648 karma · joined July 1, 2013
I did this three times before switching to a friend's phone. I don't remember what apps I had or even what phone it was (except being Android) but it was a pretty bizarre and scary experience.
All in all the Discord server has been a major turning point in community building so I recommend setting it up and promoting it as soon as possible. I've even added a quest for new players to join the Discord server that gives some in-game rewards.
It is however very time-consuming to the point where my productivity becomes zero. What has helped me is to be very transparent about this, telling them that I will need to close down Discord and focus on the new patch. They understand since everyone is always very eager for the next update.
During crunches I normally have Discord closed and only hop on once a day to go through the messages. The in-game chat is impossible to keep up with so I tend to say away from there completely between patches, which means a lot of feedback is lost but the players know this and direct newcomers to the Discord instead.
After a patch is released I dedicate a couple of days just interacting with the community both in the game and on Discord. I used to be very stressed out by all this but being transparent about my limited time and priorities has helped me a lot.
The income was abysmal and it never felt quite right, even though I clearly prompted the user that I would use their CPU when they clicked "Mine". Since Coinhive shut down the game no longer works but here's an article about it: https://btcmanager.com/tombs-io-launches-collaborative-onlin...
I even think there are some countries where they still don't know anything (Brazil?).
It doesn't require much maintenance and I'm running it on the lowest tier Digital Ocean droplet so almost free. In December I didn't touch it at all while having a break between patches.
Here you go: https://canvaslegacy.com/
A player has painted the whole starting mine yellow so it looks like a mess in the newbie area but will address that in next patch. :) Also, mobile version is severely lacking so desktop is highly recommended (actually just wrapped up the new mobile client but haven't released it yet).
What holds me back are 1. I'm ashamed to reveal the monstrosity 2. I'm afraid the code is too messy for anyone to be able to make contributions 3. it will make it much easier for hackers to find exploits.
It's a shame because I think the game would be really cool as an open source project.
One of my Japanese friends used to work for the Yakuza (without being a member). His job was to play Pachinko at rigged machines. The way Pachinko works is that every day some machines are randomly selected to be winning machines. The Yakuza somehow had intel on what machines were winners and relayed the info to their crew of seemingly normal gamblers.
They had to play for the whole day and in the night gave the winnings to their Yakuza contact. The sad thing is that most of his "colleagues" instantly went back to the Pachinko hall to gamble away their cut.
You can see the fight in action here (in the room one down and one right from the center, especially the first 30 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIJ3XFPRsSw (a lot of swastikas and penises so beware)
I'm glad that it's somewhat self-moderating but the vandals usually have the upper hand.
At the time I quit my job the startup was profitable and growing really fast. A few months later we started negotiating an acquisition and closed the deal after working less than a year on it full-time.
It was a proof-of-concept and when I saw that it worked I started building a proper version of it. However, soon thereafter rogue actors started using Coinhive for malicious things and I'm now at a point where I don't feel like continuing on the game. I still think it's a cool concept and my game is very clearly opt-in where I explain what will happen when you press "Start mining".
It feels like "this is why we can't have nice things" is applicable here.
I got a 502 and "Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form" initially though but it worked on the second try.
I'm currently working hard on integrating the product into their portfolio. Since they are using our former company as a stepping stone into a new market it's a lot like running a startup again, just with much more capital and people.
The screenshots on the website are from the new dungeon patch I'm working on. If you want to get a better feeling of what the game is like I recommend checking out the photo gallery on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/
tombs.io is another multiplayer game of mine, or rather an experiment where I explored the concept of using in-browser XMR mining as a monetization and bot fighting method.
It won't mine anything without the player explicitly pressing the "Start mining" button, in case anyone wants to check it out. It's totally unrelated to my comment though.
(Fun fact since we're on HN: the backend for tombs.io is built with Firebase and Google Cloud Functions. I haven't really seen anyone make a realtime game with server-side authority using that stack before. Wrote a bit about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977261)
I run a small browser-based MMORPG and I've seen a lot of interesting metagames play out in the game economy.
One thing I thought of while reading this is the effect of scarcity. I specifically remember one time when a stupid bug made the world a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
My game has a political aspect where one player is the ruling king, giving them a few unique abilities such as setting taxes. It’s a powerful position and players are constantly fighting for the throne. The way this works is that the king hires NPC guards to defend and protect the throne. The more guards, the more expensive and time-consuming it is to dethrone the king. The downside is that the upkeep to staff a full kingsguard is equally expensive. This has naturally made it so that only the wealthiest players can actually afford to sit on the throne and the easiest way to accumulate wealth is to run a shop.
The economy is centered around resources and mining. Normally the mines are replenished from time to time but the bug broke this mechanic. The first thing to deplete was the noble metals such as gold and silver, the same metals that the wealthiest merchants made their fortune from. With prices going through the roof a class division was created between players who had accumulated metals before the bug and players who hadn’t.
The problem is that without good gear you have no chance of coup d'etat. Even if you had a gold armor and sword you need a constant influx of new gold in order to repair them when fighting the guards. Even bronze became a rare commodity.
In effect, what happened is that the kingdom became a dictatorship. The king could set maximum taxes without any consequences. Normally such action would start a riot, have all players get their pitchforks and create a rebellion but without good weapons this was impossible.
I finally got around to fix the bug once normal iron started to run out as well and new players were restricted to useless wood gear, barely enough to kill rodents. I lost a lot of players but it was a really interesting social and economic experiment.
It's pretty much a collaborative and social experiment where I wanted to explore the concept of using in-browser cryptocurrency mining as a monetization and bot fighting method (something I had a problem with in the original Ludum Dare entry it's based on). That's a different discussion though. (You need to manually start the mining and you can explore the map without doing it. It's only when digging and chatting it's required.)
I'm actually planning on rewriting the whole backend in a more traditional Node.js + WebSockets stack so no, I probably wouldn't do it again for this type of application. However, I will probably use it again for other things.
Basically I handle all the logic in Firebase rules and lambdas. Any destructive action goes through a GCF that updates the Firebase Realtime Database. Actions that happen often (like moving) are updated directly by the client but validated with some overly complicated Firebase rules.
It's very nice not having to worry about servers and scaling, but it can be a really painful development experience.
Let me know if you want to try it out and I'll post the URL.
Apart from monetization, the miner helps combat the problem I had with bots in the original LD entry.
The backend is 100% Firebase + Google Cloud Functions.
Let me know what you think!