Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
36 points - last Tuesday at 11:33 PM
Hi HN,
I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.
It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.
The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.
Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.
You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.
To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:
1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.
2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.
The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.
In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.
Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.
I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
Comments
Unfortunately, I (and likely many others on HN) am pretty sign-up adverse, and since this game seems like it should be perfectly playable 100% client-side, I think this is going to really hurt adoption.
It might improve the flow to first letting them play a challenge (does not have to be daily challenge, e.g., just the demo tetris-like game from the starting page) and then introduce the account sign up afterward.
One big annoyance with the power-ups is that the failure condition is checked before you can use them. It's particularly painful since they all replace the current piece, so they seem tailor-made to get rid of a nasty piece that would cause you to lose... but then they have to be used before you get to that piece that would cause you to lose!
Anyway, both times I played I got in the 40s without any power-ups used, then saw that the next piece would cause me to lose but none of the powers could save me. Probably the ideal fix is just to not trigger a loss while you still have powers?
Edit: never mind! Already done! https://hnarcade.com/games/games/linex
If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing piece generation? Is it random%7, drawing from a bag, or something else?
I'd love to be able to play by dragging. On mobile it would be really nice if I could draw the shapes with my finger