Convergence: complete HTML5 game | Hacker News Reader

Convergence: complete HTML5 game

currantcat.com

215 pointsDanielRibeiro48 comments

Hello there, I'm the one who made The Convergence! Thanks for viewing my game, I hope everyone enjoyed it!

I didn't have a lot of time to finish it, but I wanted to add the sounds a friend of mine did, as well as a logo for the awesome CONSTRUCT the devs mentioned here.

Me & my girl are amazed by the amount of people that played and shared the game - it's nice to see such positive feelings spreading all around!

I want to polish the game a bit more, I fell like the mechanics deserve it! :D

Thanks for making our day even more special!

You deserve the attention! It's a great game and refreshingly original. I've got several colleagues playing it now. Looking forward to the planned improvements...

Thanks!

Hi guys! I'm Tom from Scirra and we made Construct 2 (http://www.scirra.com).

This is a great game made with our engine, the author has also made it available on the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lkiiendkaiacnmggpp...

This game of course deserves it's own post as it's greatly executed, and without meaning to steal it's thunder we would love to show you a couple more excellent games made with Construct 2!

Can't Turn it Off http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/cant-turn-it-off

Trashoid Attack http://www.scirra.com/construct2/demos/trashoid-attack

We also ran a small competition on our website and there's a bunch more games to look at here: http://www.scirra.com/forum/users-choice-final-poll_topic458...

Anyway it's really promising what is coming out of Construct 2 now, me and my brother (just two of us running Scirra) love playing games like these that get made! We hope to see lots more :D

All games made in Construct 2 are all pure HTML5, not a whiff of Flash in sight!

> not a whiff of Flash in sight!

How do you handle sound? HTML5 sound is still very insufficient for games at the moment in my experience.

This game doesn't have sound, but Construct 2 does allow for it. We've actually blogged about HTML5 sound quite a lot:

http://www.scirra.com/blog/46/more-on-html5-audio-codecs-and...

It's a bit of a minefield and is difficult to manage. MP3 has some strict licensing rules in regards to distributing games so we made a point of avoiding it. What we do is dual encode every sound to .ogg and .m4a, this will cover all browsers/devices. It's not the best solution space wise but it's safe and works pretty well.

We hope browsers make significant upgrades to HTML5 audio at some point! The easy option is to use Flash to handle sounds but we think this is cheating, we're kinda HTML5 purists :)

Scirra dev here - we use HTML5 <audio> with some hacks that makes it just about work. The next release in a week or two includes support for Chrome's Web Audio API, which is a lot better and more stable, it's really a great API. Hoping more browsers support that soon.

Shameless plug: my HTML5 Game Engine http://impactjs.com/ is a perfect fit for games like these.

This particular game seems to be made with Construct2 ( http://www.scirra.com/construct2 ) though - which is a bit more "point-and-clicky" than Impact.

Yes, the guy did it on construct 2. He is a game designer not a programmer, I'm working with him in the game Cannon Land, that you can see when you enter on www.currantcat.com

Construct 2 is a very powerful engine, and a lot of great games are being made in it! Describing it as 'point-and-clicky' really doesn't justify it at all.

But looking at it, it does seem that it is point-and-clicky. It doesn't so much look like a 2D game programming framework or am I wrong?

I didn't mean "point-and-clicky" in a negative way; sorry if it sounded like it.

Construct 2 describes itself as "A visual HTML5 game development tool", Impact however is a programming framework. Someone without programming experience wouldn't be able to do much with Impact, but may still be able to make great games with Construct 2.

We're focusing on different target groups and in my book that's great. It's what HTML5 needs to succeed :)

Yeah, hopefully between us we can silence the Flash critics who claim there aren't any good tools available :)

Cute.

Having the arrow keys move the woman in reverse puts an odd male perspective on it though. This could be fixed by making the arrow keys move in the direction of whichever character is currently right-side-up.

Edit: Having the viewport follow the guy also contributes to this on scrolling levels, and I don't know how to fix it, aside from just having a character select at start.

It was made as a gift of a 10 year relationship of the game developer and his significant other. Both the guy and the girl look like them in real life.

Edit: In advanced levels you control the girl directly

"Fixed" is relative. Personally, I enjoyed the game, and don't see any issues with the control paradigm.

There could just be a key to change the currently controlled character.

I noticed this too as I needed the mnemonic "I'm the guy, I'm the guy..."

In the larger level in which your characters are separated, your camera follows the woman and it's easy to lose track of the man entirely.

This is the biggest non-issue in any game ever. I can't even imagine how anybody's first thought would be "how DARE the man be directly controlled by the arrow keys instead of the woman." I've made games for my girlfriend several times, with some games having her control me and others controlling herself, and neither time did we think what character was being controlled was an issue.

Hell, I actually read this post to her, and she was just completely confused and annoyed that someone found this a problem.

There's no sexism to be found here. The male just happens to appear on-screen first and that's who you control. I'd struggle to find a single woman that would've even noticed that.

> I'd struggle to find a single woman that would've even noticed that.

This is kind of ridiculous. Clearly, people are noticing and some of the people who notice might be women.

I noticed because I assumed which ever character was right-side up would be controlled by the arrow keys. I didn't think it was sexist. I thought it was a flaw in the game.

People tend to focus on characters instead of directions. Since the male was the first person I controlled, it was natural that I kept on using the arrow keys to control him and I didn't even take a second to thing about it. Nobody would expect to be moving right, hit the flip button, and then start moving left just to "prove the developer treats genders equally." The control scheme would be disorienting and far more people would complain about that. And if you suggest the player select their gender at the start, then puzzles would have to be adjusted to suit this. It's needless effort to appease people that the game wasn't even made for.

And judging by the name, I'm assuming joeyh is a male, and the only other person to be "bothered" by it is also a male (dgreensp), so my claim isn't exactly baseless.

Besides, this was a game made by a couple. There's outrage where their shouldn't be any. This guy's partner doesn't need to be "liberated from male-dominated control schemes."

You don't understand at all — the whole point is that you're concurrently controlling both characters, but then for some reason it's always from the player's perspective of the male. It's a bug.

The game starts with the male on the bottom, I press right, the and both characters move to their right. When you flip the male to the top, both characters move to their left when you press right. I expect my keyboard movements to directly correspond to both characters from their own perspective.

Here's a preview of the HTML5 game I've been slowly working on for a year: http://ektomarch.com/games/

I already have 50 levels made, most of which are the size of large Super Metroid rooms, and ~60 enemy types. I'm just overwhelmed with work lately and haven't been able to make much progress.

I remember seeing this a while back and looking forward to it. Is it playable anywhere?

This is cool! Reminds me of VVVVVV (http://thelettervsixtim.es/), which had a similar section where you controlled two characters at once. It's a little strange that the secondary character moves even if the primary one is running into a wall, but it looks like the puzzles require that.

VVVVVV is the first thing I thought of when playing this.

It's a lot like Binary Land, a game from the mid 80s: http://youtu.be/NLI415emLzQ?t=42s

Exactly. Except VVVVVV is insanely fast and reactive and sometimes requires lots of training (had a great time playing it) and repetition. This game is just slow :-( (but a great accomplishment nonetheless)

It's actually quite fun to play. I think this is the first time I have said this about a HTML5 game/tech demo :)

Good gameplay is not a property of the platform (e.g. HTML5 or Flash), but of the game itself. Since HTML5 is still very young, there are mostly web devs building games with it - which often results in games that "feel" wrong.

But I agree, this game is a very nice example of how to do it right.

Also try http://www.phoboslab.org/ztype/ or http://playbiolab.com/ :)

Looks good, I did notice that the appcache has the wrong mime type it's text/plain and needs to be text/cache-manifest.

Scirra dev here. This is indeed a problem. The thing is Chrome is ultra-strict about the MIME type and rejects it if it's wrong. Firefox seems happy with it. Given HTML5 is new and nobody has their servers set up with this MIME type, and lots of people are already making HTML5 games with our tool, I'm tempted to say it's Chrome's fault for being too strict... getting everyone to reconfigure their servers is a real PITA just because Chrome is fussy.

Every single piece of documentation about appCache mentions the requirement for the correct headers to be sent. Chrome isn't being "ultra-strict", its been in the spec since day one.

It's not being "ultra-strict" it's a requirement of the spec[1] that the file be served with the correct mimetype.

[Edit] It doesn't work in firefox, the attribute triggers the permission bar but because it's the wrong mimetype it doesn't actually store anything.

Check it in Tools > Options > Advanced > Network

You'll notice that it has the domain referenced but has 0 bytes stored.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

Ah - well I guess the spec is written with the future in mind when everyone's got their servers configured correctly. Until then nobody has their servers set up right so I think it would be practical for browsers to be a bit more relaxed. Right now we're seeing a lot of games on servers without this MIME type, and the browsers respond by requesting all files from the server all over again every single page reload, probably wasting a lot of bandwidth and making HTML5 games look bad. I think there's a good case for a bit of relaxation on the browser side - standards compliance is good, but not if the web isn't ready yet.

No... just no. If browsers are relaxed now, then they are forced to provide backwards-compatibility for all the sites that then rely on those relaxed standards. Why do you think Internet Explorer is a complete mess and have dug themselves into a whole of having to ship half a dozen "compatibility modes" with every new version of their browser? Because they didn't stick to standards.

It's not hard to send the correct mime-type. For example, using htaccess.

A lot of our users host their games on free web hosts and don't have access to things like that.

This is really well done, and would translate very well to a touch interface.

Fun little game where when the twist became opaque, I immediately was excited to play more levels. That's a game design win. Thanks for sharing.

Cool concept and fun to play. Good job.

That is awesome. Nice work.

Charming concept, executed with great skill.

Note: flickers madly on Firefox 7.0.1/Windows XP, but works smoothly on Chrome 15.0.874.106 m/Windows XP.

This is great. The level design is fantastic - a fair difficulty and fun progression.

How is Convergence a "complete" HTML 5 game without sound?

Does anyone else think the guy looks a little like Hitler? Perhaps a different nose...

Just saying. It's hard to tell what exactly I see with 8bit sprites! :-)

He looks like a lumberjack

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