Play Breakout while you pull to refresh

https://github.com/dasdom/BreakOutToRefresh

by julee04 • 11 years ago

195 33 11 years ago

octo_t• 11 years ago

I can't tell if this is madness or genius.

Whats the use case? If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX? If it doesn't, then you won't get a good game in?

btown• 11 years ago

If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX?

If that's an open question, then this is the one thing that makes the answer a resounding YES.

michaelbeil• 11 years ago

In other words, it is a both/and :).

dasdom2• 11 years ago

I'm the author. The control has a bool property, `forceEnd`. If this is set to false (the default value) the game doesn't end until the user lifts the finger. But the label tells the user that the loading has finished. If the property is set to true the game ends when the loading finishes.

msc96• 11 years ago

I want to make a pull-to-refresh that smiles while it's being revealed or during its refresh animation and frowns/cries when it scrolls away.

knd775• 11 years ago

A saw an app a few months ago that did almost exactly that. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it was.

spo8• 11 years ago

That sounds adorable/heartbreaking.

josegonzalez• 11 years ago

If your users have time to play a game while data is loading, you're doing it wrong.

tvon• 11 years ago

I get the impression this is "just for fun" and not seriously meant to be implemented out of need.

rcthompson2• 11 years ago

If your users are willing to play a fun game that is unexpectedly presented to them, you're doing it right.

gibsonje• 11 years ago

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-P5drxuiJkM/maxresdefault.jpg

rcthompson2• 11 years ago

http://www.vandaliersheart.com/keenfaq/KeenPage2g.html

_almosnow2• 11 years ago

Coming soon. "Watch an ad while you pull to refresh"

xuki• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tOvOMbizBs

laumars• 11 years ago

To be fair, if that's used instead of a traditional ad banner, then I think it's a great step forward. It's intrusive as it doesn't take up your operational screen real estate, however it is still extremely visible. And it's impact is when you're bored waiting for a sync which means the ad is more likely to get read than a traditional banner would.

Sadly though, I could see this being used in addition to traditional banners. :(

_almosnow2• 11 years ago

And they pitch it like it's a great thing...

CodeWriter23• 11 years ago

Coming sooner now that you posted this comment on HN.

corbinpage• 11 years ago

I love this. Beats a boring ol' spinner any day of the week. Keeps my attention on the app and is just plan delightful.

I wonder the first app to add something similar?

My bet is Snapchat. They always have fun pulldown animations.

staunch• 11 years ago

The logical result is to add a 10 second delay to all your requests. It's the right thing to do.

bengali3• 11 years ago

the UI did appear to show that you can stay in play after the request has been completed. - letting to of scroll to exit Im assuming.

however, consider the ramifications where losing a life on breakout drops your requests and makes you try again ...

might be a cool option for a 'youve refreshed too many times, beat this level or wait 10 seconds' scenario?

dasdom2• 11 years ago

If the property `forceEnd` is set to false (the default value) the game ends when the user lifts the finger. The label tells the user when the loading finished.

declan• 11 years ago

When working on an early version of http://recent.io/, I added a physics animation of bouncing/falling balls during the network request to the server. When the network request completed, gravity pulled all the balls off the bottom of the screen.

Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the physics animation has gone away. :)

mhd• 11 years ago

Wow, the first time I actually played Breakout was during the loading of a C64 game from its cassette drive. As there wasn't even a guarantee that that succeeded, I think I played the loading game more than the actual one.

Plus ca change…

(And it had parts of the theme from One Man and his Droid as the sole background music. So it's going to take a while until I can scrub that out of my hearing canal now…)

joeblau• 11 years ago

I would probably never implement this, but this looks like an awesome proof of concept. Very creative!

a2kadet• 11 years ago

Google has a patent on this: http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632

crowbar• 11 years ago

It's Bandai Namco that has the actual patent, but what's really interesting is the fact that it is is set to expire in November of this year.

Since installs have become so prevalent in console games, I would love to see these sort of mini-games be used to ease the wait.

Roodgorf• 11 years ago

I recall some minigame-esque loading screens in some old Dragon Ball Z games and wondering why more games did do something similar. It's interesting to see there was actually a reason beyond simply missed opportunity.

tehwebguy• 11 years ago

This was awesome on some PS1 games. Ridge Racer had Galaxian during loading screens.

gilgoomesh• 11 years ago

It only applies to mini games on the loading screen of other games. It doesn't apply to mini games on the loading screen of non-games.

stormbrew• 11 years ago

Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at a time (the longest was the migration that allowed us to break free of this pattern, ironically). During the downtime we had a breakout game load instead of the site.

The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we could direct those people to it.

teddyh• 11 years ago

My cassette tape copy of Ghostbusters for the Commodore 64 lets me play Space Invaders while loading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load

Play Breakout while you pull to refresh

Related Stories