Mashed Games - a destructable multiplayer game

[q_no]

Hello,

 

I've spent the evenings of the last weeks finishing my latest game called Mashed Games and I'm looking for feedback from other developers to find any bugs I missed so far.

 

The idea of this game is to have a 4096x4096 tiles map which has to be destroyed. Every tiles generates a point and points unlock new characters as you progress. The catch is: only one player can win this game. It's not the one with the highest score, it's the player who destroys the last tile on the map. Points can also be used to buy upgrades for your favorite characters. You will certainly recognize some of the characters in the game

 

Some technical facts about the game:

 

The frontend is made with ImpactJS, which is pure joy and should also be easily portable to mobile platforms. Besides ImpactJS for the actual game canvas, it uses jquery/bootstrap for the UI and socket.io for the synchronization.

On the server side it's running a couple of Node.js processes with Sails for the API and a self-written database daemon which stores the map and counts the remaining tiles.

 

Those who a are interested in some figures and graphs should have a look at the statistics page http://www.mashed-games.com/stats.html which even provides some server metrics.

 

Thanks for reading this and I hope at least some of you enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed coding it.

Any feedback is appreciated!  Feel free to ask me any technical questions about the game.

 

 

[Hardtail]

Hi q_no! I want to congratulate you on a game well done. This really is a lot of fun! I applaud your efforts. Thank you for adding the instructional tool tips, this makes all the difference. Anyone who reads this take note, it doesn't matter what you build with technology, whether it is a game, a website or an app you must always focus your design around great user experiences. The user should never have to guess on how to use something, otherwise you have failed to display your product. It doesn't matter if you have the best thing going, that split second someone doesn't know what to do is all it takes for them to close the program and move on.  

 

The multiplayer functionality is a big seller for me, when I play with a friend I don't want to stop. It's addictive. You have optimized your game really well as far as I can tell. Being on a 4k screen it loads surprisingly fast. Most web games for me have poor loading times, this is good. Unfortunately I cannot create an account or sign up with my Google address. I keep receiving this error, "Error.Passport.User.Exists".

 

Sometimes when I break cubes there is a slow response. (perhaps with the server?) my character will hang in the air for a few seconds before he falls. The same applies to walking sideways, I will have to wait before I can walk. This becomes a slight annoyance when competing against someone. 

 

In the future it might be nice to add some textures to the tiles, maybe show the user breaking through grass, then dirt, rock, etc. Some sort of environment? I think it would bring the game to life. I'm sure the backgrounds could change to the setting of the blocks as well. Another thing that this game could benefit from is a chat room window on the right under the menu. It's fun to talk to people in game with the bubble over your character but if you just join there is no way of communicating.

 

If I think of anything else I will be sure to be back. I think this community can benefit from advertising multiplayer games in a different way. People need to see games like this. 

 

Cheers

 

ht

[oddskill]

Nice work and really fun to play. 

Hardtail mentioned already everything else necessary

 

best regards

 

odd

[q_no]

Thank you for your detailed feeback Hardtail!

 

I'm gonna investigate the login issues tomorrow morning, that's definitely a blocker.

 

The slow response you are mentioning is probably related to your 4k screen. The server keeps track of your visible area and sends updates periodically (every 2.5sec). The bigger the screen, the bigger the area to update and I can imagine it causes a bit of trouble for the rendering engine to run at this resolution. I should probably add a zoom function which makes everything bigger on QHD screens to improve the performance.

[q_no]

Just to give a quick update: The registration issues have been sorted out! Would be very happy if a few more testers join. 

[Hardtail]

Sounds good. I will give it a go.

[user123456789]

Nicely crafted, however, because I was only one online it was really hard to motivate yourself to play or enjoy the game. (no one to play against.) Maybe you need to start making BOTS

[q_no]

Well, it's not about killing each other - it's about destroying the map! The more points you gather, the more characters will be unlocked and you can get boost for each individual character.