Help my friends and I playtest our massive multiplayer open source game Swarmation that's launching in 2 weeks
Hi Indie Hackers,
My friend and I launched a game 10 years ago when Node.js was new and web sockets had just been released.
We ended up winning the first Node Knockout competition with that game.
It's a huge group of people all trying to cooperate for the same goal, but constantly fucking up and destroying each other's progress by accident. It's a really visceral experience of life in the 21st century.
We're planning to launch it on Product Hunt in a few weeks and we'd love for you to test it out with us.
I got the idea immediately (also thanks to the "get into formation" but since I was the only one playing I ended up opening another tab :D
Would love to see this with like 30 people playing at the same time.
Yet the gameplay is kind of hollow though, right? Like there's only so many combinations and it gets boring before you finish. But a novel idea (as far as I know) so good luck. Hopefully I get to play when PH launches (ping me?).
Oh, awesome, thanks for trying it out! Haha. We'll try for another big game this Friday if you want to join in with more people!
Here's what last Friday looked like: https://websharebox.s3.amazonaws.com/swarmation-preview-2min.mp4
It's actually pretty fun if tons of people show up, but yeah, I get your point. We're thinking about adding special powers if you get enough points. Like, maybe you'd get 2 NPC pixels to follow you around the board (like the snake game) if you had 1000 points or something.
Nice! That’s a fun game! Got a few minutes of unexpected enjoyment tonight Playing :)
Awesome, thank you so much for stopping by! <3
We'll do a wider release on PH soon — sign up for the daily reminders on the site if you want to hear about it :)
Hey @panphora! I checked out swarmnation and the game looks pretty cool. I was confused playing it because there weren't any directions. Or at least I couldn't find anything to help me out.
There should've been some instructions at the bottom of the page
I am working on browser-based games as well, wish you the best of luck!
Would love to hear what the business model plan is for this game!
No business model right now. Just trying to get traction. Might charge for a phone app version in the future.
I'd encourage you guys to start thinking about it a little bit! If anything, just covering the server costs will help the project live on much longer!
On a separate note, how many concurrent users have you guys been able to have at the same time? Any performance issues or high server load? I use Node.js and sockets for my multiplayer games and have been wondering how far I can go with a single AWS micro instance.
We're not sure, but we're thinking it should be fine up to around 800-1000 connections. It's difficult to say though because it depends on a lot of factors. The last time we did something similar it was back in 2008 and we had 300 people on before it slowed and eventually crashed. Now we have better measures in place to prevent that and kick players out if the server gets too overloaded.