I think I have to admit my defeat.

My goal was to learn node.js, write an asynchronous multiplayer game server and html5 client all in under 48 hours, including sleep, partying and eating.

So with 90 minutes left on the deadline I have a user/session/login mechanism that sort of doesn’t work, it seems to have a few bugs that I couldn’t track down yet.

My game made you strand on an island. Every player is alone on his island, but they are in the same ocean and can see each other on the map. The map worked, placing the islands worked too.

Then you can send an exploding “bomb in a bottle” in some direction and hopefully make a boom on the island of a neighbour. Except for the exposion part this also worked. I had a basic synchronisation mechanism going so the server would update the bottles every second and push them out to the client, the client would then try and keep up to date in beween the server messages. That worked quite nicely. But I am running into difficulties with having more than one user. I have no idea how to dig into these bugs so I decided to give up – 90 Minutes is not enough to squash at least 10 really show-stopping bugs and setup a live deployment of a web framework I have never deployed yet.

Maybe next time it will work better. Maybe I will write an HTML5 game without a server component. Node.js is really fascinating, and javascript is quite nice for asynchronous stuff.

Until next time…  Bye

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2011 at 5:35 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.