
Show HN: Meatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game - Baron_Von_Meats
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I&#x27;ve been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody&#x27;s suggestions.<p>So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn&#x27;t have done without your input.<p>Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won&#x27;t go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the AI&#x27;s threat-weighing algorithm, Completely redid the tutorial system, Added some real basic (and I mean BASIC) &quot;animations&quot;, Redid the in-game UI (several times), And most importantly, HUNDREDS OF BUG FIXES.<p>For everybody who didn&#x27;t see the original thread, Meatshields is a free, online, turn-based strategy game I made that is heavily inspired by Advance Wars. Those games took a very long time to complete in-person so I wanted to build a similar game online where players had many games going on at the same time and would log on once or twice a day to take their turns.<p>If anybody has any suggestions or bugs they encounter, please feel free to post them here. Otherwise, I hope everybody likes the game, and thanks again for the help!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meatshields.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meatshields.com&#x2F;</a>
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Pfhreak
One piece of feedback, make it easier to try the game before investing in a
login/registration process.

I will not register to try a game. It's too much friction. I will register to
continue playing a game I like.

You've hidden the 'Try Meatshields' link in tiny text below the fold --
present me with a demo experience front and center, and consider pushing the
FAQ content below that. Make playing the game the hero of your website.

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Baron_Von_Meats
Yeah, I actually completely agree. While it's not something I prioritized
during development, perhaps it should be something I prioritize now. I tried
to minimize the friction by not requiring any email verification but I realize
that's something that's a deterrent to some players.

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webwright
The ultracheap way to do this is just have a 2min gameplay video where you
describe how a turn works.

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always_good
I think a quick gameplay video is a great idea.

For something like a strategy game, it's nice to see if the game even appeals
to you at all before you invest in a tutorial.

Check out Tag Pro's homepage:
[http://tagpro.koalabeast.com](http://tagpro.koalabeast.com)

As someone said upstream, as a content-creator, I feel like I should just try
the game someone spent many hours of their life building. But as a content-
consumer, I'm irrational with my attention span for some reason.

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cpitman
Three pieces of feedback:

1\. The tutorial is really long. It would be better if it was broken up by
campaigns that use what you've learned so far. I just got to the fire mage
section, and am starting to lose interest.

2\. This really drove home how much sound matters. Even just some background
music and simple attack sound effects would go a long way to make the game
more immersive.

3\. The other player's turn happens so fast that I don't get a sense of what
happened on it.

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Baron_Von_Meats
Yeah, I tried to shrink the tutorial as much as I could to just be the core
gameplay elements. Nothing fancy. When I was first showing the game to people
they would have a really hard time knowing what to do in a real game so I
figured this was better than being totally confused when they do play :(

Sound definitely matters in the gaming experience, a part of me is torn
because I hate websites that make noise when I didn't ask them to, but I
suppose this is a game so people can expect it, and maybe I can have it off by
default?

With the way the game is set-up currently, you only get the end result of a
user's turn. One day I do hope to have a turn history or previous-turn display
though.

~~~
mostlyskeptical
Maybe have a pop up that asks if you want sound on or off?

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kefka
My critique.... You can look me up as kefka in your system as well. I had a
chance to play quite a bit over the weekend :D

1\. The tutorial could use significant tightening up. compact it to 1/4 of the
text/messages/popups. Think of this as a grind, get them through fast to start
playing.

2\. Allow undoing moves until the "End Turn" is done. More than a few times, I
mis-clicked move on the same square a piece was, and effectively did a NO-OP.
Even if it was a global-undo that reset the turn's condition would be better
than nothing.

3\. For early-mid game, mages seem vastly overpowered. I was expecting a rock-
paper-scissors mechanic but Mages seem to blast anything under Centaur away...
Even the knight hiding in the mountains gets slaughtered.

4\. Let me hit my own units. Sometimes when a pile-on is going on, I want to
off my 3hp horse to move in a Giant.

5\. Too many catapult types. There is a difference between them, but not
really. Perhaps the Fire-catapult could be a area-of-effect fire bomb,
including hitting your own units?

6\. Sound would be nice, but lower priority than these.

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abejfehr
I get "ERROR: Invalid email address submitted" with emails of the form:

myemail+meatshields@gmail.com

The plus sign in gmail allows me to know who sent the email (or who my email
was distributed by): [https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-
get-mo...](https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-more-
from-your.html)

~~~
Baron_Von_Meats
Funny enough -- while fixing this, I found out that you can just sign up
without an email and then immediately go to your profile page and add your
email with less strict validation. Whoops. Well go ahead and use this as a
workaround for now!

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dbg31415
Way too many instructions to get to play the game.

I had to click like 100 times to just get through the mandatory tutorial, and
I had to enter a User Name and Display Name and come on -- simplify this
stuff. Not fun.

If your user interface isn't simple enough to use without instructions, then
you are building your user interface wrong.

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Tepix
The game mentions that it can be played on a phone but i find it rather poorly
adapted (not at all really) to a phone screen - tested on Mobile Safari. The
game does look interesting! Please make it more pleasant to play on mobile.

~~~
Baron_Von_Meats
Yes, that's a totally valid suggestion. So far the best I've done is make the
buttons significantly more usable on mobile. I would love to create a mobile-
only layout or an app. I realize this a very important request for a lot of
players so I will try to get something working for that soon.

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aldarn
I spent about 15 minutes going through the tutorial before getting bored and
trying to find a real game, only to find I have to finish the tutorial. I get
that there's a lot to explain but man that tutorial is long.

A way to solve this problem would rather than explaining everything up front
add a campaign whereby you first play games against AI with only the basics
unlocked, then as you advance explain what the newly unlocked thing is.

The main problem here is that you have a new match for each new feature, but
walk through it step by step with tutorial messages. Just having one message
at the start of each tutorial message "this is unicorn, unicorn does X" and
then let the player figure it out would go a long way IMO.

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modalduality
Interesting game. I have been looking for a web-based turn based strategy game
for a while, this looks promising. Some thoughts:

1\. Let the user press Enter or Space to go to the next dialog in the
tutorial.

2\. Let the user press Escape or another character to exit out of the current
"move/attack" selection state.

3\. Let the user undo/go back to the start of the turn if the user hasn't
pressed "end turn" yet. Very often I click move on the player's own square or
move instead of attack/capture or other similar mistakes.

4\. The graphics are fine for me, but I just feel the UX in terms of actual
gameplay is very unintuitive/more complicated than it could be. Maybe get a
game designer to give you some feedback?

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foota
This is a meta thought, generally these are submitted as a link and then
context is provided in a comment. Not sure that that's a better way of doing
it though. Might generate more visits.

~~~
Baron_Von_Meats
Oh, whoops! I had figured Show HN was more about the discussion but that's a
great suggestion, since people can come comment on it anyways. Thanks for the
tip!

~~~
pvg
For the discussion part, you can just write a comment in the thread itself.
That what the show bit is the thing you want to show and the things you want
to say go in the thread.

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Grangar
I think I recognize some of these sprites... Borrowed them from Dungeon Crawl:
Stone Soup by any chance? If so you should mention it somewhere IMO. I like
the game's concept, always been a fan of Advance Wars! As a suggestion, I'd
add some form of sound feedback like some others have already mentioned.

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JoeDaDude
I saw the option to play against the AI. Have you considered letting players
write their own AI?

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Baron_Von_Meats
I love that idea! I've had a couple friends express interest, although I'm not
sure I'm talented enough to set up a system for player-submitted AI. If the
game doesn't work out, though, that's a really wonderful next-project idea :D

~~~
insomniacity
You could implement player-submitted AI as a web API - so they would write
something in whatever language they choose, deploy it on Heroku, or now.sh, or
stdlib or whatever, and then provide the URL.

When it's time to make a move, you just call their URL and process the
response.

I don't think games involve a lot of data right? So you could probably make it
stateless by transferring the whole game each time.

If you want a hand with this I could probably help! Just reply here, and I'll
drop you an email.

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Baron_Von_Meats
Huh. I hadn't even thought of players hosting their own AI! That would
actually be EXTREMELY easy to implement on my end, haha. You are correct, and
that's basically what the game is doing already just to my own AI server, so
all I would have to do is use a pugged-in url, perform a POST call and then
parse the response. What a good idea!

So I guess my to-do list now is: 1) Forgot password feature 2) B.Y.O.A.I. :)

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insomniacity
Awesome. I'm unaffiliated with stdlib, but I think you basically can't get
easier than that for hosting something like this for free. And you can
probably put together a template for people really easily.

Anyway, sounds like you don't need any help - good luck!

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makkesk8
You should probably implement a forgot password feature. Other than that it
looks good!

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Baron_Von_Meats
Thank you! Yeah it'd have to be only for people who have submitted their email
but that's still better than nothing. Guess I know what I'm adding next!

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eriknstr
The artwork could do with some upgrades.

If you have the budget for it, consider hiring a professional artist.

~~~
Baron_Von_Meats
Haha, and even that is putting it lightly ;)

I've had some friends volunteer to help but they never seem to pan out so
perhaps it's time I got a professional :)

