Hi everyone, french web dev here,
About 10 years ago I did a little party game in the browser inspired by Achtung die Kurve genre, it reached HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9494619) and everything went crazy, it's still largely played in open-spaces all over the world today.
This past year, I've been working on a sequel: https://curvytron2.com is live.
Same goal as the first one: challenge myself, perfect my skills, have fun and give back to the internet community the best way I know; by just putting a free little fun game out there. No ads, no tracking, no business plan.
A decade of professional web development and hours of GMTK have raised my expectations and this time I aimed for:
- a good looking top-down 3D view with improved gameplay and real game juice: I learn Three.JS and WebGL for this project, worked on the camera movements, screen shake, sound design, gameplay feedback and I'm proud of the portal-like effect of the bonus that allows you to peak and cross over to the other side of the map. - a solid 100fps server simulation (in Go) serving clients with a really bandwidth efficient netcode (it's binary websocket instead of plain JSON and I open-sourced it: https://github.com/Tom32i/netcode). - Instant reconnection, at any time: I had this requirement from day one, in the first curvytron losing connexion meant dropping out of the game permanently. Not anymore. You can just refresh the page mid-game and keep playing, try it yourself.
The game runs in any desktop and mobile browser and supports gamepads I've put up servers in US and Europe to offer a good ping to as much players as I can afford at the moment.
I still maintain and host the first game to keep the original experience live.
I'd love to get feedback from HN, and don't hesitate to stress-test the game of course!
I'll be around to answer questions and discuss if you're interested. Cheers!
This is excellent! What was the biggest challenge you found while developing the sequel?
It was clearly dynamic "trail" geometry:
in curvytron your trail grows behind you as you go, so on each frame most of active players trail "capsule" 3D geometries have changed.
I started by blindly recalculate every geometry on every frame, work well enough for a time but I think you can see the optimisation problem coming...
On each frame the trail gets only 1 new point and the rest of its points (dozens) has not changed, yet you recalculate every segment vertices (and normals, etc) for every point, just to add one new segment at the end and finally add the half-sphere cap. And this is done by Three.js: so by the CPU, not in GPU yet.
What I did was write a dynamic capsule geometry, with pre-allocated geometry buffer and the capacity to add 1 point at each frame by just filling the missing vertices, normals, etc fo the point. Resulting in a massing performance improvement.
Side note: when the player stop "drawing" and leave a hole behind, the detached trail become inactive and just stop being re-computed at each frame.
Nice! The game is fun.
How did you handle the reconnection?