Show HN: 1D-Pong Game at 39C3
57 points - last Sunday at 8:23 PM
Building a 1D-Pong game is a bit of a rite of passage at the Chaos Communication Congress.
I was inspired by a version I saw at 38C3 and built my own interpretation for 39C3. Lots of people enjoyed playing it and even Elliot Williams featured it in his 39C3 Hackaday Podcast. And I can attest: it's truly fun because it's sooo simple at first sight - but wait until the speed increases... Not a bad work to fun created ratio for such a little project.
I used the opportunity to play around with Claude Code on my preexisting codebase to publish a nice-ish repo on GitHub. It worked great without any hitch or compile errors - impressive. What a nice way to test some capabilities.
Have fun with it an build your own version. And there are soooo many ideas that could be implemented. I am waiting for your feedback!
Will we end up with a league of networked 1D-Pong games? ;-)
oneeyedpigeon
today at 1:51 PM
Nice! I wrote a similar '1d' game a while back, as a sort of 'art project' / simplest game I could come up with:
https://bobbyjack.itch.io/1derlust
I had a few ideas about how to extend the concept into a proper game; might revisit one of these days.
rahimnathwani
today at 10:47 AM
That's cool.
The only 1D game I'd seen before was this one, which I saw at the Exploratorium (a science museum in San Francisco): https://www.wobblylabs.com/line-wobbler
Someone made an open source clone: https://github.com/Critters/TWANG
I gave that code to Claude and asked it to make a web based version I could play on my phone. It's not as fun as the version with an LED strip, but it's actually playable (which surprised me): https://tools.encona.com/twang
mghackerlady
today at 3:18 PM
It'd be nice to have a version with keyboard input, I unfortunately can not pick up and shake my CRT monitor
Oh, I've seen that 1D RPG! that was actually at the last chaos camp as well :)
Played this a lot at 39C3. Love the speed-up-the-further-back-you-hit mechanic.
Thanks for building, lot’s of fun.
JKCalhoun
today at 11:37 AM
This reminds me of early games on personal computers like the Altair that had a row of LEDs for output. Maybe the title of these was something like "Kill the Bit" or similar.
frumiousirc
today at 11:43 AM
Pedantically, this game is at least 2D due to including time. It presents more dimensions if we consider the different LED colors.
I'm now trying to contemplate what a truly 1D pong game would be. We can't escape time so we would have to remove positional and chromatic dimensions. That leaves us with a single blinking monochromatic LED.
Perhaps the game would resemble Richmond's flashing lights.
I remember a 1D roguelike someone made for a 24h competition, was surprisingly fun