Show HN: I finished my site for daily dogbunny puzzles, as I promised on HN

by drcode • 4 years ago

244 53 4 years ago

Hi everyone, based on the feedback on my prototype puzzle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32884467) I have now built a daily puzzle site, with lots of animation and interactivity.

Hope you enjoy it!

drcode15• 4 years ago

I'm Conrad, the main creator of the site and creator of the puzzle. Happy to answer any questions. The site should run on most modern browsers and phones, let me know asap if you have any difficulty so I can fix!

bombcar• 4 years ago

The “you have to have someone on the carrot” message sometimes took too long to disappear. Maybe it should fade away once you try to move something else.

drcode15• 4 years ago

Yes, will fix

pablo24602• 4 years ago

Heads up- your external link to Twitter isn't working

drcode15• 4 years ago

Thanks, will fix

M4v3R• 4 years ago

Hey, congrats on shipping your game! Just a heads up - the first time I loaded up the game on Safari iOS (iPhone 11 Pro) the bottom part of the game was a bit cut off at the bottom of the screen. When I changed the day tabs back and forth it fixed itself.

Edit: it looks like the site is also getting hugged to death by HN.

drcode15• 4 years ago

Yeah, mobile browsers are brutal if you want to use a "make this rectangle as big as possible" layout strategy, because they have multiple "view heights" depending on whether the address bar is visible (since they automatically hide on scroll these days) there is no good solution for this with CSS yet that works on all browsers. I will continue to work on improving that.

the struggle is real

sohkamyung• 4 years ago

The 'i' button brings up the info page, but the words are too large, and the bottom is cut off in my browser (Firefox Nightly on Windows 11). I cannot scroll down to see the rest of the page.

To read it properly, I had to zoom the page (pressing Ctrl + '-' repeatedly).

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

Did we hug it to death? (It's not loading for me. 504 Gateway Time-out)

lairv• 4 years ago

It seems yes

drcode15• 4 years ago

sorry, I didn't expect it to reach the top of hacker news after 5 minutes of posting the link :(

gala8y• 4 years ago

that's good news in a way. congrats!

gota2• 4 years ago

My condolences, I'm happy for your loss.

max_• 4 years ago

Same here

drcode15• 4 years ago

I did some hail mary fixes to try to get it up again, but it's unfortunately still struggling

beardyw• 4 years ago

Made a note of the URL and will step aside for a while.

smegsicle• 4 years ago

animations are cute, but the hitboxes are a bit large for when you've got two characters on one square and want to select who's behind

drcode15• 4 years ago

Yes, this is tricky to fix because javascript doesn't check alpha channels on mouse events for images. I have a partial fix planned to improve this, should be improved in the next few weeks.

cmcconomy• 4 years ago

maybe single-click to shuffle the top item to the bottom of the pile.

Null-Set• 4 years ago

I believe you can apply an svg clip-path to the element with css to change the region you get events from. https://css-tricks.com/the-many-ways-to-link-up-shapes-and-i...

83457• 4 years ago

I can't get to site but the pof had slow return animation. You can move an item to uncover one behind then move that one before first return.

tfsh• 4 years ago

I remember playing this 60 days ago when you released the prototype - congratulations on the official release! The game was a lot of fun, simple enough to be intuitively picked up but complex enough to spend a good 20 minutes trying to solve.

It also teaches the user quite a bit about prioritisation, and the fact it's essentially just a graph problem with multiple constraints which can be solved with a variation topological sort shows how useful algorithmic thinking is in daily life!

I can't view the site at the moment due to the HN hug of death, but I do have a question.

You say these are daily puzzles, are they hand curated by yourself or algorithmically generated - or a bit of both?

drcode15• 4 years ago

I have a heavily-tuned puzzle generator (written in zig) that generates candidate puzzles, which I then lay out with graphviz, then manually refine the layout and curate.

Bimos2• 4 years ago

I'm trying to write program to solve it as a practice. I've almost got the algorithm part done, but I have to input the puzzle manually. I wonder if there is a way to automatically fetch and read the puzzle.

gota2• 4 years ago

I also played the prototype and similarly enjoyed it, and also can't play it now

Something that occurred to me: is there any way - or rather, are there any existing browser features that support - setting up an "alarm" for when a hug-to-death site becomes generally available again?

terribleperson• 4 years ago

The difficulty would be not contributing to the deathhug. You could check if it's accessible at all if everyone accessed a server that was itself polling the site every minute, but trying to gauge beyond "accessible" and "not accessible" seems difficult.

Best would be if a site could report its availability status on its own externally. Anyone know of an existing service where you can report the status of your website?

goturd• 4 years ago

Site is currently down, here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221117183654/https://dogbunnyp...

drcode15• 4 years ago

Creator here: I will do what I can to address the "hug of death" today. Meanwhile, here's a gif showing the look and feel: https://twitter.com/lisperati/status/1593296453534785537

jffry• 4 years ago

Those animations look great. Congrats on the launch - I'll try it out later when you're not getting hugged to death quite so hard :)

bena2• 4 years ago

Is it weird that I think the tree should be less detailed?

drcode15• 4 years ago

I actually know what you mean, I was wondering the same- These are always hard taste-based decisions

drcode15• 4 years ago

seems back up again after some harrowing server changes, will need to put more work into scaling starting now

nicb• 4 years ago

this rocks also thanks for land of lisp! people like you, why the lucky stiff, and james halliday (substack) are my programming inspirations. seeing people with a passion for making cool, weird, and fun things is so great.

paxys• 4 years ago

Tip for everyone posting their works to HN – address scaling for your site before it reaches the front page. It can be as simple as pressing two buttons on Cloudflare. You aren't going to get exposure like this often, and you don't want to blow it.

drcode15• 4 years ago

The tricky part is, you never know how much load you can handle until it's too late- I figured I had more headroom LOL

ovex2• 4 years ago

Great puzzle. I liked it so much that I saw your message about going live a few days ago already.

Is there any dynamic content generation involved? I am wondering because the Gateway timeout hints at something behind nginx being the bottleneck. Don't you just serve static files? Maybe you could configure nginx to cache dynamic resources if they only change once a day or even consider turning dynamic resources into static resources by generating them once per day and serving them as static files.

coding123• 4 years ago

it went down I think. am excited about this

annoyingnoob• 4 years ago

Fun game. I hit an exception at the end of the Thursday puzzle, was going to capture it but it went away too fast.

mr_sturd• 4 years ago

Working for me here (Firefox/Iceraven Android). I remember the original post; congratulations on shipping! Looking forward to playing more.

Took me 68 moves.

pcmoore• 4 years ago

Love this game. On completing the level this error popped up:

class java.lang.IllegalStateException:Attempting to call unbound fn: #'clojure.core/unquote

I'm running on Chromium browser on XUbuntu.

laweijfmvo• 4 years ago

Great work!

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

Love the game. I wish I had taken a screenshot to help describe this, but I completed with 68 moves and in the 15th percentile. On the lower right of the completion page was an illustration of where my solution fit - to me, it looked like the illustration was showing a small number of solutions "above" mine (I assume the 15% of people who took more moves) and a large number "below" mine.

My intuition is that "Higher is better". I would expect my solution to be near the bottom, not near the top. Of course, maybe it's complicated because I have a higher number of moves than most, so maybe the thinking is "higher is higher"?

Minor minor issue. I love the game and I think the stats page is great.

One other issue - it's sometimes hard to select which character you want if both the rabbit and the dog are on the same node.

WaffleIronMaker• 4 years ago

My friends and I are enjoying this site very much! Thanks for sharing. :)

My only suggestion is that I think clicking on the suggestion dialogues should make them disappear.

drcode15• 4 years ago

Will do

kevincox• 4 years ago

My only complaint is that moving one character a long way can be quite awkward with click-drag-drop-click-drag-drop-click-drag-drop. It would be much nicer if you could just drag the whole way then release in one go.

dpsrkp• 4 years ago

I did this in 32 moves

Bimos2• 4 years ago

Hi, did I miss something or I can't reset after finishing the puzzle?

Show HN: I finished my site for daily dogbunny puzzles, as I promised on HN

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