
Show HN: I spent two years working on an HTML5 game. I finally released it - fiblye
http://ektomarch.com/blog/?p=48
======
fiblye
Demo uploaded to mediafire because I don't want to completely kill my server:
<http://www.mediafire.com/?hh5x0jcvvkiwd5i>

I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable.
The demo has three bosses, ~25 areas, and a good taste of the gameplay.

My server seems to be intermittently dying, so Chrome Store link for anybody
interested in purchasing (buying through my site would be preferable, though):
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdggmaccchaieajonlhjkngokd)

The demo now lets players skip cutscenes by hitting the Enter/Return key.
Z/X/C (or 1/2/3 if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard) control actions and the
arrow keys control movement.

~~~
reitzensteinm
Long time indie game developer here; if you're looking to make money from
this, you _need_ to have the demo playable directly on your website.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that serving the game even on S3
would cost $2 per 1000 players - much less elsewhere (I use 100tb but that's
overkill for you).

I don't know if you're keeping track of the conversions - from hit to download
and hit to sale - but you should easily make $10 per 1000 hits. $3 is also too
low; you're likely to make far more revenue at $5 or $7.

I wouldn't be surprised if this change alone raised your revenue by ten times
or more for people not coming from the ultra curious HN crowd.

You also should make the intro more like 10 seconds long _at most_. Split the
intro cutscene up and show it slowly over the levels.

Seriously. You _need_ to do this. I guarantee you're losing at least half the
players.

Some other notes from a quick playthrough:

* Shadowing is impressive!

* You should probably scale 2x by default. Full screen is too big and default is too small

* I love the premise of the story

* You should have a visual reaction when you're hit

* Sticking in the same direction as you're firing works but I would limit it to key down, not key hit - let the player turn as normal when they tap fire

* It would be awesome if stalactites fell when you shot them, able to take out enemies

* Unfortunately I closed the game accidentally having gotten this far in the list and couldn't bring myself to button mash through the intro again :)

One last thing; I understand that it's the end of a long project and you just
want to get it out. But the hours you spend to get the launch right
(marketing, testing, feedback from friends etc) are _critically_ important to
the success of the product as a whole.

They're easily worth 10x as much to the bottom line as the hours you spend
hacking away in the middle of the project. Single changes can have a 20% or
50% or 100% impact on sales.

I wouldn't try to release quickly and barely test a project I've been working
on for two weeks, let alone two years - something to keep in mind so you don't
have to learn it the hard way like I (and many others here) did.

In any case, great first project! Do you have a mailing list to sign up to?
I'd be interested in hearing about whatever you come up with next.

~~~
andersnolsen
Amazing game. You could easily charge 8-10$ for it. Maybe more with the right
marketing.

I'm not sure about the cut-scene advice. Yes - I can see you loosing players
but It's part of what makes this game feel very retro. Sure, you could tweak
it a bit and do the cut scenes a bit shorter. Also you should add an option of
skipping the cut-scenes alltogether. I did a replay of the first part and
would happilly trade x-x-x with a single escape press.

Agree with the @reitzensteinm. You should have visual reaction to hit. I was
kind of expecting it since you had a lot of other visual effects such as
screen shake etc.

You've done an amazing job. Do you have a twitter account we could follow?
app.net?

~~~
shardling
The introductory cutscenes could be really trimmed down and still convey the
same basic plot and feel.

Regardless, they should be ruthlessly expunged from the demo. :)

------
mike-cardwell
In the comments of that page:

Q.) "I’m really interested in the game, but dont want to support paypal. Is
there any other method of purchase?"

A.) "The only easy way for me to distribute through my own site was with
Paypal. I did have Amazon Payments, but Amazon randomly locked down my account
for reasons unbeknownst to me and they only gave me generic automated
responses."

This is becoming a habit.

~~~
dylanpyle
How about something like Gumroad?

~~~
kin
You know I was hoping when Gumroad released that I would start seeing tons of
things being sold through Gumroad. I have yet to single a single thing. Good
to know it's still on people's minds.

------
tayl0r
Knowing what you do now, with the memories of the terrible bugs you had to
work through due to Chrome / OSX, would you still choose HTML5 over other
cross-platform game engines like Unity?

~~~
fiblye
If javascript could run outside of the browser, I'd use it for everything.

Javascript was nothing but pure bliss to work with, but the browsers were
hell. Overall I know I'm _definitely_ going to keep making short, simple games
with javascript because it's a wonderful tool for the job. Long-term projects
are a bit risky due to browser issues, so this'll probably be my last huge
game with the language (sadly). If you're planning on doing a 2D game,
javascript is a great language. Flash would still be "best" at this point in
time due to all the support and speed at which you can create something, but,
in a way, the problem solving and brain wracking is what makes development
fun.

Unity's something I've been looking into for a while now, so it's a
possibility for future projects.

The OS X issues have been screwing me over inside of outside of the browser.
Performance dropped like a rock after Snow Leopard, so the real question is
whether or not I'll continue using OS X.

~~~
AdamTReineke
On the language comments - Have you looked into any higher level languages
that compile to JavaScript, such as the newly released TypeScript? It is a
superset of JavaScript with static typing and structural types. [Disclaimer: I
was a test intern on the TypeScript team.]

You also say this is the last huge game with JS. Why is that?

~~~
fiblye
I've glanced over some Coffeescript, but I'm probably one of the few people on
earth who just finds it ugly. Typescript I've never really looked into. What
are its advantages over vanilla Javascript?

And the biggest reason is because I can't trust the browsers. They run in a
fragile environment that can easily be destroyed by a single update. For
example, Chrome refuses to run Subbania unless it's installed as an extension
because it directly modifies the pixel contents of the screen; Firefox
doesn't. However, the way Chrome forces me to break up my code for "security"
reasons also resulted in Firefox not reading keyboard input, which is why I
provided separate HTML files for each browser. I'm sure there's some better
way of handling it, but I just went with the simplest and most obvious
solution.

~~~
AdamTReineke
I have a Java background, so the addition of typechecking and structural types
(classes, interfaces, inheritance) without losing the JS syntax (benefit of
being a superset of JS) made TypeScript a pure joy to use to dev JS apps.

------
kylelibra
Congrats on shipping. You should post this on /r/gaming on reddit, they are
really supportive of indie devs producing games.

~~~
theceka
Make sure you use your personal account when you do this: self promotion is
only allowed if your account is contributing to reddit in some other way. I
tried to create a separate account to promote my iOS game Super Smart but the
post was immediately removed for that exact reason.

Congratulations on shipping!

~~~
hkmurakami
out of curiosity, is it acceptable if you're only contributing to other
subreddits?

~~~
theceka
This should be no problem. However, I am talking about a significant amount: I
was told that at most %10 of total contribution (posts, comments) could be
self-promotional.

The problem for me was that my personal account contained stuff I did not want
to share as a game publisher. Now I am trying to use the game account as my
main, just to catch up.

------
wpietri
Neat! Please release a simple playable demo. The video is enough to intrigue
me, but not enough to get me to buy. (I just bought Osmos for my Android
tablet, and it was the playable demo that pushed me over the line.)

~~~
fiblye
I'll do that. I'll try to have it done in a couple of hours.

~~~
celer
Trying the demo, loving it so far, just broke it. At
<http://ektomarch.com/games/SubbaniaDemo/Subquest.html> At large scale, pure
black. At small scale, normal swaying white dots with small transfer point,
upwards arrow. Happened after the "you don't have the clearence" cut-scene. I
had gotten the extra armor. When I scale up, I see the white dots for a
fraction of a second, swaying as always, before they are seemingly covered up
by blackness.

------
jay_m
I really love the music and audio from the trailer video. The gameplay and art
style looks great too. I'll be buying this in a couple of days once my exams
are over. Congratulations on shipping!

~~~
pud
I love the audio too. Sounds like a real underwater recording. Is it? Creepy
(in a good way)

------
mcmire
That's pretty impressive. I know this because I spent a good nine months
working on a clone of one of the Zelda games (I didn't make it very far,
although granted, I went down a huge rabbit hole) and it is tough. So many
things you have to think about if you are designing your own game engine. Mad
kudos for sticking with it.

------
areeve
I'm curious as to your reasoning behind spending 2 years developing this in
HTML5? The art style is great and all, but you could have knocked up a game
like this in an engine like Unity within 3 months and deployed it to iOS,
PC/MAC, even Xbox Arcade.

~~~
JackdawX
I think that's an optimistic prediction for a game of professional quality,
done by a single person. I reckon most of the work is edge cases, art & sound,
tweaking, bug fixing, not working on the generic engine.

You could save time by doing this though, as you say. I'm leaning more towards
the idea of reusing code and trusting other peoples engines at this point. But
we've all made our own engines and, as other posters have said, this is the
guys hobby, and most likely a labour of love.

------
stackthatcode
After seeing the trailer, all I can say is: wow, just wow. The mood is a post-
modernish film noir mixed with vintage 8-bit style. And the visual effects are
striking. Very much looking forward to buying and playing.

Lately, I've been spending a crap-load of time coding in JavaScript, and in
spite of its obvious quirks (and haters) very much enjoy it. I'll be
interested to see how you managed complexity on such a large code base.

Kudos, man: you shipped.

------
jqueryfan33
Bought a copy. Good stuff. Some feedback:

\- get the option to skip cutscenes back in \- these octopus dudes come way
too close. It is too hard to dodge them. \- if you get killed, you should
start over in the sub-area you were in, and not the main level.

~~~
zizee
there are save points along the way.

------
sprokolopolis
Congrats! this looks great! It brought back memories of an old game that I
loved as a kid called Sea Dragon:
<http://homeoftheunderdogs.net/game.php?id=3871>

------
elliottcarlson
Would you be willing to provide a follow-up on how your launch of the game
goes? Always interesting to hear various metrics after a product launch.

Good luck!

~~~
fiblye
Will do. Expect it in a week or two.

Thanks.

------
Spoom
Nice! This is very encouraging to me as I'm also working on an HTML 5 app that
I plan on using with CocoonJS to distribute as a native iOS / Android app, in
addition to the web version. Have you looked at mobile HTML 5 "players" like
CocoonJS? You could double your potential market if it works (though it
requires that the game be drawn entirely through a canvas, not sure if that's
what you did here).

------
almost
This looks really cool and $2.99 it really wasn't a hard decision. I look
forward playing it!

Well done for getting it out, 2 years is a bloody long time!

------
scotty79
Please consider allowing people to pay with bitcoins for your game.

<http://mtgox.com> has a shopping cart that is trivial to integrate and allows
people to pay with their bitcoins (also buy some if they don't have them yet).

~~~
scotty79
Since I got downvoted I'd like to point out that I'm not trying to lure the
author of this game to bitcoins or to mtgox and I'm not downplaying the
integration effort for this purpose (it's really easy, I tried it).

I'm just suggesting alternative mode of payment that would be useful fore some
of his customers.

You can set up mtgox cart so that all bitcoins you receive are immediately
sold and money transfered to you so the whole process is transparent for the
seller. (S)he doesn't have to have any knowledge or interest in bitcoins. You
can set price in dollars and the amount the customer should pay in bitcoins is
automatically determined.

You'll also get more money for each dollar your customer pays than with
PayPal.

------
sskates
Congrats on your release! I love the camera effects, definitely adds a lot to
the atmosphere.

------
mgkimsal
is it really B&W?

was that a stylistic choice only, or are there some performance benefits?

some of the artwork reminds me a lot of Yellow Submarine stuff.

~~~
fiblye
Full black and white, yes.

My original reason was that I'm not at all good at working with color, and
especially not creating colored sprites. By sticking with black and white I
could easily draw images with my tablet and modify them pixel by pixel to look
sharp. I eventually came to like the look, so I suppose it's also stylistic.

It wasn't intentionally done for any sort of performance reason, but oddly
enough, it kind of ended up that way in the end. If I'd gone with full color
sprites, there's no way I would've fit within the 10 MB constraints of the
Chrome store. Images with one black and one white compress much better than
images with dozens or hundreds of colors.

~~~
Evbn
Hmm. Super Nintendo games fit in well under 10MB.

~~~
fiblye
They were also written in assembly and had their audio encoded in a midi-like
format, so they're designed from the ground up to fit in tiny storage.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Looks great!

Any chance of IE9 or IE10 support? I hear it's pretty fast for 2D games
(certainly in my experience it has higher FPS than Chrome and FF)

~~~
fiblye
Haven't had a chance to test it on IE yet and I don't have access to a machine
running it at the moment. I'd be glad if somebody else would be willing to
test it or the demo on IE and tell me how it runs.

~~~
kevingadd
IE10 can't run the demo because you use ES6 features (const, looks like) that
it doesn't have.

The doctype detection also seems to drop it into quirks mode. You could
probably fix that by using a standards doctype, but you could also just put in
the meta tag that forces IE to run in standards mode for quirks documents.

------
robbiea
website was down for me, then i refreshed and it was up. If anyone is having a
problem viewing, go here:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdggmaccchaieajonlhjkngokd)

It has the youtubelink & buy now button.

------
sgdesign
I love the style and artwork, and if this was an iOS game I would definitely
buy it.

But for me the problem of browser-based games is just that: they're browser-
based, and the browser is just not the environment I like to play in.

I'm not familiar with what's involved in porting this to iOS but if you can,
you should definitely consider it.

~~~
fiblye
Would you pay for a PC game in general? Because it's essentially a desktop
game that's (at the moment) only easily played through the browser due to its
language. It doesn't require an internet connection, if that's an issue for
you.

As for an iOS port, it'd be nice, but it's simply not possible without me
heavily modifying and diluting the game. Touchscreen controls wouldn't feel
comfortable (maybe that's just me) and games of its difficulty and type don't
port well. I've played other action-heavy 2D games on iOS, e.g. Dodonpachi,
and so much needs to be sacrificed just to make it playable.

If anything, I could maybe attempt an iPad port. There's no way it'd be
comfortable on the iPhone, though, and I wouldn't feel right completely
killing the difficulty just to make it playable.

------
ommunist
Play your destiny against the chtonic gods of despair. I like the setting.
Great taste and gameplay looks well weighted. You rock, man! You shall carve
your niche with it, but it won't be Quake. (Disclaimer: I formerly led JavaME
games production)

------
shardling
Did you use any existing js frameworks in making the game?

I've been writing a little puzzler/platformer using Crafty JS, and it seems to
have a pretty flexible approach.

Fair amount of bugs/undocumented behavior, but hey, I can always go straight
to the source. :)

~~~
fiblye
Absolutely none. Most of my fun comes from solving every problem myself and
Subbania was started before such engines and libraries even existed.

However, I probably would recommend something like CraftyJS because it can
help take some of the cross-platform troubles off of the developers'
shoulders.

~~~
louisstow
Hey, I'm the developer of CraftyJS and now the lead SDK engineer for Game
Closure. I would love to talk further about the tech and potentially working
together. You can reach me via twitter (@louisstow) or my gmail louisstow AT
gmail.

------
mitsche
Bought it on impulse because I love the aesthetics of it (both sound and
imagery).

------
rrbrambley
This looks awesome. Congrats.

------
tsieling
Congratulations, it looks really playable and responsive. Fun style, too.

------
shawnphoffman
Very cool. The sounds made my dog freak out like I've never seen her before.

Good work!

------
msie
Great looking game, love the music, but I don't want to play a Nazi.

------
jeromeparadis
Nice! It takes dedication to release something like this. The look is awesome,
the atmosphere sounds creepy and intriguing. I haven't played it yet but
looking forward to purchase it.

------
padenot
This does not work out of the box on current Firefox nightly (19).

------
tby
why in the world would you pick a nazi as your character?! D:

------
jjacobson
You are really good at your own game! Love the demo video!

------
fmoralesc
Cool stuff. Congrats!

It's nice you also released your notes for it. ;)

------
donkeylipstick
The dialogue scenes are way, way, way too long. To the point where I didn't
even want to play anymore since the dialogue was taking too long.

------
altschuler
Any way to transfer progress from demo to full?

~~~
fiblye
You should be able to open the Javascript console in the demo and run the
following: JSON.stringify(states)

Copy what's displayed.

Then open the main game and do this in the Javascript console: states =
JSON.parse( _paste your copied data here_ )

I actually did have that feature in the game, but I deactivated it once it
seemed my apparent save corruption issue was gone (didn't want to bring
attention to any possible bugginess). I should reactivate it in an update.

------
Narretz
Looks really cool, and I love that the tech is pure html / js. I'd wish there
was another option to buy except PayPal though.

------
wslh
Any opinion about SVG? the last time I used it on Google Chrome was very buggy
(objects leaving a trail behind)

------
comex
Bug report: In Safari, holding down X makes the level disappear(!) instead of
continuing to fire.

~~~
fiblye
I don't even know how the hell that managed to happen.

Was this the demo or the full version? The last time I tested the full version
on Safari (~5 days ago), it ran just fine.

I'll look into it.

------
jiggy2011
Looks cool , I like quirky games.

Since it uses JS , can I use my 360 pad or am I stuck with keyboard?

~~~
fiblye
No gamepad support yet.

------
quattrofan
Love the strange atmospheric music, also the visual style is cool. Good job.

------
johncoltrane
The artwork is beautiful. I second the request for a playable demo, though.

------
pacomerh
Very inspiring man, also love the music/fx. (High hopes for JS + HTML5)

------
martinbc
Great work! Needless to say, you have to play listening to Pink Floyd?

------
becomevocal
This is great, and I have bought in support. Kudos on shipping!

------
jschrf
This is really cool, nice work. I really like the art style.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Love, love the art on this.

You should host a playable demo on your site!

------
treenyc
I like the theme of the game as well, very occult.

------
austinsarner
Is this inspired by In The Hunt for PS1?

~~~
fiblye
It's more inspired by Metroid, Yume Nikki and Thunder Force, but I suppose a
little bit was taken from In The Hunt. The original game was going to be much
closer to In The Hunt, however.

------
ntide
Looks amazing, I bought a copy. :)

------
ralphholzmann
What's with the all seeing eye?

------
smweber
Also bought a copy - good work!

------
trifu
can you talk about your sales so far and if it's been promising?

------
yogrish
why most of the games emulate Mario? I am not a gamer, but for me, the first
impression appears to be like mario...though the plot and creatures are
different.

~~~
zizee
Are you trolling or serious? In this game you control a submarine, exploring a
cave network. The graphics are also extremely different as is the atmosphere.

To be clear: It is in no way like mario, perhaps you misclicked?

~~~
barbs
Maybe one of the main characters has a moustache?

------
p0nce
I was very sceptic then I saw the trailer.

------
taskstrike
The boundary of html5 has been pushed far beyond this before.

In this the author said most HTML5 games are pacman, etc. If you look at
Bastion for the chrome store, it's a very complex game with great graphics on
HTML5.

~~~
numo16
I was under the impression Bastion was made with monogame and compiled to NaCl
for the chrome store, which is a bit different than HTML5.

<http://supergiantgames.com/?p=1611>

~~~
taskstrike
ah, I was mistaken there.

What about this: <http://www.scirra.com/arcade>

