This is an excellent idea, you should definately work on this some more. It has a lot of appeal because it is social and creative too. It also brings back memories for me, I loved to play with level editors for games in my younger years.
I think though that you should allow people to play a level without signing in.
The gameplay does feel a little slow and generic though, you should work on making that more fun and a little more polished. For a well polished 2d game have a look at Cavy Story.
thanks! the toolset is extremely bare-bones right now, somewhat in the spirit of "launch and iterate". we're trying to gauge what percentage of the population is interested in stage design (vs. just playing). as for the player logins, i want to keep an identity because the main value-add of our game is the player stats tracking and replay footage.
cave story is a huge inspiration, and i hope someday we can enable folks to build their own cave story-like experience.
I'd recommend that you work on making it easier for the user to play the game right away. Every click the user makes will result in a dropoff in conversion rate. Otherwise this is pretty interesting!
Data point of one warning: I played through a couple of rounds without too much difficulty and I haven't spent any amount of time playing games in about 10 years. I was able to jump right in. That was fun!
the client-side javascript is written from scratch -- so if there's any wonkiness with the physics (especially with the moving crates), it's my own fault. it probably would have been faster to use an existing engine (i'm sure there's many), but i wanted to take on the challenge myself.
this is my first time posting to hacker news, so sorry if i made any faux pas.
i've done html and css before, but i started learning javascript/node.js a few months ago. my background is in hardware engineering at apple (with some experience in C and java), and recently i've decided to get into software/web app development (with this being a project to sink my teeth into). needless to say, i'm not a fan of javascript :-)
Currently it is desktop browser only. If there's enough traction and the concept is proven, we plan to look into porting it to iOS / Android / etc. We'll see!
I think he allows a reasonable experience prior to having to log in. I watched his overview video (nice job), played the first level, and started designing a level without having to log in. Requiring account creation to save a level seems fine to me.
hah, yeah, the physics was a lot of back and forth for us. we tried to match the original super mario bros. physics, but clearly we're still missing the mark. the plan is to update our engine periodically with versioning control, so we can fix issues without breaking old stages. thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for sharing! It's really fascinating for me to learn more about the psychology behind playing games. Much like traditional art, it's all about evoking the desired emotion from the players, with sense of control being a critical one.
I think though that you should allow people to play a level without signing in.
The gameplay does feel a little slow and generic though, you should work on making that more fun and a little more polished. For a well polished 2d game have a look at Cavy Story.