Weball: Play Katamari on Websites | Hacker News Reader

Weball: Play Katamari on Websites

funwithcomputervision.com

308 pointscroes23 comments

Wow - this is surprisingly well done. I really like that it goes from picking up text elements to eventually being able to grab physical images off the site as the ball grows larger.

Tangential but I was playing "Kirby and the Forgotten Dreamland," a little while ago and in the game there's an ability you can absorb called 'needle.' It initially gives you the appearance of a spiky porcupine rolling around in a ball.

However, the evolved version of this ability lets you attach random objects to you, like a tower, a corkscrew, and a cactus, among other things. Rolling around with all these items attached to you seems to be a nod to the game "Katamari Damacy."

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4aa4xR8zAJk

That's amazing. I would have no clue how to write that so that it works so well.

Edit: I guess the main enabler is that it gets out of the business of HTML really quickly, by importing a representation of the page into the game engine. The classic bookmarklet version linked below messes with actual page elements using CSS transformations etc.

There was a Katarmari bookmarklet way way back around 2008ish.

yes - kathack or something. I won a lot of friends because of it back in the day.

http://kathack.com/ !

it's http only, so the bookmarklet won't work on most sites. I fixed it up:

https://kathack.greg.technology/

thanks for the great reminder/reference!!

Google also has their own take on this when you search for Katamari. Click on the little katamari ball.

Horrible framerate after a few hundred words, but super fun until then! I love the special touch of the large images being true obstacles.

Likely because the ball isn't a single static 3D object. There are likely improvements that can be made on that front by periodically generating the inner layers of the ball as a single asset.

I was surprised by the frame rate staying surprisingly smooth on an iPhone 17 Pro Max even after completing the entire wiki page, even though it got moderately warm. I guess these things really are powerful.

It was playable even on an 8 year old iPhone XS. I cleared up the whole wikipedia page and the framerate never got bad enough to hamper the gameplay.

This is such fun. I just went along and rolled up a few websites, including my own. Great little bit of web whimsy.

So much fun. If it had the original music that'd be super awesome!

Thank you so much for reminding me! I had kind of given up but your comment prompted me to check again and it turns out Bandai Namco recently put all the original soundtracks on streaming. Na na na na na na na na …

Slows down real quick

You can't fully roll up the first page >:(

Amazing, most addictive things I have seen in ages.

Freaking love it lol. Very cool idea got sucked into rolling up the corporate site.

Awesome! This sort of thing brings me back to the good old days

This makes me so happy.

very well done! reminds me of the katamari bookmarklet i saw on hn a while ago

http://kathack.com/

It's not really Katamari without the abusive father.

lwn.net makes for a pretty fun level. See how big a combo you can get!

This is awesome!

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