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Show HN: FitIt - multiplayer puzzle game

18 points by sgehlich ↗ HN
I went to the ADVANCE Hackathon in Cologne, Germany last weekend and this is a project I created together with @snnd and @newmetl. We used node.js and socket.io in the backend and HTML5 + JS in the frontend. The rules are simple: Make your and your teammates' gaming pieces fit into the highlighted area without talking to your mates.

The levels are generated randomly, so they might be too easy or too hard from time to time. I'd like to emphasize that this game has been created within less than 24 hours!

http://fititgame.com/ http://hackathon.advance-conference.com/

Feedback and criticism are appreciated! :)

25 comments

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i12khan
its a good game

ran into too many idiots needs more instructions for some people..

Also maybe text communication for said idiots?

sgehlich
I guess that with text communication, it would be too easy, right? The gameplay will change within the next days... like more levels in a row with the same team and stuff like that.
eoy
What if the text communication became available after ~1 minute? It would take some of the frustration away if you could instruct someone after a while (or call him names).
tudorw
some people thought you had to add to the grey area to make a shape, but most people pretty good at it!
Axsuul
Perfect idea for a hack-a-thon and also executed really well! Love the Japanese theme
JAVagueArgument
Would be better with Levels, once you finish a game, the next level should start, even if it is the same it could be timed with a scoreboard for each team.
sgehlich
Yup, that was our idea at first actually, but we didn't have enough time to implement that. But I guess we will keep on working on it from time to time, so this feature will definitely come!
eoy
this game makes me lose hope in humanity...
sgehlich
Yea I guess we need some more instructions for some people. Sad but true story!
Gring
It's interesting that most puzzles got solved faster than if one person tried it alone. And that's without an option to talk to each other. Seems that you're tapping into some kind of "swarm intelligence" that humans use rarely, but animals like ants use all the time. Interesting to be part of such a thing for a short while. Fascinating stuff.
batiudrami
I think perhaps it gets solved faster than if one person was trying, but you're putting 4 work-seconds into every real second of time. Sure there are some overheads while others work out what the first person to solve the problem is doing, but once one person has solved it and put their block into place, most of the time it becomes obvious.
locusm
lost 46 mins of my life - thanks.
benrmatthews
Nice work :)

1) Would be good if it remembered my player name: having to input it every time is annoying...

2) Took me a few seconds to work out the aim. Perhaps a short text description / tutorial to show how the game works?

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Khao
I enter my name, hit enter and it just refreshes the page. Can't play it and I've tried every browser I have (Chrome, FF, IE) :(

Or am I just retarded?

Edit: I opened Chrome's resource window to see if anything failed to load and I can see that your socket.io backend uses port 8080 and this request fails. I think it's being blocked by company firewalls. If you could perhaps run your backend on a subdomain instead of on another port it would most likely fix this.

VinzO
Same here, I also tried several browsers, nothing happens when I enter my name
edanm
Did that to me to. 1 time out of 5 it did actually work, the rest - just refreshed the page.
sgehlich
Yup, that's because we connect to port 8080 directly (that's the port the server is running on internally, see http://fititgame.com:8080). But unfortunately, we can't fix this right now since nginx isn't able to forward websockets, yet (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong)
Khao
If you're running on a single server with nginx I guess the only way you could fix this is by getting a second IP address from your host to point on your server and binding nginx to one IP and node on the other IP.
firesofmay
Hey this is great! :D I loved the idea of No communication puzzle game! It has nice twist to it! Port it for Android/iPhone.

Suggestion, You might want to emphasis somewhere that flipping (F) is also a button! One time, rest of us got it right, 4th guy didn't know he could flip and we all were waiting for him to flip and fit it! :p

Awesome stuff!

avalore
Honest question... When someone make projects like this as a public git repo, and there's no obvious licence visible (unless I'm missing something), what are the ramifications (or what's stopping someone) from taking the project, modifying and releasing on iOS/Facebook/Android and making some money?
samfischer
yeah i like that game. thanks for the fun! can you implement invitations for friends please? :)