SpinPunch (YC S12) Aims To Build Faster, Prettier HTML5 Games | Hacker News Reader

SpinPunch (YC S12) Aims To Build Faster, Prettier HTML5 Games

techcrunch.com

38 pointsirunbackwards18 comments

Well, given all the talk about negativity on HN and what-not, I thought I'd take a harder look at this to give some constructive criticism.

The graphics. Good, from a traditional RTS perspective. Limited and dated in comparison, but c'mon it's HTML 5 and runs pretty smoothly. However, I don't think you're going to get the traditional RTS market, a few minutes in they'll get a whiff of the skinner-box-ness and run off. I assume you're going for the more traditional Facebook game market, in which case I think the graphics need to be made simpler and larger, and also more distinguishable - the units all look quite similar. Think TF2 or Plants vs Zombies.

Speaking of target market - is there any point in using HTML5, really? It impresses the hacker crowd but I'm not sure if there's any actual benefit to your users - plus they'll all have Flash installed already and be used to using it, to use your game they may well have to upgrade or switch browser.

As for the game content, it seemed a little fast paced to me? Perhaps give the user more time to click around and fiddle with things between dialogs. Definitely get them to repeat essential actions - maybe look into Valve's "rule of 3" to make things less tutorial and more learn by doing. I can't be certain about the pacing though as I haven't played any FB games recently.

Lastly, a couple of technical considerations.. please adapt the game window to my screen size! Either the top or bottom controls are off the screen at any given time for me (1440x900 display), and please don't crash the game if my privacy settings are locked down!

Thanks for the feedback!

Agree on many of the points you raised, particularly the tutorial changes needed. Urg, sorry about the issue with your display. May I ask what browser you're using? Also, sometimes browser add-ins cause issues, and if you figure out if one might be responsible, we'd love to know.

In terms of crashing, wondering if you might remember the error message received? I'm not aware of errors related to privacy settings, but if we have one definitely want to fix it.

Thanks for taking the time to help us improve!

I'm using Firefox 14 on OS X Lion.

Just triggered the error again, I got:

Communications Problem

Sorry, there has been a temporary network error. Please reconnect to Mars Frontier. (code 0650)

Thanks ZoFreX, yeah, this can happen sometimes when a network connection has a hiccup. It's pretty common for connections--particularly on WiFi--to go down briefly and randomly. You typically don't notice when reading a web page, since your requests are intermittent, and streaming video hides it with buffering. We need to get smarter here. Thank you the feedback.

It's definitely not my connection hiccuping - I only get the error whenever the game tries to do something with my friends, and I assume it's not a coincidence that my privacy settings prevent it from doing so.

Oh, that could be different. We're probably missing a case. Appreciate your letting us know. Is this for inviting friends or messaging them? If your privacy settings prevent this we should be more graceful in catching the error than a connection failure.

First thing I'll say is that I really don't like the idea of using Flash, HTML5 etc any web technology for making games. However I see the need for it. I'd like to get more information though how your game engine makes it easier to create faster/prettier games. I am a fan of Construct2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2). They make it really easy to create HTML5 games (it is all point and click, no programming required).

What differentiates your technology from the many existing ones on the market now?

Before the negative/hate comments star pouring in, maybe the OP/founders can give us an insight and some more information on what their plans are.

Hi mirsadm, excellent question. Our focus is pushing the limits of HTML5 to rival hardcore PC and console games. Our alpha for Mars Frontier came out in January, and some of our top players from the early days have spent over 500 hours in game so far. These guys are master competitors and dominate our leaderboards. It's a very different dynamic than casual games, and we think it requires a very different mindset and approach.

> Tien thinks the shift toward building more compelling browser-based gaming experiences is a matter of course, but doesn’t see too many players in the space really trying to push HTML5’s limits.

He doesn't? I see plenty, some random examples I can remember off the top of my head,

Turbulenz

PlayCanvas

Game Closure

Cloud Party

and those are just new startups, there is a lot of interest from existing companies as well (more slowly, though).

Angry Birds has an HTML5 version [1]. Also, the article said that no good browser games exist, not no good HTML5 browser games. There are some notable exceptions to that claim, one that springs to mind is Quake Live.

[1]: http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

Well, I believe the intention there was HTML5 games (which Quake Live is not, cool as it is).

But yeah, there are things like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope which show 2D games working very well in HTML5.

wanted to try the demo game. don't have/want a facebook account. didn't get to try it.

Me too.

Is there any reason to make it run only on Facebook? Some requirement by Facebook perhaps? If not, why wouldn't you at least put a preview version of it outside of Facebook, which might make people interested enough to join?

There's a very good reason to make it run only on Facebook - it's a "Facebook game", through and through.

To be clear, this isn't a real-time strategy game. It is no different to any of the hundreds of "skinner box" games already on Facebook. I let the app access my Facebook, but refused to let it post anything to my friends (make posts from this app available to: only me). Every time I reach an action where it wants me to message my friends or post to my wall (these are frequent) the app crashes and I have to restart it to continue. Probably not a coincidence!

In addition you can click on buildings in progress to speed them up, initially for free but I've played enough of these games to know soon that resource will become limited, unless I spam my friends or fork out cash.

From a gameplay perspective, you just click on what it tells you you need to be clicking on next, and then do quests to unlock more items that you can click on. You collect resources from your resource harvesting buildings by clicking on them periodically when they are full, an absolutely classic FB game feature that is completely absent from any actual PC game or RTS game.

Lastly, it doesn't even leverage the HTML platform well. One thing I expect from HTML is for things to be at least semi-usable on many devices, and in particular I expect sites to work well on reasonable resolutions. I'm on a MBP and even in fullscreen mode, I couldn't get the whole game to fit on screen, and so had to scroll in the browser to be able to click on some of the buttons. This really negatively impacted my experience of button clicking, especially as sometimes it took me a long time to figure out which button I was being told to click.

Edit: Played on for a few more minutes, and sure enough, time, money, or friends. I can really, really recommend that anyone on HN who hasn't played one of these games creates a throwaway Facebook account and tries one out, just to see how vacuous and manipulative these games really are.

Thanks for the explanation.

That's worse than I expected, you saved me the effort of trying it out.

You should still try it out, because a) you shouldn't trust just one person decrying something and b) because everyone should witness the awfulness of skinner box games first-hand at least once!

Ok, ok :)

I registered and tried it. Technically the graphics and gameplay looked smooth, but as far as 2D games go, I thought that was already normal in HTML5. Despite the comment in the article, lots of people are doing stuff like this, and even 3D content that looks very good.

As for the rest, the constant nagging to connect to Facebook friends was highly annoying. But I guess that's the same as any Facebook game these days?

Otherwise, the game didn't really appeal to me, not sure why, I used to like this genre. Something about the tutorial felt overly contrived perhaps.

I wouldn't judge your like of the RTS genre on this game - if you are looking for a good one, StarCraft II is probably the best recent one. Going back a little, Dawn of War (I and II), Company of Heroes, and World in Conflict are all worth a shot too.

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