node.js ko
Node Defense
Node Defense
by Wrench Labs
Multiplayer tower defense! Work together with your friends to save the world! (Or just a few pixels.)
We have currently disabled multiplayer so that people don’t have to wait for another person to show up to try it out. It does work, however, and later in the week we’ll re-enable it.
Judging Instructions
Click the link and enjoy the game! :D
The lobby is a fully-functioning chat room that is aware of the state of everybody playing the game. Take some time and get to know your other defenders–if anybody is actually paying attention.
If you’d like to play a multiplayer game reach out to @nathanhammond and @ibdknox on twitter. If we’re not asleep, one of us will drop everything and join (or at least, we’ll try). Chris and I have special usernames, so you’ll know when we’ve arrived. :D (You may have to scroll down in the log window to see most recent messages.)
The game has been tested in Firefox 6, Chrome Main Channel, and Safari 5.1.
Who
nathanhammond — Charlotte, NC
ibdknox
How
Hosted on Linode.
Core
Libraries
- node-express-bolierplate
- node_redis
- connect
- ejs
- express
- socket.io
- underscore
- uglify-js
- jQuery
- deploy
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(26)
cruciallyjudge
hc5dukejudgeGoing with the assumption that currently-disabled multiplayer mode works flawlessly. Great idea – though I was torn on completeness because it’s missing a lot of the features most tower defense games have… I settled for 4 on that one as a result.
- contestant
That is accurate, multiplayer works beautifully. :) However, it makes for a really poor demo-ing experience when you don’t know if there are going to be another person around who can play. :) To better demo everything we should have allowed somebody to load up the game room and wait for a teammate, or click the “Play Solo” link.
Standard features forthcoming: upgrade, sell, and move. We were vicious with cutting features to make sure we delivered something at the end of the competition which actually worked.
_kamzillajudgeThis was fun to play, really enjoyed it. I wish there was an undo button or a way to re-position the shooters.
SuttojudgeA supremely fun and geeky take on Tower Defence. It worked as advertisted, functioned flawlessly and was ridiculously easy to get started.
I can’t wait to play it with multiplayer enabled. Great work!
mstinaleejudgeLike the clean design. However, I couldn’t figure out how to play. The goal/mechanic wasn’t obvious. The instructions didn’t help me.
- contestant
Hi Tina, we hadn’t really thought much about people who have never played a tower defense game – sorry about that!
The basic premise of tower defense is to destroy “minions” before they reach some goal, in this case the end of the map. Every minion that gets to the end causes you to lose a life (or “node” in our game). Minions come in “waves”, where each successive wave makes the minions more difficult to kill as well as increases the number you get at once. For each minion you kill, you get memory to spend to build more turrets. The goal of the game is to simply last as long as you can before all of your nodes are destroyed :)
To place one of your defenses, you simply click on it from the bar on the right and then click again to place it around where the minions will travel. Each turret has a radius of attack, so make sure you put it close enough to where the minions will be.
So take a look again and let us know what you think! :)
dGoligorskyjudgeNot 1337 enough to appreciate this game, but I tried. Sometimes I grabbed attacks, but they wouldn’t show up on the game area. Maybe there are gameplay rules that aren’t apparent to me. Right now I’m trying to grab a Fragmenter, but I just can’t get it to work. Is it me or the game? Is there a limit to how many attacks I can have or it it just a matter of putting them all over the gameplay area as quickly as possible? Also, the Return to Lobby button doesn’t work…
The gameplay feels fairly arbitrary to me. Not getting enough feedback on what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. Not sure when it’s Game Over or when I get to keep playing… if I were better at the game and kept playing, would I move on to faster gameplay like Tetris or would it be different-looking levels?
I think there’s a bunch of functionality that needs to get resolved and the game needs some more dimensionality to draw me in and stay interested.
- contestant
Hey David, the basic premise of a tower defense game is that you are trying to destroy “minions” before they reach some goal. These minions come in “waves” and in general there are a few different indicators as to your current level of success: the wave you’re on, the score you have, the amount of money (in our theme, memory) and how many lives you have left (nodes in our game). Each successive wave makes the minions more difficult to kill as well as dramatically increases the number you get at once.
In terms of the issue you were having with placing turrets, I suspect the problem is that you were trying to drag them. If you just click on one, you can then move your mouse to where you want to place it and click again. At that point the turret is active and will beginning killing the minions so that you don’t lose your nodes :)
If you have any other issues, let us know.
therazorbladejudgeLove the theme – it’s geek-a-licious! The game itself is just too easy – need to better balance the defenses, especially the orange. Would be great to have x2 speed mode. The low innovation score is due to lack of upgrades or other original elements.
- contestant
We had a lot of fun with the theme and trying to figure out what made sense for particular sections of the game. Late in the process (three hours to go?) we actually removed the login feature and simply presented our server’s random session ID as the PID to better fit the theme.
We were mere moments from the deadline when we finished our interface code and play-testing was next on the list. End result is that we were a few multipliers, hit points, and range adjustments away from having something really great. The best part about it coming so close? Updates are coming immediately after the competition to make it more balanced.
And with regards to innovation, we did two things we liked: we didn’t use any libraries for the <canvas> stuff, and we have a “blinky” minion that prevents you from putting all of your towers in one basket (so-to-speak). Also, multiplayer exists and works but we didn’t enable it because we didn’t want people to have to wait for a second in order to get a chance to experience the game. However, if you want, reach out to me on twitter (@nathanhammond) and I can turn it on and we can play a game!
- therazorbladejudge
After reviewing everything, I updated my vote to reflect the innovative nature of this entry compared to most of the other games.
rjkentjudgeSo fun! I love tower defense games. In fact it is still running in another tab :) Should get even harder as levels go on – and you should be able to call a bunch of waves at once. Seems to work on FF for Mac but not Linux.
- contestant
Wait, seriously? Are both running FF6?
Rhetorical: What in the world is different between Firefox on OS X and Linux!?
(Makes a note to check it out on Linux to try and track down what is going on.)
burntojudgeThis is awesome! Works well, gets more challenging as I go. Not the most innovative of game concepts, but hey, I had a lot of fun playing with it. I like the simple geometric visual style too.
Would love to see multiplayer when it’s working.
- contestant
Multiplayer works! Care to play a game right now? I’ll set it up for multiplayer!
jacobquistjudgeThis is extremely impressive, especially with such a short amount of time to develop. Would love to see what it looks like after a few more weeks.
rauchgjudgeAwesome game, very brave to take on a largely unexplored game genre on the web, and well executed.
slightlylatejudgeTower defense? In a browser? With other people? YES PLEASE.
travhimself
contestantTook me a minute to figure out how to place towers, but I dig it. An interesting take on the classic game, but nothing earth shattering.
- contestant
Can you describe what you tried before you figured out how to do it? That would be valuable to know so that we can detect it and give “hints” to people as they’re trying to play the game.
Thanks for playing!
travhimself
contestantI initially tried dragging and dropping. It’s one of those things where once I figured it out I thought “oh, duh”, but it took me a minute.
- contestant
Okidoke, next version we’ll bind a tutorial to the “ondragstart” event. :) Solved. Thank you for the feedback!
linus
contestantI love the game! My only nitpick is that it’s way too easy – even without understanding how it worked at first, I can just harvest points and memory.
Also, while the design of the lobby is beautiful, the game could use some finishing touches.
Extra awesomeness points for automatic pause/resume when the window loses/gets focus!
- contestant
And we didn’t even get a 5 for completeness with automatic pausing!? ;)
We didn’t get all the time we wanted to play-test it and actually scaled money with wave progression which we probably shouldn’t have done. Instead we should have scaled minion speed as waves progressed. Lesson learned.
linus
contestantWe also learned a lesson: When there’s 4 hours left, refine what you have and don’t start building yet another feature! ;)
christopherdebeer
contestantvery fun, well done. love the simplistic/retro visuals, as well as the tech-theme
jesusabdullah
contestantI really like tower defense games, and I think this one has a lot of potential! I also love how it’s still responsive when things get hectic, unlike some other online TD games I’ve played.
That said, the game balance could use a lot of work. After about an hour of playing it, I was able to throw down a ridiculous amount of turrets and then leave the game unattended overnight:
http://imgur.com/2EIdu
That said, I’m sure it’s a problem that trial and error should solve pretty quick.
- contestant
Somewhere in there there must have been a buffer overrun. ;)
We didn’t get nearly the time we wanted to play-test the game so we ended up with what is a good game, but one that doesn’t really have the balance we wanted it to have.
Fortunately you’re correct, it is just a matter of changing a few scalar variables and playing with it until the difficulty is “just right.” We’ll be releasing an updated version shortly after judging ends to address the game balance.
Thanks for voting!
lunks
contestant- contestant
Thanks for voting!
azlen
contestantfun but too easy
- contestant
We agree, we just ran out of time to get the game-play balance just right. However! We’re glad you liked it!
dethe
contestant- contestant
Thanks for voting, hope you enjoyed it!
mustardamus
contestant- contestant
We appreciate you coming by and voting!
mdyer
contestant- contestant
Thank you for voting!
joshthecoder
contestantWould have liked it to be more difficult. Overall great job!
- contestant
We would have liked that as well! We were 2 or 3 scalar modifiers away from having a great game! Fortunately, we are only two or three scalar modifiers away from having a great game, so those are coming shortly after judging ends. :)
eirikurn
contestantAn awesome theme and a smooth implementation. Though not very innovative or feature-rich. Would have loved to see tower upgrades or multiplayer in some form. :)
- contestant
I don’t know when exactly we came up with the theme but it couldn’t have been earlier than hour 30, probably much later. The minimalist style also worked for the ~6 hours we allotted ourselves for design. :)
And with regards to innovation, we really liked our blinky minion! He disappears and then jumps ahead some distance which prevents you from creating a choke point where you simply pwned all the minions.
Reach out to me on twitter (@nathanhammond) and if I’m around I’ll join you for a multiplayer game!
jamesaduncanjudgeGap in difficulty between levels should be higher :–) Other than that, thoroughly addictive!
- contestant
We absolutely agree! Play-testing was, unfortunately, the thing next on our list when we finished development a few moments (not even minutes!) before the deadline.
We actually figured out a way we could update the game logic via XSS (oops!) which we could use to adjust the difficulty but we’re not going to do it because, whether or not it is against the rules of the contest, it is certainly against the spirit. :)
So, instead, look for updates to fix that shortly after judging is over!
pcaprjudgeWould’ve loved to see the multi-player version of it, because I think that’s the true innovation here. Not rating completeness high because, well it’s not complete. :) But pretty cool work in 48 hours.
- contestant
Get in touch with me via twitter (@nathanhammond) and I’ll be glad to join you in a multiplayer game! We’ve hesitated to turn on multiplayer all the time because we’d rather people see the game than sit and wait for a second player to join (we can’t guarantee enough traffic to support multiplayer).
carsonmcdonald
contestant- contestant
Thank you for dropping by to vote!
joaomilho
contestantComplete and fun. Can improve design a lot.
- contestant
I really wish we had a time lapse video we could show you of the design of our project. It looked hideous all the way up until the very last hour before the contest was over. Chris did some mockups on Sunday early afternoon which showed up in my inbox 3 hours before the KO was over–and I wasn’t done with the server syncing logic for multiplayer! After finishing that I banged together some HTML and CSS to put things in the right place and some simple interface JS to allow you to navigate.
The thing we most regret is not having more time to play-test it to get the balance right.
Didn’t work in Safari, was too easy :)