Just because.
March 27, 2012 9:00 AM   Subscribe

 
I'm going to pretend it's like real life where you generally die just the one time, and never go back.
posted by nanojath at 9:08 AM on March 27, 2012


you generally die just the one time, and never go back.

Are you a non-committal Buddhist?
posted by jaduncan at 9:11 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Are you a non-committal Buddhist?

Isn't everybody?
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:12 AM on March 27, 2012 [7 favorites]


I've gotten as far as entering my username (Herman Caine, if you must know) and hitting play. Now all I'm doing is staring at a screen that says "Connecting to server".

Now I have no idea if this is because I'm doing this from within Chrome, or because our IT department somehow magically blocks specific java/javascript that they somehow deem not work related.

But being that there's not enough context in the post, and my current nerdevents score is so low, I have no idea if this is what I should have been expecting in the first place.
posted by Blue_Villain at 9:14 AM on March 27, 2012


MWA HA HA HA, I stole loot in a browser demo (they give you an accomplishment for it too).
posted by jaduncan at 9:16 AM on March 27, 2012


Not waxing metaphysical, jaduncan, just talking about regular corporeal death on earth, where occasionally people are technically dead for a little while and then revived by purely secular and materialistic means. Admittedly this isn't really much of an issue when you have been hacked apart by a skeleton with a sword.
posted by nanojath at 9:18 AM on March 27, 2012


This is awesome. My character is Rufus, if you happen to see me running from a skeleton.
posted by ChrisHartley at 9:18 AM on March 27, 2012


When I turned into the Red Panda from Urbana, I figured I'd won the game.
posted by Smart Dalek at 9:23 AM on March 27, 2012


World of Whitepeople
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:27 AM on March 27, 2012 [6 favorites]


I unlocked an achievement called 'Foxy' where I looked like a a cute Firefox creature. Go me.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 9:49 AM on March 27, 2012


World of Whitepeople

World of Whitedudes, more like. There's an NPC who specifically refers to you (and the other players) as male.
posted by jedicus at 9:54 AM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


Nyan cat! Heh.
posted by Iosephus at 9:58 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Connecting to server...

*waits*

Connecting to server...

*waits*

Connecting to server...

*waits*

I think Metafilter has beaten this game.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 10:01 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


What do I win?
posted by Four Flavors at 10:02 AM on March 27, 2012


Sir Mudkip's first fight was with rats in a house. I'm shocked.
posted by Blue Meanie at 10:03 AM on March 27, 2012


background information on the game from Mozilla: BrowserQuest – a massively multiplayer HTML5 (WebSocket + Canvas) game experiment
posted by gen at 10:05 AM on March 27, 2012


BrowserQuest server status/user distribution here: http://browserquest.mozilla.org/status/
posted by gen at 10:08 AM on March 27, 2012


gen: "BrowserQuest server status/user distribution here"

Ah cool. I was certain there couldn't just be 70 people playing this!
posted by vanar sena at 10:12 AM on March 27, 2012


Cute demo, lame game.
posted by Meatbomb at 10:16 AM on March 27, 2012


Not really that hard. Once you get a weapon and armor in the current area, you move on to the next. I didn't die at all. I won after about 20 minutes of playing. (For comparison's sake, I can beat The Legend of Zelda in just under an hour.)

An interesting design decision was to not have any experience points. Advancement is entirely from found loot, which can generally be found without combat.

I think the game was okay for what it was. If this were available on a Commodore 64 in the 80s it'd be an incredible sensation.
posted by JHarris at 10:18 AM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


What is the final achievement?
posted by smackwich at 10:24 AM on March 27, 2012


@smackwich: never gonna give you up...
posted by SAnderka at 10:31 AM on March 27, 2012


never gonna give you up...

I quit.
posted by JHarris at 10:50 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


The noise it makes when you try to pick up a weapon you already have is the synth sound at the beginning of Fishbone's "Ugly".
posted by humboldt32 at 11:01 AM on March 27, 2012


1997: Look at this cool Java applet!
2012: Look at this cool JavaScript!
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:03 AM on March 27, 2012


Reminds me of Graal Online back in the good ol' days.
posted by Evernix at 11:11 AM on March 27, 2012


The innovation for me in this demo is the sound. I think this is the first HTML audio game I've played that just worked. Previous efforts I've seen all used Flash to play the audio.

Speaking of Flash and this kind of game, if you like this kind of thing give Realm of the Mad God another try. It's all Flash, no fancy HTML5 demo, but the game is actually fun.
posted by Nelson at 11:11 AM on March 27, 2012


sethead link_ocarina_of_time.gif
posted by Evernix at 11:14 AM on March 27, 2012


My character was "Count de Monet". Stole some loot, naturally.
posted by phong3d at 11:14 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Also, going through the source code is fascinating, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
posted by phong3d at 11:16 AM on March 27, 2012


Yeah the real story here is not the game, but how it's implemented. Not that I have any idea...
posted by grog at 11:23 AM on March 27, 2012


Any idea what those 2 mystery achievements are?
posted by GilloD at 11:31 AM on March 27, 2012


One of them is eating the cake through the portals in town. The other has to do with Rick Astley, who I have not found, thank goodness.
posted by JHarris at 12:00 PM on March 27, 2012


He's in a cave.
posted by captaincrouton at 12:03 PM on March 27, 2012


It's succeeded in this: I'm going to take a closer look at both web sockets and node.... (This is the third thing in a week that's made me think it's getting to be time to put those on my todo list.)
posted by ook at 12:06 PM on March 27, 2012


or because our IT department somehow magically blocks specific java/javascript that they somehow deem not work related

WebSocket has a lot of trouble with proxy traversal. If your work restricts all web traffic to a proxy, WebSocket will only work if your proxy supports HTTP CONNECT.
posted by zixyer at 12:24 PM on March 27, 2012


As phong3d and grog said, the implementation is the cool thing here, not the actual play of the game. The source code is a pretty nicely written demonstration of what HTML 5 can do.

This is the a death knell for Flash. This game is implemented entirely in HTML/JavaScript, written to work (mostly) cross-browser. HTML 5 doesn't require Flash to play video. This proof of concept shows that most of the other things that require Flash are also unnecessary. Since Flash is a bug-ridden closed source security hole installed on most people's machine, this is a VERY good thing. When you no longer need Flash, it closes one of the major vectors of malware on the Internet.

Time to short Adobe stock.
posted by Xoc at 12:26 PM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


The last achievement is talking to Rick Astley, who is in this cave. The cave is a maze, and I found him in there by going back in the door I came from repeatedly.
posted by Algebra at 12:41 PM on March 27, 2012


"Achievement Unlocked: Coward"

Woo hoo!
posted by BitterOldPunk at 1:00 PM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


Achievement Unlocked: Your browser cannot run BrowserQuest!
posted by RobotHero at 1:02 PM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Took me forever to get the achievement for killing the boss. There's like a dozen people just hanging around in there, waiting for His Boniness to pop up and get monkeypiled. Least threatening endgame ever.
posted by echo target at 1:39 PM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


How do I get to the Mario Pipe?!?!?
posted by maryr at 1:49 PM on March 27, 2012


The last achievement is talking to Rick Astley, who is in this cave. The cave is a maze, and I found him in there by going back in the door I came from repeatedly.

It's less a maze than a practical joke, hence the Rick Astley at the end. You go into one of the doors in the second room - it doesn't matter which one. Then, go back through the door you entered from eight times.
posted by zamboni at 2:15 PM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Is there anything left to do after you get all the achievements? Is it wrong that I keep wanting to be able to pk the new players right when they spawn?
posted by Arbac at 3:47 PM on March 27, 2012


It's less a maze than a practical joke, hence the Rick Astley at the end. You go into one of the doors in the second room - it doesn't matter which one. Then, go back through the door you entered from eight times.

Do you know that I made a MAP? That was my instinct "Oh, make a map" and I was SO ANNOYED when it dead ended and my map was just a circle. Curses!
posted by GilloD at 3:52 PM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]


I am excited and bummed about this, because I started building something just like this as an in-house test of a realtime messaging service I was working on last winter. Of course, more practical uses of my coding time came up and it was shelved, but browser quest is what i had wanted it to be if only i could have borrowed a few more man-weeks from the budget :(
posted by thedaniel at 4:46 PM on March 27, 2012


I want to know how to get to the Mario pipe too...
posted by Night_owl at 5:34 PM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


re: The death of Flash. Audio is still an issue with browsers and especially mobile browsers. Some browsers can only play back .OOG, some only .MP3.

I believe Adobe has a plan to move ActionScript/Flash dev to HTML5. Basically, you still create a Flash app, but when you've completed it, you just export it to HTML5. I may be wrong but in a general gaming context HTML5 really just means javascript+canvas. Canvas is really just used for blitting, just like old school arcade/computer games.

However, I've moved from Flash based development [with open source tools] directly to "HTML5", and I haven't looked back. With HTML5, all I need is notepad++ and a computer. With WAMP*, I can do dev and playtesting on an Atom-based netbook just fine. I don't have to compile or anything, I just hit f5/refresh and my new code runs.

I can hit all platforms [win, mac, linux, iphone, andriod] at once -and since everything is stored/called from my server(s), any updates I do can be instantly propagated to the world and no one ever needs to update a plugin [I'd like to check out Unity3d, but that's another closed system that requires a plugin].

The only issue [outside of sound support] I see with HTML5 vs Flash is security, to wit, site-locking and encryption. I suppose a chunk of this could be fixed by storing assets/code in a database and having the game/app "call home" in various ways [PHP/AJAX] to validate authenticity.

*You don't need WAMP, but it makes things easier since you can have a full Apache server with MySQL running on your dev box with a few mouse clicks.
posted by ill13 at 5:51 PM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]


Time to short Adobe stock.

I heard they make other things other than Flash. Very nice things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. I doubt their stock is going to be affected by HTML 5 and Flash.
posted by juiceCake at 6:35 PM on March 27, 2012


I wonder how much money they really made off of Flash, anyway. They only sold the authoring tools, which would still be necessary in a post-Flash world, assuming that they do a decent job of exporting HTML5.
posted by zixyer at 8:39 PM on March 27, 2012


You can see what all the achievements are by viewing this source file.

The 3 unknown ones are:

FOXY: {
id: 18,
name: "Foxy",
desc: "Find the Firefox costume",
hidden: true
},
FOR_SCIENCE: {
id: 19,
name: "For Science",
desc: "Enter into a portal",
hidden: true
},
RICKROLLD: {
id: 20,
name: "Rickroll'd",
desc: "Take some singing lessons",
hidden: true
}
posted by kakarott999 at 8:29 AM on March 28, 2012


I wonder how much money they really made off of Flash, anyway

Well, they spent $3,400,000,000 to acquire it* in the first place, so for their sake I'm hoping the answer was "lots and lots".

*and yes Dreamweaver and a handful of niche products, but at the time it was mostly about Flash and Director. (Which I am surprised to learn still exists; I honestly thought it had been subsumed into Flash years ago)

Transforming Flash into an HTML5 authoring tool is probably the best move they could have made at this point, but it's basically a last-ditch attempt to hang on to their existing customer base for a version or two rather than a serious attempt to own the HTML5 authoring space.
posted by ook at 8:29 AM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]


On the other hand they're trying to both have and eat the cake -- at the same time that they're trying to reposition Flash as an HTML5 tool, they're also seeking to skim the profits developers make when using Flash's higher-end features. Which as a business strategy makes sense to me only if their secret goal is to drive away all the quality developers and kill off Flash as quickly as possible.
posted by ook at 10:06 AM on March 29, 2012


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