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Posted by babel16 5 days ago

Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence(isabisabel.com)
Number Gacha is a half-parody, half-real gacha game where you roll, unwrap, and battle numbers. Play on Desktop for the best experience!
143 points | 56 commentspage 2
matheusmoreira 1 hour ago|
You got everything right. Impressive.
nottorp 2 hours ago||
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.

minimaxir 8 hours ago||
It's not a gacha essence unless there are numbers with increasingly sexy designs.
amarant 6 hours ago||
Oh you just didn't unlock 69 yet ;)
asimovDev 1 hour ago||
personally disappointed that it wasn't a legendary alongside 42
Forgeties79 7 hours ago||
Stupid, sexy integers
cheald 7 hours ago||
Very fun! There seems to be an exception when using the 10-roll function that might need some attention.

    index-BwvgcC1c.js:62 Uncaught TypeError:
      C is not a function at zi (index-BwvgcC1c.js:62:150798)
Those lines of code are:

    for (var oe = [], ce = 0; ce < 10; ce++)
      oe.push(C());
KaoruAoiShiho 6 hours ago||
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.
Iron_Ninja5 4 hours ago||
Do people like slot machines at casinos?
xboxnolifes 2 hours ago|||
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.
ydj 6 hours ago|||
I think some people do like the collection mechanics. And some games require specific team comps in order to beat the harder content.
LAAGU 6 hours ago||
idk i just like to play stuff like this where there is a random chance to get something rare
ChicknNuggt 3 hours ago||
Quite a cool game! With a bit of refining and colours, I would say would be a hit!
gausswho 4 hours ago||
There seems to be a graphical issue that makes the text very hard to read. It may be Firefox or my Dark Reader addon.
nkrisc 8 hours ago||
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?
pynappo 7 hours ago||
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.

applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago|||
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.

wordpad 5 hours ago||
You have all that with Gacha pulls and battle system.
applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago||
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.

auszeph 8 hours ago||
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.

measuredincm 3 hours ago||
Ha - I've thought about making something like this - good on you!
yogorenapan 4 hours ago|
Wow. Surprisingly fun game. I got to level 7 before it became a bit too difficult
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