Previously the landing page had a video of the game but my goal was to always just put the actual game on the website. I merged the landing page into the game's monorepo, added the game's React components, and boom – the video was replaced with a playable version of Athena Crisis.
Of course, the real game has tons more features, but the landing page now always runs the exact same code as the actual game – including assets, the AI, and the UI/UX – and it is pushed within 5 minutes as the actual game is being updated live.
I frequently talk about the tech behind this game (see this React Summit talk about "How Not to Build a Video Game": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8SmXOTM8Ec ) and I'm planning on open sourcing as much as possible in the future.
"Plagiarism" does not mean what you think it means.
On the landing page you can press shift (or hold Y on a Gamepad) to speed up AI actions.
Once you play the real game, you can change the settings to make all AI moves fast, or make all animations including your own (and other players) fast.
The page loaded fine, but when I hit "Play" everything ground to a halt, and even scrolling the page up and down had a 3-5 second delay.
Firefox has not been a focus for the game as it mostly ships on Chromium/WebKit based browsers/app wrappers, but the landing page should still work great.
For some context, my phone is old (2016) but I do find it amusing that it can run this page with a physics engine and 3D rendering without any lag http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/demo/webgl/box2d.html
Your game looks great though, and the website matches it perfectly! Nice work
(As an aside, I'd urge you to take the from-scratch ethos just one step further and make you next game without any libraries, or with sensible exceptions like Howler and Pixi.)
* I don't know what to do when all my units have played. Is there a next turn button ?
* The info/goal/next unit buttons are fixed to the page and doesn't feel linked to the game itself, making them easily confused for page navigation instead of game element.
* I have trouble distinguishing between the background and the active units. Perhaps make the background slightly more desaturated ?
* Disable the music by default. It's jarring to have it play directly.
* It's super impressive to have a game playable like that in the browser
If they were anchored to the side of the map, that would make it more obvious they were related.
Didn't know what to do when all the chars were dimmed out.
Also it didn't seem like I could move then attack? It was either move or attack (that or the tiles that showed the actionable area was way too dim to make out to see if it overlapped with an enemy tile).
The artillery didn't show any range tiles at all so I thought I couldn't use it even though it wasn't dimmed.
*Some companies I worked at called it NUX because FTE would be ambiguous as it usually means "Full-Time Employee".
But actually having a demo directly in the middle of the action embeded in an iframe of the landing page is quite neat. It blends properly with the rest as well, so actually well done.
Some feedback: - Demo plays music. If the user clicks the purchase button, a new page opens which also plays music, this can be quite unpleasant as they are both playing at the same time. - Personally I like the art of the game, including the pixel art character faces, but I don't like the banner. The banner feels like it was drawn by a teenager discovering photoshop with a book "learn to draw manga style in 2 hours" – That might be a bit unfair and I'm sure it was a lot of effort, but a lot of details make it feel amateur-ish in the wrong way, in particular the most central character and its face. Have you considered using the same pixelised style that you use for describing each character bellow? - on firefox the character faces overlap with the text on "Create your own maps..." (Firefox, Mac OS, very large screen)
Just one note: it’s not an iframe, it’s literally on the page itself.
As for whether it fits the rest of the style of the game – that's up for debate.
There are only a few crazy folks like us right now
I became a lot more pragmatic, so next time I'd probably start with a game engine that uses WebGPU/WebGL. You get so much value from the DOM and CSS, but it's also really not meant for building such interactive experiences like I want to. It works kinda ok for a turn based strategy game, but likely breaks down for some more involved games.
Unfortunately after filling out the stripe form on iOS Safari the pay button remained gray and I couldn’t checkout.
I actually experienced a variety of quirks on mobile while navigating that might require some investigating. Perhaps because it is optimized for Chrome?
The game is primarily optimized for Chrome and Safari, and should definitely work well in both.
Definitely have seen similar issues with autofill in the past. If it helps I have been doing web development for over 20 years, so whatever the issue was, it wasn't obvious to me. If I get time later I'll hook up the device to a debugger and get a closer look at what happened there.
Not sure why the file name change, but looks a bit fishy.
[1] https://www.myfonts.com/collections/johto-font-superpencil
Sorry for the curveball, but I’d be really interested in hearing about the process of finding your publisher (if you don’t mind) — it seems incredibly tough for devs without huge resumes right now, so I’m curious how the process went.
When I had something fun I got a few keynote slots at React and web conferences in 2023 (that's where the resume comes in, I guess?) and while I put together the presentation I also put a publisher deck together, mostly just for fun. The game was fully embedded in the slide deck just like it is now on the website, and how I did it in the public presentation (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8SmXOTM8Ec ).
A mutual friend introduced me to Null, we had one meeting, and that set me on this path. I didn't seriously talk to other publishers.
I'm afraid this story is not super repeatable and mostly just hard work and serendipity. Before all that I spent 10 years as a teenager and early adult building games and social networks, and than I spent 12 years at Facebook & Stripe.
I wrote about my reasons for starting a company here: https://cpojer.net/posts/building-a-company
How do I build structures in the prequel campaign? Is it an action on the Pioneer on specific land squares?
The game looks really good, love the art style and the readability of it all.
