Messing with your TI-84 graphing calculator is a rite of passage for every teenager who has ever been bored in a math class. In 2013 I was that teenager, and it gave me an idea for a tiny game about sledding on graphs. This project grew into my white whale, and I spent my twenties trying and failing to finish it alone. I shelved the game when I started working for Hack Club in 2018—until last May, when a few community members took it off the shelf. The project took on a life of its own, and turned into a year of nights and weekends from a global team of 20+ teens in 8+ countries. Today SineRider enters public beta!
SineRider is literally an infinite universe of function composition puzzles, each with infinite solutions, that range from welcoming for 9th graders to difficult for even the most serious matlab user. And every day we tweet out a fresh one to be solved with your morning coffee.
We hope you enjoy playing SineRider as much as we’ve enjoyed making it. And we’re not done! Mobile support, polar coordinates, and a level editor are all on the roadmap. SineRider is a living project, to be continuously built and maintained as free OSS by the Hack Club community: https://github.com/hackclub/sinerider
The team that built the game will try to be in the comments today between high school classes and AP tests.
—chris walker, creative director
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nDYoIwiA8
Play now: https://sinerider.com
The bits between the levels...not so much. Just frustrating trying to work out what arrow I need to click to get to another level. Kept accidentally finding myself in the same level again. I just don't care about which meta-path to take, just give me the next level.
Also...those weird inter-level screens where you click or use arrows while the figures move glacially slow across the screen? ARGH. I lost patience after 30 seconds. So. Slow. And no way to skip it. And when I clicked the wrong thing I had to start over.
The actual levels were good though.