DOOMscrolling: The Game
ironicsans.ghost.io423 points by jfil 3 days ago
423 points by jfil 3 days ago
It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.
This kind of language is fascinating/terrifying:
> I assume doing all this computationally is more processor-intensive than using pre-rendered monsters, but it’s very smooth for me on both desktop and phone, so it must not be too intensive. I guess I’ll hear from people if it’s choppy on their device.
I think the nature of our profession as coders is in process of shifting very rapidly, from "write code to do something useful" to "write code to do something useful, better than I could vibe code myself".
Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.
On the other hand, as someone who can code in certain domains (web, maps), I could definitely see myself vibe coding as a way to quickly create something in a domain where I have no expertise (eg, Unity).
We already had to beat "I made a spreadsheet", which continues to be pretty damn hard even for large teams of experienced engineers - ask your finance team sometime how many custom spreadsheets they use regularly.
A) Lots of useful apps aren't a great fit for a spreadsheet. AI seems to be opening many of those up the same way.
B) Lots of spreadsheets have bugs which cause then to give wildly inaccurate results, which are relied on to make crucial decisions. AI is also repeating this part of the pattern.
If you need it to work correctly all the time, there's still no substitute for expertise - but looking at the state of computing, clearly many people are willing to use things that have obvious, serious bugs.
The problem is management and short-term stock-holder interest. If some spreadsheet cowboy convinces some C-level suit that this is the way to go, and it works now, not in 6 months time, IT and development will be made to bear the brunt. Same with AI. The most ardent supporters of its use seem to be the higher-ups, $$$ in their eyes. Convinced of their superior decision skills, they can wreck the place, or in their view, rightsize the help desk/IT/dev departments. Then they get a bonus for delivering cost reductions, and move to another job before being held accountable.
I've already seen (second hand, through my wife) a complete cycle of this:
- LLMs make writers (for the kind of formulaic crap we ghost-write) unnecessary. We're firing 75% of our writing + editing staff, mostly the writers. Editors will now use LLMs to do the whole thing.
- What do you mean even our best editor and best LLM-user is still taking 90% as long as the total writing + editing process before, and their parallel-work capabilities are down, so throughput is down to a trickle and also every remaining worker is pissed off about how intensely frustrating working with LLMs is so the whole team's grumbling about leaving? Of fuck, we committed (without asking you, naturally, and ignoring a ton of explicit warnings that this was a growing problem) to deadlines!
- Hires back nearly all the writers as contractors
Exactly! This is what I always say when people claim "AI won't replace jobs because jobs still need expertise !" While the cause statement is absolutely true, the people with the power/money don't believe it to be true (or, in some cases, don't care if it's true) and can get a quick win for the shareholders.
I wonder if there's gonna be a big reckoning of these "AI-first" companies suddenly people to fix their shitty vibe coded stuff. Ooh, new job title: AI fixer, minimum salary, $1m/yr, with RSU.
We have an actual department that just supports spreadsheets and power bi reports for the c suite. That's all the poor bastards do.
Maybe I don't know enough about spreadsheets but two dimensions isn't enough for most applications. Maybe pivot tables? They are too hard to figure out. Need something like "SQLSheet" that takes a more complex data structure and presents viewing and editing it in a natural way with drill down and joins etc. AI should be able to help you design the DB and then create a tool to interact with it.
The people using these sheets have no idea what you’re talking about. They use multiple sheets to layer the dimensions and understand pivot tables perfectly.
Are people who understand relational databases and people who understand pivot tables disjoint sets?
I can look at someone’s finished pivot table and reproduce it from the data through other means, but any explanation of what a pivot table actually is and does reads like pure gibberish to me.
The pivot tables don't require people to understand data normalization and software maintenance good practices. Outside of that, yeah, not really relational databases because those focus on having more than one table, but they do understand relations.
It is certainly much easier to shown than to tell about pivot tables. I tried to think of a good form of words to explain them but couldn't.
Probably. A pivot table is basically a way to turn on one of the dimensions of the sheet to make sense of the data. Like "show me all invoices, grouped by date and sum each group". It is effectively a query, in a way that makes sense for people working in spreadsheets.
Check out the full version of Towards Scalable Dataframe Systems from VLDB 2020 [0]. They propose an algebra for dataframes and section 4.4's example succinctly describes the pivot operator.
Microsoft Access?
If someone is going to invest the time in learning how to design a database and how to build a UI then they might as well do so on something more modern.
In theory, I'm a fan of it. I think getting a working mock-up as a demonstration of an idea is far better than building something from a few napkin sketches and then iterating while we close in on the original vision.
As for my own work, I just spent a couple hours this afternoon in a back and forth discussion with claude code, asking it to mock up a UI for me before "we" start building it tomorrow. It was just a mock-up, so I didn't require precision, but I was impressed with some tidbits that came along for the ride.
Some things it did without me asking
* Mock data for the lists and pages in json format, so I could easily add records to it for different scenarios
* Working navigation between pages, including modals
* Working progress bars and timers
* Working list sorts and filters
* Toasts for functionality that was beyond the scope of the mock-up ("sending email to author of post" or "banning user")
* Not-half-bad animations and transitions between pages, screens, modals, etc
* A responsive layout that worked better than expected on mobile and desktop
* Some ideas I hadn't considered, that we then expanded upon
I would have mocked this up for a client, but not for myself. It's quite nice to have a working html / javascript / css mockup to play with while I flesh out my own ideas - with a benefit that I actually fully understand the output and can tweak it myself as needed.
> It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.
It existed with adobe flash. As much as programmers hated flash, it allowed artists with little technical skills to create awesome mini games.
Exactly, I don't think people vibe coding flash games is much of a threat. There'll be plenty of work for actual game devs in the future. Nobody is going to be vibe coding the next Final Fantasy or GTA
>Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.
Hmm, do we have statistics about that? Like, did the profession collapsed?
I wouldn't equal the photo I do (not much) with anything close to a pro. Not even to a good amateur level actually. But that's just me. :D
The "nature of the profession" might already be quite diverse, but that's an interesting remark.
The upside is clear - vibe coding to test the market, get an MVP defined etc. The downside is that sometimes non-technical business owners decide that something is good enough to launch with non-existent security guardrails, and then a bunch of unsuspecting people get their private data stolen (like happened recently with that dating app).
I know this is not the case here and the game is very cool, I was primarily replying to the comment about the new trend.
The number of monsters on the screen doesn't seem to affect playing speed for me, but when the wall of fire appears it slows down the game very noticeably. (Using Firefox on desktop.)
You may not be able to code, but the fact that you identified the need for asset editor tooling ("lab") entirely on your own, and built and used it successfully tells me you'd probably make a great engineer.
You also invented a movement control method I have never seen before - please keep making games.
> I had ChatGPT build labs with sliders that I could adjust to decide how I want things to appear, instead of getting frustrated with the chatbot.
Your very own Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set[1].
(It is of course very common to do all sorts of game art using ad hoc parametric stuff like this, I just find the similarity amusing.)
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
This 100% occurred to me as I did it. I may not be a coder but I did read the Steve Jobs biography.
I actually haven’t :) But I did read the Macintosh stuff on folklore.org and I find it fascinating. (Read it several times, in fact, as it makes for very good procrastination...)
It reminds my of this scene from ST:TNG [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=22&v=VddS5IWxHd8&feature=you...]
I’m not impressed by ChatGPT writing the code for this game. The author has beyond average vision and taste. I’m excited to see what other creative little geniuses will be able to do when these tools get better and cheaper. I think creatively we are living a moment comparable to the introduction of portable 35mm cameras in the 1920s.
This game could have been made in a number of other no-code/lo-code environments, from Shockwave in 1995 to Unity visual scripting today. LLMs may enable more open-ended game design than those tools, but this game is not proof of that.
Finally, a game that accurately simulates my daily productivity. I open it intending to play for 5 minutes and somehow 3 hours later I'm still there, having accomplished nothing useful, with a vague sense of dread and the feeling that demons are chasing me. The verisimilitude is uncanny.
If you did this at work, relax; it just means you've finally "made it" in your career!
I used ai to make a simple game for a hackathon:
you are an ai gathering training data
its a bit like warioware with an extremly annoying soundtrack
came 2nd! thanks claude
It's really cool ! How many games are there ?
(Also I was dissapointed that double-tapping the picture for the Instagram one didn't work..)
theres about 15-20 games
you can add your own!
I put it together quite quickly for @levelsio vibe coded games competition
https://x.com/levelsio/status/1915127796097290534
originally it had levels and bosses but The code got too messy. I'm thinking about coming back to it and adding some more games.
I don't use instagram or any social media actively so didn't know about double tap!
will add it to the todo list.
tptacek spotted
what does this mean?
(Someone emailed me about this). I assume it's a weird barb about a blog post I wrote about coding agents a couple months ago.
Would love an option to adjust the "mouse sensitivity", and flicking(is that the right term? I mean that the momentum from scrolling continues even if you lift your finger from the screen). Right now movement feels a mite heavy, I'm scrolling like three times as much as I'd find comfortable.
Aside from that, this might become my new favorite time waster of the week.
Is this inspired by Death by Scrolling, the upcoming video game by Ron Gilbert?
https://www.grumpygamer.com/deathbyscrolling5/
Even the fire effect coming after you looks similar.
Damn this hit me in a weird spot. The game looks fun, but the fact that you said "i cannot code" and managed to pull this off with sloppy ai is really scary.
I know this is just fun and games, but i cant even start to imagine what the code is like.
I'm not here to defend generative AI (in fact, I'd say do not use it unless you already know the language/framework well enough to clean up the output) but we have got to stop arguing from a place that assumes humans don't produce sloppy code in equally alarming volumes.
About half of my week is spend troubleshooting old legacy code for this or that industrial automation devices and PLCs, the latter being their own animal driven by ladder logic. Regardless if it's some firmware in C, some proprietary app pounded out in some ancient .NET version or just plane old PLC programming, the amount of times I have puzzled over what the heck the original programmer was thinking is mind blowing. Prior to moving into this position, I had no idea what the crufty greybeards meant when they were griping about spaghetti code. Now I do. Stepping back through someone else's work, often done with some kind of set-it-forget-it mindset because, for some reason, people create things and ignore that the environment will eventually change, is the biggest, dumbest headache. So dumb, that about a year ago, I start practicing things like writing firmware from scratch because just starting from zero turned out to be easier than trying to fix someone's old, convoluted mess.
Most humans code crap. Some humans code very, very well and write beautiful, eloquent software as a result. Congrats to those in that crowd, but understand they are the minority. So, when we started feeding a stochastic parrot some code to teach it to do our work for use, we fed it garbage. And what happens when garbage goes in?
> Most humans code crap.
My biggest frustration with AI coding tools is that bad engineers are no better at judging the quality of AI code than they are at writing code themselves. So, their output has shot through the roof without an improvement in quality.
The productivity of good engineers has gone up as well but good engineers tend to actually think about what their tools are doing, which slows them down. Bad engineers are now able to output more shit code than ever before.
I feel like I’m watching my company building a house of cards in real time.
Proof for there being still some pretty simple ideas to be explored. – Well done.
This reminds me of the old Mac shareware game BOOM, which is a (very well made) Bomberman clone with Doom assets. I would recommend anyone who likes Doom or Bomberman to try it!
The game Is genuinely great even tho I think there's something off with the slide sensitivity.
Also, this is the first time I'm genuinely impressed by some LLM coded output, bravo to both you and chatgpt.
This is awesome!
Finally camped by the health and was rewarded with...one health.
Kept hoping the +spread would shoot closer to down.
Cool, but I came across a headline for some reason about Charlie Kirk and wondered what the hell that was about, I left the game shortly after.
This is mentioned in the piece, it's a further play on the idea of 'Doomscrolling'
"I was pretty happy with the game and ready to share it. But then at the last minute I got another nagging idea in the back of my mind: What if it was somehow more like actual doomscrolling?
It would be easy to get an RSS Feed of headlines from a news site. Could I make them appear in the game as you scroll, in a way that felt integrated with the game?"
Because he was shot today, it was in the news, and the game pulls a live feed of news articles via RSS to simulate doom scrolling.
I crashed it by dying at the same time as getting a 100-kill power up (chrome, iOS)
Love to see that people are able to create games without technical barriers. Being able to bring your ideas to life is such a powerful thing and it's great that more people can experience that
Hi! I’m late to the conversation and maybe this will be buried too far to notice, but as the person who made this game I’ve really enjoyed reading all the comments and thought I’d address some of them. In no particular order:
* Yes the game is easier on taller screens where you can see more of the game at once. I considered making gameplay literally identical everywhere by scaling it or capping the size, but this way felt more in the spirit of real doomscrollable content, since web pages are taller on different devices.
* The game is not inspired by Ron Gilbert’s upcoming Death By Scrolling, which I only just learned about and am relieved to see is not the same concept. But I’m a Ron Gilbert fan and can’t wait to play it.
* Yes, you can cheat the Wall of Fire, as people noticed. It’s not constantly present. Once it’s a certain distance behind you (I think 20m), it’s not in memory anymore and won’t chase you. It only shows up again if you remain within the same 10m area (+/- 5m) for 7 seconds or longer. So if you move up and down enough, it won’t come.
* A few people have commented about the scrolling speed and momentum. I actually worked on this, it wasn’t up to the LLM to decide. I had the LLM make a config file with parameters I could tweak for top speed, friction, momentum, acceleration, deceleration, etc., and played with it until I was happy with it on my devices. But I did play on a borrowed device and it had a slightly different feel. So it may feel different on your device or perhaps you just would have preferred different settings. I don’t know if an experienced coder would have written it in a way that is a better experience across all devices to begin with, or if play testing would have helped me identify cross-device differences I could still fix with vibe coding.
* A little more behind-the-scenes because it seems like people here might enjoy more details: I set the sprite baseline for the first monster’s animation at the bottom so it would “bounce” properly, and this made it so the collision box wasn’t placed right because the code kept using the sprite bottom as the center of the collision box. The LLM had a really hard time understanding that the box should match the sprite and I spent a lot of time struggling with it. So for debugging purposes, I made it possible to reveal the collision boxes by typing the ! (exclamation point). I left that in and you’re welcome to toggle that if you feel like it. It also exposes the collision box for webs so I could determine how much they should overlap before getting caught in a web.
* Another debugging thing: I needed to be able to trigger a weapon upgrade manually so there’s a hotkey for that. It’s not too hard to find but shhh no cheating.
* Someone noted that this feels like “the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.” I was a professional photographer working in NYC during the commoditization of photography and I 100% relate to this. “Why should I pay you $800 for a photo that my nephew can take for $50?” was the sort of thing we heard a lot. Photography hasn’t recovered. I successfully pivoted to video.
* This isn’t my first vibe coded game or my first time on Hacker News. So if you found this interesting, you should sign up for my newsletter: https://ironicsans.ghost.io
Thanks everyone!
I just Doomscrolled 1878 meters and killed 3482 monsters. How far can you get?
Great game! Few impressions of the gameplay - Way easier on laptop compared to mobile; the monsters still spawn at the bottom of the viewport so you can camp at the top much further away on a laptop - The game almost gets easier the more powered up you get. To make it more challenging you could consider speeding up the lava at the top
Once I gave this sometime I actually enjoyed the concept quite a bit. I think it's a novel twist on the bullet hell genre, and I'm a sucker for single button/input style games. I'm playing on a mouse, specifically a Logitech G502 that I can "unlock" the screen wheel to be almost frictionless, which to me feels like the right meta for a game like this.
Couple constructive criticisms:
- Is there a pause button that I'm missing? If not, add one, I want to actually play this more but I need to be able to take breaks
- The beginning is too easy. I'm biased as I like difficult games that encourage mastery, but I found myself dying early on runs because I was getting impatient with how slow the early progression is
- I haven't played enough yet to know whether monsters eventually come from the top, but eventually they should, it would greatly increase the difficulty curve - Hitboxes feel a little meh, and don't seem to match the sprites
- If there's sound, it wasn't working for me, which leads to...
- Pump up the juice. You've got a great core loop, but you need the juice. One of my favorite game dev talks of all time would be perfect for you to watch and iterate with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U)
- Monster diversity. Again, maybe I didn't play long enough yet to get to newer monsters, but from what I can tell the only diversity is their looks, health, and approach angle. Monsters that are faster and incentivize different movement, or that shoot back at you, or blow up after shooting so you have to avoid, etc.
I'll stop there, don't want an absolute laundry list. Keep at it, you've got a unique foundation, it'd be a shame not to polish it up!
Maybe add a charge meter that can fire a pulse weapon with a press of the spacebar after so many seconds of play. Unlock it later on in the game or something, idk.
I played for about 300 monsters and it got boring.
I found a way to cheat. The fire which is meant to force you doom scroll actually disappears if you scroll down then back up. This means that you can just chill out in the “easy area” and get your powerups and kills. Scrolling down (doomscrolling) is not mandatory.
Yeah, a relentlessly advancing deadly wall of fire becomes much less scary without the "relentless" part...
Another way of decreasing the difficulty is to enlarge the "playfield". I actually did that by chance, because my browser window is usually only half of my 4K monitor, so it's taller than wide. Because the monsters always start off at the bottom, you have much more time to shoot them.
Kind of concerning what a non- programmer can do with vibe coding... On the other hand, it's somewhat reassuring that the game is clearly missing scroll inertia/momentum. I guess he didn't yet get the language model to do it for him.
The author is not just a regular vibecoder. He’s a very talented artist. Most people will be creating unengaging, boring and tasteless apps and games with AI.
But that's something coders have in common with vibe coders: most of them are bad artists.
That was a lot of fun, and far too addictive to play on a weekday!
I feel like you are forced to get the power upgrades at first to get past the larger roadblocks before the fire wall hits you, but maybe this is avoidable if you're fast enough.
Really nice. Cool mechanic. I wish it was a little bit harder, though. At 2000m, I just sort of got bored, because the weapon was so powered up that all of the enemies died instantly.
Great job, the little articles caught me off-guard at first, excellent little addition.
Lava is a nice touch. And the backscroll feels like a cheat code tbh
I understand the legal reasons for not including it, but Doom music and sfx would enhance this game so much.
Clever idea, this is why indie games are so fantastic. They explore ideas that no studio would touch, until...
This is a genius little game. Haven't had this much silly fun since Captain Comic days.
I'm honestly impressed. I've seen many early games where countless concepts were tried (with mixed results) and you've found something entirely new with extra points for it's extreme simplicity.
Am I the only one who finds in bad taste to use "Epstein victims demand release ..." in the game? Is rape and pedophilia already normalized and I didn't notice?
It pulls news headlines via RSS feed, so the developer didn't intentionally put that headline in the game.
Maybe the game should have a kind of "trigger warning" on its start screen, telling you that it incorporates current news. Not everyone will read the blog, and few people click the "about" button before trying a basic game.
The game is just pulling news headlines - specific text isn't being intentionally included.
It is a part of life, why shouldn’t it be in games? Does it cease existing if you don’t see it?
I read vibe coding and I click the back button. Genuine human effort is interesting, but if it's outsourced to Ai, anyone can just do the same
OMG this is a great game! Simple and addicting, congrats!
Great game! I like the share button copying to clipboards ha ha.
very cool. ik you built it with ai but do you have the code public ? Really want to check it out.
a good start! (reminds me of a simpler, bullet-hell variant of absolute legend "Doug Dug")
Strangely compelling. Nice idea
Pretty fun. I enjoyed.
Fun!
Cool!