Color Ring Tips: Blind Tapping Hit 7 Times in 47

The first color ring game tip is to watch the ring instead of keeping a beat: in Huepin, a script that tapped on a fixed rhythm without looking hit the matching color only 7 times in 47 shots, about 15 percent. The reason is in the game’s own numbers: the ring keeps turning while your dot is in the air.

How Huepin works

Huepin is a one-tap color game. A ring of four colored arcs spins near the top of the screen and a small colored dot waits below it. A tap shoots the dot straight up. If it lands on the arc of its own color you score a point and a new dot appears; one wrong color ends the run. Gems unlock other ball designs on the character screen at 100 gems each.

What the game’s settings say

The game stores two speeds: the ring turns 150 degrees a second and the dot flies 1,000 pixels a second. From the dot’s starting place to the bottom of the ring is about 395 pixels in the game’s layout, so the flight takes about 0.4 seconds. In that time the ring turns about 60 degrees, a sixth of a full turn. We worked this out from the settings and the screen layout; we did not time individual shots.

What we measured

We played in a test browser at 500 by 800 pixels with software rendering, which is slow. A small script tapped the screen on a fixed rhythm without looking at the ring and read the game’s own score after each game. We tried two rhythms, 20 games each: a tap every 0.4 seconds and a tap every 1.0 second. Taps made while a dot was still flying did nothing, so we count shots as hits plus the one miss that ends each game.

40 games in one test browser with slow software rendering, tapped by a script that did not look at the ring. The first tap of each game came at about the same moment after the start, so the games are not fully independent. A person who watches the ring should do much better.

Blind timing is worse than a coin flip

With four colors you might expect one blind shot in four to land. Our script managed about one in seven: 7 hits in 47 shots. The rhythm hardly mattered, 3 of 23 at 0.4 seconds and 4 of 24 at 1.0 second, and no game got past 2 points.

Tap before the color arrives

Because the ring turns about 60 degrees during the flight, tapping when the right color is already at the bottom is too late: by the time the dot arrives, that arc has moved on. Tap when the matching arc is roughly a sixth of a turn away from the bottom, on the side it is coming from.

4 tips that follow from the numbers

• Look before you tap. Blind taps hit only about one shot in seven.
• Lead the ring. It turns about 60 degrees while the dot flies.
• Do not rush. Tapping faster did not help: taps during a flight are ignored.
• Collect gems for designs. Each new ball look costs 100 gems.

Where to try it

Try it yourself in Huepin. For another color reflex game, Prismhop has you climb through colored obstacles, and Keybloom is about tapping the right tiles in time.