So you want to compete with Roblox
fortressofdoors.com
fortressofdoors.com
We're about to release a new social hub today and our user facing release of our TypeScript based scripting very soon.
One really nice thing about the web is that it works anywhere you can find a browser. So we run on smart fridges and thanks to MS including Edge on the XBox accidentally launched on console last week. Was a pleasant surprise to find full controller support and all our editors working!
Web games also let you do other neat things. We built a game with Day[9] one of the OG streamers and due the wonders of deep linking could open up the game to his entire chat. A short highlight video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4
We're also hiring a bunch of roles here: https://controlzee.com/#jobs
Edit: oh, so scripting is not even there yet.
World Editor: https://dotbigbang.com/game
Voxel Editor: https://dotbigbang.com/voxelobjecteditor
Currently game functionality is made in a Unity style component system using components written in TypeScript. All the games on the site right now were built in our editors. So with the release of scripting to the public we'll be enabling people with existing game dev or programming experience to make their own games. For an example one of our Incubator program members, who is high school aged with some basic prior programming experience modded our FPS game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Cklg-3EBM
We're also working on lowering that bar to entry. Both with elements users can drag and drop into their games to create functionality and simplified scripting environments.
> Edit: oh, so scripting is not even there yet.
Yup, releasing soon but we've been making games internally with it for quite some time.
As for the name it's a historical accident as far as I know. Our CEO began dot big bang as a hobby project back in 2012ish and wanted to call it big bang at the time but obviously that's a very hard name to get a good URL for. So he prepended a dot which has since stuck. I think we're keeping it for the foreseeable but other URLs are definitely worth a thought.
"support dot dot big bang dot com"
You can see where this going :)
Plus them playing Minecraft gives me an excuse to play. :)
There are way too many web games/apps that don't get this.
It's a 2x3 grid of floating 3D objects and you need to click the square where two of the constantly moving object collide.
The login/account creation process must be attacked frequently and intensely to warrant making this captcha tool so difficult. I'll never bitch about "finding all the bicycles" again.
Perhaps the off-the-shelf captchas people are using are too expensive for Roblox's tastes.
As a result, the average multiplayer game has better security than the typical bank, because thousands of bored and emotionally immature teenagers are trying some pretty sophisticated crap to just get more points in a fucking online game.
So totally not surprised that roblox's captcha is extra hard.
Why do so many try to make something that is so hard to do? Basically every other game genre is easier to make money with, and non-game startup ideas are easier than making a game. This is about as hard as it can get if you want your project to succeed.
Think the roughness and how everything is a hodgepodge appeals to kids in some way. It's more like the Flash era where you visit Kongregate, NewGrounds etc and although some of the games looked bad they were still fun and the rougher graphic style sometimes added to the charm.
A lot of times, technology isn't really that important in making a good game. Amazon has all the technology they need but still can't understand why people play games, it's hilarious seeing them fail even after all those years of investment.
Other mistakes I’ve actually made myself that this article is right about - technically superior, better graphics, quirky features, lower prices. Don’t compete with X, where X is any large entrenched business. It’s more or less guaranteed that you don’t know why that business is successful. If it looks like they have bad graphics or are technically inferior or lacking features, the assumption should be that these things are a competitive advantage. But that never stops most of us from making the wrong assumption, does it?
Meaning, you have to overcome the network effects of social, the lock-in effects of a popular programming environments in addition to all the usual problems with trying to make a successful game. All of those challenges are hard to overcome on their own, overcoming all three at once isn't something anyone should bet on.
And worst of all, there is no need for multiple products in this space. You only need one game maker game, making more doesn't add more value. This is why the other things matters, it would be easer to replace World of Warcraft or Fortnite or Unity etc, since there are fewer entrenching effects.
My team is building a sort of “Roblox in WASM/WebGPU” that’s built in UE4 and compiled to the browser, that will allow anyone to easily create virtual words and experiences for HTML5 without needing to know how to code. We’re even working toward live building using editor client side on the web, with hot reloading and a simple “publish” button so you can see in real time as you push changes.
Furthermore, the metaverse will be born from the web, because it “just works”, not to mention accessibility is increased when anyone can join with a simple link.
And for developers? No 30% tax from monopolistic walled gardens, plus only one codebase to worry about.
If anyone is interested in early access to our platform, you can join our Discord here:
Why do you mention 'no code'? To little coding opportunity is one things that made many metaverses after second Life boring.
Mostly because it is like doing PS2/Amiga games, and dealing with browser blacklisting is even worse than just driver issues on native code.
At least with driver issues one can work around them, with browser blacklisting there is no idea what is happening, while the user gets a single digit FPS.
Additionally WebGPU is now getting some kind of MSL/HLSL/Rust inspired shader language, yet another one to master, with plenty features only after 1.0 MVP.
2 generations of game developers were able to get a degree during that time.
No wonder everyone is now yet again going for streaming with server side rendering using the 2021 hardware capabilities via Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate.
I see flash as the MVP of the modern web. It showed us a glimpse of the possibilities if we were to make the tooling available. And it worked: the modern web has more than caught up with Flash and there are absolutely incredible things being done with modern tech.
Google Maps on the web is one of those, by the way. If you look closely and consider everything they are doing with these "catch-up" specs... Well, i for one am glad they're not doing it in Flash :)
An MVP that 10 years later there is yet tooling to properly match it.
Unless one goes to Animator, Unreal, Unity, PlayCanvas.
And then regardless of how much everyone tries, it is an API for 2012 hardware capabilities, with constraints.
In 10 years no one was able to produce something like NSight, PIX or Instruments for WebGL.
The best we could get was SpectorJS, really?
It's just that the web can do so much more today than flash could back then, so you need so much more tooling as well.
And yeah, the web wasn't really picked up by game developers very much. But that is because there is no value appeal to it, it's not due to a lack of capabilities. Web distribution doesn't make sense for most games when apps are a thing for mobile where most players are, and where more involved gamers either have their own consoles or hardware you can distribute executables to directly.
So why would you need such solid tooling for something that doesn't have any market demand? This isn't a case of "build it and they will come",some of it does exist and is used, it's just unpopular.
Unity and Unreal don't count, it is just another backwend, where rendering needs to be downgraded to GL ES 3.0 subset.
Yet few Web games can replicate an Infinite Blade experience, other than a couple of demos like the flow.
But there is high demand for a lot of crazy shit flash could and couldn't do back then. And the tooling is nuts. Even just VSCode and the devtools are huge and blow the IDEs/tooling from the flash days out of the water, and those are just the most standard tools we have. Then you look at all the JS tooling... There's a ridiculous amount of manpower and huge companies behind lots of it, so yes, the tooling today is far better.
That you can't as easily make a game for the web as you could for flash is an asterisk. Nobody is asking for those nowadays.
Don't get me wrong, i much prefer the web as a platform to mobile app stores, but I'm aware of the reality.
I really would like to see what such wonderful tools are those that beat Adobe's professional tooling for Flash.
Specially the stuff Shockwave was capable of, including native compilation and C++ stuff.
VSCode with a couple of plugins?!?
My contemporaries wrote amazing games, finished, and published them.
Usually with our users the biggest issue we find graphics performance wise is that they have manually disabled hardware acceleration. I don't think we've seen a single instance of being forced into software rendering for another reason in the wild.
Just yesterday I sent a an example to someone, on their computer they got nothing instead of a couple of nice balls rendered with a fragment shader.
Reason, their browser just dropped into software rendering and instead of progressive rendering, they got a black canvas with pixels slowly coming up.
No idea about the specific card, an integrated one in a Windows 8 white label PC.
Maps could be done in a PS2.
Building games is hard enough already; thinking you can build the whole toolchain on top of that is hubris.
I feel like a point that the author missed when discussing this is that there is a lot of evidence that being more mature may not be a strong selling point. The best example would be Fortnite, the most profitable game in the world at one point that had a sales pitch that could be boiled down to 'Like PUBG but more childish'. TF2 is another one that seemed to have plenty of competitors that tried to dethrone them by making a more mature and serious game, but that only one to succeed was Overwatch that went for a even more kid friendly esthetic.
And the stuff doesn’t end there. Nowadays they also have their own Lua-derivative language forked from Lua 5.1 (https://luau-lang.org/) with many improvements like static typing, performance, and sandboxing. And their renderer seems to work smoothly on low-end computers too, they've probably done lots of optimizations over the years.
He writes about startup hubris, about the meaning of an open web, about empowering your users.
Amazing article. Thanks for posting it.
I realised fairly quickly, that a great early step to achieving that goal, is via browser games that invite players to build their own levels or maps to share with their friends. People can play a game as a quick and occasional diversion with no commitment, then if they've had fun and tools I provide aren't overwhelming, they can have fun creating. At that point they are contributing to the game, learning basics of creating and gradually building confidence. Maybe later they'll go further and get involved with my public GitHub or my subreddit.
It's going to take months more to fully finish the opening game and map builder, but I've got the starts to a fairly simple 2d adventure/escape game in JavaScript that will run in any browser & play on any device. http://solarrageasylumbeta.protostart.net
I've been releasing it incrementally via a public GitHub project, with a beta version that makes it easy to jump in and play whatever feels polished at the time & a messy alpha version hidden behind a "deliberately not-secure" cheat code updated along with most of my GitHub commits.
Before starting on the game I also set up some basic overall community stuff: subreddit for (r/ProtoStart), website that sets out what the community is about protostart.net/
Here's to the next wave of kids that pick up programming from platforms like these.
Basically minecraft with a first class modding engine as a second expansion that kids can use eventually.
The first and most important part is a game that people want to play.
You need to start with a game that's fun, in a context that's fun (i.e. not coerced by outside authority), and only then you can sneak in some extra value.
> You need to target a specific known study path and be maximally efficient in presenting those concepts and offering a way to grade performance that translates to standardized tests.
Yeah, this is exactly what I meant. You do that, it's no longer a game, and kids will hate it. Those concepts are also all related to fitting your product in the education pipeline, which is distinct and mostly opposite to actually teaching things.
> Anything else is DOA because neither parents nor teachers nor kids will buy it.
Well, of course. Parents and teachers won't buy it because it won't fit the education pipeline, and kids won't want it because it's still labeled as intended for education pipeline.
To get to kids, you want something that's an actual videogame first, learning second. As a random example, try Kerbal Space Program - it's absolutely a game first, but it's easier and more fun to play the more you understand the math and engineering of space travel, which is how you end up with 12 years olds learning basics of orbital physics on their own, equations included. Because there suddenly is a point to it.
(And I want to reinforce the point about coercion. The simplest way to kill any such product is to get a school to make its use obligatory in a classroom setting. It's the same way as school reading lists kill people's desire to read books in general, and to read specific quality literature in particular.)
I don't see myself playing it but when I was younger Runescape was my thing, lost in that world. Philosophically (ha) question of what matters in life ultimately guess it's having fun since time is one directional (what you own/sentience) and fun is subjective. This is my neg comment on how (playing) video games could be considered a waste of time for not being "real" but it's about the experience. West World vs. reality too.
I do play video games, like a few hours a week of some multiplayer game like BFV or watch TV when I'm burnt/can't think anymore.
Also a tangent, space travel (probably impossible in our life time eg. stars) vs. going inwards eg. virtual reality/brain jar.
The problem is that you are _completely_ beholden to the same companies that are making money off their app stores, to continue to develop and maintain their browsers' ability to act as competitors to their own app store.
Why is so much children's content crowdsourced and MMO these days? AI-based moderation and whack-a-mole approach to letting strangers play with my kid and what content my kid sees is not a good plan.
I honestly don't understand how this is the business model of so many companies - so much that submitter has to create a post dissuading more from cramming into a crowded space.
While often cited, I don’t think that’s as much of an advantage anymore in the age of app stores, Steam, game streaming, and downloadable games on consoles, where all it costs is a tap or two.
Some of the stuff they've been posting on Twitter looks rad.
You compete with Roblox by creating another game the users will want to spend time on.
Apple won the competition with PC and Microsoft when they discovered a new paradigm. Macs lose the battle but iPhone won.
Create new markets, create new needs.
And if the past 5-10 years of video games gone viral is anything to go by, none of them did it on purpose.
Minecraft (at least in my opinion) kickstarted the indie game market, and years later slowly grew in popularity with a new generation of gamers.
Fortnite was a(nother) failed project from Epic, after they tried to do another Unreal Tournament. For a laugh they added a Battle Royale mode on top of what they already made for what they first thought would be popular, and the rest is history. They added a battle royale mode after the unexpected success of the shit looking PUBG, built in a shit engine with shitty looking assets by a half-assed developer. Which in turn was based on dayz, standalone version of a survival mod for the pretty obscure military game ARMA.
> Do you view Fortnite as a game, or as a platform?
> Fortnite is a game. But please ask that question again in 12 months.
[0] https://www.twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/12102919619047...
If you take a deeper look on how it works, the companies and game designers that are involved in it. The crazy amount of money they paid and pay to early designers to build up content...
So if Notch pitched the author Minecraft the answer would have been to abandon the project? This puts a huge dent in the credibility of the article
Minimalistic open-source is the only way forward. The complexity of Unreal and Unity is way to far gone to be able to build anything original.
Browsers are way too complex to make 3D scale, even with WASM your turnaround will be too long for the kind of iteration speed needed.
The author probably bought the stock.
I wrote something on the subject a while back (very biased): http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html
I want to challenge this because it's wrong. And the best way to do it is to show you how fast iteration times can be: https://youtu.be/jvDz72FAOd0
I use dynamic .so/.dll hot-deploy, which can reload native code in microseconds without disturbing state.
My game can render 600 non-instanced skin meshed characters on a 10W Jetson Nano.
I'm also not trying to say you can't have fast iteration time in other ways. Just that the statement about the browser was incorrect.
You need fast turnaround AND performance at the same time.
You are sinking your cost into a dead-end proving the articles point.
I've been making games professionally across a wide gamut of technologies for over sixteen years and that's simply not true. Further there are loads of games written in JS that prove it's not true! Believe it or not I've actually written game code in languages SLOWER than JS for shipping titles!
Krunker (https://krunker.io/) is a browser based multiplayer shooter.
CrossCode (http://www.cross-code.com/en/home) is another pretty famous one that is also on Steam and very popular.
Slither.io (http://slither.io/) and really the whole genre that these sorts of games became.
The whole Godot Engine IDE (https://editor.godotengine.org/releases/latest/) has a web version.
Game Dev Tycoon (https://store.steampowered.com/app/239820/Game_Dev_Tycoon/) is made with JS.
Curious Expedition (https://store.steampowered.com/app/358130/Curious_Expedition...) was written in CoffeeScript which is compiled to JS.
And so on, and on. There are literally loads including umpteen multiplayer ports of Quake 3 and that sort of thing. Throw in all the JS13k games. Numerous games people have published using the Unity web exporter and so on. All the little web games people have released on itch.io, all the stuff made with Twine and Bitsy. And on, and on.
The idea that JS is too slow to make games with is pretty silly and smacks a bit of willful ignorance.
These prove the point, they don't scale or deliver anything that will dislocate roblox. Even wormate (which is way better than slither does not run properly on my android pad)...
> Javascript is not usable, you wont be able to make anything useful if that is your underlying VM.
And yet all these useful games exist all targeting JS backends. Some of which have made oodles of cash.
Of that list I've been making games for dot big bang for the last three years.
For other slower languages I worked in for shipping games there is EVE Online a large part of which is written in Python and then APB which had a lot of code written in UnrealScript for Unreal Engine 3 both of which are very much definitely slower than JS.
Edit: Another really cool browser based project is this fight simulator: https://www.geo-fs.com/
The V8 is an incredibly good VM. It has compute performance comparable with Rust in Debug mode for a single core, or comparable to the JVM with a single core. That’s plenty for a great many game genres, and for ALL of the game genres that I am personally interested in playing.
CrossCode, Game Dev Tycoon, Curious Expedition, Screeps, FoundryVTT
I feel somewhat confident that there are others, but the devs of these games were somewhat public about what technologies they used. I can easily imagine other very popular games like FTL, Darkest Dungeons, Slay the Spire, etc having made use of browser tech, even though I have no idea if they did or not.
The fact that I bought these games (in some cases on multiple platforms), spent countless hours playing them, and never had a complaint about performance, should be evidence enough that browser tech is plenty good for delivering high quality games that people are happy to pay good money for.
Heck, the fact that it was possible to do this three decades ago ought to be evidence enough that you don't need something better than V8 (or even a potato) to make great games that "scale" in terms of number of players and in terms of purchases.
If you mean VM performance, you can always play the Computer Language Benchmarks Game: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
You'll find that of course languages like C++ and Rust can perform better. But is that level of performance necessary to pull off a great game with a big paying audience in 2021? Absolutely not.
Eventually you won't be able to afford anything beyond 10W! Javascript is not an option on 10W for action MMO games with real character graphics.
We are talking "metaverse" levels of complexity, and all the games both of you list are very simple compared to that.
I do think your low powered engine project is very cool though.
The 3D action part of this equation is very important, without it you cannot trick the reptile brain that you are actually there, 3D MMORPGs don't trigger this at all, f.ex!
Also if you use that excuse to keep building wasteful software you are not part of a solution.
Likewise I’m skeptical in such an energy scenario we’d have affordable internet access or supply chains to build and equip people with low power computers.
Let’s hope we don’t have to find out!
What I'm saying is that today we use the internet for mostly non interesting stuff when we all can be gods and create interconnected worlds with our minds!
It sounds like you are working to enable VR based massively multiplayer games with very low energy/compute requirements. I absolutely applaud you for that. I think it’s awesome. It just doesn’t match your original claim, that performance better than js is necessary for creating a viable game in 2021.
Possibly you meant 3D/VR MMO, but that’s not what I took you to mean when I first responded to your comment about js as a viable engine for communal game building.
Post link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28723689
Game link: https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html