Ask HN: What's the most beautiful web game you've seen?
I'm looking for examples of web games with slick animations and / or an elegant aesthetic. Think 'Two Dots' or 'Monument Valley'. Bonus points if your example performs well on mobile as well.
Unfortunately the site is no longer up with flash having been sunsetted, but you can still find the collection on the internet archive or other places. It takes a little more effort to set up than it used to but they are still playable if you're dedicated.
https://archive.org/details/orisinal-morning-sunshine
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I have an unfinished personal project of a game built with the Rough.js library for a hand drawn feel (everything is drawn programatically, there are no sprites or images) and I think it looks not bad. Since I had a baby it's kinda on hold indefinitely, but it is playable on desktop and mobile, and I almost finished a decent level editor for custom courses:
You can play the game completely offline as a PWA and still get a new level every day (and you can in theory also play an infinite number of past and future games if you just change the url params). It was inspired by the pre-NYT Wordle where the game was always playable offline and you still get the same game as everyone else that day, but instead of using a fixed number of possible words/games, it makes levels with a seeded PRNG using the date.
If I find the time to work on it again I'll add the level editor so people can share custom levels, and a backend so you could sign in and share your levels or daily scores. But with my growing family I'm too busy for the foreseeable future, so it may remain as just the proof of concept that it is right now.
This is a mobile friendly custom renderer, with FXAA, depth of field, subsurface scattering etc. and I still got more headaches from CSS than anything else. (The other game https://luduxia.com/whichwayround/ is the same engine).
The whole thing was a proof of concept to understand the current challenges with the space.
Coming from native apps the tough lesson of this exercise is just how disposable websites are from an end user perspective. It really is not enough to have something for people to play with, you must give them a reason to come back again.
Inside[1] - slick animations and very elegant.
My ability to find "good" games on Steam, as opposed to just... games, is really bad also. I don't know if it's Steam's fault or my fault. But I just want to play good games and I just want to be able to find games that are good in the same way another game is..
Basically how do I find more lovingly-crafted top-down RPGs where you get stats and level up and stuff? I literally don't know?
Whether it's consumer trends or technical accessibility, it seems to be more of a "wasteland" than it was 10 years ago. [Old man shakes fist at clouds.] Meaning more "small and not very good games" or a focus on simpler concepts à la Wordle.
Did developers move to mobile? Was there something about Flash that reduced the barrier to entry that we have lost? Did consumer preferences change? Is this all anecdote and the indie game scene is thriving?
I believe the web is now Wordle or bust, by which I mean you need a wordle type sharing mechanic or you will not get repeat players. Players of webgames seem overwhelmingly to jump from one to the next, and while it is easier to get that first play session than from mobile app stores it is much harder to get them back. This is not helped by monetization on the web being awful.
An exception to that is the crypto space, which seems to not generate too much money either and suffers from the related phenomenon of players involved mainly to acquire things to express themselves. Some form of UGC seems a necessity moving forward.
Flash represented a very fixed target that was easy for everyone to reason about. (On mobile this is one reason iOS is much easier than Android). Typically the game itself wouldn’t even resize, it was just hosted on a page that did. It got a understandably bad name with tech people but as an art tool with programming embedded it was actually very good, just not a secure delivery platform.
The result is the web has barriers of entry low enough to keep competition insane while being complicated enough to deliver premium experiences on that it is practically impossible. Not a winning situation.
Roblox has lots of custom games, but they mostly prove that polish matters.
I feel like there is a very open niche for a game-review site that takes strong opinions on this stuff and just tells me what the highest-rated games are by people who also like the games I like.
Continuity was a small platformer, in which you needed to rearrange the levels in the form of a sliding puzzle. It was programmed by some Swedish students and published as a Flash game on Kongreate. In 2010, the same year, in which Steve Jobs published Thoughts on Flash.
Thankfully the guys programmed a sequel for iOS, Continuity 2: The Continuation. It was even better than the original, using the iPhones rotation sensor for additional gameplay options. With iOS 11 Apple removed support for 32-Bit-Apps, book burning a huge part of iOS's early legacy of creative games, including Continuity 2.
Lesson: Never trust Apple with games or with history.
Some Screenshots and a game trailer of Continuity in this article: http://devmag.org.za/2011/05/02/how-are-puzzle-games-designe...
https://abagames.github.io/crisp-game-lib-games/?cywall
He wrote a lot of words on small game development:
https://abagames.github.io/joys-of-small-game-development-en...
(PS I liked cywall so much, I'm made a clone: https://opyate.itch.io/paddles (audio not working yet, sorry))
And hopefully this doesn't suffer from HN hug 'o death, but here's some more of his games, implemented with all sorts (HaXe, Flash, JS, etc):
The technical writeup was posted here once afaik https://anslo.medium.com/slow-roads-tl-dr-a664ac6bce40
http://nicotuason.com/solarmax2.html
The sound design also stood out to me even among proper RTSs: in particular, the appropriately distant explosions that aren't irritating when repeated. Stereo panning was an interesting touch.
That was the tail end of Flash, so it was cross-platform (Adobe Air) and doesn't run in Ruffle.
The mentioned Monument Valley reminds me of Wonderputt. There was a whole genre of those 'elegant orthographic' Flash games.
It was built with HTML/CSS/JS (React). It uses divs for everything and doesn't render everything into a canvas.
and Zero Man: https://zeroman.space/
edit: How could I forget auditorium? https://store.steampowered.com/app/205870/Auditorium/
Back in the day I would keep this game open so the music would keep looping while I worked.
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Simplistic Elegant.