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Show HN: Magma Studio – multiplayer drawing/art platform for game dev/animation (magmastudio.io)

113 points by RushPL ↗ HN
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Magma and coded huge chunks of the product. My other co-founder Radek coded the collaborative drawing engine in Typescript with parts in Web Assembly and also using WebGL - that's why it has a native app feel. If you have an iPad or a Wacom tablet we support pressure sensitivity (enable Windows Ink if you have issues).

We prepared 10 drawings that you can join. Beware that there is a 30 users (drawing at once) limit on each. You can easily create your own drawing and share the url with others to join.

https://magm.ai/k36k

https://magm.ai/exp-1

https://magm.ai/exp-2

https://magm.ai/exp-3

https://magm.ai/exp-4

https://magm.ai/exp-5

https://magm.ai/exp-6

https://magm.ai/exp-7

https://magm.ai/exp-8

https://magm.ai/exp-9

How is it good for game dev?: - Brainstorming on art - Concept art - Storyboarding - Character development

Some trivia: - There are 16 tools already like paint, select, bucket fill, including advanced tools like custom shapes - We have multiple brushes to choose from. More in the Pro version. We will let you upload your own in the future. - You can export to Photoshop and continue working there with some more advanced post-processing - You can draw with a mouse, touch or stylus (preferred) - iPad, Wacom and other tablet vendors - We are building a team space called "Artspaces" with project & team management. Currently teams can use an on-premise version of Magma (dockerized).

More technical: - We are one of the first commercial projects to use Deepkit - a revolutionary high performance Typescript framework https://deepkit.io/framework - It works on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari - but Google Chrome is preferred - We use all the cool web tech like Canvas with WebGL acceleration and a software fallback. Websockets for communication - 99% is built in Typescript - 1% is Webassembly and C for some optimizations. Node.JS on the backend.

Happy to take questions :)

32 comments

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rsweeney21
This looks awesome! Impressive work!

You mentioned you and your co-founder. Did the two of you build the entire product? Curious how long it took the two of you.

RushPL
We actually have 3 co-founders. Radek built aggie.io - it's been online for a few years. He initially built it to draw with his friends from South America. ;) First-hand need for art collaboration hehe.

Wojtek and I were in the meantime building code2flow.com, collaboration solution for diagrams. Also took us a few years.

2 years ago we decided to join forces and built an ultimate art collaboration solution with the experience and codebases from Aggie.io and code2flow.com.

Hard to say how many years ... Definitely over ten thousand of engineering hours but at the same time things were a bit harder few years ago when it comes to browser APIs so if we decided to rebuild it today it could take less time but we would also be more experienced.

Today we're hiring some more people and it's a team effort!

rideontime
Definitely using code2flow next time I need to make a flowchart for something, what a great concept.
echelon
> Today we're hiring some more people and it's a team effort!

Have y'all raised capital?

This is really impressive!

RushPL
Took us a few months but we're now wrapping up last investor for our Seed/SAFE round.
tdullien
Still room for more? :)
RushPL
Maybe, let's chat. Email me at damian@magmastudio.io
depingus
This just brought back memories of openCanvas 1.1b72!

I don't see it in your features, but one of the great things about OC was that it would record your entire process into a file. You could share that file so anyone could playback and pause your process.

RushPL
We actually have it on the roadmap. Not sure if it will be a file export but imagine being able to share your drawing as GIF timelapse, or being able to go back to any point in your drawing or generate a video from the entire process. Or even use your own drawing flow as a virtual drawing partner.

Thanks for the suggestion!

dcanelhas
One nice thing about OC11b72 playback is that you can change the scaling of the canvas that you do the playback on and increase the resolution of the final image
mansilladev
Very impressive and intuitive. Been playing with it on my iPhone, and it’s been working far beyond my expectations. Looking fwd to trying this on my laptop. Nice work!
RushPL
Thank you so much. :) Yes a lot of development went into it so that drawing experience is top notch. We're now expanding in areas that make it useful for a real production workflow. Game dev seems to be a sweet spot. I've been to GDC and spoke to a lot of people and got really good feedback.
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wccrawford
I clicked on the first one and it says "kill cops" and "hehe nice". This is why we can't have nice things.
Minor49er
Just paint over it
tawaypol
If that stopped people they could just fill the entire canvas and deny people from drawing. You can change your layer priority (which is global.)
Shadonototra
Nice concept, i can see this being very successful
iyasu
Nice! If there's any aspects of growth in the games industry, it's definitely in making the artist's workflow more collaborative and efficient (of course, game infrastructure is also growing a lot too but it seems like AWS/Azure/Unity are on top of that).
woolion
Had some fun on the 9 one, and the experience almost feel like native software, quite impressive! I can't say much more as I'm on Linux, so pressure sensitivity does not work. Is it somewhere on a roadmap?
RushPL
We have an experimental WebHID support for some Wacom tablets. Can you let me know your username? I can enable WebHID for you and will leave you some instructions on how to try it out.
RushPL
Sorry, forgot to clarify. WebHID is a way to get pressure sensitivity on Linux. It was tested on Wacom One and Intuos Pro. But may work on more tablets.
woolion
Sounds great! I'm Woolion#1094. I'm using a Wacom Cintiq.
RushPL
All right, you can now go to "Edit -> Connect Stylus". Try reloading if you don't see it. I pray that it works for you. It's still somewhat experimental. :)
woolion
I could see the connect stylus after refresh, but unfortunately it didn't seem to work, either on the Cintiq or the Intuos Pro. If there's some mailing list or a roadmap, I'll definitely be interested in checking out again in some time, or even beta-test :-)
RushPL
So what could go wrong is lack of permission. Can you try doing "chmod 666 /dev/hidraw*" on root on trying again?
woolion
Sorry, that did not change anything. It's a bit late in Europe now, but don't hesitate to let me know about a beta.
RushPL
Can you message me at damian@magmastudio.io and I'll reply with some additional details? :) I'd like to make sure Magma works for you.
kradeelav
Very, very cool! Reminds me of mid 2010's days of messing around on iscribble with other college-aged artists - there's been a huge void for collaborative art sketching ever since then and OpenCanvas.

Sending this link around to a few of my buddies.

onion2k
I have a vague recollection that id studio (id software's tools package for making games in their engine) has neat collaborative texture painting tool that runs in the game engine. Lots of artists can be in the game level at the same time, running in the game engine, painting bits of the level. It was one of the features that came with the MegaTexture tech around id tech 5 or 6. I don't know if it was a real thing that devs used or just a demo, but the notion of collaborating on art creation live is great. Its good to see the idea coming to the web.