Not only do you have to deal with playing two games of breakout at once, but the same mouse controls two paddles simultaneously, but at different scales.

The interesting challenge is when the two balls are briefly in sync but you can't hit them at once. You have to move the window paddle up so you hit its ball earlier, then go and get the tiny ball. Easier said than done though...

A desert traveller is searching for water. He sees, in the valley ahead, a shimmering blue expanse. Unfortunately, it’s a mirage. But fortunately, when he reaches the spot where there appeared to be water, there actually is water, hidden under a rock. Did the traveller know, as he stood on the hilltop hallucinating, that there was water ahead?

Here's a real world example :

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzWlxkbp0vT/

Imagine a video feedback loop version of gettier problem where the problem is resolved only at the Nth nested level.

Sort of like this short story : https://qntm.org/responsibility

I made a simple online playable game of it back then: http://mck-.github.io/T3/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5898506

It reminds me of a program my brother wrote in high school that would spawn invading spaceships (Java Triangles) onto your desktop and they would bonk your mouse around.

Meanwhile, I was in the corner of the lab playing Starcraft.

Linux/Chrome: Paddle doesn't move but the paddle popup does bounce the ball.

Only issue is the low resolution screen on my old Thinkpad makes it difficult to see the entire game area.

Super cool game! Plays great on higher res screens, just wanted to test on Linux.

Linux/Wayland/Chromium: chromium crashes as soon as I click "launch game" :))

Edit: also GNOME 45

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/scre...

Sounds nothing but reasonable to me.

  KDE 5.27.9
  Qt 5.15.11
  Wayland 1.22.0-1
  Firefox 120.0

Linux/Chrome on gnome with enabled wayland ozone.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pippinbarr.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pippinbarr.github.io

Does time go faster in the smaller one?

Also I have wobbly windows and that makes the game hard too.

It made me think that changing the window could be part of the game somehow. Perhaps as you drag it bigger the playing field of the smaller game increases in width, so that game becomes harder (and also you can't move the paddle as far because your new window is too big to drag).

Or maybe you should be able to capture the ball in the big window into the smaller window, and the size and position of the smaller window determines its entry point.

Super cool project, OP!

You sent me searching for it with your comment, and it's still around: https://gamesnostalgia.com/game/dx-ball

File size: 380k. I miss those days.

Blast from the past, the author had a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20126142

(It doesn't seem to allow 'steering' of the ball by varying where it hits the bat, though?)

Paddle doesn't move.

Firefox Version 120.0

This drastically changes the game in the sense that as a player, you can't decide precisely which bricks of the opponent you break (as opponents move their walls): you have some influence on which one of your bricks you break and you most fundamental goal is to make sure that the ball just bounces against your own paddle/wall to send it back and not lose a life.

And the more you touch the ball with your paddle, the more the paddle's size shrinks (because of all the broken bricks), which contributes to make the game harder for you and might give your adversary some chance to come back.

That's a terrific idea, even without the brickception (just a simple brick-wall-paddle).

This is very similar to Reflective Towers Of Interpreters: https://blog.sigplan.org/2021/08/12/reflective-towers-of-int...

https://youtu.be/C_J4dSAWqY4?si=BQN90pEFjOaGtOxj&t=1118

[1] https://git.askiiart.net/askiiart/dotfiles/src/branch/main/s...

However, I never tried implementing it.

Initially it doesn't open the pop-up. Once I allow it, it opens correctly in a new window, but the smaller window doesn't move with the mouse.

It's a copy of someone else doing exactly the same thing (2 layers of breakout played by moving window) but in C++ (which the author credits) both years before the following. Although the general concept of having games creatively use windows is probably much older. I assume it showed up now because of recent trend of people rediscovering that this concept works in (some) browsers and making various non breakout variations of it of it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413660

I wonder if this game could be used as a benchmark for alternating attention (switching between tasks.) People with disorders like ADHD and others that effect executive function are supposed to have difficulty with this. So it would be interesting to see if ones score increased off medication vs on medication. Or even if a healthy person saw an increase with stimulants.

Psychologists love games like this because it lets them study isolated aspects of cognition in a standardized way. It's honestly a cool project.

Two levels. ;-)

I liked to think that words had meaning.