Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence
isabisabel.comNumber Gacha is a half-parody, half-real gacha game where you roll, unwrap, and battle numbers. Play on Desktop for the best experience!
Number Gacha is a half-parody, half-real gacha game where you roll, unwrap, and battle numbers. Play on Desktop for the best experience!
Fun game overall, took a little over 2 hours to beat. Some notes: - I found the decade theming of the packs a nice touch. - I'm mildly curious as to the maximum difficulty of the math problems. - I did find the combat a little frustrating as the levels increased, I found that I had to basically ignore the block button if it was on cooldown at level 10 because the time between attacks is shorter than the cooldown, and I was definitely reaching the limit of my reaction times there. - I recognised most of the movie quotes but some did elude me.
On the topic of incremental game gacha parodies, I couldn't help but think of the recent game One Trillion Free Draws (https://duducat.moe/gacha/), the premise of which is that you need to use your draws to get upgrades to use up your 1 trillion free draws faster. I've come across a few others in my time but I don't quite recall the others.
Awesome game! I guess that makes the first (and probably the last) game I've played in that genre. Completed the collection in about 2 hours. Would like to know how many math problems (microtransactions) I had to do and how much resources I spent on rolls/packs/lost battles. The battle system is frustrating and I don't know if that's by design or not. Being able to block and heal with hotkeys would make it significantly easier, but there's still RNG. Loved the visuals, the sound effects, the quotes, and the general look and feel.
This is actually a very well-polished game and I think you've definitely got that core gacha distillation down pat!
I love that you can solve math problems to unlock more rolls and that you can buy packs and then the "slicing" of the packs is very satisfying too.
Well I beat the game on my phone then moved to my laptop to write some JS to see what I could automate. I know this is child's play for most of the people here (and especially with LLMs but I did it all by hand):
- Used hnfong's script [0] to make it easier to block
- Wrote a script to auto-heal and auto-divide (might need to be smarter about only auto-healing when hearts get low as to not use up all your hearts on healing when you need some for dividing)
- Wrote a script to power-level my cards (just rolling and occasionally solving the math, all automated)
- Wrote some code to slice open packs but never got around to writing code to click on the packs (I just did that manually)
I got up to level 31 in the fighting and leveled all my cards to 10. I'm trying not to fall into the rabbit hole of "Can I write some JS to level _and_ fight from 0 with no interaction from me?" - I mean I know it's possible, just would take some more time. I never wrote an auto-blocking code but I'm sure that would be possible, probably just need to watch for classes on the boss to indicate which direction it's attacking.
I greatly enjoyed the game in "manual" mode and in my automated mode. I love things like this (and Universal Paperclips, and Kitten's Game, etc).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191366
If the battle has numeric controls for blocking and other actions (assigned to 1,2,3...) the game would be more fun to try and optimize.
Exactly, clicking on the buttons is so slow. I want to be able to use keyboard keys.
It would be too easy for the geeky audience then :)
That being said, I'm so plugging my proper gaming mouse (that's normally used on my gaming desktop as the elder gods intended) into my laptop to do battle as soon as i get home...
document.addEventListener('keydown', (event) => {
});
This works better if you change "block-button" to "attack-button", because you need to attack far more than block.
Once you get past the first level you're never using the attack action
I don't get it, aren't you supposed to attack to get the enemy HP down? How else are you supposed to win?
A spoiler, but higher level numbers gain auto attack.
This script doesn't work for me, and mouse-based battle makes me want to throw the entire computer out the window.
Love this! I wanna make parody games of all the game genres I don't like now, just to tease.
This game is inspiring. And reinforces my previous view that gacha is a silly genre.
Yet somehow addictive. What a let down it was when I finally managed to unlock the best number, 69, and it was just another number like the rest of them, because what else would it be?
There are layers to this parody. Love it!
TBF gacha is best described not as a genre, but rather as a dark mechanic designed to promote a psychologically exploitative stimulus/reward system as a revenue increasing measure.
In much the same way as Arcade Games are designed to counter 1-credit completion, or how console games later augmented playtime to surpass a standard weekend rental window, Gacha is something that compromises genres rather than defines one.
This is very well done. Where are the microtransactions? You could be rich beyond your wildest dreams, dear author, if only you let me buy gems.
Cmon, you heard the xyzzy, let us gamble on sexy numbers you coward /j
This is a fascinatingly minimalist project that really strips back the gacha genre to its bare essentials. I found myself surprisingly invested in trying to collect all numbers, which really highlights how powerful that core collection loop can be even without flashy graphics. The 'Roll' mechanic feels very snappy, and I appreciate the clean, distraction-free UI you've built here. It's a great interactive way to explore the psychology of probability and collection.
Reminds me of NumberWang from Mitchell and Webb’s skits.
https://youtu.be/0obMRztklqU?si=CA5NWDE6FVSSM5Ih
Very funny. What is this a parody of?
Perhaps it's a riff off of Mornington Crescent which is another British sketch comedy show nonsense game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
And let's not forget the OG Progress Quest! [1]
[1] https://progressquest.com/play/
Frank Lantz's Universal Paperclips is the absolute pinnacle of taking game mechanics to a logical extreme. Engaging to the point of existentialist crisis - anyone who describes themselves as a gamer owes it to themselves to complete a playthrough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
It's not a gacha essence unless there are numbers with increasingly sexy designs.
Stupid, sexy integers
Oh you just didn't unlock 69 yet ;)
personally disappointed that it wasn't a legendary alongside 42
Most of us nerds only get to 2138008 ;)
5318008 ftfy ;)
Alas, the only ones I'll see are my own (who am I kidding I'm flat as fuck)
I love the sound design, and the dithered look is also great. Feels more polished than many "real" games.
Where can one find good research on the human psychology around these patterns? They're fascinating (ideally more towards gaming, not the casino side of it though I understand the crossing between both)
Not exactly on the "casino" nose, but "100 things every designer should know about humans" by Weinschenk has a lot of these principles outlined (backed up with academic references).
You might also really enjoy the work of Rory Sutherland - listen to one of his shorts on tiktok/YouTube.
Sutherland is seductive, but essentially just a Marketing Executive with after-dinner speaking skills. For something a bit more robust, I'd recommend the consumer culture exposition in Adam Curtis''The Century of the Self'; particularly the segment where Edward Bernays used psychoanalysis to market cigarettes to women as feminist "torches of freedom".
Curtis' summary at the conclusion of the series works just as well as a chilling indictment of Gacha Gaming and the self-imposed Skinnerbox of the microtransaction era - "Although we feel we are free, in reality, we - like the politicians - have become the slaves of our own desires."
OP probably made this as a joke on Gacha but all the comments are unironically enjoying it(including me, I got a legendary 3rd on my 2nd roll)
This is so silly, but I’m really enjoying it lol. If you wanted to add some extra juice, haptic feedback on the rolls would be super cool!
OP, it would be fun to have a letterboxd / imdb list of all of the movies the quotes are from
unless i just got incredibly lucky and all of the numbers I rolled were movie related and other numbers have quotes from other places
You can't just have that. It won't feel good unless you unlock it with honest gacha!
Very fun! There seems to be an exception when using the 10-roll function that might need some attention.
Those lines of code are:
Confirming the same error on my side.
This is the only (very small) blemish on an otherwise fantastic game.
I know this game is a satirical sendup of gacha, but in the same way that Universal Paperclips subverted the clicker game genre and made something fantastic, I find this stripped-down gacha utterly charming. Thank you to the dev!
Thank you!!! Fixed.
Completed the collection in 4h 11m here :)
Good job OP!
I think the Sunset Boulevard quote is used twice: for 32 and 40.
In a similar vein is https://rngdle.com/ which takes daily games where you post your scores to social media to gloat to its logical conclusion
>Play on Desktop for the best experience
on level 10 this statement starts to feel truly evil, wish i could just use a touchscreen instead
Do people like "gacha"? I thought people played games for the game experience, story, etc, and the gacha is just the monetization mechanic. It's like making a big deal out of paying $20 bucks a month, or buying loads of DLCs for example.
I think some people do like the collection mechanics. And some games require specific team comps in order to beat the harder content.
idk i just like to play stuff like this where there is a random chance to get something rare
> to get something rare
It's only rare cos they programmed the drop rate. Might as well sit rolling a dice and trying to guess the numbers.
Makes you wonder why they never added any rng into chess, ya know, to keep the player base "engaged"
> Makes you wonder why they never added any rng into chess, ya know, to keep the player base "engaged"
arguably this is why Chess960 was created
Dang, didn't realise that had been done. i did mean like you start with pawns and have to acquire the better pieces like rooks and bishops etc, or you can buy chess credits and spend them on two queens at once or sommething
Then that's just a video game might as well as play a video game why limit yourself to still confined to the rules of chess.
And that video game is called Gambonanza [1]
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/
Do people like slot machines at casinos?
At least money falls out of a slot machine... This is just rolling a dice and seeing what number you get. Seriously, that's all it was for me... where are the battles people spoke about?
You have to play for longer.
You'd be surprised. In the mobile app stores, there are slot machine simulator games that are licensed reproductions of popular physical slot machines but don't pay out any actual money. They play all the visuals and sound effects of a win that the physical machine would if the player spins a winning combination and award virtual currency for more spins. Despite this, they rake in absurd revenue from people spending real currency to play beyond the daily free allotment of spins.
I've seen people stop wanting to play a game after they removed gacha mechanics for their monetization in favor of just a skin shop. There are legitimate addicts.
> gacha mechanics
*gambling. It's been around centuries, nothing new
Sometimes it's useful to create more specific terminology. When i say gacha, people who know what gacha games are know that I'm not talking about plain lootboxes, or slot machines, or blackjack, or dice games.
I can only speak for the 2 gacha games I'm familiar with (genshin impact and love and deepspace, neither of which I play but know people who do)
In genshins case, that's an alright game aside from the gacha mechanics. People like it because of the cast of characters that can only be unlocked via gambling for them. Everyone has a favorite and sees cool fanart online and then wants to have them.
Love and deepspace on the other hand, is pretty much propped up on sex appeal. Women will spend embarrassing amounts of money for media that prioritises their desires over what men think they want. I should know, I am one (despite not having played love and deepspace because of the gacha mechanics, I do like otome games)
Some suggestions and thoughts:
Could use a little more color. Countdowns (like the ones for packs and events about to expire) should be red and bold when they get close to 0
Use different colors for each type of currency.
Locked battle levels should still show what the prizes will be to encourage players to unlock them early.
I've accidentally purchased packs I was trying to trash. Probably a good idea to keep that though!
Prices for packs, early refreshes/unlocks should be based on the amount of currency you currently have. Charge people more if they're hording wealth. They can afford it and you'll profit when they're hurting for currency.
The price for early refreshes/unlocks should gradually increase over time at first if they are affordable to the player to make them feel like it's costing them to wait to spend their currency and then the cost can gradually start to decrease after a certain point. This encourages players to spend fast, and can cause them to end up spending more if they strategically wait unless they are willing to wait for the entire cool down.
Having costs that are constantly fluctuating are good for getting people to play higher prices too
If two or more packs in the shop are waiting on timers and a copycat pack comes up lower the odds of the other waiting packs being good ones unless the player can't afford them. Increase the odds of good packs appearing in the shop when the player can't afford them so that they spend more money (or in this case, work harder) to get the currency they need.
Right now my maim strategy for battles was to just pump high numbers. Detect this and lower the odds of 80s/90s pack and the number of copycats when 90s packs (or anything that looks like it's being being pumped) were the last packs used.
Events should be less frequent if the player has rolls available.
Timers should be longer in general.
If you use progress bars instead of telling the player the exact number of seconds before something becomes available/unavailable you can mess with that. Slowing things down a little or speeding them up when its to your advantage. For example when you detect that player is away or too idle.
There once was an rpg that had you move boxes around and fight random box encounters, and the battles were likewise just deducting each other's hp in turn with a rng. There was no dialogue I can recall. Basically similar spirit but I remember playing it in the mid 2000s.
I might be misremembering but your characters also had "spells," a menu for attacks but each attack was a random string of characters.
this is great, did you use some kind of framework to make the same?
game*
Is the ~20k opponent at level 10 much faster than others at attacking? 11-14 have not been nearly as difficult.
Having never played gacha games but getting a good laugh out of this, is this really a thing people play? How different is the real gameplay?
I think the idea is that many games in essence boil down to this. Gamified random number generators.
It's really well done, and hilarious.
Generally speaking I think the allure of modern-day gachas is providing a near-premier gaming experience (like paid RPGs, open-world games, etc.) while being free-to-play, at the cost of slowly encouraging you to spend a lot of time and/or money to get better characters in order to actually keep up with the end-game content and/or PvP side of the game.
If you commit to playing the gacha for an extended period of time, the system of:
- daily rewards that encourages you to play for a couple minutes each day to get enough currency to get good characters from the gacha
- newer characters being better than older ones (in visual design appeal and/or power-level)
- harder end-game content requiring better rosters of characters (or more grind)
- sales on the premium currency used to pull
- the ol' sunk-cost fallacy
all combine to encourage players to spend money over time
In this regard, the game in the post obviously does not have the scope of a game that actually costs money, and doesn't have the goal of getting you to spend money, but it does cover the grind and gacha part of pulling for different rarity characters and such.
No, this is nothing like a real gacha game at all. Gacha games have a wide variety of mechanics, and can have significant depth to them. Trading card games were the original gacha games, and those have entire competitive scenes with tournaments, etc. (Magic the Gathering, Yugioh, Pokemon TCG). Digital gacha games are similar. In a real gacha game you aren't rolling for a static number, you're rolling for a package of numbers and modifiers and mechanics that feed into a complicated combat system, and there's tons of strategizing around how you combine different packages of numbers together in deckbuilding/teambuilding, plus the decision-making in the battles themselves.
Gacha is really just a monetization approach. The mechanics that accompany it are the real draw, and you can have card games, RPGs, tactics games, action games, etc.
You have all that with Gacha pulls and battle system.
The battle system is too rudimentary to capture the essence of gacha. Insofar as gacha lends itself to gameplay mechanics and not just monetization, deck/teambuilding is absolutely integral. Obviously, the game is a parody, but even as a parody I think it does a poor job of capturing that aspect of building and experimenting with your deck/team. Which is fine, not a criticism of a silly little app, but the person I was responding to asked if this is what real gacha games play like and why people play them and I do not believe this is sufficiently representative.
In fact, I would describe this as an idle game, not a gacha game. In other words, a gacha-themed Cookie Clicker reskin. The emphasis is on the gacha, but in a real gacha game, rolling gacha occupies <1% of the playtime, and this doesn't adequately capture how the gacha model intersects with real gameplay mechanics.
> The battle system is too rudimentary to capture the essence of gacha
Gacha is not related to battle systems at all. wordpad was referencing the random awards from the battle system as another funnel.
Constantly trying to no-true-scotman what Gacha means, is not definitive or compelling.
I am repeating myself, but somebody asked if this is what playing a gacha game is like. Elaborating that it is not is not a no true scotsman, FFS. This is "gacha", but it does not play like a gacha game.
The specific type of battle system is not inherent to a gacha, but having a gameplay system of at least moderate complexity is. The one thing that virtually all gacha games share is that they have a large number of distinct game pieces of varying rarity. This lends itself specifically to deckbuilding/teambuilding. I've played dozens of gacha games and they all have teambuilding elements. I'm sure you can find some exception that proves the rule, but it is the basis for the genre, insofar as it is one. If you wanted to actually boil a gacha game down to its abstract essence to showcase what playing a gacha game is like to someone who had never played a gacha game before, you could not possibly give them an accurate experience without it.
RNGesus is far, far, far too nice on this game. :)
In real gacha, the odds of pulling something good are generally super ridiculously low.
The odds are generally so bad that they will implement a "pity" system to avoid the awful PR from the common case of spending a ton of money and getting absolute garbage.
It's any game that has rng drops. Theyve been doing it years
What are the rules to play this game? I don't understand it. Please could someone tell?
Business idea: turn this into a skinnable library and license it for a couple hundred to wannabe gacha peddlers.
Or make it more predatory and up the price to a couple thousand.
Eh, that seems like a thing that wouldn't be that successful solely because of licensing costs. It's a glorified random number generator, everything else would need to be rewritten to a degree for most games
I’m on level 11 and I’m now convinced the number 7 does not exist
The legit gacha experience
I am unable to assign different numbers to battle slots. On iOS I could just drag them, on firefox nothing seems to work.
I also use Firefox and it works for me (Android Firefox)
There seems to be a graphical issue that makes the text very hard to read. It may be Firefox or my Dark Reader addon.
It is dark reader.
Is there any way to decrease block cooldown??
Fun! On iOS I can drag numbers into my battle team - it tries to refresh the page when I drag outside a very short range.
Edit - refresh fixed it?
On mobile, I would appreciate the numerical keyboard for the math problems.
It's there for me on Firefox on android.
Quite a cool game! With a bit of refining and colours, I would say would be a hit!
Wow. Surprisingly fun game. I got to level 7 before it became a bit too difficult
What does "factor" do in battles?
if a number is a factor of whatever number you're fighting against it gets bonus multipliers to its stats
Ha - I've thought about making something like this - good on you!
Love this and I'm addicted - wish there were hot keys in the battle
shared this with my gacha fiend friends and they unanimously enjoyed it
Its so satisfying to play
Pulled a 100, A tier for PVE but still holding out for a 69 and a 42.
Don’t let your dreams be memes. Spend spend spend
there are roblox games who already reached this point - unironically. see https://www.roblox.com/games/13586065205/balls-rng
I honestly had no idea what a Gacha is - but the sound of rolling kept me playing. :)
Ive added this to the HN Arcade https://hnarcade.com/games/games/number-gacha
You got everything right. Impressive.
is pity system implemented? i don't want play gatcha game without it
Essence of gacha games is predatory monetisation realised via fomo, drip feeding and sex - not numbers.
oxford comma, I can only imagine 'dripfeeding and sex' is the name of a heavy handed 'love and deepspace' parody about comatose anime men
I hate how addicted immediately got addicted to this game
Yeah, that's a scary way to lose 20 minutes...
20 minutes? Try an hour!
Help, it's 1 a.m. and I haven't eaten dinner!
3rd pvp round is 852 and seems quite difficult
Seems to be a fair bit of luck as to whether the boss attacks the same number twice in a row, or maybe it's based on who attacked most recently?
Honestly the feedback loop of "do math to roll more" would make this an excellent game for kids IMO
This is pretty well done
I think roll 10 is broken...
That is addictive!
çok beğendim hakkatan çok harika
This is really clever and one of those projects that strikes the delicate balance of “I could’ve done this” and “actually no.” When I look more closely, the details (which I wouldn’t have nailed) sell it. The slow down as it lands on a number, the way it displays, etc.
It really does distill the whole experience down. It’s so reductive yet somehow it makes me want to keep playing. Honestly the more I think about it the more impressive it is.
guzel yeni işlere başarılar
I cannot believe how much time I spent playing this. In fact, I am still playing this! You have done such an amazing job with such a simple idea.
If I can, my only feedback is that the battle system is REALLY hard for me. If there were keyboard shortcuts to block I wouldn't complain, but having to mouse to block is too much. I ended optimizing by letting one on the left or right die and then praying I could block enough to kill the boss.
Really great work! Seriously love this stuff!
Same. I think it's probably easier on a touch screen than with mouse, but I'm stuck on level 10 for now. Maybe it's intentionally frustrating. Need to finish this level to unlock the last number I think, but I guess I've I've sunk enough time into it and will let it rest there.
I struggled with the battle system, as well. Block was way too difficult with a mouse on desktop.
Keyboard buttons would be better or slightly more windup to the attacks to allow more reaction time.
But, I still found some tactics. Similar to OP, I'd send two sacrificial lambs up and focus entirely on a single decently-high (say, 70+) leveled-up number (minimum level 3). Let the other two numbers die, block on the focused number, heal as needed and hit that Divide as soon as possible. With 6 or 7 hearts I was able to finish levels 10 and 11 that way.