FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD20 → Multiplayer Zombie Garden Adventure

Multiplayer Zombie Garden Adventure

By goffmog

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Innovation1073.1921
Fun2152.2921
Theme1952.4020
Graphics2612.0022
Audio2181.6411
Humor1802.1916
Overall2132.4821
Community1292.7516
Coolness243

Comments

ratking 2011-05-02 03:03

I really like the idea, even though it lacks a little bit feedback (e.g., didn't know if I hit a zombie or not).

mattdev 2011-05-02 15:13

Really cool idea. Like ratking said, could use some feedback, and perhaps a visual bullet that gets shot. Would be great if you expanded it with more weapons/items/etc.

Nice work!

jsmars 2011-05-02 16:10

really neat that you made a multiplayer game!

zzorn 2011-05-02 16:18

Multiplayer was a nice tough, although there wasn't anyone else playing when I tried it out. The shooting was hard to see, and it seemed like the zombies were pretty hard to kill (I guess that was the point of backup though). Didn't work in firefox 3, ok in chrome.

endurion 2011-05-03 15:58

Can't fairly vote, pressing play doesn't seem to do anything (there is an alert in the code, but that didn't seem to fire). Used IE9 on Windows 7.

the-jack 2011-05-03 22:27

Well, kudos for making a multiplayer HTML5!

Grats on clearing the LD48

gobo 2011-05-04 02:27

It seems you spent your time on the networking and not on the actual game.

little-angel 2011-05-04 13:42

Could be fun with enough players. The map seemed too large, but not-unexpectedly, I was alone. I found that as I moved within the maze, I slowly left the center of the screen, which made me feel claustrophobic (not in a good way) if I was going in the direction where the sightlines were limited. Could use weapon/bullet animation.

hamumu 2011-05-04 15:08

Pressing play did nothing for me either (Firefox).

goffmog 2011-05-04 16:39

Thanks everyone who tried this out so far! I haven't been replying and haven't made a post mortem post either only because I've had some more serious things to deal with IRL since almost the instant that I finished the compo.

A few things I will quickly reply to now:

The original intent was for game to be a bit like multiplayer Gauntlet, I simply ran out of time to have Gauntlet style projectile weapons.

Shooting was the very last thing I coded. There are 3 issues with the zombie shooting mechanic. Firstly the zombies bunch up to the extent that what looks like 1 zombie is often a stack of zombies. Secondly, the real position of the zombie on the server is not the position to use to determine if it's been shot (the client is trusted because it was quicker to code it that way) and thirdly the check to see if a zombie has been shot depends on what tile both the player and zombie are in. Which is a problem since this is determined by the sprite hotspots and not by bounding rectangles.

I spent about 40% of the time writing the networking code and about 40% writing the essential drawing, animation, pathfinding and collision code. less than 20% was spent on proper game coding and graphics... Loking forward to the next Ludum by which time I will have proper base code, as this is the tech I think I want to use.

Finally, I think the firefox issue is related to firebug. I developed the game in firefox and there is an awful lot of stuff output to the firebug console. I'm not sure what happens when firebug isn't installed/enabled but chrome clearly ignores it.

Thanks again guys.

arielsan 2011-05-05 14:12

Couldn't play it, server is down :(

I will try it later.

winterblood 2011-05-05 20:44

Server down for me too...

goffmog 2011-05-06 21:32

Sorry about the server, it died due to lack of socket exception handling in the code that sends chat messages to all players, for whatever reason it tried to send a message to a player who wasn't connected anymore and crashed :(

arielsan 2011-05-10 13:21

Server down again :(

matthias_zarzecki 2011-05-12 16:55

"Unfortunately, so do ZOMBIES" <- great

Also, servers. Neat.