Love it - I'm sure our old tube TV still has scratches from when I used to get too excited as a kid and pressed the NES zapper directly against the glass.

I'm also a big fan of re-purposing sprite sheets from old video games - years ago I wrote a little edutainment game called "Aladdin's Mathemagical Flying Carpet" to help teach my little brothers the multiplication tables.

https://specularrealms.com/alad

Any retro gamer will instantly recognize the assets.

“Abu, that’s taboo!”

Love it.

what a great game idea

dunno who wasn't happy with this, did they think i was being sarcastic?

i really wasn't.

it's great idea, and I'm thinking of making a 2d version where you 'collect' the right answers, etc.

This is great! Super nostalgia.

Also -- anyone who doesn't know how the original light guns worked, it's worth a read. This crowd will likely appreciate the solution.

It’s simple enough to explain in a short HN comment.

Essentially, when you fire the gun the screen briefly turns all black except for a small white square where the target was. If the gun barrel sensor detects this bright white light, it means you hit the target. This is also why you reportedly could aim at a light bulb and never miss.

> This is also why you reportedly could aim at a light bulb and never miss.

Except IIRC you couldn't because it displayed a fully black screen then a square, and detected a signal edge that must happen within those few frames, or some other implementation to that effect.

A lightbulb being constant would not work.

LCDs would work but they introduce latency that CRTs did not have, enough so that the check can fail. Even worse if game is emulated. Also I wonder about LCD backlight.

EDIT: confirmed by eykanal's link nearby.

Link: https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/how-does-the-duck-hunt... Super low-tech and amazing ingenuity in making something work within the limitations of the tech they had then.

Here is also a brief overview, how to use a "clone" lightgun without the filter to play on modern LCD TVs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCZ-Z-OZFUs

1. Awesome and well done!

2. But it doesn't have the classic "win" sound that I remember so fondly :(

3. Prepare to be destroyed by Nintendo

Great job, this is kid tested and approved. My 12yo son, who plays a lot of FPS games discovered how bad he is using the trackpad on my MacBook Pro. It was a lot of fun seeing him as frustrated at the laughing dog as I was in 1986 on my NES.

Nice! This made my day :) Thanks to you and your son for playing my game.

I'm hoping to publish a step by step tutorial soon on how to develop this in JavaScript for anyone interested in learning gamedev.

I usually post my tutorials on my YouTube channel here : https://youtube.com/@jslegenddev (Plenty of tutorials available already for people interested in JS gamedev)

I plan this time on also publishing a written version on my Substack available here : https://jslegenddev.substack.com/

It is amazing how much easier games like this (Missile Command comes to mind as well) are with a full-blown external mouse.

If you really want to up the challenge rating, see if you can find an old IBM Thinkpad and use the nub to control the targeting reticle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

nice!

kaplay is underrated as a game engine imho, especially for teaching. It's intuitive and quite simple, and the web playground has some assets built in so it's immediately ready to go.

I put my mouse against the screen but it didn't make me better at aiming in this version of the game unfortunately ;)

Thank you for letting us relive this moments of childhood!

The Score and Round text rendered strangely in Firefox for me, but worked great in Chrome.

That's strange, I developed the game using Firefox as my primary testing browser since it's the one I usually use.

Would you mind describing in more details how the text rendering looks like?

It may be that my privacy settings are just too high.

Here are some screen shots:

https://tacky.dev/others/title_screen.png

https://tacky.dev/others/round_start.png

It was amusing to realise the duck flight patterns use the same logic as the DVD logo.