminds me of certain games on NES which could be played for hours, once you lose your 3rd life you start all the way from the beginning.
Here it's the same. With one life.
Related but I played a similar orbital minigame a while back on Itch.io which has a bit of a 2D Mario Galaxy feel to it as well.
https://danceswithpixels.itch.io/orbital-slingshot
- on desktop (tested in Brave Browser) the speed is faster than on mobile (is this supposed to be ?)
- on desktop would be nice to have a short cut to instantly start a new game (may be on mobile you could calculate early on if the balls curve would have a collision and show a button to directly restart)
https://pod.sekor.eu.org/@modinfo/statuses/01KNXT3ZQDTHZBDYF...
Git rekd nerds
I did however expect the stars to attract my ship, that combined with the top down gravity vector made it less intuitive.
It also makes it feel like a game happening in earths atmosphere instead of space, it impacts the possible sense of scale.
Still fun :)
I loved the simplicity, it was fun!
Right now the first 5 or so times you miss. Probably the first 5 times you try.
You get an annoying process of having to shift you hand to press the play again button.
The solution is easy as checking what the game score and high score is, if it's 0 just restart.
I don't need or want to hear about how to sign up to your mailing list if I've just fallen flat on my face!
There's a reset button but it seems to do nothing and you end up at the play again screen.
(Apparently iOS still doesn't support it [1]? It's been in Chrome for the past 12 years. Maybe someday.)
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...
Good art style, terrible UX
You didn't play the game you created
Tangentially, this is also why I dislike the modern trend of auto-shooters and idlers. The twin-stick shooter is by far the superior control scheme for this type of game, yet for some reason people enjoy having less control and engagement. I never got the appeal.
I ship self-contained HTML files for a different project and the sneakiest gotcha is </ sequences inside inline <script> tags — the browser sees </ and tries to close the script tag prematurely. You have to escape them as <\/. Curious if the author ran into that one.
Fun concept for the format too — games are the perfect use case.