ehmorris

Hi!

(I’m the author) making ideas legible and testing them with users is part of the design process regardless of tooling. You can summarize this article as “I find LLMs more effective at making ideas legible vs figma - for the work I’m doing at Jane Street”. This has helped me iterate and it helps me test with users and get better feedback from them. I’m not just prompting “make no design mistakes” over and over.

Congrats!

I’m glad you like it! Anyone can use the builder and submit a level suggestion through github:

https://ehmorris.com/bubbles/builder/

Everything is drawn directly to canvas including the score view:

https://github.com/ehmorris/bubbles/blob/de0c6c8b40328df9fcf...

https://github.com/ehmorris/bubbles/blob/main/scoreDisplay.j...

Oh no. That will make the whole game frustrating. I actually recently made a change to try to mitigate this so I’m sad to hear it’s still an issue. I take the pointer position on pointerdown and pointerup, and do collision detection both times. Then I pop the underlying bubble in either case, giving you the benefit of the two possible pop locations.

Ah bummer. Some phones struggle because the bubbles are pre-generated bitmaps drawn each frame.

Yes if you don’t already know where the bubbles are gonna fall it’s very hard to get to them in time with a trackpad. Although I play with a trackpad myself and can beat most levels.

I had a friend suggest a “course preview” during the countdown screen so that users can anticipate the bubbles without memorizing them.

This is my “finally try to make something real with AI” project that I have yet to do. I have no native experience. Both for this and ehmorris.com/lander.

Me too. They’re all by my friend Max Kotelchuck. He made the sounds for /lander too.

Oh, this one is one of my favorites. If you time it right, you can get all six with a slingshot of the right speed.

It’s easier on desktop if you stick with slingshots and make your window fairly narrow

A slingshot tank! Did you like the fireworks?

Yes desktop is extra challenging. On mobile you can spam slingshots with all 10 fingers but on desktop you’ve got to be leet fast.

Thanks! Writing the game has been really fun and I’m proud of the codebase. It’s therapeutic to work on it because I get to skip all the frustrating parts of web dev like writing config files.

You've gotta move your mouse at least 36 pixels within the first ~200 ms. You might be pulling it too slowly.

If you're interested the code for the simulation all lives here: https://github.com/ehmorris/ecoli-chemotaxis/tree/main/ecoli...

Someone made a neat autopilot for an older version of the game actually! https://szhu.github.io/lunar-lander-autopilot/

The real challenge is landing after you get really really high up

That was almost two years ago and would have been for legal residents only, and only municipal elections.

Woah this is awesome! Someone on Twitter made an autopilot with ML but this seems a lot better.

https://twitter.com/_s_w_a_y_a_m_/status/1633468475611004928...

I will take a look!

Thanks for the feedback, I ought to just make the font responsive on larger screens. I will get to it!

Yeah that is a flaw. You could also just make your browser window very short on desktop. I think if it’s shorter than the lander height you may land in 0 seconds?

This is tricky on laptops with touchscreens and keyboards, and iPads with keyboards. Seems there’s no good way to ask “is there a keyboard attached” or “what is the primary input method.” So I have to pick one set of instructions to show based on a guess, even though both inputs are acceptable.

Mostly thanks to my friends for play testing it!

I think this means you “landed” at 0mph. No idea how this would have happened in the background though…

Ah I will update the wording!

No tech, I wrote it all in plain JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Check out the repo!

Making an autopilot would be fun!