Hacker News: juhrjuhr

Show HN: An RPG in the Windows file explorer

juhrjuhr — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:25:38 +0000

Hello,

This is my game, it's a tiny dungeon crawler played in the Windows file explorer. Your player character is a folder that you drag and drop into other folders to move, items are equipped by dropping them into your equipment folder, some items are used by deleting them, and monsters can be looted for their files.

I got the idea to do something in the file explorer after I saw this version of Flappy Bird in the Mac finder: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/flappy-dird

It was fairly straight forward to make, using just a file watcher, shortcuts, and (optionally) Window's explorer API to detect whether the player folder is open in an explorer window (to delay renaming the folder until it's not used). It only uses files and folders it creates itself, and doesn't look outside of its executable's folder.

The project lent itself very well to TDD, especially since there are a lot of interactions that are quite tedious to manually test again and again.

It's also available on Itch (no account required): https://juhrjuhr.itch.io/directory-dungeon

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47134867

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by juhrjuhr in "Pathfinding"

juhrjuhr — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:51:08 +0000

Thank you! At the moment, about 7 months (I originally thought it would take 4-6 months haha). I'm really hoping to release it in the next couple of months, but my ability to estimate these things is obviously lacking.

New comment by juhrjuhr in "Pathfinding"

juhrjuhr — Thu, 15 May 2025 18:18:46 +0000

Hey, I'm the developer of the game in the blog post. What takes several milliseconds is the number of world queries that need to be made to detect blocking objects and also object proximity. This is why I went with a quad tree to try to speed that part of things up.

Once those queries have been made the actual search is very fast. The problem then is that those queries need to be made again due to the dynamic nature of the game world.

New comment by juhrjuhr in "Pathfinding"

juhrjuhr — Thu, 15 May 2025 18:12:27 +0000

This definitely happens! Mostly it's from the NPC taking a corner a little too quickly when there's obstacles around. I've added data to the resulting path so that the NPC can know how far each path step is from an obstacle so that it can slow itself down first.

Like you said, it adds a lot to the fun so I'm only trying to smooth out those cases that look stupid.

New comment by juhrjuhr in "Pathfinding"

juhrjuhr — Thu, 15 May 2025 18:06:23 +0000

Hello!

I'm the developer of this game. Thanks very much for your interest and discussion here :)

I'm starting to feel like I didn't go into enough detail with my post, since there's a lot I could talk about and also a lot I could benchmark to give you some actual numbers on performance. But maybe I'll leave that for a different post in the future.

The game I'm developing is a commercial project, so it would be silly to be on the front page of HN and not try to direct people towards the commercial side of things. Here is the link to the game's steam page, you can wishlist and maybe buy the game when it's released so I can afford living expenses and expensive coffee beans: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3656660/Deep_Space_Exploi...

Thank you! :)