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Show HN: Eonfall – A new third-person co-op action game built for the web (eonfall.com)

222 points by jonkuze ↗ HN
Hi all, I'm excited to share Eonfall with Hacker News Community!

It's been 2-years in the making built by a 2 man team. Eonfall, is a new third-person co-op action game with rogue-lite elements built exclusively for the web! We've finally reached a release candidate state and set our official public release date for Jan 15th! The game's current version 5.0.0-beta is live and available to test play today!

Unity game engine was used to develop the game along with other services to handle the backend, and Nuxt 3 + Nuxt UI to handle the front-end.

We welcome any and all questions, feedback & suggestions!

Thanks all, Jon

144 comments

[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread
palmfacehn
Crashed upon joining the game in Firefox. A modal dialog with a stack trace appeared.
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qingcharles
Same with Chrome, Win 11.
cchance
Same with Arc on Mac...

I saw people jump and sound for a second then crashed, hope hes got some error logging on the server side

lexlambda
Yep. So much for "built for the web". While I know that a lot of software is only tested on Chrome and Safari, I would expect different when marketing as being web-based.
shermantanktop
It’s out for “test play” so I guess these are test results. It’s a two-person team, cut them some slack.
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Kiro
Getting the same on Chrome though so not sure what you're referring to.
jonkuze
Give it another shot after we pushed a fix earlier today. =)
tgdn
Same on Chrome and Safari on mac
jonkuze
thanksss fix coming shortly!!
mlok
I am on Brave on iOS and I have no idea how to start the game.
thepill
Sign-up/in appears only in landscape mode
pmontra
Firefox Nightly Android: the signup button appears in desktop mode, both portrait and landscape.
jonkuze
sorry the game is only playable on desktop at the moment... we will try to support mobile next year.
jmpavlec
It might be worthwhile to point this out explicitly on your home page for all the people checking it out on mobile. It wasn't inherently clear to me that I could play right now. Only found out it was playable by reading the comments here.
abc-1
Looks really good, you should be proud.
Its_Padar
> Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, preferably without having to sign up, get a confirmation email, and other such barriers. You'll get more feedback that way, plus HN users get ornery if you make them jump through hoops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

This looks very interesting but Show HNs need to be usable easily without making an account

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emaro
You don't need to sign up. But I saw the play button only in Firefox. In Chromium the Play button wasn't there.
Its_Padar
Odd but still not within the guidelines as

> HN users get ornery if you make them jump through hoops

Is in them

pvg
It just isn't the case that you can't have a Show HN without signups - it's preferable for the friction-to-try be as low as possible but sometimes 'as low as possible' is, in the given context, still a fair bit of friction. Lots of Show HN's are in very early stages and unpolished, some use finicky/newish technologies, etc. If this particular one is too much of a hassle and you bounce off, that's fine but the suggestion the poster is breaking some sort of rule here is inaccurate.
cchance
what hoops? i clicked, play .. play now and got in... it crashed, on Arc (osx) but it started to load and i saw people moving around
Kiro
You click "Play now" and you're in the game. That's less friction than most Show HNs. You’re misinterpreting the rules and being overly zealous for no reason.
Perenti
No "Play now" button on Firefox for me, only "Sign up" and "Log in".

No corporate webpages, only anti-social media links to invite people.

No "FAQ", "About" etc links.

Not human friendly.

jonkuze
you don't need to signup at all to play! thank you for the feedback
Perenti
Firefox 133 no play now button at all. only "sign up" and "log in".
jonkuze
Thanks for the feedback... will look into testing further on Firefox.
rakibyte
I played one game without signing up for a quick tour. I played against one wave then quit. The game is good for a browser game there are server issues but I guess that will be fixed before public release. I was getting ping around 21.
jonkuze
thanks for testing the game, really appreciate it. We will be looking into improving things for sure between now and official release date. Thank you.
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lovegrenoble
Blocked in the store, asked to purchase some stuff ((
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jonkuze
if you unequip the premium items you can play!!
skndr
Congrats on the launch! Looks like you can only play one game as a guest before getting stuck in a loop when hitting "play now" between "forgot to buy items?" and "you must be logged in to buy". I also wasn't sure which one was the base to defend once I'd wandered off.
jonkuze
thank you!! ahh stuck in loop because maybe you selected some premium items? thanks for the other feedback will for sure improve the onboarding.
avree
Arc browser, get stuck in a loop of "Connecting to server" and "Unable to Join! Connecting to New Server..." when I try to join.
jonkuze
thanks for feedback! New build should be coming shortly to fix this!
avree
works great now btw, fun game!
doright
Reminds me of the days of spending dozens of hours in Sherwood Dungeon in my youth.
polishdude20
I haven't thought of that game in ages! The nostalgia hits hard.
Snacklive
Dude i remember that game it was so fun to wander around. One of the best memories of my childhood
jonkuze
ahhh yess use to play that game too!! I've been working on web games since about that time when adobe shockwave game became a thing. Fun times! = )
rnewme
Now that's something I haven't thought about for almost 15 years, but have some nice and vivid memories about. Cool!
tiznow
This took me back to a very fun time in my life.
geor9e
Doesn't work. Perhaps too much hackernews traffic at the moment. Unable to Join! Connecting to New Server... Joining, Please Standby... Unable to Join! Connecting to New Server...
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jonkuze
Try now... I think it's working OK after we pushed a quick patch update earlier today.
robblbobbl
Here is the error log of the error I get when trying to connect https://pastebin.com/YMXijJhB
sourthyme
Looks like a shader doesn't support your GPU. Sharing what GPU you have might be helpful. I'm not sure if it is in the logs somewhere.
swirly-mcswirl
I'm unable to play it on my chrome. No extensions enabled. OS Mac
jonkuze
ah you mean chromebook? YEs some chromebook may not have good enough GPU to run it.
dimgl
Super cool! For some reason my mouse doesn't work on Chrome, Windows :( I get a WASM error message and then it immediately stops working. Shame!
jonkuze
this WASM error should be fixed now...
fidotron
Very nice work, and congrats on getting so far with this! I have a few odd questions though:

Is the networking websockets or webrtc underneath?

Did you have tech challenges with the Unity side at all?

What's your business model?

jonkuze
thank you! - using Mirror Networking Library w/ Websockets - No tech challenges except for the super slooow build times lol - Business mode Ads, Ad Rewards, and Virtual Currency to buy premium cosmetics
fidotron
Hey you could always try Unreal for even slower builds!
intelVISA
shame they abandoned their web targets in UE5
bcjordan
Curious, are the slow build times locally, your own CI or Unity Cloud Build? (If local/own builders may be some ways to dramatically lower the build times eg by managing the Library/ cache per-platform.)

Happy to help anyone with optimizing these approaches it's been a pain to figure out

jonkuze
Slow builds locally, but last I tried cloud build it was about the same.
bcjordan
In the most recent game I automated builds for the initial build took 1-3 hours, but subsequent builds with the Library/ folder cached took 5-10 minutes.

Are you switching platforms between builds locally? (like building one for web / server / pc / mac etc). Platform switching essentially blows away the cache, making it take the full build time each time. There was an asset years back that would create folders for each platform's Library/ cache and switch between them when you switched build platforms.

In CI (eg using https://game.ci) you can prefix build cache keys with the platform to manage that automatically.

Unity Cloud Build is in general slower/more flakey/sometimes has cache issues compared to DIY CI, but it should speed up after a successful first build as long as it caches the Library/ folder, and they do separate that out by build platform properly. (Worth checking each build config setting is set to cache that)

jonkuze
Nope not switching between platforms. I'm actually using ParrelSync that allows me to have 2 instances of Unity open working off same codebase. One instance is set to Server and other to WebGL platform. The purpose of it is mostly for faster multiplayer development & testing.

Server Builds are super quick, it's the Unity WebGL Client builds that take forever even if I have cache. Although I have not migrated to Unity 6 yet, that's actually next on my to-dos which I believe there are lots of improvements for WebGL builds there. So I'm hopeful for better dev experience there.

I never knew about game.ci seems like it could be very helpful! Going to check that out... thank you!!

ciaoben
I am curious, what are the best Ads, and Ads Rewards platform for the web? Last time I dig into this I could not find anything on par with the offer for the mobile platforms.
jonkuze
I've used Google Ads in the past but they didn't have any Ad Rewards... then I transitioned to using AdinPlay (https://adinplay.com) which does support mobile and Ad Rewards.
Thorrez
This page seems to indicate Google Ads supports ad rewards:

https://admob.google.com/home/resources/rewarded-ads-win-for...

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not in ads, and know very little about ads.

jonkuze
Ahh I forgot to mention last time I worked with Google Ads was 2012 lol!! I'm pretty sure that didn't exist then... I never saw a Flash game with ad rewards at that time and never heard of it myself then.
gcr
Really exciting!

Arc on OSX gives me a javascript alert() with a giant wasm stack trace about 2s after joining the match. Music continues to play but the graphics stop updating.

Edit: Chrome works fine on OSX, oddly enough. (M1 mbp)

Wonder if windows users are having trouble? Chrome on mac is infamously bad for OpenGL content

robpco
Also crashes with a Javascript alert on Firefox 133.0.3 on macOS Sequoia 15.2
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jonkuze
ahh yes fix is coming shortly!! Thanks for reporting
kc711
Stuck in a join lobby error loop, but can't wait to try it out!

One thing i will say, I LOVE the color picker options. I cannot stand games who nickel and dime for basic ass colors and you have an entire color wheel for free so kudos!

jonkuze
ahhh shoot i think the next build pushing shortly should fix the error you saw!! and yea haha i can't stand that either charging people for dang colors.
reynaldi
Very cool, I am surprised how it loaded so fast!
jonkuze
thanks!! glad its working well for ya = )
ineedaj0b
ran on a depreciated 2013 chromebook. impressive
jonkuze
whoa! niceee thanks for checking the game out
cjrd
Really enjoyable overall.

As a noob, I did feel like I spent the majority of my time just running around trying to figure out what to do.

jonkuze
thank you for feedback... ah yes we are totally missing a tutorial with good guidance for noobs! we plan to work on that too.
pentagrama
Feedback: Got this error after pressing Play Now https://imgur.com/a/VCzACsF
jonkuze
thanks for sharing... actually pushing a new build to fix this shortly! it only happens when other players are in-game with the squads (friendly ai spawned) fixing sooon!!