by ironicsans | 2025-09-11 12:04:42+00:00
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!