

Show HN: DoodleOrDie - "a game of telephone with doodles" in Node.JS - NTH
http://doodleordie.com/play

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ericflo
Somewhat related: a friend and I built a game a lot like this as a Facebook
app back in 2009 called Pictionnected. It had a few really passionate users.
Didn't really iterate on it, got busy with work, and didn't maintain it when
Facebook made some platform changes--eventually killing the app.

I deeply regret not sticking with it. I didn't know at the time just how
unique it was to have that core set of extremely passionate users. The thing
I've been realizing more and more these days is that persistence really is the
name of the game.

In any case, it's great to see that the idea is still alive and kicking!

(Screenshot, for posterity: <http://i.imgur.com/pSLNA.jpg>)

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dc-tech-fan
That is so cool, thanks for sharing the screenshot! I love seeing how
different developers show the final chain.

There have been many times when I've wanted to give up on Doodle or Die. For
example when somebody created a site called Screw Your Doodle to upload
offensive images and users were asking for a reporting system that we didn't
have yet and I had already been working every night on the site for much of
the night...

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qeorge
Big fan of Doodle or Die. Two things I was very impressed with:

1) Ability to play without signing up. When I finally did sign-up, they asked
for few permissions from Facebook (only name and email, IIRC).

2) Trolls don't ruin the game. The community is great, and will just play
through. Example:
[http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/564/doodleordiecomce5t8eyus...](http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/564/doodleordiecomce5t8eyus.png)

Its addicting.

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dc-tech-fan
Awesome, thanks.

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pigstylus
I've been trying to play this on a Galaxy Note running ICS using Chrome for
Android. Mostly works, with some expected lag during drawing. The layout of
the drawing tools is a bit off (overlapping themselves and the drawing space).
Hope an app version is in the works.

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addies
Wow, great concept. I can see just how addicting this site can become.
Sidenote, this is my favourite chain so far:
<http://doodleordie.com/c/1qp-p7-YK>

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dc-tech-fan
Wow, excited to see a shout out on HN for something I created!

I'll try to answer any questions you have, especially technical questions
about running a game with thousands of users on Node.

(Edit: spelling)

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tlack
Great site! Can you tell us about the technology you use to run it, such as
db, npm modules, server configs, etc?

Sometimes I wish sites had something like a colophon that described how the
site was made.

~~~
dc-tech-fan
NPM Modules:

mongodb

async - no more insane levels of nested indents when doing async javascript

express - middleware

ejs - templating system

logging - very simple logging module i wrote more than a year ago when there
weren't good logging modules for Node yet.

knox - for storing doodles and static assets on S3

uglify-js - compress that client-side javascript

stylus - much nicer way to write css. variables, functions, mixins, etc.

everyauth - authentication - supports more than we could ever want but we're
just exposing Facebook and Twitter for now.

useragent - we only support modern browsers, sorry IE users!

shortid - module I created to give us very short unique ids that are not
guessable for chain sharing, like <http://doodleordie.com/c/Eih5TDOHk> or
<http://doodleordie.com/c/1hODyac94#1to4>

moment - nice time references, like "7 days ago"

canvas - we render doodles on the server and then save those pngs instead of
accepting pngs from the browser because people figured out they could send us
any image they wanted.

ansi - doodles above a certain number of brush strokes we convert to ansi and
echo in our console log. This is my favorite feature of the whole site,
especially because I got my start in online communities in the 2400 Baud BBS
world when ANSI art ruled.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Drawing does not work for me. I try to hold down mouse and draw, won't let me.
Can't select colours properly.

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dc-tech-fan
What browser and version are you using? I developed the drawing tool using
Chrome, tested in Firefox, and people tell us it works on the iPhone and iPad.

Also the game is 100% Javascript - if you are disabling Javascript it won't
work.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Google Chrome. And I assure you, I have JavaScript enabled.

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dc-tech-fan
Do other drawings load slowly for you? Most images you see are drawn via
canvas using the same code that runs when you draw with your mouse.

For example:

<http://doodleordie.com/profile/underwearhero>

Let me know if those drawings load very slowly or not at all.

Anybody else using Chrome on Linux having this issue?

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TazeTSchnitzel
Nope, no issues with viewing them.

I just can't click and hold to draw. (Well, couldn't, haven't tried again)

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mdonahoe
I've heard this game called "eat poop you cat"

It's awesome in a group setting with pen and paper.

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jcfrei
not quite sure I understood what I had to draw, but here you go:
<http://i.imgur.com/0JrhK.png>

btw. a very funny concept (although it's also quite easy to get lost in those
games)

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ajanuary
If I sign in with twitter, why do I need to pick a password?

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dc-tech-fan
We want you to have a user name, and the Node module we're using for
authentication (EveryAuth) makes it easy to require a user name and password
but not easy to require a user name without a password.

EveryAuth: <https://github.com/bnoguchi/everyauth>

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madsushi
So which came first: DoodleOrDie or Drawception?

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Cushman
Broken Picture Telephone?

Though the game itself is almost certainly older than the internet.

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dc-tech-fan
It is very simular - but we actually had never heard of or played Broken
Picture when we created the game.

I wish we knew about it before launching because there have been many times
when deciding how the game should work that it would have been much easier to
know how Broken Picture did things, such as how long chains should be and how
to handle jerky players.

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billybob
Was excited to see this, as some friends and I independently invented this
game on paper once.

DoodleOrDie is fun, but jerky/stupid players are really the biggest downfall
for me. I don't want to write an elaborate, funny caption and then be asked to
draw something for an obscene, misspelled, 3-word one.

