Mandelbrot Hunt

by ksadov
co-authored: @tjaden-hess
Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.12
Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.62
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★4.00
Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.50
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.75
How much Mandel can you handle???

Try to locate the target section of the Mandelbrot set by panning and zooming into the set. Click "reveal location" to see whether you've found the target or merely a recursively similar section ;)

Desktop controls: drag to pan and scroll to zoom.

Mobile controls: drag to pan and use the 2x and 0.5 buttons to zoom.

Comments5

eboatwright
eboatwright26 Apr 2021, 02:29
I love fractals and mandelbrot shapes, but I don't really see how this fits the theme? Really interesting though!
Billnotic26 Apr 2021, 02:34
Fractals are cool, love seeing them in games. Don't get how this fits "deeper and deeper." Maybe because you zoom deeper and deeper? idk, but it's a neat concept
Hestrateja
Hestrateja26 Apr 2021, 02:50
@ksadov if the fractal was infinite and not a png it would be a fantastic game for the theme. Very clever!
ksadovauthor27 Apr 2021, 02:22
@hestrateja The fractal is generated on the fly and not a fixed .png, but the fixed size of floating point numbers means that zooming in too close produces a blocky image instead of revealing the Mandelbrot's actual infinite layers of complexity. There are interesting engineering tricks for getting around this with arbitrary precision arithmetic... something I'd like to look into for future projects :)
KP_CFTSZ
KP_CFTSZ28 Apr 2021, 16:40
I think it fits the theme. The idea is cool, I do think there's some room for exploration in building interesting game mechanics around fractals, but this didn't feel like much of a game (key word: *feel*; I don't think the concept is bad at all, but the presentation could be more game-y)

A couple suggestions if you wanna expand upon this sometime:
- Scroll up/down feel inverted compared to normal programs which involve panning/zooming into things
- It'd be nice if the zoom would use the mouse cursor position as an origin, i.e. zooming into the cursor
- Panning/zooming could have some kind of sense of friction/animation. Google Maps, Leaflet and lots of other GIS-related programs tend to do this

You have to incentivize the player to keep looking, and to do that I think there should be some kind of reward for the player when they find the target.

This is a nice idea though! Interesting entry

Other games by @ksadov

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