
Show HN: The Curious Expedition – A Steam game in HTML5 - riadd
http://demo.curious-expedition.com
======
danielbarla
Congrats on the success! I stumbled across Curious Expedition a while back,
bought it on Steam and had a few playthroughs (of varying success). It's a
very cool game, and despite being a developer, I had no idea it was HTML5. If
hiding that fact was a goal, then you've succeeded there too.

Since you've already answered some of the technical questions, I have a random
non-technical one. In some ways, Curious Expedition is extremely similar to
Renowned Explorers (~ identical plot?). To be clear, I think there's plenty of
room for both games - especially since the gameplay is nothing alike - and I'm
glad both exist. But did this happen by accident? I'm curious because there
seems to be a trend of various things emerging in pairs (good examples are
Hollywood movies, e.g. the movies Armageddon and Deep Impact coming out with
similar plots within months of each other).

~~~
riadd
Thank you! We became aware of Renowned Explorers after we had been working on
The Curious Expedition for about 2 years already and stumbled into them at
Gamescom.

I won't deny that it was initially a shock to see a game that superficially
seemed so close to Curious Expedition, but as you said there is more than
enough space for both games and playing them they are definetely quite
different from each other.

Over the years we met the folks from Abbey Games a couple of times and
developed a friendship. Last year we decided to poke fun at the whole
situation and did a joint bundle on Steam. The bundle has ended at the moment,
but the page is still online:

    
    
        http://curiousvsrenowned.com
    

To this day being able to collaborate with them and turning this potentially
sour situation into something fun was one of the best experiences I had as an
indie developer.

~~~
danielbarla
That's awesome, I had no idea the situation had been so well explored! Glad
both sides took it lightheartedly.

I ended up with both games in my collection separately, and was pretty shocked
at the plot. What are the chances of that happening randomly!? I thought there
may be a common thread I missed, but this is far more hilarious.

------
chmod775
For those who are interested because of the tech, "CrossCode" is another Steam
game that uses HTML5.

It has a demo running in the browser as well. I thought it was quite
impressive back then (it's been playable for a while now).

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/368340/CrossCode/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/368340/CrossCode/)

[http://www.cross-code.com/en/start](http://www.cross-code.com/en/start)

Definitely cool to see "professional" HTML5 based games finally picking up,
though it's been a few years at least since they were prophesied.

Oh also of course there's RuneScape having had a WebGL version for ages now.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2NVY2mFv_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2NVY2mFv_0)

 _Edit:_ For the sake of completeness, here's the Steam URL for OPs game -
though you should consider buying it via GOG or directly from them instead.

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/358130/The_Curious_Expedi...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/358130/The_Curious_Expedition/)

~~~
makepanic
CrossCode is using [http://impactjs.com/](http://impactjs.com/)

~~~
codetrotter
Impact was recently open sourced, so for anyone that have heard of it but
didn't know that it is now open source it might be worth checking out Impact
again.

[http://impactjs.com/blog/2018/05/impact-is-now-free-open-
sou...](http://impactjs.com/blog/2018/05/impact-is-now-free-open-source)

------
mrspeaker
I really love Curious Expedition - and I am also a huge fan of making
JavaScript/web games. My favorite aspect is that it's no longer even very
notable when a game IS a HTML5 game. There are heaps of them on steam now, and
usually the creators don't even mention HTML5: partly because it's seen as a
terrible choice in the gamedev world, but mostly (I hope) because it doesn't
matter any more. The games get to speak for themselves. A game like Game Dev
Tycoon can be a great game about game making, and secretly written in
JavaScript.

I'm continually impressed with Rezoner's games like wilds.io and wanderers.io,
Ansimuz's Elliot Quest was a great game, Play Keepout
([http://www.playkeepout.com/](http://www.playkeepout.com/)) is a fun dungeon
crawler from the team that make the multiplayer Browser Quest game for
Mozilla, and Jandisoft's upcoming MMO
[https://www.madworldmmo.com/](https://www.madworldmmo.com/) looks pretty
amazing (it's built on Pixi.js I believe)

The technology is becoming less and less a factor, and the ideas and execution
more and more so. Good times!

~~~
riadd
Agreed! Mentioning the HTML5 backend on Steam is actually a detriment, or
completely unimportant at best.

There are lots of interesting web games in the free-to-play market, but I'm
excited to see which web game actually manages to really break out into the
premium market. We're using a humble bundle widget to sell our web based
version at the moment.

    
    
        https://www.humblebundle.com/developer/widget
    

It is very hard (or nearly impossible) to make up for the increased visibility
that you get when you launch on Steam. Although that one is getting harder by
the minute as well of course.

Thanks for the mention in your book by the way!

------
AshleysBrain
For those interested in HTML5 games on Steam, our HTML5 engine Construct has
supported Steam publishing with NW.js for some years now - here's a selection,
all built with HTML5 too:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/332250/The_Next_Penelope/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/332250/The_Next_Penelope/)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/317250/Airscape__The_Fall...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/317250/Airscape__The_Fall_of_Gravity/)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/412660/Klang/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/412660/Klang/)

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/293240/Cosmochoria/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/293240/Cosmochoria/)

If you thought there weren't HTML5 games on Steam, it's probably because
they're so good nobody notices.

~~~
abetusk
A bit off topic, but the creator of Airscape had a blog a couple of years ago
about the difficulty in making money from their indie game: ‘Good’ isn’t good
enough - releasing an indie game in 2015 [1].

[1]
[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Go...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Good_isnt_good_enough__releasing_an_indie_game_in_2015.php)

~~~
Ntrails
There is a super accurate statement in that article:

 _We made a game that nobody wanted to buy_

Everything else is trying to convince the reader that the above wasn't a
failure on their part. There is an ever growing saturation of games (and music
and books and indeed all consumable entertainment) - and success is down to a
combination of making something that people _want_ to play and making sure
that those people know about it. One of the two things alone is insufficient
tbh.

~~~
AshleysBrain
They did then go on to get nearly 2000 "very positive" reviews, which is
indicative of many more sales. I think they did well in a sale later down the
line.

~~~
tprynn
Slightly directed at a sibling comment, but yes indie games (can) make a
significant amount of revenue through non-release sales, even at heavy
discounts. For example, Dustforce more than doubled its cumulative revenue
through a 50% steam sale and inclusion in a Humble Bundle:
[http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-
figures](http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures)

------
babuskov
The demo looks cool, but for I really expected to read which libraries were
used, what IDE did you use for programming, how did you package it for Steam
release, etc.

Could you at least give some of those details here in the comments?

~~~
riadd
Yeah sure, I also want to do a blog post about it in the future, but I thought
it would be nice to link to playable build for this submission directly.

It uses our own HTML5 engine. Rendering is based on a simple canvas tag and 2d
context draw calls. The code is written in CoffeeScript. The server runs on
node. I just used SublimeText as text editor. We ship the game on Steam via
Electron and the greenworks Steam integration.

It has sold over 130,000 units so far. The regular price is around 15$ on
Steam. Generally we're obviously very happy with the success considering that
95% of the content was created by two persons.

The project started as a hobby project in 2012, so there are some technical
decisions which I would approach differently now: \- Using modern JS instead
of Coffeescript \- Using WebGL instead of Canvas

For our next project we're considering switching to Unity since 90% of our
distribution happens through Steam and 3d engines like Unity and Unreal are
imho way more mature than HTML5 engines at the moment. The biggest obstacle
for us in using HTML5 has been the player perception of web games being for
free games that are built around grinding.

~~~
guigui
Congratulations! From the few minutes that I've played, this looks really
polished, especially for a web game.

I'm curious to know what kind of promotion efforts you had to do to reach 130k
units? Was it just word-of-mouth and good reviews that took you there, or did
you spend money on advertising, PR, etc.?

By the way, I completely agree with using WebGL instead of canvas. We created
our first HTML5 game back in 2012 (called BrowserQuest), and achieving good
performance with canvas was a big challenge at the time. We would definitely
choose WebGL over canvas today even for a 2D game.

~~~
LoSboccacc
webgl comes with it's own set of drawbacks depending on what your targets are.
I was targeting mobile with my game and phaser/canvas had much more consistent
performances than phaser/webgl across devices.

~~~
riadd
Interesting! So far we're only targeting the desktop since putting the game on
mobile would require a lot of UI rework. Might happen at a later point though.

~~~
LoSboccacc
> Interesting

long story short, webgl had memory issue on low end androids and was
unplayable on chrome/iphone because it lacked acceleration. this was last
year, thing might have changed now.

------
masklinn
Seems to "work" in safari/osx (if a bit slowly and the initial loading bar is
as bad as can be), however none of the zoom hooks work (neither scrolling nor
keyboard keys) and there is no UI element to zoom in/out so… can't pass the
second step of the tutorial.

The scroll hooks work in Firefox/osx, the keyboard zoom still does not, and
it's also pretty slow there.

~~~
riadd
Thanks for the heads-up! I'll try to upload a fix in the next hour or so.

~~~
masklinn
I don't expect you can magic the performances but I'd suggest seeing if you
can provide more feedback on the initial loading bar: in both Firefox and
Safari it stops as the last or second-to-last step and looks to be stuck. I
know progress bars are hell, but in Safari it stopped long enough that I
actually opened the devtools (and saw messages printing in the console so knew
it was fine, just slow).

It probably doesn't help that I'm on an 8 years old iGP, performances-wise,
and I don't know that you have any ability to detect that sort of crap.

------
amelius
Datapoint: demo is VERY slow on Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64 + Chromium 66.0. Startup
took more than a minute, and then it proceeds with what feels like 1-2 fps.

More info: 8GB of RAM, motherboard graphics (no GPU), Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU
G1610 @ 2.60GHz.

~~~
ixtli
Yes, I'm running current chrome on current macOS with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti
(6gb vram) and 16gb ddr3. CPU utilization is 75% on all four cores and when
drag-scrolling around the map I don't get more than 10fps. EDIT: I measured it
with the developer tools. The performance is not significantly different with
them open. I have a feeling you'll never be able to solve this without going
to webgl because canvas drawing is slow af. I highly recommend checking out
Three.JS. I wouldn't be surprised if you could port the entire game to using
it in a week or so.

~~~
ballenf
How does Safari compare? For me it's butter smooth and no fan whir on a 3+
year old mbp.

~~~
ixtli
Holy shit Safari is a smooth 60fps with around 5% cpu load. The differences
are really shocking.

------
dom96
This is great, but my first experience with it so far makes me wonder whether
you wouldn't have been better off just creating a traditional game instead of
using HTML5.

I really liked the aesthetic of the game, so I took a screenshot and wanted to
share it with my SO over Messenger. When I opened messenger.com the game made
the rest of my system start to lag significantly as Firefox started to peg my
CPU. I guess handling this game and messenger.com at the same time is too much
even for a fairly new MacBook Pro. It's a bit ridiculous that this is the
case.

Perhaps the benefit of making the demo as accessible as possible outweighs
this downside.

~~~
rootlocus
> I guess handling this game and messenger.com at the same time is too much
> even for a fairly new MacBook Pro

I don't know if it's the MacBook Pro hardware, or the HTML5 bloat, but this
shouldn't happen in 2018.

------
rcruzeiro
FYI:

This site is blocked due to a security threat.

demo.curious-expedition.com This site is blocked due to a security threat that
was discovered by the Cisco Umbrella security researchers.

~~~
riadd
Do you have any more info about this? I don't have Ciscro Umbrella installed,
I could not reproduce any issues using other anti virus services.

~~~
rcruzeiro
Unfortunately no. It was installed on the wifi netork i was using.
Interestingly enough, the error seems to be related only to the demo subdomain
based on what i observed.

~~~
riadd
The demo is hosted on [http://layershift.co.uk](http://layershift.co.uk)
whereas the rest of the website is hosted on our regular simple web server. It
is probably related to that.

------
adamjc
Fun game, had it in Early Access. My biggest beef is it feels like it has too
much RNG. I'm a big fan of roguelikes/lites, but you shouldn't be placed in
unwinnable situations. It Curious Expedition it feels like you are (fairly
often!).

~~~
riadd
I agree somewhat, but we've made huge updates since early access and even
since launching the 1.0 version. I feel like the current version works much
better in that aspect. Check it out if you haven't played since then maybe.

* Here's a list of updates as well: [http://curious-expedition.com/updates](http://curious-expedition.com/updates)

------
nrjames
I love The Curious Expedition; did a presentation on it at work recently.

What can you tell us about The Curious Case?

[http://curious-case.com/](http://curious-case.com/)

~~~
riadd
It will be quite different from our first game. Here are some things which we
don't like about current detective games.

\- They have very carefully hand-crafted scenarios which are very expensive to
create and therefore rarely allows the player to go off the tracks or to
completely fail. Some of them don't even allow you to leave a crime scene
until you've literally found all the relevant evidence. These games do a lot
of hand-holding and player direction and rarely feel satisfying when you find
the killer.

\- You're forced to try to mind read the game designers intention and world
view instead of really taking in the game scenario itself since the game world
is primarily explained qualitatively instead of quantitively. For example in
LA Noir I'm asked to judge whether a person is lying or not, but what I'm
actually doing is judging a actors interpretation of somebody lying or
speaking the truth.

\- They rarely explore strategic gameplay / resource management aspects or if
they do they go so far in that direction that they don't feel like a detective
game anymore.

I'm not saying that we'll be able to fix all these problems, but these
problems are at least what drove us to think that there would be some
interesting game design work in this space. It turns out to be quite hard, but
I'm excited about our current prototype. Will take some more time before
you'll be able to play it though unfortunately.

Oh.. and it is set in Berlin of the 1920s, which is really a quite fascinating
and relatively unexplored setting.

~~~
Marazan
_Some of them don 't even allow you to leave a crime scene until you've
literally found all the relevant evidence._

The GUMESHOE Rpg System would says this was a feature not a bug.

Failing to solve a case because I couldn't piece all the evidence together is
an acceptable fail. Failing to solve a case because I couldn't even find the
evidence is infuriating.

~~~
riadd
Agreed, you should be able to find all the evidence. Curious Case will feature
redundant evidence, so that you will not be reliant on finding that one
specific trail in the corner of some screen and it will allow you to explore
the scenes in your own order freely.

Personally I dislike detective games forcing me through a linear sequence of
rooms and not letting me continue until I've done everything that the game
wants me to do. That's not what the fantasy of being a detective is about for
me.

Thanks for pointing out the Gumshoe System. I read about it before, but I'll
make sure to check it out again. I'm a big fan of Robin Laws previous works
Feng Shui and Over The Edge.

~~~
vlaaad
I think you will find interesting Three Clue Rule of rpg mysteries:
[http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-
games/t...](http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-
clue-rule)

Justin Alexander also has nice set of articles about node based (role playing)
game design, which is like an extended version of Three Clue Rule.

~~~
Marazan
In my not very humble at all opinion I find the 3 clue rule is just an attempt
to apply a band aid over the problem that GUMSHOE eliminates entirely.

The problem is that PCs can miss clues through not fault of their own. The
three clue rule simply throws in enough clues that the PCs would have to be
very unlucky to miss them all. Gumshoe ensures that the PCs never miss vital
clues because Gumshoe contends that _finding_ clues isn't the fun part of an
investigation - interpreting them is the fun bit.

------
indescions_2018
Congrats! Any game you can play as Darwin or Lovelace is already a winner in
my book ;)

Anyone searching for startup ideas, packaging HTML5 as native binary apps
remains a pain point. Mostly in making sure things like full screen layout,
mouse pointer lock, networking, etc all work as intended on hosts. Apart from
simultaneous testing on multiple machines, emulating via virtual box isn't
sufficient for game performance. Electron and NW could vastly be simplified
for humans ;)

[https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/application-
distributio...](https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/application-distribution)

[http://docs.nwjs.io/en/latest/For%20Users/Package%20and%20Di...](http://docs.nwjs.io/en/latest/For%20Users/Package%20and%20Distribute/)

------
Tepix
I saw this game at the Indie booth at gamescom; i love the graphics style and
the setting! I missed the Humble Bundle "Very positive" bundle last May. But
it's currently on sale for less than 10€ on the Humble Bundle store.

------
seba_dos1
Another HTML5 game on Steam that I know of:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/399820/Kopanito_AllStars_...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/399820/Kopanito_AllStars_Soccer/)

Also, I have a standalone build prepared for
[https://holypangolin.itch.io/karambola](https://holypangolin.itch.io/karambola)
\- waiting for some spare time in-between working on our bigger project to put
some finishing touches to it before uploading to Steam.

~~~
riadd
Oh I didn't know that Kopanito game. Looks cool. I think I'll compile a list
of all the games mentioned here and will put it up on github as resource.

------
lewisj489
The performance on my PC isn't the best, regular spikes in FPS

~~~
riadd
Which browser are you using?

~~~
lewisj489
Chrome 66.0

~~~
riadd
Thanks for the info!

------
james33
Exciting to see so many HTML5 games popping up on Steam and elsewhere the last
few years. Here's another one that was built using Isogenic Engine/Electron
and is also playable on the web, iOS, Android and Windows Store.

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/658970/CasinoRPG/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/658970/CasinoRPG/)

------
RobertRoberts
I found this game endearing, and I wish I was a kid again with lots of time to
play. I would have gotten immersed in this.

The game play is pretty smooth, and I am impressed with the performance and
interaction.

The sound work is great, and is a large part of what makes this game feel
engaging. I played some of the tutorial, but the chewing smacking sound when
eating food was a deal breaker for me, had to shut it off.

------
JimWestergren
K9 Web Protection Alert

curious.j.layershift.co.uk/demo is blocked because it is currently categorized
as: Suspicious

~~~
riadd
Thanks! Will investigate

------
techsin101
Can I see code. I want to see code of professionally written stuff that is big
but not too big

------
billfruit
Well having played for a short while, my only significant point to complain is
that the music is too short and repetitive, especially the combat music I
found annoying, if not for that I would have played longer; I feel.

------
heretoo
Hi, looks great.

I'm trying the tutorial, but the mousewheel doesn't zoom, but scrolls up and
down on the map.

The +/\- keys also don't zoom.

I'm running on a macbook pro, in chrome.

UPDATE: +/\- keys working now.

~~~
squidbot
How did you get it working? I'm also playing on MBP and I can't zoom with
mouse or with +/-. I'm stuck on the second step of the tutorial because of
this :(

------
itajooba02
Congrates .. But it seems to be slow .. or its my browser ?

~~~
riadd
Not sure, which browser are you using?

------
keithnz
is there a write up about how you approached doing it?

------
franciscop
Is this related to Gods Will Be Watching in any way? Has a similar survival
vibe and character description though this one is quite exploratory.

~~~
riadd
I've never played Gods Will Be Watching so I can't say anything about gameplay
being similar or not. There was no creative connection though.

------
drwicked
The first screen has a bit of a typo, it says "beaconed" when it should say
"beckoned". Looks like a fun game!

------
saagarjha
I love the fact that you say that this is only supported on desktop, but allow
me to try it out on mobile anyways.

------
shawndrost
Bug report: can't zoom in. No scroll wheel, '+' doesn't work. Macbook
pro/Chrome

~~~
memco
Yeah, I had that issue. Couldn't progress past the second text box of the
tutorial because of it. I'm using Safari on an MBP.

------
fileeditview
I cannot find Alexander von Humboldt. Is it really possible he is not a
character in your game?

~~~
riadd
Yes, he's not a character because we leaned more towards figures from the late
19th century and Humboldt was born mid 18th century. Maybe something for a
later update or a mod though.

~~~
fileeditview
Ah that makes sense. I was just thinking: how can they not add Humboldt they
are even from Berlin! :)

Seems like a cool game. I will try it as soon as I find some time! Good Luck

------
davidjhall
Game mechanics remind me of Seven Cities of Gold, back in the day. Was it an
inspiration?

------
tobyhinloopen
The unexpected sound is quite obnoxious. There is no obvious way to shut it
up.

~~~
e_proxus
Yeah, have the same problem on Safari 11.1, a looping sloshing water sound.

On Chrome 66.0 the zooming doesn't work so the tutorial is blocked.

------
imode
just a note to the devs, if you're watching:

I ended up refunding your game because it just failed to launch on my
particular (bare-bones) configuration. shame, I would've loved to play it!

~~~
riadd
Too bad :( Did you try the web version already?

------
kizer
I'm getting like 3 fps over here. But the graphics are neat!

------
LoSboccacc
congrats! played the demo a little, it's very well polished and quite
interesting as a concept.

~~~
riadd
Thanks!

------
myf01d
Also [https://airma.sh](https://airma.sh) , one of the most upvoted show HN
posts of all time is a multiplayer HTML5 game

~~~
imhoguy
and WebGL

------
vmateixeira
I hate having my scroll hijacked

~~~
kowdermeister
There is no scrolling on the page :)

~~~
Narishma
And that's a problem on low resolutions like the very popular 1366x768 where
part of the play area is cut off on the bottom.

Another issue is that the game is hogging the CPU at all times, which is
terrible for battery life.

~~~
kowdermeister
That would have been a better error report, scroll hijacking is a totally
different thing.

------
nullifidian
Game looks really nice, but the HTML5 aspect of it is nothing to be proud of.
Game looks as if it could work on someting like a 386 from the 80ies, but I
seriously doubt it will work smoothly on anything older than 8 year old
hardware.

~~~
riadd
I guess that argument goes against a lot of JS stuff. Running on very old
hardware was not our top priority for this game.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Yeah yeah, it's not about running on very old hardware. The point is it runs
terribly on modern hardware.

