> Kaboom Valley

This game reminded me of Gorilla Basic (GORILLA.BAS), it really brought back some childhood memories, so nostalgic! Unfortunately, this Kaboom Valley game seem to be unplayable! None of the buttons is working for me and only the computer is able to fire its projectiles over my head :(

Could not play any of the games - too many requests errors. Why do they need "sessions", are they not running client-side?

Does everything need a "session"? Is it possible to have fully static games/exports?

Server-side-by-default kills half the point though. Static/local-first would let people fork, run offline, host on a static bucket. "session for sync" isn't a reason to force it, just the easiest architecture to build first.

One thing I forgot to mention is all of these games run server side and thin clients just render and send input back to the server. So a game session needs to exist for the back and forth communication to work.

Theoretically you could do this all client side too, but that would remove the magic of every game getting multiplayer for free

Hey I was looking for documentation to learn how to make my own games but I didn't see a link on the website. Do you have any docs? If so please consider putting a link to it on the front page.

I didn't try logging into the studio since it was asking for username and stuff, so maybe the docs are there? I just wanted to read the docs before committing to a login and stuff to see if this is worth my time.

Web games moved way beyong these style of games. Complex 3D using three.js and rigid body physics engines in wasm workers like rapier is feasible now. We can do full multiplayer pipelines with server authority, client prediction and reconciliation and still run at 60fps. Its really amazing what can be pressed into a single html these days.

Everytime I try and use one of those Complex 3D web games, all 8 cores of my computer go to 100% and my computer becomes unresponsive until I kill the web browser.

Its really amazing how inefficient those Complex 3D web games are.

Usually that's GC thrash from spawning objects every frame, not the physics itself. Switched to object pooling + fixed timestep for rapier steps and CPU dropped like 70%. Chrome's task manager per-tab is great for catching this.

Breakout is still a good game even though we can 'do 3D'

Ran homegames on a Pi Zero over wifi last weekend, lag was maybe 40ms tops for a card game lobby. Nobody in my group cared it wasn't 3D, they cared it just worked and reconnected fine after wifi hiccups.

Wow! Can you tell us a bit about what the past 8 years have looked like for you?

Sure thing! Basically started making simple rendering tests over a websocket and then added images, font and audio support.

The initial idea was to make jackbox style games people could host on their computers and play on their phones in the same room over wifi.

Added to that and kind of did a whole lot of nothing productive around covid, just experiments that didn’t get deployed anywhere. And a podcast with over 100 episodes.

A few years ago my wife and I had our first kid, so I spent about a year polishing the self hosted stuff and figured I would put the project on the shelf.

So that’s pretty much what I did until around 6 months ago when I realized the actual Internet is fast enough to run these games outside of a LAN, and a lot of people including myself miss browser based games. That plus Claude making me way more effective in my limited free time led to the current state of things

I like the concept and tried to play some games by starting or joining sessions, either nothing happened or I got disconnected straight away?

Anyway nice concept. I’m also making web games (see my post history) so if anyone wanted to connect and discuss, send me an email (in profile too)

Sorry about that, looks like the traffic spike from HN overwhelmed my session management stuff. It will only get better!

Does anyone remember "Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit" on the Amiga?

And for the Commodore 64.

And Amos and blitz basic

Nice. Why does the homepage have two scrollbars?

Nice idea. I found a couple of interesting games on this.

Thanks for sharing! Cool that you haven't stopped working on this project after that long time. It gives me inspiration to work on my projects which I can't find time to finish.

Thanks! I'm planning on making a lot more. I made most of this stuff before AI tools were available. But now Claude can one shot really impressive stuff, it's amazing

8 years of side-project life means 8 years of nobody paging you at 3am when a game server hangs. That's the real luxury here, not the tech stack.

strangely your site was not blocked from my company :D you are doing a great job

Nice! Some fun making big chains explodey things :)

Fun, seems to be working. Do you have levels? All the games I played seemed to have a static level.

Thank you! I don’t have any super fleshed out games with progression yet. I have some ideas but the most thorough game at this point is vegas trail. The balancing is busted in that at the moment. Will definitely fix that and make more games with some depth

I was just closelined by a beam in one of the games. Badass

Nice! I actually didn’t know the rendering stuff could support anything pseudo-3D like that until yesterday.

interesting idea, i wanted to build something like this for some time

Very cool! Love seeing more browser games

Thank you! Obviously still some gaps to close but would love for this to carry on the spirit of newgrounds and stuff like that.

Wow nice.

As a side note, having "Weed Smoke Willie" be a featured game on the front page isn't really a good look. As the saying goes "birds of a feather flock together", and I think a lot of people will see that and think "okay so that's the kind of person that uses this platform"

I donno man, i just want to drive my gondola thing and help fish “get high.” Glorious

As a side note, writing comments that sound like some pearl-clutching culture warrior on a post about someone's open source software isn't really a good look. As the saying goes "birds of a feather flock together", and I think a lot of people will see that and think "okay, so that's the kind of person who comments on people's passion projects on hacker news"

8 years solo on this and it's still session-required, rate-limited on day one of launch. We shipped stuff way rougher than this and it survived HN traffic. Infra's the actual product here, not the games.