Pull this up in your Android or iOS browser: Defense | Hacker News Reader

Pull this up in your Android or iOS browser: Defense

m.lostdecadegames.com

163 pointsdonohoe42 comments

It's such a shame that the HTML5 audio API's are still such a minefield that all these demos usually are silent.

Or the reverse: by now I have seen too many HTML/JS based games to remain really impressed by the technology - unless the demos start to provide audio.

Because honestly, a game like this needs matching 8bit sound effects. Too bad it's practically impossible to play them in a timely fashion, nor mix multiple of them together, let alone reliably generate them based on game state

On iOS, you can usually get sound effects or music working pretty well int terms of latency, but not both. For a while Android had decent flash support for multiple sounds at once in the browser. I agree, sound is really the most lacking in mobile browsers.

Hmm.. how do you get sound effects working 'pretty well' in iOS? Apart from the latency the big problem is that you always need a user action (such as a click on a button) for sound to start (1), which is pretty hard for games.

[1] http://weblogs.vpro.nl/digitaal/2011/11/04/why-html5-audiovi...

1. Wait for user input before loading 2. Load up a "sound sprite" (kind of like a sprite sheet for audio) since iOS only supports playing one sound at a time 3. PROFIetc.

Do you have any working examples? Would love to see this working in practice.

Wow, I just tested this on an age old HTC Hero (Android 2.3) and it runs a lot smoother than most native apps. It even loads much faster. While it may not be the next Battlefield, I'm impressed. I never gave HTML5-games much of a chance for mobile phones because of all the additional overhead and quirks. But if it starts quicker than Reddit... Kudos to the programmer[s]!

Thank you very much! :-)

If you want to take a peak under the hood, their first game, Onslaught! Arena was open sourced a couple of days ago:

https://github.com/lostdecade/onslaught_arena

Fun. Though it has the problem many of these kind of gun defense things seem to have, where first you are completely dominating the enemy for a long time, with practically no challenge, and then the balance tips over to where you can no longer handle the waves and you get quickly overrun.

So the difficulty ramps up like this: it goes from 1 to 100 every 60 seconds, spawning more difficult enemies as it increases. The difficulty increases faster the more damage you've taken. Once it reaches 100, it spawns dragons, resets to 0 and doubles the amount of monsters it will spawn.

You can reset the difficulty manually by working your way up the weapon tree to the RUNEFORGE (purple sword)!

Glad it was still fun despite your frustration :-)

I feel that more apps will head towards this route. An app is going to be a webpage.

Apple originally suggested that (before the release of the app store), but people bitched.

It was true back then though. Try running this in the browser on the original iPhone.

That was 4 years and many many many HTML5 APIs ago. And Javascript engine improvements.

To be precise, their existing Cocoa/Objective-C writing desktop developer community bitched.

So far this works well for free apps, but nobody has really cracked the "make people painlessly pay for web apps" thing yet.

Didn't Facebook just announce a group to help tackle that problem?

BlackBerry has a solution for this - package this as an app and sell it like any other.

Very cool, good work.

Axes are terrible, btw. I only started losing once I somehow got some Axes. Gotta tune those.

Agreed. I had a very powerful sword, then switched back to an intro axe. Could you have the level of the powerup carry over across types?

I thought the same thing, but I think its because I used up all the swords. It seems each weapon has a quantity?

Yeah axes are something to avoid ;) We were thinking about making them more fun but we're basically done working on this game.

Thats too bad, but thanks for replying

Holy shit. I am blown away that this can be done in a mobile browser.

Short link: http://bit.ly/hndefense

Thank you

qr http://i.imgur.com/a5lyZ.png

202 on my g2. Now we need a leaderboard. Fun though, great to see it!

Also works on a BlackBerry (7.0 OS).

dosent seem to work on chrome in ics but all systems go in the stock browser. nice work

doesn't work on wp7 :(

Isn't it still the IE7 rendering engine? Does it surprise anyone?

edit: this information is outdated and incorrect, my apologies. Thanks for the correction.

Unless the grandparent is on the GM of WP7 he should have the full IE9 Trident engine. Support isn't the greatest, as the vast majority of mobile sites seem to target Webkit, but it's far better than the release was. Tango should bring IE10

As of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), it's an improved version of the IE9 rendering engine, and is generally not bad. It doesn't work with a lot of mobile sites that expect WebKit (as with Opera Mobile or Firefox Mobile), but it's not a bad browser by any stretch.

A lot of fun and well polished.

Wow, this is so well done!

I love the graphics. And it was really fun to play, well done.

Doesn't work on my WP7

yawn. If you want to make a game, make a game. Start by writing a story, then break it down into scenes, then create a variety of opposing forces, then balance them, then create suspense, then make it all fun. This might have been notable before the onslaught of web game frameworks, but now it's just something for me to complain about. And like pilif said, where's the sound?

Do you even know what proof of concept is ?

Really? Some people just want to watch the world burn. Native apps are the future. It's something someone made in their free time to be enjoyed, not bitched about on HN.

No. HN is not your mom's fridge. If you want unconditional validation, ask someone who cares about you. I expect that anything posted here will be fixed with fire, because that's a valuable service that only skilled peers can provide. Annoying less is wasting everyone's time.

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