A game whose source code fits in one tweet

https://github.com/omnus/tiny-twitch

by eigenbom • 11 years ago

162 53 11 years ago

github.com

bigiain• 11 years ago

Was half expecting this to be:

curl http://www.hackerz-r-us.ru/really_awesome_game.sh | sudo bash #YouveBeenP0wnd

omgitstom• 11 years ago

And that kept my interest for about 140 seconds. Pretty damn good character:fun ratio. Bravo!

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

Cute; I didn't realize that the element's ID implicitly mapped it to a javascript variable in Chrome.

67726e• 11 years ago

Can anyone speak a bit more to that? I was wondering if this was just a convenience feature that browsers added or something that has been in Javascript all along?

rev087• 11 years ago

Has been like this for as long as I can remember (at least back to IE6).

xem2• 11 years ago

yay, I wrote an article about that!

http://xem.github.io/articles/#implicitgetelementbyid_en

Cheers :)

neckro23• 11 years ago

It's an old browser feature. I think the idea was so you could easily reference other elements in inline-HTML event handlers (onclick= etc.).

Personally I find it handy for messing around in jsfiddle and the like:

    <pre id="out"></pre>

    [...]
    out.innerHTML += some_result;

arocks• 11 years ago

If you liked this then you might find my Python one liner games interesting [1]. They fit a tweet in most cases.

[1] http://arunrocks.com/python-one-liner-games/

eigenbom3• 11 years ago

These are pretty neat and very concise! :D

simi_• 11 years ago

For some reason copy-pasting some of those into iTerm2 doesn't work.

http://i.imgur.com/GEMAeM8.png

vanous• 11 years ago

not on a mac myself, but make sure to use python 3

   python3 -c "import random;p=lambda:random.choice('7♪♫♣♠♦♥◄☼☽');[print('|'.join([p(),p(),p()]),end='\r') for i in range(8**5)]"

throwathrowaway• 11 years ago

I like that lambda trick. I was hoping Crash would actually crash the program so you could tell if you won by looking at the error it gives (if its KeyboardInterrupt or something else).

Here's mine.

  $ python -c 'import random;L=sorted(str(random.randint(1,9)) for i in range(4));a=raw_input(L);print(eval(a)==24,sorted(filter(str.isdigit,a))==L)'
  ['2', '6', '7', '8']8*(7+2-6)
  (True, True)

Try to make it print (True, True) without abusing eval too much (intended to be +-*/() only with digits as tokens).

A nicer interface, but too long:

  import random;L=sorted(str(random.randint(1,9)) for i in range(4));a=raw_input(" ".join(L)+"\n> ");print(eval(a)==24,sorted(filter(str.isdigit,a))==L)

dblotsky• 11 years ago

Totally exploiting the fact invalid HTML is accepted by modern browsers. :P

chrismorgan2• 11 years ago

Somewhat, but it can still be fitted in legal HTML 5 in 137 bytes:

    <!DOCTYPE html><title>X</title><script>s=0,t=Date.now()</script><p onclick="(e=Date.now()-t)<15e3?style.margin=++s+e%300+'px':alert(s)">X

(Note that the original version is at least 36 bytes larger than it need be: https://github.com/omnus/tiny-twitch/pull/1)

wunderlust• 11 years ago

What exactly is happening here: "a.style.margin=++s+e%300"? (Specifically, the "++" part.)

marpstar• 11 years ago

increments `s` before evaluating the expression and adds it to (e % 300)

username• 11 years ago

++ will increment s before the new margin is set.

SapphireSun• 11 years ago

    s += 1
    a.style.margin = (s + e) % 300

mgraczyk• 11 years ago

Increment global state variable, add it to e, which is the number of milliseconds the game has been running modulo 300. Then set the margin size to that value. It's a simple pseudo-pseudorandom number generator.

andrewmunsell• 11 years ago

In case any one was wondering the difference between "s++" and "++s" (the former of which is probably more common), prepending the "++" increments the variable before returning it, whereas appending it would increment after returning the value.

The code you posted is essentially equivalent to "s = s + 1; a.style.margin = s + e % 300".

jakejake• 11 years ago

increments s before doing the rest of the calculation?

tylersmith• 11 years ago

All that matters is that s changes for each call. It really doesn't matter what the value is or how it changes. In this case incrementing afterwards would be "s+++e%300" which looks gross and using any parenthesis for clarity would take up more space.

shubhamjain• 11 years ago

OP can save a few more characters by not using 'var' and using 'E' notation for representing 15000, i.e, 15E3, or better, 2E4.

microcolonel• 11 years ago

Could also use `!0` for `true`.

ninkendo• 11 years ago

He could use the savings to close that <p> tag.

ivanca• 11 years ago

He can save 14 more if instead of creating a function he copies the function content inside of 'onclick'. And he can save one by using +new Date instead of Date.now().

sgibat• 11 years ago

Better yet, set a variable to Date.now since it's called twice.

eigenbom3• 11 years ago

A few of us were doing this over on Twitter, with the typical "guess a number" games. But Alex's was the best so far! I built a few games, but all of them were too big.

Here's a 2048/Threes-clone in <700 characters (or 5 tweets): https://twitter.com/eigenbom/status/615424395192877056

chrismorgan2• 11 years ago

I cut the size down by 39 bytes in https://github.com/omnus/tiny-twitch/pull/1. You can trade 36 of those bytes for “legal HTML 5” status, too.

escherize• 11 years ago

I'm sorry I'm a dirty cheat: http://fetchh--captured.s3.amazonaws.com/Monosnap_2015-06-30...

    while(true){f()}

Omnus• 11 years ago

Author here - I'll implement some of these suggestions and see if the extra space might allow for something a little more interesting. It's a pleasant surprise to see a pull request on this little thing.

umeshunni• 11 years ago

If you're interested in really small games, the smallest game is Chess written in 487 bytes of x86 machine code: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64962 Source code here: http://olivier.poudade.free.fr/src/BootChess.asm

asgard1024• 11 years ago

Reminds me when my father showed me "number guessing" game on TI-57 calculator. It had 50 instructions (button presses) of memory. It's interesting that the size wasn't that a big deal then. :-)

fit2rule3• 11 years ago

I'm not really a gamer, but I do love me some synth one-liners:

http://countercomplex.blogspot.co.at/2011/10/algorithmic-sym...

Most of these would also fit in a single tweet ..

JonnieCache2• 11 years ago

It's OT but I can't resist: I recently found out that a selection of these little "synths" have been implemented in the chipsounds VST instrument using its bandlimited oscillators. You can play them up and down the keyboard and they sound awesome.

http://www.plogue.com/products/chipsounds/

fit2rule3• 11 years ago

Wow, that is really lovely .. thanks for pointing that out!

(I'm really more of a hardware guy myself, love to strip the SID's from any C64's I find in the trash .. and of course synths (analog and digital) are really a different subject altogether .. but I'll check out chipsounds on a DAW next time I get a chance. Ta!)

lalwanivikas• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a game I made while learning to code:

http://lalwanivikas.github.io/window-game/

(Concept inspired from Jennifer Dewalt's project, but code is entirely mine :))

xem2• 11 years ago

Cool! some suggestions:

- show it on http://www.reddit.com/r/tinycode/

- if you aim for low character count instead of low byte count, you can pass your code through my unicide packer here: http://xem.github.io/obfuscatweet/

- Golf your code even more (using the tips of the other comments), and use all the remaining chars to add features to your game and fill the 140 chars of a tweet :)

Cheers

naugtur• 11 years ago

Shorter version: <p onclick=n=Date.now;id||(t=n(id=s=0));(e=n(++s)-t)<2E4?style.margin=e%300:alert(s)>X

DaveSapien• 11 years ago

Doesn't actually fit in a tweet. 12 characters too long...am I missing something?

eigenbom3• 11 years ago

I think the . expands to a url so you have to use the zero-width space trick.

david-given• 11 years ago

One thing I've always meant to do was to put together a system for loading and saving Sinclair ZX81 games via Twitter messages.

Depending on how much you cheat, you can get about two bytes of data per Twitter character. That'd allow 256 bytes of game to live comfortably within a single twit, which is a quarter of an unexpanded ZX81 RAM. By comparison, that would take almost ten seconds to load off tape. You should be able to get a respectable ZX81 game in that.

With something like the JtyOne Javascript ZX81 emulator (http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/jtyone.html) and some Twitter interaction, the whole process should be pretty seamless --- click on a twit to play; modify it using the ZX81's built-in cough IDE; click on a button to reshare...

bartbes• 11 years ago

A few years ago I put a tiny game in a data uri in a QR code, unfortunately I lost the QR code, but I thought it was a neat concept.

the_duck• 11 years ago

This game makes me feel like a cat.

A game whose source code fits in one tweet

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