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Show HN: Mariocraft.com - A Community Based SMB
12 points by xumi 4637 days ago
After three years of joyful experiments I'm glad to present you the result of them.

Mariocraft is a SMB web project based solely on HTML5/CSS/JS, without canvas. The whole idea behind it was to create a community in order to build and share new kind of SMB experience. To achieve this goal, I focused most of my efforts on the editor, making it as easy to use for beginners without forgetting about advanced users (shortcuts, etc.) I tried to create overall design which matches subject of my nostalgia – the 80's. Hence, you'll have the pleasure to encounter less fancy effects and more 8 bits images.

Once you have created a world, it is serialized in a database. At this point you can share your world with anybody just by sending a link. I must precise that anybody can play without a need to register. Registration is only required to perform editing or creation of a new world.

Here is an example of a world I made for the HN community: http://mariocraft.com/show_hn/s/xumi and if you want a little challenge, here it is: http://mariocraft.com/nfXdir/s/xumi (beat my time if you dare: 346)

Oh, and please note that for this demo sounds and musics are available only to registered users to spare some bandwidth.

If you are interested in the project you can visit a little blog about it which I started: http://blog.mariocraft.com. Naturally, all the client side code will soon be available on Github.

Thanks for your time, I hope to see you soon jumping on Goombas with me!

4 comments

Looks pretty neat. I'm at work so I only had a few minutes to play around with it. It seems really smooth and fun. I'll bookmark it to play around later. The concept is really cool. I want to see what some people have been able to come up with. Do you have limits on the size of the world people can create?

I wonder why you "brag" that you don't use canvas though. I would think that's the correct way of making a game now-a-days, in lieu of web-gl not being widely supported.

Thanks! Not bragging, totally sorry if it looks like I'm! At the very beginning I tried to do something very stupid: create the game using only the DOM. All data in it, no variable, just div, data attributes, classes. It was just to have fun with jQuery limitation (and gosh, I saw them, my Firefox died a lot at this time!). When I started to do more, with a bigger goal, I just kept all I did previously.

I started to do a canvas version for a weekend, but at the end it wasn't worth it, the editor and the game were too far to step back!

Again, thanks for your feedback!

Sorry, I forgot the size part! The biggest world possible is about 25K pixels wide (the famous 1-1 world is around 10K), so it's quite a lot, but not limitless!
Cool, glad to see it released!
Thanks for the support!
Great job there!
Thank you!