Alien Runner

[Edit: OK, now I grasp your FULLSCREEN comment above. And I now see that Firefox has a "show only this frame" option that I could have been using.]

Oh boy. I'm not going to be experiencing any bad side effects after 10K anytime soon, at least not on my desktop. I finally downloaded the game and I like the downloaded version a lot. It fills the browser window. I assume itch.io constrains your format here.

The only thing I saw that I'd describe as a bug: In one game I had two birds so close together that the first bird covered the "equation" for the second. I didn't get a screenshot.

The only "data" I have at this point is the time it takes for the next bird to cross a 1920 pixel screen after I let the character die, right at the beginning of the game. That is ~23 seconds on the x86_64 desktop, and ~45 seconds for the odroid-xu4 Arm mini-PC. I didn't have a good way to time this - I used the stopwatch widget on my phone.

It seemed to me the mini-PC began to slow down even more around ~2000, but I don't have anything quantitative. Actually I kinda liked playing on the mini-PC; I can stay alive long enough to practice my 10-key skills. That's gonna be a long slow (and almost off-topic) process if it happens at all tho.

Later I'll try to provide crossing times for a bird at ~10k on the XU4. I can't make it that far on the desktop. I also have a Raspberry PI 2 somewhere that I might fire up.

(Even farther off topic: I wanted to check this earlier but the batteries in my second keyboard were dead, and it was such a PITA swapping the dongle back and forth between desktop and mini...)

Optimized performance to eliminate slowdown at high score levels (>= 10000).

Added difficulty levels - as your score increases, eventually there are more numbers in the equation, and eventually higher odds of multiplications.

Good job on the bird entry backgrounds. That wasn't at the top of my list of complaints/excuses but it was on the list. I like the translucent clouds.

I'm not good enough with the numeric keybad <-- (I'm gonna leave that). I have to sneak a peak at it now and then, and as soon as I do a bird always gets me.

New additions include backgrounds for the bird text (for when they pass over text headers, etc.), and a fix to the phantom double jump bug (this was due to the aerial input fields creating a "jump zone" above spike pits at time of completion, and the character hitting them during their jump).

Yeah, I had to ponder the bird -vs- ground input box for a moment.  I decided to allow simultaneous input. and once you get one of them CORRECT then it would clear the other answer box (because e.g. you solved 3x4 = 12 for the bird, but the next one on the ground is 1+2 and you don't want a 12 in that box still)

That created a bug of its own - if you solved e.g. 1x1=1 on the ground on "accident" because you were looking at the bird in the air with a "9 + 1 = (10)" solution, then after you inadvertently solved the ground equation, it reset the bird puzzle.  So you would press 0 to think you were entering a 10, but now the input had only a 0.  The solution right now is to preserve the work-in-progress answer as long as the current answer is correct (substring match).

I like the smithereens effect. Impressive indeed. Whew. I retract my request to make it harder as the score goes up. This is hard enough already! I can't say whether I like the new double jump code because I haven't made it that far yet.

I think there is gonna be an issue where the bird passes over a stationary answer box after you enter the 1st digit but before the final one(s). I guess you could say it is up to the player to see that situation coming and not start entering the stationary answer if you can't complete it before the bird gets there.

New version has birds that will drop rocks on you and destroy you in impressive fashion if you don't solve the puzzle.

Current bugs include hard-to-read equation for birds over "title texts" and also the ability for birds to spawn overlapping, also making the equation hard / impossible to read.  There's also some sort of bug where the double jump triggers unexpectedly, but it's so far harmless.

Added a boost to the double jump, increases speed for a moment to make the jumps more forgiving.  Also added a waypoint above the currently "active" ground puzzle.  (Icon does not appear properly if all puzzles are solved and next level component hasn't been autogenerated yet.)

LG V520 8" TABLET (ANDROID 7) with wired keyboard: Everything works fine, but it runs slow like the Odroid mini-PC.Dunno what processor the V520 has but it is some flavor of Arm 64 bit, like the Odroid. Chrome  browser - dunno how to check version.

Hmm. OK I'm back on my desktop x86-64 with Firefox 74 on Fedora 31, and it runs a lot faster than on the Odroid Armhf64 mini-PC. Subjectively it is about twice as fast. Fedora has a screencast recorder built in; I was able to capture 30 seconds of that. I'll have to see what is available for capture or debug on Arm/Ubuntu.

[Edit] I think that was a waste of time - I need to learn a lot before I can do useful screen capture. But I'll post what I captured. I'll post links first then experiment with that little video icon in a separate post.

alien-x86_64.mp4 I suspect the main problem with this is that the screen capture built in to Fedora probably defaults to a low frame rate. The speed of the video seems similar to the real thing, but the video is more jerky, like it is missing frames.

alien-arm.mp4 I installed something called simplescreenrecorder. I said the Odroid was already slower than the x86 box. When I started the recorder, the browser frame rate dropped to ~3 fps. Underwater molasses.  The speed shown in the video is pretty much like what I saw on the screen during the recording. But when I turn the recorder off it is a lot faster than that. So, more research required for sure.

Yeah, I'm impressed with this one. I used backspace several times, and I entered a # whilst holding down the space key at least once - both of those work fine. I like the posture changes of the character while "he" is in the air.

I practiced enough now that I'm thinking you could tune it by making it harder as the score goes up.  Tricky process though. You don't want to speed up a browser game too much, especially when the browser might be running on an older Raspberry Pi.

OK - This is pretty good now! I got something like 3577 (lost the screen when I logged in to comment) before hitting the space bar too soon on a double jump. I'm running Chromium 80 - Ubuntu 18.04lts - arm64hf - (Odroid XU4) and it seems pretty smooth. I'll go back and check Firefox & win10 shortly.

Kind of surprising / embarrassing how easy it is to screw up. My most common error is mistaking + for x or vice versa, but sometimes I just hit the wrong key, or subtract wrong!

I changed the input fields to READONLY to fix the double-digit bug.  (That was annoying, didn't happen locally on chrome)  I also added a reminder to double jump on the first pit where it's required.

So then I was hitting enter after each #. That also seems to cause the double entry. Once I stopped clicking and hitting enter I've not seen the double entry bug.

I'm still getting these ?bugs? where the character jumps, but only makes it halfway across the pit. Always seems to happen when the pit is ~320 pixels.  Maybe that is per design and I have to enter the answer earlier as the game goes on or something... [Edit] Got one where the pit was more like 255 pixels. Then I got one where I'd entered the answer for the next pit before he jumped but he still didn't clear the previous pit. Dunno if you have a log but the score was 1095 and it was about 7:50 CDT, or maybe 02:50 GMT.

I'm getting the double-entry bug almost all the time with Firefox 74 on Fedora 31 x86-74. Hitting R, reloading the page, or re-starting firefox don't fix it. About 1/3 of the time the first box is OK. I don't think I've seen the second box OK yet. [Edit} Just had one where the first 3 boxes were OK. (I was too slow on the third but entered it posthumously. The 4th had double chars.)

OK OK. I was clicking in each box. (Didn't read the instructions)  This last time I swear I entered the correct value for the [4th or 5th] pit before the jump but still fell in. I'll report if I can duplicate.