Apestronauts is a multiplayer game of banana warfare developed in 48 hours by Team Watermelon Sauce for the Node Knockout competition. You can play online with your friends at apestronauts.com.
The game was written in JavaScript with a Node.js server using Socket.IO for realtime WebSocket communication. I created some notes for the JavaScriptMN meetup if you'd like to learn more about the development of Apestronauts.
Being fairly new to node.js, and even newer to the use of Socket.IO, I had a very interesting morning exploring some of the behaviors of Socket.IO. I thought I'd share the things that raised my eyebrows. There were some good lessons hidden in a basic Hello World example. There was also a really interesting question posed by the feature of Socket.IO that allows for a callback to be executed as an acknowledgement that a sent socket message was received.
I don't want to spend a ton of time on getting started with node.js or learning Socket.IO. But you should know that I'm just talking about a default, easy to replicate install of node and io. All I basically did is brew install node, curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh, npm install socket.io and I'm off writing realtime code.
Hello World Has Surprise Lessons
The first thing I noticed is that it is a bit surprising — even alarming — how little you need to get a hello world example working. Let me show you the example and then explain the alarming part.
I spoke at the Twin Cities, Minnesota chapter of the International Game Developers Association on Wednesday, June 8 about the current state of making games with JavaScript and HTML5. Here are my slides.
I recently participated in the 20th Ludum Dare, a competition to make a brand new game from scratch in 48 hours, going solo!
The theme for the competition was from Zelda and internet Kitten meme fame: "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." I made an old school, top-down puzzle game for this theme. After the 48 hour competition ended, I polished my game a bit and also re-submitted to the 72 hour Jam.
If you don't like something about it, please tell me! If you really love something about it, please invite your friends to play.
There are still some bugs, and this training mission level doesn't have a ton of content... but it has been fun to draw the sprites and modify Akihabara. I also like to think the level has a certain charms. ;)
