Since other people are popping their projects up here that meet these criteria have ours as well. It's a full game making/playing platform called dot big bang where everything is done in the browser.
We're about to release a new social hub today and our user facing release of our TypeScript based scripting very soon.
One really nice thing about the web is that it works anywhere you can find a browser. So we run on smart fridges and thanks to MS including Edge on the XBox accidentally launched on console last week. Was a pleasant surprise to find full controller support and all our editors working!
Web games also let you do other neat things. We built a game with Day[9] one of the OG streamers and due the wonders of deep linking could open up the game to his entire chat. A short highlight video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4
I've told two people about your site (in person, verbally) and both of them have been confused about the "dot" in the name - thinking that it's a single character "dot big bang dot com". Why not Big Bang? More memorable and easier to communicate.
As for the name it's a historical accident as far as I know. Our CEO began dot big bang as a hobby project back in 2012ish and wanted to call it big bang at the time but obviously that's a very hard name to get a good URL for. So he prepended a dot which has since stuck. I think we're keeping it for the foreseeable but other URLs are definitely worth a thought.
Hey! ControlZee CEO here. Lots of people raise this as a potential problem but our data says that our target users don't have an issue with it at all. We spread mostly by word of mouth between players or direct links where there's no ambiguity. Our users have actually given us very positive feedback on the name :)
Currently game functionality is made in a Unity style component system using components written in TypeScript. All the games on the site right now were built in our editors. So with the release of scripting to the public we'll be enabling people with existing game dev or programming experience to make their own games. For an example one of our Incubator program members, who is high school aged with some basic prior programming experience modded our FPS game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Cklg-3EBM
We're also working on lowering that bar to entry. Both with elements users can drag and drop into their games to create functionality and simplified scripting environments.
> Edit: oh, so scripting is not even there yet.
Yup, releasing soon but we've been making games internally with it for quite some time.
I’ve got two step kids who play roblox/Minecraft obsessively. The network effect in playing what their friends play is super strong. That combined with as busy parent there is a reluctance to switch to anything else. They don’t want to do it because their friends don’t play it. I don’t want them to do it because I know roblox/Minecraft are reasonably safe. The idea of having to understand another platform seems exhausting.
Plus them playing Minecraft gives me an excuse to play. :)
> Second, running in a browser makes the top of your user acquisition funnel wider, because all it costs to try your platform is a click. No downloading an executable, no installing anything, and no App store. Just please, for the love of all that's holy, don't throw your advantage away by making guest users register and sign into an account before they can play.
There are way too many web games/apps that don't get this.
agar.io (as well as Matheus’s subsequent io games) understood the need for this lack of friction very well. Literally type a name and press enter to start playing. Once you have a large playerbase where network effects come into play, then you can start thinking about things like registration.
OT (slightly): The Roblox captcha system is INSANE. I witnessed one of my kids' friends attempting to solve one and it was hilariously difficult.
It's a 2x3 grid of floating 3D objects and you need to click the square where two of the constantly moving object collide.
The login/account creation process must be attacked frequently and intensely to warrant making this captcha tool so difficult. I'll never bitch about "finding all the bicycles" again.
Games and consoles have this security issue that I call the "bored teenager effect". They get pummeled security & cheat wise way more than is warranted for their market size, and their user base is way more technically sophisticated and more willing to put up with BS to play their games.
As a result, the average multiplayer game has better security than the typical bank, because thousands of bored and emotionally immature teenagers are trying some pretty sophisticated crap to just get more points in a fucking online game.
So totally not surprised that roblox's captcha is extra hard.
From my experience, as a web guy who implements CAPTCHA at least once a week for a client being spammed - yes it's broken. reCAPTCHA rarely slows down bots, it only stops the lowest tech/efforts. v1/v2/v3 doesn't matter, I implement them all and clients still get spammed.
They may have just decided to NIH, there are other large-scale games like Genshin Impact that use much simpler captcha systems despite the amount of money at stake.
Perhaps the off-the-shelf captchas people are using are too expensive for Roblox's tastes.
People here seems to miss the main point of the article: Don't compete with Roblox!
Why do so many try to make something that is so hard to do? Basically every other game genre is easier to make money with, and non-game startup ideas are easier than making a game. This is about as hard as it can get if you want your project to succeed.
It's basically the startup equivalent of "indie gamedev wanting to make an MMORPG". You need every edge in technology that you can get (which you will never achieve), and you still need to actually make your game fun enough!
A lot of times, technology isn't really that important in making a good game. Amazon has all the technology they need but still can't understand why people play games, it's hilarious seeing them fail even after all those years of investment.
Roblox looks like shit for a reason though. Because of that, the game has insanely low system requirements, since most of the players are kids and only have access to potato-level hardware without good GPUs.
It's not even, Minecraft has low system requirements and although it has a low-tech aesthetic it's a beautiful game. League of Legends runs on a potato and looks fine.
Think the roughness and how everything is a hodgepodge appeals to kids in some way. It's more like the Flash era where you visit Kongregate, NewGrounds etc and although some of the games looked bad they were still fun and the rougher graphic style sometimes added to the charm.
The article talks about this explicitly. It's a valuable design choice. When you have a graphical ceiling it means that even the best, most skilled Roblox games don't look better than the amateurish games kids first makes. That in turn means that a kids' first experience making a Roblox game feels like "my game looks like a real game!". That sensation is priceless.
This whole thing rings very true for just about any startup business idea. The bit on education was especially fun to revisit, and by fun I mean painful, because I’ve made that mistake of trying to sell software to education. It’s unending amounts of work for no commitments, especially if you are targeting kids or classrooms. I’m now suspecting the only way to sell to education markets reliably is to convince a state legislator or a board member somewhere. Schools just don’t approve or buy their own things no matter how much they like them.
Other mistakes I’ve actually made myself that this article is right about - technically superior, better graphics, quirky features, lower prices. Don’t compete with X, where X is any large entrenched business. It’s more or less guaranteed that you don’t know why that business is successful. If it looks like they have bad graphics or are technically inferior or lacking features, the assumption should be that these things are a competitive advantage. But that never stops most of us from making the wrong assumption, does it?
Roblox is a social network, a technical tool those persons have already familiarised themselves with and a game.
Meaning, you have to overcome the network effects of social, the lock-in effects of a popular programming environments in addition to all the usual problems with trying to make a successful game. All of those challenges are hard to overcome on their own, overcoming all three at once isn't something anyone should bet on.
And worst of all, there is no need for multiple products in this space. You only need one game maker game, making more doesn't add more value. This is why the other things matters, it would be easer to replace World of Warcraft or Fortnite or Unity etc, since there are fewer entrenching effects.
Love the author’s point that web-based is an untapped blue ocean opportunity.
My team is building a sort of “Roblox in WASM/WebGPU” that’s built in UE4 and compiled to the browser, that will allow anyone to easily create virtual words and experiences for HTML5 without needing to know how to code. We’re even working toward live building using editor client side on the web, with hot reloading and a simple “publish” button so you can see in real time as you push changes.
Furthermore, the metaverse will be born from the web, because it “just works”, not to mention accessibility is increased when anyone can join with a simple link.
And for developers? No 30% tax from monopolistic walled gardens, plus only one codebase to worry about.
If anyone is interested in early access to our platform, you can join our Discord here:
So far I haven't seen a use for WebGL other than shadertoy like experiences and product visualisation on online commerce.
Mostly because it is like doing PS2/Amiga games, and dealing with browser blacklisting is even worse than just driver issues on native code.
At least with driver issues one can work around them, with browser blacklisting there is no idea what is happening, while the user gets a single digit FPS.
Additionally WebGPU is now getting some kind of MSL/HLSL/Rust inspired shader language, yet another one to master, with plenty features only after 1.0 MVP.
Usually with our users the biggest issue we find graphics performance wise is that they have manually disabled hardware acceleration. I don't think we've seen a single instance of being forced into software rendering for another reason in the wild.
I was one of WebGL's early users. I was working with a team doing renderings of 3d models from World of Warcraft online for a WoW fansite database. We could only do it in Flash before webgl became a thing.
2 generations of game developers were able to get a degree during that time.
No wonder everyone is now yet again going for streaming with server side rendering using the 2021 hardware capabilities via Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate.
I mean, even at the time flash wasn't a good experience. It was proprietary, nonstandard, buggy, riddled with security holes, didn't work well on Linux at all, required installing a plugin that more often than not came bundled with malware, and I'm forgetting a lot.
I see flash as the MVP of the modern web. It showed us a glimpse of the possibilities if we were to make the tooling available. And it worked: the modern web has more than caught up with Flash and there are absolutely incredible things being done with modern tech.
Google Maps on the web is one of those, by the way. If you look closely and consider everything they are doing with these "catch-up" specs... Well, i for one am glad they're not doing it in Flash :)
All the reasons you listed are why I didn't use flash during its heydey. What do I have to show for shunning flash? Well, a bunch of projects that never got out of the idea stages, that's what. And a Pygame game that won't run on Py3.
My contemporaries wrote amazing games, finished, and published them.
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. The tooling we have on the modern web is leagues ahead of what was available in flash, and it's generally free and open source.
It's just that the web can do so much more today than flash could back then, so you need so much more tooling as well.
And yeah, the web wasn't really picked up by game developers very much. But that is because there is no value appeal to it, it's not due to a lack of capabilities. Web distribution doesn't make sense for most games when apps are a thing for mobile where most players are, and where more involved gamers either have their own consoles or hardware you can distribute executables to directly.
So why would you need such solid tooling for something that doesn't have any market demand? This isn't a case of "build it and they will come",some of it does exist and is used, it's just unpopular.
Again... You're focusing on games, which makes no sense, because there is little to no demand for web games.
But there is high demand for a lot of crazy shit flash could and couldn't do back then. And the tooling is nuts. Even just VSCode and the devtools are huge and blow the IDEs/tooling from the flash days out of the water, and those are just the most standard tools we have. Then you look at all the JS tooling... There's a ridiculous amount of manpower and huge companies behind lots of it, so yes, the tooling today is far better.
That you can't as easily make a game for the web as you could for flash is an asterisk. Nobody is asking for those nowadays.
Don't get me wrong, i much prefer the web as a platform to mobile app stores, but I'm aware of the reality.
Naturally there are hardly any games, that is consequence of WebGL killing the market and everyone left for mobile, where APIs actually exist for modern hardware.
I really would like to see what such wonderful tools are those that beat Adobe's professional tooling for Flash.
Specially the stuff Shockwave was capable of, including native compilation and C++ stuff.
Are you targeting mobile with that? If yes, how does iOS Safari do with WASM and WebGL (since webGPU isnt really supported anywhere in factory settings afaik).
From our experience (we're running on WebGL) iOS Safari is very performant and on modern iPhones very, very performant. No support for fullscreen and a bunch of other things makes me sad though.
It was there behind a OS setting, but most features were available by extension anyway.
Still no float rendertargets, which is more of a pain than anything else
>"Our platform is like Roblox, but for when kids age out and want something mature!"
I feel like a point that the author missed when discussing this is that there is a lot of evidence that being more mature may not be a strong selling point. The best example would be Fortnite, the most profitable game in the world at one point that had a sales pitch that could be boiled down to 'Like PUBG but more childish'. TF2 is another one that seemed to have plenty of competitors that tried to dethrone them by making a more mature and serious game, but that only one to succeed was Overwatch that went for a even more kid friendly esthetic.
Seriously, they built a custom-built physics engine from scratch that seems to perform much better than the current ones out there (PhysX, Bullet, etc.). This alone is an achievement of years and years of R&D… (For examples of the inner details see https://youtu.be/P-WP1yMOkc4 or some of their technical blog posts)
And the stuff doesn’t end there. Nowadays they also have their own Lua-derivative language forked from Lua 5.1 (https://luau-lang.org/) with many improvements like static typing, performance, and sandboxing. And their renderer seems to work smoothly on low-end computers too, they've probably done lots of optimizations over the years.
This is really a fantastic article. And IMHO, it should be must read by every startup founder out there. The nuggets of knowledge shared here are truly incredible.
He writes about startup hubris, about the meaning of an open web, about empowering your users.
Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, is taking a shot at it https://sbox.facepunch.com/. If anybody is going to succeed in dethroning Roblox, it's Facepunch.
My ambitious, long term goal I'm building towards is: creating an online community where hobbyists, newbies, part timers and full time pros alike collaborate on apps, websites and indy games.
I realised fairly quickly, that a great early step to achieving that goal, is via browser games that invite players to build their own levels or maps to share with their friends. People can play a game as a quick and occasional diversion with no commitment, then if they've had fun and tools I provide aren't overwhelming, they can have fun creating. At that point they are contributing to the game, learning basics of creating and gradually building confidence. Maybe later they'll go further and get involved with my public GitHub or my subreddit.
It's going to take months more to fully finish the opening game and map builder, but I've got the starts to a fairly simple 2d adventure/escape game in JavaScript that will run in any browser & play on any device. http://solarrageasylumbeta.protostart.net
I've been releasing it incrementally via a public GitHub project, with a beta version that makes it easy to jump in and play whatever feels polished at the time & a messy alpha version hidden behind a "deliberately not-secure" cheat code updated along with most of my GitHub commits.
Before starting on the game I also set up some basic overall community stuff: subreddit for (r/ProtoStart), website that sets out what the community is about protostart.net/
I had my start programming via https://www.byond.com/games/
and it makes me really excited to see so many platforms where it's easy to hop in and start programming games with modern technologies. I don't work in games as an adult but I wouldn't be where I am without sites like that.
Here's to the next wave of kids that pick up programming from platforms like these.
My guess is if you want to compete with roblox, you make a good independent multiplayer game that has a world aspect, get popular and then start adding user editing, vs starting with user editing first.
Basically minecraft with a first class modding engine as a second expansion that kids can use eventually.
The first and most important part is a game that people want to play.
It's kind of like with "edutainment" - authors try to make education more palatable to kids by sprinkling some game aspects in, as if it made more sense than sprinkling a bit of sugar on top of broccoli to get a kid coerced to eat it to like it.
You need to start with a game that's fun, in a context that's fun (i.e. not coerced by outside authority), and only then you can sneak in some extra value.
That may be how you make kids enjoy learning, but edutainment doesn't sell based on fun. It sells based on curriculum. You need to target a specific known study path and be maximally efficient in presenting those concepts and offering a way to grade performance that translates to standardized tests. Anything else is DOA because neither parents nor teachers nor kids will buy it.
I.e. the educational equivalent of developing to a checklist of features the customer wants, with the customer being a corporate manager that doesn't use the software themselves. We all know how this works: this is how you get garbage software everyone hates but still has to use.
> You need to target a specific known study path and be maximally efficient in presenting those concepts and offering a way to grade performance that translates to standardized tests.
Yeah, this is exactly what I meant. You do that, it's no longer a game, and kids will hate it. Those concepts are also all related to fitting your product in the education pipeline, which is distinct and mostly opposite to actually teaching things.
> Anything else is DOA because neither parents nor teachers nor kids will buy it.
Well, of course. Parents and teachers won't buy it because it won't fit the education pipeline, and kids won't want it because it's still labeled as intended for education pipeline.
To get to kids, you want something that's an actual videogame first, learning second. As a random example, try Kerbal Space Program - it's absolutely a game first, but it's easier and more fun to play the more you understand the math and engineering of space travel, which is how you end up with 12 years olds learning basics of orbital physics on their own, equations included. Because there suddenly is a point to it.
(And I want to reinforce the point about coercion. The simplest way to kill any such product is to get a school to make its use obligatory in a classroom setting. It's the same way as school reading lists kill people's desire to read books in general, and to read specific quality literature in particular.)
I'm interested to see where Hytale goes since this seems to be their approach, roughly and with pre existing community support to boot. Unfortunately they've been pretty unresponsive since their acquisition so I hope the eventual release keeps same spirit they started with.
Listened to a podcast about it recently on Hansel Minutes pretty crazy the tech involved with Roblox and the meta verse thing.
I don't see myself playing it but when I was younger Runescape was my thing, lost in that world. Philosophically (ha) question of what matters in life ultimately guess it's having fun since time is one directional (what you own/sentience) and fun is subjective. This is my neg comment on how (playing) video games could be considered a waste of time for not being "real" but it's about the experience. West World vs. reality too.
I do play video games, like a few hours a week of some multiplayer game like BFV or watch TV when I'm burnt/can't think anymore.
Also a tangent, space travel (probably impossible in our life time eg. stars) vs. going inwards eg. virtual reality/brain jar.
"It lets you do a complete end run around the app stores, and lowers friction for users and content creators alike. However, it's technically demanding to get full browser compatibility across mobile and desktop, and not every "browser-based" solution is created equal."
The problem is that you are _completely_ beholden to the same companies that are making money off their app stores, to continue to develop and maintain their browsers' ability to act as competitors to their own app store.
My kid begged me to play Roblox with her friends when she was 7, and I looked into it and immediately recoiled...
Why is so much children's content crowdsourced and MMO these days? AI-based moderation and whack-a-mole approach to letting strangers play with my kid and what content my kid sees is not a good plan.
I honestly don't understand how this is the business model of so many companies - so much that submitter has to create a post dissuading more from cramming into a crowded space.
“ Second, running in a browser makes the top of your user acquisition funnel wider, because all it costs to try your platform is a click.”
While often cited, I don’t think that’s as much of an advantage anymore in the age of app stores, Steam, game streaming, and downloadable games on consoles, where all it costs is a tap or two.
You make your 10 year old's friends make your 10 year old feel bad / FOMO that they are not playing your game, until they beg their parents to help them install it on their device, or they just do it themselves if they have access.
> You compete with Roblox by creating another game the users will want to spend time on.
And if the past 5-10 years of video games gone viral is anything to go by, none of them did it on purpose.
Minecraft (at least in my opinion) kickstarted the indie game market, and years later slowly grew in popularity with a new generation of gamers.
Fortnite was a(nother) failed project from Epic, after they tried to do another Unreal Tournament. For a laugh they added a Battle Royale mode on top of what they already made for what they first thought would be popular, and the rest is history. They added a battle royale mode after the unexpected success of the shit looking PUBG, built in a shit engine with shitty looking assets by a half-assed developer. Which in turn was based on dayz, standalone version of a survival mod for the pretty obscure military game ARMA.
I don't like their aggressive crypto advertisment model either. I do have some sand tho :)
If you take a deeper look on how it works, the companies and game designers that are involved in it. The crazy amount of money they paid and pay to early designers to build up content...
The article calls Roblox a "company town" version of the metaverse. NFTs are an attempt to extract value from content production when everything else is open and free by design.
In my opinion the timing is wrong for such games. NFT/crypto is still too damn raw considering accessibility. They won't be able to capture a decisive market share from common/non-crypto games. They also won't have first mover advantage because what's fundamental for a game is the game itself.
Sorry my point in the demo isn't to tell you how it works (we're compiling TS to JS, not really mind blowing) but to show you what is possible in terms of iteration time with a browser native game engine.
I'm also not trying to say you can't have fast iteration time in other ways. Just that the statement about the browser was incorrect.
> Javascript is not usable, you wont be able to make anything useful if that is your underlying VM.
I've been making games professionally across a wide gamut of technologies for over sixteen years and that's simply not true. Further there are loads of games written in JS that prove it's not true! Believe it or not I've actually written game code in languages SLOWER than JS for shipping titles!
And so on, and on. There are literally loads including umpteen multiplayer ports of Quake 3 and that sort of thing. Throw in all the JS13k games. Numerous games people have published using the Unity web exporter and so on. All the little web games people have released on itch.io, all the stuff made with Twine and Bitsy. And on, and on.
The idea that JS is too slow to make games with is pretty silly and smacks a bit of willful ignorance.
https://vrland.io/ VRland is another great example to check out, lightning fast load times and works across all devices such as mobile, PC, and even VR via WebXR. Entirely web-based.
Ok, which of those have you worked on during those 15 years?
These prove the point, they don't scale or deliver anything that will dislocate roblox. Even wormate (which is way better than slither does not run properly on my android pad)...
> Javascript is not usable, you wont be able to make anything useful if that is your underlying VM.
And yet all these useful games exist all targeting JS backends. Some of which have made oodles of cash.
Of that list I've been making games for dot big bang for the last three years.
For other slower languages I worked in for shipping games there is EVE Online a large part of which is written in Python and then APB which had a lot of code written in UnrealScript for Unreal Engine 3 both of which are very much definitely slower than JS.
Edit: Another really cool browser based project is this fight simulator:
https://www.geo-fs.com/
The fact that some of my favorite games that I’ve paid for in the last 5 years have been built using browser technologies proves this completely unfounded.
The V8 is an incredibly good VM. It has compute performance comparable with Rust in Debug mode for a single core, or comparable to the JVM with a single core. That’s plenty for a great many game genres, and for ALL of the game genres that I am personally interested in playing.
Off the top of my head, I bought (and totally loved):
CrossCode, Game Dev Tycoon, Curious Expedition, Screeps, FoundryVTT
I feel somewhat confident that there are others, but the devs of these games were somewhat public about what technologies they used. I can easily imagine other very popular games like FTL, Darkest Dungeons, Slay the Spire, etc having made use of browser tech, even though I have no idea if they did or not.
The fact that I bought these games (in some cases on multiple platforms), spent countless hours playing them, and never had a complaint about performance, should be evidence enough that browser tech is plenty good for delivering high quality games that people are happy to pay good money for.
Heck, the fact that it was possible to do this three decades ago ought to be evidence enough that you don't need something better than V8 (or even a potato) to make great games that "scale" in terms of number of players and in terms of purchases.
You'll find that of course languages like C++ and Rust can perform better. But is that level of performance necessary to pull off a great game with a big paying audience in 2021? Absolutely not.
I think you have yet to see electricity prices rise, in Europe we are paying alot per KWh right now only the bills haven't arrived yet (not to mention gas prices), November is going to be energy inflation resulting in debt deflationary hell (because they cannot lower rates) over here and with Evergrande and peak coal in China and the printing + fracking mess in US it's downhill from here.
Eventually you won't be able to afford anything beyond 10W! Javascript is not an option on 10W for action MMO games with real character graphics.
We are talking "metaverse" levels of complexity, and all the games both of you list are very simple compared to that.
You and I disagree about what is necessary to have a compelling “metaverse.” I do not think that 3D graphics, or even 2D graphics, are a requirement for creating a socially satisfying and rich online multiplayer universe. There’s a reason that RuneScape still has a huge following, and that some people still play MUDs even though there are higher fidelity environments available.
It sounds like you are working to enable VR based massively multiplayer games with very low energy/compute requirements. I absolutely applaud you for that. I think it’s awesome. It just doesn’t match your original claim, that performance better than js is necessary for creating a viable game in 2021.
Possibly you meant 3D/VR MMO, but that’s not what I took you to mean when I first responded to your comment about js as a viable engine for communal game building.
In a median 10W consumer compute future where that’s limited by electricity prices you’ll have much more pressing issues than “what does the metaverse look like”.
I do think your low powered engine project is very cool though.
No you don't, the only thing separating mad max without cars from hell is if you can communicate and not feel lonely, a global 3D action MMO is the only thing that makes sense, meatspace is about to become a mess!
The 3D action part of this equation is very important, without it you cannot trick the reptile brain that you are actually there, 3D MMORPGs don't trigger this at all, f.ex!
Also if you use that excuse to keep building wasteful software you are not part of a solution.
I lean the other way TBH in such a scenario local, meatspace relationships are going to be all the more important! Not just for loneliness but for basic survival.
Likewise I’m skeptical in such an energy scenario we’d have affordable internet access or supply chains to build and equip people with low power computers.
It's impossible that we won't find out, 2nd law of thermodynamics combined with photosyntesis.
What I'm saying is that today we use the internet for mostly non interesting stuff when we all can be gods and create interconnected worlds with our minds!
https://dotbigbang.com/
We're about to release a new social hub today and our user facing release of our TypeScript based scripting very soon.
One really nice thing about the web is that it works anywhere you can find a browser. So we run on smart fridges and thanks to MS including Edge on the XBox accidentally launched on console last week. Was a pleasant surprise to find full controller support and all our editors working!
Web games also let you do other neat things. We built a game with Day[9] one of the OG streamers and due the wonders of deep linking could open up the game to his entire chat. A short highlight video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs1p22oI_V4
We're also hiring a bunch of roles here: https://controlzee.com/#jobs