After feeling the heartbreak of seeing MMOAsteroids last week turn out to be an April Fools' joke, I decided to take things into my own hands. This afternoon hack project I threw together yesterday using Firebase.<p>I adapted a simple single-player asteroids game off github (<a href="https://github.com/dmcinnes/HTML5-Asteroids" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dmcinnes/HTML5-Asteroids</a>) and made it fully multi-player with Firebase.<p>It's set up to spread out users across a bunch of games to avoid having 500 HN'ers on the same page. Login with Twitter so other people see your picture...
I just set <a href="http://www.Asteroids.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.Asteroids.com</a> to redirect to <a href="http://www.MMOAsteroids.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.MMOAsteroids.com</a> for the next week.
The problem with calling this Asteroids is that there are no asteroids. :)<p>This reminds me more of an old DOS shareware game called Spacewar (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5qHe2VadA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5qHe2VadA</a>), which was also multi-player although that game also allowed turning on gravity and warping (I see a comment mentioning warping in this game but I don't see it in the command list.)<p>This was one of my (and my friends') favorite small games back around 1990.<p>Edit: It was a DOS game when I played it. It is good to feel like a young person when talking about a game that I played 22 years ago.
Question: How do you bootstrap an MMO to reach a critical mass of players so that the environment sustains itself?<p>A friend and I built this MMO game called Pixza (<a href="http://pixza.com/lite" rel="nofollow">http://pixza.com/lite</a>) and we're finding it incredibly tough to bootstrap the ecosystem. The problem is that since it is an MMO game, it's not enjoyable with a few players. So after every wave of publicity, traffic comes in sporadically which does us no good. If all of the traffic came within a frame of 20 minutes of starting a game, I'm sure the game will explode. I've seen it happen during play testing with friends and family.
Very cool. Quick feedback: there are too many players on one screen. Getting immediately run into and killed repeatedly by random players careening around isn't a great user experience. My guess is dropping ~5 players max onto a canvas would be more compelling, and lead to longer initial engagement times.
Please can you make it scale to for a 1024*768 resolution? Thanks. I found it great fun dog fighting with another when it's a bit quieter. Annoyances were someone hacking the controls and setting a ship to move across the screen shooting a great number of shots directly left and right that moved in a wave straight up and down the screen, wiping out all players in its path. Trying to move ahead of this often didn't help due apparently due to lag. I managed to shoot the bugger, but then they respawned with movement reset and the whole screen was speckled with shots, yet another killing field. Later it was doing similar movements to before but shooting out in a spiral at a rate unmatchable with the space bar. Thanks for building this!<p>Edit: A hide-able chat msg system would be cool. I just wanted to hit t and say "good fight!" after an opponent and I managed to take out each other at the same moment.
Cool job!<p>I wish there some an MMO that's like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)</a><p>Good times…
Brings back memories of Zap from torque network library.
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentnl/files/Zap/" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentnl/files/Zap/</a><p>This little sample game turned out to be tons of fun and is a great example of how to build something like this in a scalable and rock solid way.
The current mode is impressive, although may I suggest a co-op mode where you don't shoot other players but rather actual asteroids? Might be less crazy/frustrating that way.
I would definitely lower the inertia, it's not very enjoyable when there's such little control over what your doing also there's a bit of lag but that's to be expected with the influx in traffic. But other than that it looks pretty good, nice job!
In similar news I created a MMO Snake, you can try at <a href="http://bfilmhelden.de:8080" rel="nofollow">http://bfilmhelden.de:8080</a><p>My backend is running on Go -
Would be really interested in what firebase is exactly. Looks like it would make this much easier.
I'll agree it's multiplayer, but considering gameplay goes from "fun and challenging" to "frustrating" at around 10-15 players, I doubt its massive-ness.<p>However, if the map scrolled instead of wrapped, it could easily become massive.
The scoreboard has been hacked already!!!!<p>Also, I'm not sure if I was regrouped with players who weren't signed in but after logging in with Twitter I no longer saw any other user pictures.
Awesome! I've been using Firebase for a while now and this further proves that it has so much potential! Every day I see more and more apps being built on it.
I discovered this one last week, and I personally prefer it: <a href="http://seb.ly/demos/MMOsteroids.html" rel="nofollow">http://seb.ly/demos/MMOsteroids.html</a>