Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5

I upvoted this because it is awesome, and it is, well... Bomberman.<p>But I'm genuinely curious: at what point will we stop being fascinated by what can be done in HTML5, and actually start focusing more on what is actually being done -- regardless of the technology used.<p>Or to put it another way: when will HTML5 games stop feeling like HTML5 games?<p>For example, if this were on a console, I think it would still be cool, but it's lacking a certain "game" feel to it. It still feels like playing an old school game on a PC keyboard, and there still seems to be a sort of keyboard-to-response latency that I find in most HTML5 games. Not to mention, no music/sound.<p>Again, I'm not knocking it for the effort. I still think it's pretty dang fun, even for an HTML5 game. But it still feels like an HTML5 game.

Pardon my English.<p>Team consists of two programmers and four helpers, we live in different cities near Moscow.<p>I started developing the game in April, published link at habrahabr.ru and since then i'm optimizing network and rendering.<p>We were preparing for Mozilla GameOn, posted a link to /r/webgames, it became viral. We're in shock :)<p>Game Core: Pure Java.<p>Game Client: cross-compiled with GWT. Angular.js for UI (scoreboard, chat).<p>Game Server: Haproxy -&#62; Jetty<p>Web backend: nginx -&#62; node.js<p>Servers are hosted in cloud and begin to slow down after 800 players.<p>We'll rent dedicated servers to archieve 1500 players on a map.<p>P.S. Langoliers are eating the time you spent in bombermine.

This is what I imagine when I hear HTML5 gaming. Just like "fun" on a PC looks different from "fun" on a console, and even more so from "fun" on a Wii, or a DS or an iPhone, "fun" on the web needs to take advantage of the nature of the medium.

What I found interesting is that when you "scale" a game from n &#60; 8'ish players to n &#62; 10 players and make it MMO style and continuously running, the strength disparity between the players who have been alive for quite some time and the "newly spawned" players becomes so large that a Quake/TF2-like system where players can instantly become "fully buffed" (by picking up an uber gun, for instance) becomes necessary.<p>Furthermore, I think an interesting game design challenge is what we can introduce to these scaled up games to make the psychological rewards enticing enough to have players keep playing. After the nostalgia feeling wore off after a few minutes, I personally no longer really felt like continuing to play since it was going to be the same stuff over and over again without much variability or depth.

I'd love to know how was AngularJS used in this app: not the kind of app I imagined AngularJS would be helpful in writing!

The langoliers are a nice addition to the game, I have to say.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langoliers" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langoliers</a><p>(the pac-man type things eating up the level near the end of a round)

Awesome, but one exploit makes it less fun:<p>Smart players who are trapped by a foe are dropping their own bombs so that the foe doesn't get the kill.<p>I blocked a player in an alley. Right before he died he dropped his own bomb. I got no point for the kill. That means any skilled player can prevent anyone from scoring points for killing them.<p>The solution is to use a kill chain. When a bomb kills a player, look to see if that bomb was detonated by another bomb. Keep going until you find a bomb that is not owned by the dead player. That owner gets the kill.

"How the fack?" was my first reaction..Because this is so awesome! Revives old memories, yet also seems really fun (especially when you try to bomb others)!!<p>A few questions:<p>1) What backend technology do they use for real-time and concurrency? Node.js?? Scala??<p>2) How does one update the players' real time positions/actions??<p>If someone could shed some light on these questions, it would be so freakin awesome!!

This excites us developers, but sadly the gamers couldnt care less. Sure it doesnt require a plugin, but thats not really a dealbreaker for most web gamers.

Aaaaand it's midnight and I'm meant to have written a 1,000 word post.

This such a great example displaying the power of HTML5. I'm going to be playing this quite a lot!<p>Is this going to be open sourced any time? It'd be neat to see how this works on the server etc.

I wonder what they're doing about cheating? I guess this type of game is not so easy to 'cheat' with but I'm sure it is possible.<p>I was thinking about building an Unreal Tournament clone in WebGL, but I'm still not sure what to do about cheating.

Server has been bombed it seems. All game servers dead.<p>No idea whether it was HN related or a separate issue.

The workspace has been shutdown here, too many bombermen.

The play button seems to have stopped working; and the number of players seems to be shrinking slowly. Something broke?

The game is back to working now. Really solid job man. It's really smooth in Chrome on my low end desktop.<p>My only concern is that there's no client side prediction for movement? Every input key feels delayed by my ping and is most noticeable when moving diagonally by pressing 2 keys at once.

Anyone got any background on the backend tech involved?

Honestly, not only is this incredibly fun but also really innovative and clever. Well done.

man that is really fun!! we did a bomberman on a hackerthon, but only for 4 people each time, i like the mass multiplayer idea...<p>are u planing to put it on github? will be awesome to host in our own server to play against company people only

Oh god, have work to do. Must resist urge to waste entire afternoon..<p>One thing that always seems to be missing from these web games is support for gamepads for that authentic console experience however.

It is impossible to love more than I love this right now.

It's cool to see AngularJS was used for the templating engine. I'd be curious to see how deeply it's being used.

Actually, this is what I believe is the place of Go (the language) in HTML5 programming. I don't know if this was done with Go on the server side, might as well be node or gevent, but Go would be faster and easier to build a multithreaded game server with.

Looks like their servers cannot deal with the onslaught...<p>I love Bomberman. Looking forward to try it.

I closed the window on myself a few times with CTRL+W, whoops.

Undoubtedly the most fun I've had with one of these HTML5 games. Does anyone have any resources on how to keep clients in sync without lag?

Who's up for massively multiplayer Double Dragon?

Thanks for sharing, brings back good memories...

Am I the only one seeing:<p>&#62; Disconnected from server...<p>UPDATE: This had something to do with my login. I just logged out and back in, and was able to get in.

Its eating up my CPU . The problem is that its an addictive game so far. Levels getting reset with the pac man is hilarious !

Definitely the best browser multiplayer game ever.<p>And nice to see that it's build on Node (among other tech).

We got 1500 players at US Public Server #1. 100kbit/s per user, i'm gonna optimize it.

Quick, everyone come up with the HN nicks so we can resolve the disputes there!

The bomb! Great game and great execution! Kudos to the Bombermine team.

It's working ok in the EU!

awesome game...wat did the developer use for realtime updates??

Well, there goes my evening. What stack is this built on?

All servers are down.

This is my first comment ever on HN and this is AWESOME!

This is an amazing game! Such good memories.

I think it just broke. The game just froze.

Awesome! Loved this game on Super Nintendo!

Really well done. Love it I am 13 again !!

Why aren't you taking payments yet?

This is fantastic. Thanks :)

nooooo, don't post this kind of link here!! my working day is over ;)

what other games are out there that are as neat as this ?

This made my day.

Very impressive.

Awesome!

THIS IS HECTIC!!!

OK, so how many pixels / sprites can I push per frame (and at which framerate ; ) on this HMTL5 thinggy?<p>Btw I was eating mode 7 for breakfast on the SNES and ruling the Amiga co-processors (eg to do copper bars), so I happen to know a thing or two about very nifty optimization that can be used in games.<p>I'm pretty sure a few old dogs could teach some young monkeys a few tricks in this HTML5 thing...

Awesome, I had once developed a bomberman clone for palm pilot.<p>Here is what HN users have commented on your game <a href="http://www.infocaptor.com/bubble_viz/newsycombinatorcomitemid5291843.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.infocaptor.com/bubble_viz/newsycombinatorcomitemi...</a>