

Doodle or Die - our "bizarrely addictive" Node Knockout game - dc-tech-fan
http://doodle.no.de

======
jtwb
Please add a way to link to these chains! Some of them are quite funny and
worth sharing.

~~~
jvc26
+1

~~~
dc-tech-fan
After the competition we plan on adding this and other requested features like
a better drawing tool and ipad support.

------
ImprovedSilence
Fantastic game. If I may, I would enjoy more colors, and/or overlapping colors
to mix/kinda fight over transparency issus.. but that's just the wanna be
painter in me. I want it to be more like actually painting.. and that just
gave me a brilliant idea for destorying ms paint and whathaveyous....

also, my productivity just dropped to zero...

~~~
ImprovedSilence
And another idea. What if I wanted to compare my stream to my friends, see if
we shared any common threads at one point?

------
RyanMcGreal
Oops, I think I just broke it. I scrolled right down the list of past chains
(utterly ingenious, by the way) before finishing my newest task and submitting
it, and now I get an internal server error.

~~~
enjalot
I get one too t.t

~~~
dc-tech-fan
I fixed the error - the logs were too damn big. I should have turned off 100%
logging. I'll fix after the competition is over.

------
diiq
This is a favorite of mine, though I know it as "Eat Poo You Cat".

A narrower marker or a real color selector would both be nice.

The server appears to be down now, though.

~~~
starwed
It's a type of Exquisite corpse:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_cadaver>

According to wikipedia the original version was text only, while I think the
pure image version is most common on the internet, but the alternating version
is definitely the most fun to play! :)

I've always thought a fascinating thing about the game is how certain images
are so iconically associated with particular words that they'll make it
through several iterations. (Such as the zombie example elsewhere in the
thread -- once a zombie appears, it's so recognizable that it sticks around.)

~~~
Dove
Unicorns also persist remarkably.

------
RobertHubert
<http://roberthubert.com/zombie-apocalypse.PNG>

~~~
dc-tech-fan
That is awesome! We hope to create a Hall of Fame site to go along with after
the competition.

------
yesimahuman
Awesome, great work! One minor thing: if you draw outside of the canvas you
lose the drag event and have to click to draw again. Makes drawing in large
areas frustrating.

I was also confused what the ordering was, and I still find the output a bit
difficult to follow. I didn't know if I should find my picture and read up, or
read down.

------
city41
This is really great, I've been playing for the past hour. If you guys made
this into a scalable site with a few more features, you might have a hit on
your hands.

------
jarin
You must draw: collapsed trampoline with piss all over

It started off as the Sun.

I love this game.

------
ColinDabritz
Tracking 'latest' changes would be nice, once you've played for a while, it's
hard to find all the recent updates.

Also, I like identifying pictures more than drawing. If there are others who
like drawing more, it would be nice to be given a preference so you get those
more often, e.g. "I prefer identifying/I prefer drawing".

An excellent game. I also second the idea for saving them, perhaps bash.org
style?

------
nachteilig
I'm kind of impressed with how quickly I encountered dicks. I guess this is
chat roulette 2.0. Really fun and impressive work otherwise though.

~~~
jwcooper
An easy way to make the thread interesting again is to describe them as rocket
ships, or pickles, or...well you get the picture.

------
BasDirks
Couldn't sleep last night, stumbled across this, laughed my ass off until I
was tired, slept like a baby. Great fun, and thank God for making so many
people hilariously terrible drawers.

And wondered what would result if we could have a chain with say
Vermeer/Michelangelo/Da Vinci/etc. In fact the history of art can be
summarized as a doodle chain, if we want to be very silly!

------
Sniffnoy
Also, there's no surprise that it's addictive, because you _didn't include a
natural place to stop_. Every time you submit something, you're immediately
given something new to do, no break inbetween! Of course people are going to
have a hard time stopping.

Edit: Let me also add, it's not immediately obvious that there's a way to see
what becomes of your chains if you don't keep going.

(Also there's too many people who will just totally ignore what they're
supposed to do, but others have already said that and I have no idea what you
can actually do about that.)

Edit: Also, the mismatch between the drawing box size and the display box size
can be a problem if the boundaries of the picture matter.

------
Sniffnoy
I think it would be good if you added support for (or just switched to :) )
starting with a description rather than starting with a drawing. I think that
tends to be funnier. Especially here -- the drawing interface is annoying, so
people will start with something that's easy to draw rather than something
more interesting. (Whereas I think people will be more willing to draw
something complicated if they already have a description. I certainly am. :) )

Edit: Might I also add, that starting with simpler things is implicitly
encouraged also means you get long chains of things like "balloon...
balloon... balloon...".

------
JoeCamel
Two ideas. Maybe some people would like only to draw or only to describe
doodles. Though I don't know how this would affect the game. And a troll
button for marking intentional chain-breakers. If enough people mark the troll
then you could remove his image/description and recover the chain.

Some of my favorite (parts of) chains: <http://i.imgur.com/52307.png>
<http://i.imgur.com/SnT6r.png> <http://i.imgur.com/KhMql.png>

------
emp_
Was playing with my kids and a few dicks popped in, give it some warning guys!

------
dc-tech-fan
I'm happy to answer any questions about the game or using Node.

~~~
jakubmal
Nooo, it's dead! 500

~~~
dc-tech-fan
It's back. In 8 hours we did not have time to build it for scale. Each image
is stored in Mongodb as a base64 image.

~~~
jarin
I hate to ask, but why store images in a database?

------
bryogenic
You can greatly decrease your load by making each thread link-able and then
linking to each, not displaying _all_ of them each time.

~~~
dc-tech-fan
Thanks for the suggestion.

We plan on doing that after the competition. It's crazy that it works at all
the way it is now.

What you see was built in about 8 hours, at a bar, using an iPhone for
internet.

~~~
jwcooper
If you can manage to keep the last few displaying, and not link all of them,
it would make for an easier time viewing your recent drawings. This game is a
blast seeing how these threads develop.

------
bsmith
Now getting a 500:

Express 500 Error: notConnected

    
    
        at [object Object].executeCommand (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/db.js:708:41)
        at Collection.findOne (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/collection.js:753:11)
        at /home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:143:16
        at MongoStore._get_collection (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:92:19)
        at MongoStore.get (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:142:8)
        at Object.session [as handle] (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:319:11)
        at next (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/http.js:198:15)
        at IncomingMessage. (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/bodyParser.js:74:9)
        at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:61:17)
        at HTTPParser.onMessageComplete (http.js:133:23)

------
jazzychad
Very nice. Played this game on paper at a big family reunion. It was
hilarious.

------
cing
This was also the premise of the site: <http://brokenpicturetelephone.com/>

Unfortunately it's been "under development" for about a year...

------
kirillzubovsky
You might want to include more object requests that contain words beyond
"shit", "piss", "nigga" (oh yea, it was there!) ... etc. Seriously, the
concept is cool, your drawing requests are ridiculous.

~~~
jtwb
The drawing requests are the descriptions of other drawings, not generated by
the system.

------
joshwa
It might help perceived performance to load the drawing widget before loading
all the previous chains... as it is I have to wait for the entire page to load
before I can start drawing again.

------
l0c0b0x
How is this a game? It's awesomely entertaining, but I'm not sure it's
considered an actual game if there isn't some sort of goal.

...even if the goal is 'have fun' :)

------
geoffc
Nicely done you sucked me in for a few drawings :-)

------
chrisballinger
Have you seen <http://thesentencegame.com/> ?

------
bryogenic
Similar to:

BrokenPictureTelephone.com

Was a great game back when it actually existed.

------
adaline
Really loving it, haven't laughed so hard in a while! But then it fell over :(

------
spydum
Seems like more die than doodle.. HTTP 500's.

~~~
dc-tech-fan
Victim of our own success! We had no idea how popular this would be come. We
expected a few hundred drawings and we already have over 3000!

I restarted the node service and it should be back now.

------
mhm1216
when the box closes in on you does that mean you took too much time? is that
the "or die" part?

------
Chairmonkey
This is awesome! You got my vote

------
voodoomagicman
It censors all of my penises!

~~~
Tichy
You mean in 8 hours they learned Node, JS, MongoDB, git and built a penis
recognition algorithm? I suck at coding :-(

~~~
dc-tech-fan
Haha no penis recognition in 8 hours. But don't abuse that - it kills the fun.

------
pennig
when I tried to draw "procrastination" it killed the server, apparently.

------
jvc26
looks like its suffering with load at the moment!

------
ft5
wonderful. how can I contact you?

~~~
dc-tech-fan
@dylang on twitter

------
tomh-
it is extremely slow, how come?

~~~
mcantelon
Because it's on HN's frontpage. I was playing this the other day and it was
fine.

~~~
tomh-
Yeah but what does that mean:

\- the No.de instance is not good enough for that traffic

\- Node.js can't handle the traffic

\- the game doesn't scale

~~~
htilford
Or it was coded in 8 hours. . .

~~~
enneff
But isn't this one of the selling points of node.js? From their site:

"Node's goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In
the "hello world" web server example above, many client connections can be
handled concurrently."

I've noticed a few sites hosted at no.de go down after hitting the HN front
page. I'd like to know the answers to the questions posed by the grandparent.

~~~
mcantelon
Part of the issue might be that Joyent's virtual Node servers, at least the
ones used by Node Knockout competitors, have 120 megs RAM.

~~~
enneff
That makes sense. I didn't know that. Thanks.

~~~
dc-tech-fan
And we coded it in 8 hours, at a noisy bar in DC, using an tethered iPhone for
internet. There's no caching, no compression, heck the images are stored as
base64 in mogo as strings. We had NO IDEA this thing would take off the way it
did.

------
innes
Bug report: Drawing lines erases big bits of the drawing near to the line (on
iPad). Eg, draw a NE SW diagonal, then draw another diagonal NW SE, the first
one gets erased.

~~~
dc-tech-fan
We didn't have time to test on ipad or other mobile devices. The prize for
most votes is an ipad2 so if you vote for us (top right corner of the page)
you might be helping us build the ipad version.

