node.js ko
Doodle or Die
Doodle or Die
by opower
The game of telephone with drawings!
Judging Instructions
- Play multiple rounds.
- Scroll down to see the history.
- Keep playing to see what happens to your drawings and phrases.
- Play enough and get to start new chains.
Browser Support
- Chrome, Safari and Firefox are all supported.
- It does not work well on the iPad, iPhone, or Android.
- IE users will be prompted to install Chrome Frame.
How many people are playing?
We stopped obsessively checking at 10,000 players! We were not expecting such a huge following and we didn’t have time to optimize anything. All images are served inline base64, fun!
Future of Doodle or Die
We hope to continue this after Node Knockout. Show your support by voting here, or follow us on Twitter or Github. Dylan: @dylang, github and Aaron: @zugwalt.
Who
dylang — Washington, DC
Zugwalt — Washington, DC
colonhyphenp
Invites (1 pending)
How
Express, Connect, MongoDB, Sketch.Js.
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(96)
CrabDude
contestant
chrismatthieujudge- contestant
Thank you! We wanted to include a timer but we’re seeing some amazing artwork that had to take a long time to create.
hc5dukejudgeI just wasted an hour on this thing… Really fun, I think the only additional feature I would have wanted was if I could see which one I drew/captioned in the long list of drawings.
- contestant
Thanks for the great review! We hope to bring this to the mobile platforms – have you see anything like this on mobile before?
geradjudgeMaybe it’s not super innovative (it’s been done before), but really smart to pick to do in this competition especially in 8 hours in a hurricane on a phone. :)
That being said, I thought there were some substantial design issues that could make it way more fun if resolved. First, it was unclear what the point of anything was until I scrolled down. Using the initial screen as an intro would really help. Also, the drawing / labeling portion of the game keeps going on and on, it’d be nice to break it up with actually showing you how the chain worked every once in a while. For instance, after you draw something, you should probably see, a how’d we get here that shows you the whole chain. Finally, it feels like there should be some sort of goal or point. Maybe some point system?
- contestant
Hi Gerad – Thanks for reviewing Doodle or Die.
It says to scroll down on the Notes for Judges page but we’ve heard from a lot of people that discovering how the game works is part of the fun.
elizabethchajudgeFun idea though I’m not sure how I win (if at all). With telephone, the fun is hearing how your phrase changed after being shared with lots of people. One idea: to keep tabs on a “chain” that you initiated, you could receive alerts. At first I just did a bunch of different drawings, not knowing what became of them. Then I realized there were past chains if I scrolled down the page.
sh1mmerjudgeI think this is a really great project. It’s so damn addictive. I can’t stop doing it. I marked you down on design because well it’s not so pretty, but I think the design is mostly appropriate to the app itself. Great job!
trycatcherjudgeI wish you would have been able to spend more time on this. This could have been the winner. I “wasted” a good 2h playing before I forced myself to stop. Improve performance and make the UI better but keep it basic. Limited colors and brushes make the game more fun. F'ing Awesome!
3rd-Eden
contestantReally easy game to get started with, you just fill in a random name and you can start with the game. So my initial response was \o/! lets rock..
Until I had to draw something that I had no clue off. So I started searching for a
nextbutton so I could draw something else, but it’s not there =/ So I searched a logout button, not there. So I actually had to delete theconnect.sidcookie from my browser in order to log out, sign in again and get a new question.So I finally got a easy one, finished it, answered what a other picture look like and then I got another pain in the butt picture to draw:
“I’m in a gang. My fellow gang member, who smokes weed, and carries a giant pistol, offers me a light for my marijuana cigarette.”
srsly, wtf..
- contestant
Hello Arnout, sorry you didn’t have a good first experience. The real fun from the game comes from seeing how chains of drawings and phrases evolved / continue to involve. Even if you get a difficult tor seemingly random phrase, doodle it in whichever way you like and then see where others take it from there! Scroll down to see the chains you’ve participated in. For an example, check out www.aaronplusplus.com/dod_cereal.png for an example.
We didn’t get around to adding this to the front end If you do want to skip (but I say give each phrase a shot!) you can surf to http://doodle.no.de/bye to clear your session.
I recommend you try playing again and have fun with drawing the silly phrases without striving to be a master! Cheers!
cmichi
contestantLove the game – had a lot of fun! This project is a really good example that you don’t need a super-fancy-awesome design to make a good game to enjoy! Too many projects lay the focus on design rather than on fun.
Would be cool to be able to view some of the drawings and how they evolved without having to play.
therazorbladejudgePretty impressive for a first time project. The game needs a lot more polish and it wasn’t clear how you iterate between drawing the describing. Scrolling down to see the thread isn’t the best way to expose the full history. Should be part of moving between steps (like after you finish a drawing, show what the previous one looked like).
Same idea as Sketcharound.
- contestant
Hi Eran – I think it’s great that you reviewed every team, I’ve only reviewed 35 so far. Since you reviewed our game over 7000 people have played, adding thousands of new drawings and captions to the system leading to a lot of positive feedback with regards to how addictive and fun it is. I would really appreciate if you gave it another try.
- therazorbladejudge
Ok. It is more fun now. Upped your fun scope by two stars.
amirmanjijudgeThis made me laugh. A lot. I spent many hours subjecting the world to my awful trackpad sketches.
It would be nice if your own drawings and descriptions were identified somehow. Private threads would be cool too. Being able to save/favorite image threads would also be a nice feature.
It might also be cool to see different branches of a single image/description to see how different people interpreted the same thing.
dmitrydimovjudgeI played it a bunch, got a few pictures. Not bad for a quick app and once you get into drawing you don’t care anyway.
- contestant
Thanks for the review Dmitry! While drawing is entertaining I think the real fun is in seeing where the phrases and drawings came from. I admit our interface is not the most straightforward, but after drawing the pictures / writing the phrases scroll down to see how they fit into the overall chain of other people’s guesses. In addition, after a little while you can see how people guessed with regards to your drawings and phrases. If you don’t laugh out loud a few times I will buy you a beer next time you find yourself in Washington, DC. Cheers!
electronicwhisper
contestantI love playing this game IRL. And if you sit in a circle you can do it all at once so with n people by the time a paper gets around you’ve got n stories.
Although this version is fun, I feel like it loses lots of the hilarity because you don’t know the other participants. My favorite thing about the IRL version is that you get to see how your friends think/what’s on their mind (e.g. What! You thought that was a vagina/whatever!).
I don’t know how you would remedy this though, it’s a hard social design problem! Maybe a facebook/invite version is appropriate.
Great job with the implementation though. Everything worked for me. Would be nice to see ALL of the past stories, I only see two previous stories.
- contestant
Thanks for the review! We actually hoped to add in a “game” functionality where you and X people all rotate like you were saying. Some members have begun signing their drawings and phrases with their initials—if you and some friends all play at the same time I recommend doing that as it will certainly boost the hilarity.
We didn’t have time to code for performance the proper way, so to avoid overloading the server, every now and then long chains of phrases/drawings are archived. You must have been playing when an archive happened. If you try again you will most likely see all the chains you’ve participated in that session. Caution: you may wet your pants laughing! Cheers!
b00giZmjudgeGetting a 500 when visiting the page. I’d really like to judge this, please fix :)
Update (working version):
Man, this is so addicting! I’ve been doodling around for over half an hours without even noticing it :) I don’t know if a drawing version of whisper mail should be considered as innovative, but it’s funny as hell!
I’m really missing an eraser tool while drawing and maybe some circle or rectangle tools – but I’m not really sure about this, because drawing crappy circles, rectangles or other shapes might be intended by the team ;)
But there’s a real problem I have with this app: It does not leverage the real power of node.js. This might have also been possible with (vanilla) Ruby, PHP or other non-evented languages.
maraksquiresjudgeImplementation and design kinda sucked. The site crashed twice when I using it. And apparently the idea has been done before.
I don’t care about any of that. I laughed for hours with this and I intend to use it more / build my own. It’s just too awesome and the community of people using it right now make it even better.
I know you probably won’t place, but I’m giving all 5s for spirit.
Next time I would try to add more real-timey features and be able to do unique urls for image threads.
- contestant
Thanks for the epic review Marak! Because of the amazing response we’re getting from the Node Knockout judges and public on Twitter we are definitely going to continue working on this game.
zgryw
contestantUgly outside, pretty inside. So awesome game!
drewblasjudgeSpectacularly fun! Would like to see a little better control over the drawing.
ryanmcgrath
judgeI like this concept quite a bit – would make a very addictive mobile game (hint hint).
Design could’ve been a bit better, but overall it was intuitive enough. Drawing interface was surprisingly responsive (but would enjoy it if focus wasn’t lost when I accidentally started drawing outside the area).
Overall it’s a very complete entry IMO; works well, decent enough design, great concept.
ireneinkyujudgeHad to tear myself away. This is addictive! Design is clean and intuitive. I would like to see a layout for drawing/caption chains that doesn’t require you to scroll through everything. My drawings and captions were always the last of each chain — not sure if this is because no one else was on those chains, but it would be fun to see where others take the chains (and identify which ones are my contributions). Didn’t see any obvious bugs. Nice job.
chrisumbeljudgethe design was non-existent, but the drawing interface was very smooth.
a well thought-out end-game could make the idea interesting. my kids would probably get a kick out of it.
jcolebrand
contestantGreat little game, would have loved to see it be truly interactive somehow.
swoodiejudge“denzel washington breaks up with undersized girlfriend dressed as a man during a fire”
didn’t totally get it til i saw the history, and then i was cracking up how people get from one thing to the next. pretty funny. enjoyed it. thanks!
visnupjudgeI just spent several hours on this drawing and describing. drawing and describing. drawing and describing. enough said.
fun – obvious
design – yeah, definitely not there, but at the same time I wasn’t confused about how anything worked either.
innovation – been done before.
completeness – didn’t run into any bugs at all and it all hangs together. again, design-wise it’s not ideal, but it definitely doesn’t leave me hanging.
deluxeroyale
contestantGreat fun! Maybe some added effects would have brought some more woah factor in to it!
Coreh
contestantIncredibly fun and creative. Made me laugh a couple of times.
Could use more work on the design front, and perhaps more colors and an undo feature on the drawing area.
ncb000gt
contestantTechwraith
contestantCool concept, needs some design love, but it seems to work pretty well :)
blakmatrix
contestantAwesome… all it needs is a bit of graphical polishing and some way to make it show it doesnt load all images, because after a while it takes forever loading all the chains, also notifications might bee cool too(see some one jsuyt responded to your text ort amage)
devin60070
contestantepeli
contestantmustardamus
contestant
mahemoffjudgeVery playable as is and very fun! Main suggestion is show only the chain user just completed (with a list of all the others they’ve done before).
ssorokajudgeseen pretty much this exact game before. but a lot of fun. well done
thammi
contestantVery cool game. Even more impressive with the described dev background.
waxpancakejudgeCongratulations on learning Node, Mongo, and Github. if this was your first JS project too, I’m really impressed! Obviously, missing a lot of polish and isn’t exactly fun, but a solid first project that works as intended.
lunks
contestantAwesome game. It’s out right now, but had a lot of fun with it yesterday.
It gets you to the point where you forget to actually think about the implementation and just have fun.
you should add a timer to the game to make it even more exciting. Nice job!