mansim

https://kongregate.com/games/mansimas/armygrid (Kongregate published, PC-only) https://armygrid.online (website, playable with phone) armygrid Is soon going to beta. Will appear now in ArmorGames. They have finally accepted the game as a good quality HTML5 cross-browser game. The game is still under everyday's development by 1 developer having full time job But it goes good and as planned. Alpha version - from 2019 April released on Kongregate. Has ~40.000 registrations after 8 months, 58000+ sessions. Beta version - from 2020 ~July will be released on ArmorGames. The game is about the Chess Reality in a grid-based world. Player controls a castle and deploys chess figures to manually conquer as many grid tiles as he can by making strategies to destroy defensive towers and walls, kill PvP and PvE based enemy Chess. Each Chess represents an army inside of it. So, Chess = army. The stronger Chess, the bigger army is inside of it, reaching up to 7000 units. Players can watch (if he wants) every single army fight he ever had and share the fights. The game has also almost everything any single MMO-RTS has, also, MMO-RPG, Tower defense game genres mix. This MMO-RTS has no energy system and can be played without limits as any MMO-RPG. Some strongest players have more than 15000 Fields conquered, played actively (server is counting every active minute) for 20.000+ minutes, played for 6+ months everyday. It gets really addictive for some players. This game has still no end and enough content. Currently, quite burried in the Kongregate games list, as Kongregate MMO games sort not from newest by default, but by highest rating. After release to ArmorGames, the game will be in the first page for like ~2 years, as the MMO games there are sorted from the newest.

I have turned on javascript performance tool, made CPU throttling 6x and i see instant huge lag on your game. Analyzing the chrome console performance results i see that most of the time it renders and renders, there is not much logic happening. You have to reduce rendering that much. Looks like you are trying to paint everything using canvas and using less images. You also constantly redraw the whole canvas element and using just 1 canvas element. Thats the worst part actually. Your best and fastest way to fix the lag - make more canvas layers. As i see here you can easily create 2nd canvas element layer and draw animations just in there. And 3rd layer for UI, on top of animation layer.. If you have animated UI, make it as 4th layer. Also, there are some shapes drawing with canvas which can be copy-pasted by reducing long game load, if you dont want to use png images. That seems like a lot of work needed for you, to split the logic across several canvas element, but at the end result will be really good and the game will work easy on any weakest device. There is no other way. In canvas world that is usual, to use many canvas elements. For my HTML5 browser game (armygrid) i use 15 canvas layers. 2 for global map backgrounds (grass/sand..etc and other for rocks, bushes.. on top), 1 for map animations, 1 for dynamic textes and lines, 1 for army fights background, 1 for army units animation, 1 for army editor units, 1 for cover of army editor, 1 for requirements textes, 1 for main navigation, 1 for chat, 1 for flash messages, 1 for tutorial UI, and the last one for mouse events. So, on top of that, i am redrawing navigation and tutorial just if something is triggered by click, or if there are some real-time animated counters/numbers, i redraw once a second. Its even not yet perfect with frontend performance, but the performance is quite good and can play using 6x CPU throttling without much problems, also on any weak mobile. To achieve that, had to study and learn a lot the chrome developer tools - performance and audit.

Armygrid Looking fo some alpha testers. Game will come to release in ~6 months, will go to Kongregate. Game's navigation is very poor and a designer is hired to make a nice navigation. Currently navigation is a placeholder.

Thanks man, your feedback is very valuable compared to all others i had I think i have a clear vision how to build scalable server for MMO. But yea, i am bad with graphics, UI, UX The last 2.5 years i worked only with programming, preparing it for scaling, and this month i am starting little on design.

Yep, i know how to work with architecture in server-side games and how to make it scalable. I am a backend browser developer.

Yes, i will do exactly this MVP with alpha version in 6 months. I mean, final release with everything polished and perfect will be in 2.5 year. I plan to have monetization already in alpha version and look for players, maybe start some kickstarter before launching this alpha. I have fixed these things you said, should work after hard-refresh with ctrl+F5 in-game. This game is MMO and has unlimited map size, which increases with every player. Now i have a demo server which is weak and can hold like 10-20 active users. I will rent a good server in 3-4 months where i can hold like 200 active users (at once), or totally like 10k registrations on one server.

Hi. Thanks for this very useful feedback! I plan to open alpha only in 6 months, so i will change a lot. And this game final release date is in 2.5 year. Now there are no graphics, only placeholders, they are not nice. I will buy graphics. I know that this game is difficult to understand. So i have implemented tutorial, but seems it doesnt help a lot. I need to find out how to make it clearer. Maybe better graphics helps with understanding. When battle is finished, player needs to close it manually now. I didnt think it can be a problem. Gonna fix it with improving tutorial. Same with moving when the figure is under construction, needs to implement confirmation box. Your feedback really helps me understanding what i have to fix, because these fixes are the easiest ones and gives most influence

Keeping development of this game and reached version 0.7. This is about Chess reality, where Chess is a huge army and can build towers, walls, upgrade or destroy them. This is a Map-Builder MMO where every new player spreads the whole map. Looking for feedback of the current development version. Game video: You can try out this game on ArmyGrid (development server)

I have an army game made with HTML5 canvas. I am using spritesheets (.png images) for sprites. And for every movement of every unit i redraw every unit like here: But i heard something about HTML5 canvas sprites copy for better performance.. But i can't google it out, or any examples of it. I heard that Pixi.js is using it, but i am not considering using Pixi.js. Do you know any examples or possibilities of cloning the same sprites for performance improvement?

I dont understand anything here.. I see many random colored squares. And no idea which color is mine. i have found some square, where says, that i can capture it. i was looking like a minute for it. Then i was clicking on the square and then i have no idea how to conquer. i see these popups at the top right side, but these messages doesnt help at all to understand anything. I have captured some, but in playing 10 minutes i still dont understand anything. i have no idea how i spread my territory and how i capture. i just random click squares and somehow randomly capture them. you could include a tutorial, with arrows what to click everytime with explanation then it can be more clear what is going on here. So, i was playing 10 minutes and quitted because i still didnt understand anything

Thanks! I appreciate that! You just raised my motivation to keep hard working on this project

It has only this movement of chess. But its more about tower defense, huge armies and area control. I wanna have this game done now, but i have to finish programming everything Probably in 3 months i am finished with programming and then i start with graphics.

Oh, i trough you have seen it This feature i was creating 1.5 year, and the whole game itself only 6 month There are no nice units yet, only 2D placeholders. I have ordered 9 months ago, but still need to wait few month until completed. Then there will be all super cool looking nice units, looking like 3D. Armies of these. But this fight showcase is used rarer as to see other information of that field, as i was playing.

Oh that's a really good feedback! Thanks a lot!

Sorry, i still don't have logs implemented. It should be in around v0.6.. For now, you just have to click on the field where is red number and see the fight - that number is how many fights were in that field. This game is like travian - slow paced. Its a multiplayer. You can log off and come back and your resources will be increased. There are more players around you. Your point is to conquer as many fields as possible to make your income higher and protect against players and against NPC. NPC movements are not implemented yet. But all black chess figures are your enemies and you should destroy them all. Now these turrets are not shooting yet.. So you can destroy walls and turrets without loss. But in v0.5 i will make that turrets shoot in real time and destroy your armies slowly. I wanna ask some questions.. You will help me with game fixing. I wanna make this game perfect 1. Was tutorial helpful and clear? Was'nt it buggy? 2. What was your first impressive about this game in the first 3 seconds? 3. What do you think would be nice-to-have here? Thanks! I will be programming this game probably for the next 10 years without break and implement totally everything best i could imagine I started from real army fights, in few months i will include better graphics.

yes, its a multiplayer. It looks complex i believe with that many objects at the start, i made a tutorial, i hope it helps.

Please test out the v0.4 alpha Its a browser game, works same on any devise. If any bugs, please post them here, or pm. http://46.101.215.196:1337/ - this domain only for testing

Nice game ! this easy bot is too strong for me I didn't expect such a great graphics and a full bug-less game from this simple post without any images

Good job! played it for some time Keep it up The biggest problem was - my PC started heating and was so loud (calculating something) while playing this game, so i had to refresh the website. You should find a way for better performance, to reduce this big loading. But as for early alpha - its super good! I like that randomness for items really much.

Hello. This is my game early version. Still absolute no graphics, just programming Added the image how it looks now. The turrets can shoot and damage the armies And this is my Goal:

You mean something like my game?

Thanks a lot for explaining about pixi and other things. I will take my time improving performance, there are so many ways to increase performance.

Well if i don't draw unit sprites, it has really much faster perfromance. Yes, my 10k units perform AI calcs every tick. There is no pathfinding. Every unit is looking at 3 positions [0, 1, -1] every frame. But yea, i plan to improve my javascript performance in future. Just trough maybe easier and faster job first would be to improve rendering. I am drawing whole big screen of units. One caveat is that i resize my sprites. I have many multiply functions. I plan to make for every multiplying - an unique spritesheet. But i trough that the biggest bottleneck is that i redraw all sprites on whole screen. On other hand, it would be hard to find a function how to draw only changed screen, when after 30s of action whole screen is moving if there are so many army units - they all are moving and doing something. 10k is an example, actually there is no limitation and before a year with smaller size of project i handled easy 100k units on screen(there were only cubes drawed). But now more calculations, much better unit graphics and a lot more done. So you say that i should ignore the screen redraw performance problem and concentrate on my javascript/images? That should be faster reached performance?

wow thx for a clear answer. THat really is, i would need to redraw every sprite that touches bounds of changed sprites and that was unclear for me how to reach it. I will try out this pixi.js and wegl

I have a project with armies on HTML5 canvas. There can be 10.000 army units on screen and all are moving. But not at the same time. Every frame there is about 20-1000 units moving on random places, others are waiting for free way to move forward. I am redrawing the whole page, 1500x1200 screen canvas at 20 fps. I have readed many tips on how to increase performance - that i need to draw only changed content, and now brainstorming on how to increase performance and draw only the moved units. But - maybe you know any source, link or book where i could find the answer? I can find out how to do this alone, but it can take very long, I believe in every game needs this performance increase by drawing only changed content, where random places are changed, so maybe you know it or already implemented it.