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This game DISAPPEARS if you pause it!

Name: This game DISAPPEARS if you pause it!
Description: A game-dev video demonstrating a noise shader in Godot where shapes are visible only in motion against animated noise and vanish when the game is paused or screenshotted. The demo is available on GitHub.

Branta Games Demos intermediate

Open on YouTube

This demo was cited on HN 4 times between 2025 and 2026, but never outright recommended.

2007–2026

4 citations HackerTube score 0

HN people cite it as the origin of the vanishing-in-a-screenshot effect, used in ideas for captchas and AI-resistant text.

A game-dev video demonstrating a noise shader in Godot where shapes are visible only in motion against animated noise and vanish when the game is paused or screenshotted. The demo is available on GitHub.

Pull quote: “I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games.” (HN, 2025)

Also tagged: noise shader effects, shader, godot, animated noise, game dev, visual illusion

What Hacker News said

4 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Cites it Trung0246 March 2025 under Anubis: Proof-of-work proxy to prevent AI crawlers

Hides shapes in animated noise, an idea for no-JS captcha.

For no js solution, I think some sort of using optical illusion as captcha could works, especially [link] or something like [this video] which could cleverly hide captcha answer within animated noise mess. However these methods are not really accessibility-friendly tho.

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Cites it Syntonicles September 2025 under Show HN: The text disappears when you screenshot it

Origin of the effect where content vanishes when paused.

I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games. [this video] The effect is disrupted by introducing rendering artifacts, by watching the video in 144p or in this case by zooming out. I'd love to know the name of this effect, so I can read more about the fMRI studies that make use of it. What I've found so far: Random Dot Kinematogram Perceptual Organization from Motion (video of Flounder camouflage) [link]

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Cites it rzzzt July 2026 under A font that humans can read but AI cannot

Related work using noise and flicker to hide content.

Related work (all involve noise and flickering images, photosensitive eyes/brains beware): - "This game disappears if you pause it": [this video] - "Illusion: If You Pause, The Image Will Disappear": [link]

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Cites it vunderba July 2026 under I created a font called Ghost Font that only humans can read

Popular video hiding shapes in high frequency noise.

There was a pretty popular video showing this exact concept (hiding shapes/text in high frequency noise ) about a year ago, for those interested: [this video]

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