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Show HN: Neil the Seal Game
Neil the seal now has a game to destroy Battery Point.
- finecode 3mo agoFun game! One quick piece of UX feedback: when adjusting the direction, the entire screen rotates along with it, which makes me feel a bit dizzy. It might be helpful to have an option to lock the screen orientation or smooth out the rotation. Great work overall!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoThank you, hopefully the new changes make it better.
- HanClinto 3mo agoThis is pretty hilarious. :D Feels like a combination of Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator. Vibe-coded? It's pretty impressive.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI have been occasionally building indie games since the 90's, so a bit of experience mixed with AI coding Assistant. Some things AI really struggled on, others it blitz.
- davewasthere 3mo agoI can't blow up the servo, even though I've totally wrecked it.
- davewasthere 3mo agonvm. One little pole did the trick
- dalemhurley 3mo agoyeah, quite a few people have made the same comment. I should normalise the damage across the different elements so a single element does stop it from being destroyed.
- dalemhurley 3mo agofixed it to be a much better experience.
- Retr0id 3mo agoI love the voice lines
- Retr0id 3mo agoI got stuck on the "push a car into a pool" quest, even with the car directly on top of a pool it didn't go in. The car-pushing physics seem buggy, the rotation direction seems opposite to what it should be.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoyes agree. pools need to be bigger and cars need to be easier to push.
- dalemhurley 3mo agofixed now
- dalemhurley 3mo agoyeah, me too, lots of laughs.
- chao- 3mo agoSound isn't working in Firefox on Linux, but otherwise very fun. The only thing it's missing are Neil's favorite traffic cones ;) Also glad that Neil is getting the protection he needs (and the public as well) despite the media attention.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoYes I need to add the cones.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoCones have been added. Sound improvements implemented.
- BSTRhino 3mo agohaha this is cool :) What made you choose to code this as a webgame? In either case, good idea much easier to share
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI wanted to create a proof of concept and used three.js a few years ago, Codex made the POC much easier and faster to build.
- jumploops 3mo agoMy preschooler loves the Untitled Goose Game, please vibe-port this to the Switch (:
- dalemhurley 3mo agoYes - my kids love that game too, and I should.
- mrspacejam 3mo agoBrilliant, I love Neil, great idea to immortalize him.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoThank you,
- Jordan-117 3mo agoCute! But the car challenges in Tier 8 feel undoable -- they're a bear to "steer" and can't seem to go more than a short distance before bursting into flames.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI am thinking of changing that cars only explode on slams, so it is easier to nudge on mobile. Desktop is much easier.
- Jordan-117 3mo agoI played on desktop and it seemed pretty impossible tbh. They veer around unpredictably when bumped, and explode long before you can plausibly bump them into a pool. Limiting that to slams would definitely help though!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoDone
- rladd 3mo agoI nudged a car exactly into the pool and got no credit for it. It had exploded already though, so perhaps that was the problem?
- dalemhurley 3mo agofixed, must be pre-exploded, made it harder to explode a car.
- dalemhurley 3mo agofixed
- infinitebit 3mo agoi love this. i don’t understand why web games like this aren’t more prevalent
- Benjamin_Dobell 3mo agoThey are. There's a LOT of web games on itch.io. It's just the typical challenge with over saturated markets: publicity.
- purple-leafy 3mo agoThey are incredibly hard to market, I built a web game and it’s so hard to get traction lol And it’s quite a bit more polished than most web games. Too complex though so I’m fixing that.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoCompetition. Marketing. Expectations. In the 1990's and early 2000's I loved building web and flash games, people had lower expectations, getting notice was easy (StumbleUpon etc) and there wasn't a lot other choices.
- purple-leafy 3mo agoCute but your volume and camera buttons don’t work at all
- dalemhurley 3mo agowas that on desktop or mobile?
- purple-leafy 3mo agoMobile iPhone 15, also the action button is really slow to react
- dalemhurley 3mo agothank you, hopefully it is fixed now.
- ymolodtsov 3mo agoNeil broke them already damnit
- dalemhurley 3mo agoGood on ya Neil.
- protocolture 3mo agoCombines my 2 favourite things, cutely annoying animals, and destroying tasmania.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoLOL too true!
- jackvalentine 3mo agoCars are driving on the wrong side of the road - presumably in terror of His Neilness!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoCompletely correct! It was late, I even checked with my wife, she told me the left. Darn, I went the wrong way. Will fix it.
- jackvalentine 3mo agoNow driving on the correct side of the road, but wrong side of the roundabout! Neil’s reign of terror knows no limits.
- crowd51 3mo agoLol definitely a cute game. Good job
- dalemhurley 3mo agoThank you, I hope it made you smile.
- byhemechi 3mo agoi regret to inform you that we drive on the left in australia
- pelagic_sky 3mo agoI regret to inform you but this inst Australia it’s Tasmania. /s
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI should add mushrooms!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoadded
- dalemhurley 3mo agoFixed. Even worse is I am Australian, I spent a lot of time and concentrating on the left, discussed it with my wife and kids, yet somehow I still got it wrong.
- worthless-trash 3mo agoMissing bollards.
- E-Machine 3mo agoGreat work! I had some rendering issues with some part of the houses' roofs not showing
- dalemhurley 3mo agothank you, that has been fixed.
- jezzamon 3mo agoI can tell this is at least partially vibe coded... Out of curiosity, how much did you use AI for this?
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI have been building games since the late 90's, this is the first one I used AI Assisted coding, I wouldn't call it vibe coded as I am in control of the code, the implementation, the decisions, and approval. I am using Codex GPT-5.5 $20p/m.
- latexr 3mo agoI wanted to like it but found it immediately frustrating on mobile: * The joystick is too sensitive, so it’s hard to keep a straight line, wobbling everywhere instead. The camera makes it worse. I felt that if I kept going I might get motion sickness. * Despite moving both cars out of the way and getting through, it always marked just one. Took me three resets and had to move Neil back to properly push them and get that done. * I have played other browser 3D games on mobile but this was the fastest my phone has ever heat up. I didn’t even know it could become this hot this fast, to the point it’s uncomfortable to hold.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoJoystick has been improved, I just dampened it down a little. I will look at the cars, I deliberately added the back and front sensitivity in an early version, it is okay on desktop horrible on mobile. Battery improvements implemented dropping the load by 90% with a minor change :)
- benj111 3mo agoWell I was deemed to have pushed 1 car. Pushing them slamming 5 more didn't get me past the first level.
- MarcScott 3mo agoYou inspired me to make one for kids to create in Scratch https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/neil-the-seal/0 https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/neil-the-seal/0
- rickydroll 3mo agoOn my desktop, On Firefox, I just got a uniform blue screen. On Chrome, I could turn left or right, but that was all. The W, S, and C keys didn't work.
- doodpants 3mo agoI think I saw Jesus, because a guy ran right across the surface of a swimming pool.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoyeah the NPCs need a bit more attention.
- YPCrumble 3mo agoThis is great! Whats the tech stack? I started thumping cars but then got into an infinite spiral I couldn’t get out of.
- dalemhurley 3mo agothree.js and Vite, very basic, I set out originally to make a game where Neil knocks over cones and grew it from there. If I was to start again I would use a game engine as it has scaled further than I intended. What do you mean by "infinite spiral"?
- robbiejs 3mo agoCool game! Reminds me of the untitled Goose Game, bullying citizens, is that a genre? It should definitely be a genre.
- efilife 3mo agoGoat simulator as well
- dalemhurley 3mo agoGoat Simulator is such good game and a lot more intense, I want Neil The Seal to be more chilled.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoUntitled Goose Game is an inspiration, UGG is such a beautiful game with such amazing attention to detail.
- adecoster 3mo agofunny one!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoThank you
- ninju 3mo agoFor those who don't know Neil.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_the_Seal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_the_Seal
- UrMomsRobotLovr 3mo agoThis is great. I don't know how to get chain reaction but I have already spent a decent amount of my work say knocking off achievements....
- UrMomsRobotLovr 3mo agoGot it. Need more achievements please haha. Thanks for this!
- dalemhurley 3mo agoAbsolutely, I honestly thought it would be my kids and a few people into indie would like it, Cloudflare says there has been over 50k unique visitors which is pretty amazing, and a good sign that it could be more.
- dalemhurley 3mo agopush a burning car next to another car.
- retentionissue 3mo agoLoving the Cleveland Brown reference (if that's the intention) of people falling out of knocked down houses in their bath tubs.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI didn't know the reference, I wanted to add funny elements to destroying the houses.
- retentionissue 3mo agoWell it's funny nonetheless and a nice little homage to Family Guy. Also, how does the car dunking function? I've dropped two cars into pools now whilst on fire and still no achievement :(
- FantasyLabai 3mo agoCool game! Love free web games.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoMe too
- sheldon7337 3mo agoNot what i expected, but kind of cute.
- dalemhurley 3mo agowhat did you expect?
- alvaro_l_torres 3mo agolove it
- SCPlayz7000 3mo agoLovely little game! I also appreciate the meme references.
- dalemhurley 3mo agoI wanted to have lots of laughs and Tasmanian references
- SCPlayz7000 3mo agoIn the game's beginning, the water doesnt render very well for me. Perhaps it's because I have a lower-end device.
- SCPlayz7000 3mo agoIs there a way to disable shadows?