We Dreamers is an abstract online sandbox that placed sixth in the Innovation category of Ludum Dare 26.

You can play it here. (Ludum Dare page) It may take a while for the 4+ MB of user data to download, so give it a minute or two. Here’s ten seconds of it:

Of all my programming escapades over the past couple of years, I’m most proud of this one. Here’s a comprehensive collection of my thoughts about it, including a discussions of the technical aspects.

Conception

During the final voting round for Ludum Dare 26, I spent a couple of hours coming up with good ideas for every possible theme…except minimalism. No way that would get through, right?

When that theme was chosen, and I had to throw out all of my wonderful schemes, most of which were single player pseudo-roguelikes. Instead, I picked a vague idea: a web-based multiplayer world where you dig out rooms underground in a grid. Maybe there would be shapes and colors and stuff. Genius! I figured out the rest as I went along.

You can do a few things:

1. Move with the arrow keys or WASD.
2. Harvest color with space.
3. Dig out new rooms by bumping into walls. You need color to do this. The new room will be the color of your dot, which is affected by the color in your bucket.
4. Dump color with r, g, and b (or 1, 2, and 3) to change the color of your dot.
5. Leave notes on rooms (if you are level 2) that appear at the bottom of the screen when you enter the room.
6. Put down big block letters (if you are level 3) that you can use to spell [sometimes naughty] words.

You gain levels by adding content. If anyone else is online at the same time as you, you can see their dot and any content they add, all live-updated.

Competition results

It placed 6th in the Innovation category out of 2,346 games. The rest of the category scores aren’t as impressive as raw numbers but are still nice in terms of the number of games:

Category	Ranking	Score
Innovation	#6	4.38
Mood	#210	3.36
Overall	#238	3.51
Audio	#464	2.85
Theme	#492	3.60
Humor	#549	2.23
Graphics	#650	2.92
Fun	#769	2.75

People tend to have one of two viewpoints. They’re either like wrongcoder:

Neat. Quite unique. Technologically a marvel for the available time. To be honest, though, I don’t get the purpose of it.

or they’re like BlennosoftGames:

There is something very cheerful about this game. As far as I can tell you don’t “win” you just smile :)

Most players were in the second category, so I’m very happy with how it turned out. People seem to understand what I’m trying to do: create a virtual canvas where contribution is easy, bad behavior is difficult, and quirky things can be found given a few minutes’ exploration. Hegemege said it “felt a bit like geocaching,” which really tickles me.

The numbers are encouraging as well. When I checked earlier today, there were 3,019 rooms dug by 147 users. 54% of players dug 5 or more rooms, with some people digging over 100 rooms. 11% had a note on them. 18% had a stamp. So people were definitely doing more than running around and bumping into walls.

At first I was surprised that more rooms had stamps than notes, since you have to be level 2 to write a note, and level 3 to place a stamp. But it was pointed out to me that a stamp is just one letter, and you have to think a lot less to put one down. Want to spell DOG FART in huge letters? It’s only seven easy pieces!

I got a friendly nod from a post on Indie Statik’s Ludum Dare highlights. They compared We Dreamers to Peter Molyneux’s game Curiosity. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment, but it’s still nice to be noticed. They have a second highlights post as well.

Technical details

You might be wondering, like StuStutheBloo in We Dreamers’s comments, “How did you even put this together in the time available?”

The short answer is that I used Firebase, “a cloud database designed to power real-time, collaborative applications.” Put another way, it’s a magic, event-driven Javascript object that updates instantly across all clients. I didn’t have to write a server, or even deal with much multiplayer logic at all; I just designed all interactive objects to listen to Firebase events. The only thing special about the dot you control, as opposed to those controlled by others and displayed on your screen, is that your client is updating a Firebase subtree for your data. Those updates are reflected instantly for you, and very quickly for everyone else.

If you want to try your hand at a multiplayer online game for Ludum Dare, I strongly recommend that you try Firebase. There are half a dozen two-player games I haven’t been able to rate because I’d need to have another person sitting next to me to play with. You don’t even need to get all crazy and realtime – it’s also perfect for turn-based games. I hope to try something head-to-head next time.

Now for a longer answer to StuStutheBoo’s question. Although Firebase was essential to having the technical capability to build this kind of online experience, it was even more important that I knew my tools extremely well. My day job is to work on Buildy, an online multiplayer realtime building sandbox where you can make just about anything. For LD26, I brought out the same tools we use to make Buildy: HTML5, CSS, Coffeescript, Grunt, Bacon.js, SoundManager2, jQuery, Mousetrap, and underscore.js. The whole game is a bunch of static files hosted on Github Pages, just like the rest of steveasleep.com. To deploy, all I had to do was push to the gh-pages branch.

I didn’t do anything I hadn’t done before. All of the rendering is just styled <div> elements. I’m familiar with each of those Javascript libraries. I’m comfortable with the Chrome dev tools. Static files are incredibly easy to deploy and serve without paying a dime. As a result of using all these familiar pieces, I spent almost no time debugging simple (or even complicated) issues.

If you’re looking for advice about how to do Ludum Dare well, here’s mine: learn your tools. Make sure you know how to write, run, and deploy your game. Don’t give yourself any surprises. (Python developers have a particularly tough time with this one. There are still a few that ask you to install PyGame to play and rate their game. I sympathize, having used py2app for LD19.)

If you spend any time in Javascript, try to get your head around Bacon.js. It can decrease game logic complexity by quite a lot if you’re willing to invest your brain resources in it. We Dreamers would have had 30% more code and been 30% buggier without it.

Downsides and difficulties

There’s another, secret reason why I was able to write We Dreamers so fast: I didn’t give more than a passing thought about scale. I had no idea how much data users would generate (currently ~4 MB) or how well browsers would deal with 6000+ DOM elements moving around (not very well). Buildy partitions its worlds into squares, so it’s easy to only load a piece at a time. We Dreamers has no such wisdom, so every user loads the entire world when the page loads. Threeish megabytes isn’t so bad for a game, but DOM performance turned out to be a huge issue once things got big. To help players deal with the speed, I now provide a stripped down version that web browsers can handle better.

I chose to do all the rendering via styled <div>s because I wanted to spend as little time as possible on drawing code. I gambled that web browsers would be smart enough to efficiently clip offscreen nodes. It almost worked, but I really should have used <canvas>. It wouldn’t have been much more work.

I had a tiny bit of trouble with cross-browser compatibility. requestAnimationFrame still hasn’t been un-prefixed in Firefox or Safari. Safari didn’t like any of the CSS gradient variants I tried either, so the doors are all white when viewed in that browser. In the end, though, I was able to make it widely compatible and consistent. (This is another issue that would have been avoided had I used <canvas>.)

Despite using Firebase, here was one aspect of distributed computing I did have to deal with: syncing the time across all clients to get the color harvesting to look right. I thought I was being clever by using a public web service that gives you the current time in JSON. Unfortunately it’s hosted on Google App Engine and blew through its quota soon after voting started, so now all the players’ clocks are wrong anyway. It doesn’t affect the game much, but I should have seen it coming.

There was one last issue that I was always aware of but never had time to deal with: access controls. There are no API-level restrictions on who can edit what data. At least one person exploited it to leave me an amusing note, but fortunately there were no abusers. Firebase has the ability to use access controls, but I didn’t have time to learn their API. Another reason to know my tools really well, I suppose.

In closing,

I had a fun and intense time this year. Of my three attempts to date, We Dreamers is far and away my best Ludum Dare effort yet. I plan to come back for another round in August for LD27.

Appendix: my favorite reviews

Ooh, collaborative art! I liked the idea and of course took the liberty of leaving my mark on the world. Makes me happy! Thanks! -semi

I really enjoyed my play session. Had a good time reading all kind of different messages and just messing around. I love the collaborative stuff and the openness. Art is cool and the sound is charming. It is also a nice piece of tech. -PsenFilip

There is something very cheerful about this game. As far as I can tell you don’t “win” you just smile :) -BlennosoftGames

I love open-ended and creative games! I had fun just wandering around reading everyone else’s notes. I might have to come back later to do some more exploring ;) -cardboard

This is beautiful. Found some really awesome messages, had fun following a huge tunnel dug by Lies, and then spent some time extending it even further myself. Tried to make sure to leave some inspiration bits around too. Amazing stuff, I love it. -SnoringFrog

As someone else pointed out, this is an awesomely artsy guestbook. A very neat idea, and a technical prowess for the time constraints, that shows you’ve got some deadly programming chops.

All in all, a nice collaborative experience, very fitting of the theme. I’m just not too much into games without any gameplay to them - yeah, the ages old debate about games as art :) -TenTonToon

That is a very interesting entry, and I loved the technical details.

I think it would be kind of cool if there was some sort of “decay”, so that after a few days, some of the painted cells would go white and then fill again - as to keep the instalation fresh.

Also, having some sort of minimap or full view mode would be really great. (The browser’s native zoom doesn’t go very far…)

Thanks for the game! -caranha

I just had the most interesting conversation with a wall, containing soul fragments of past dreamers. It’s like a dream: you cannot predict what you will find, but you’ll always walk on the path of an interesting weird journey. THANK YOU stevejohnson.

Oh. And too bad that the sound reacts sometimes badly when travelling to many successive tiles of various colors. It makes it hard to create music :D -Chronodrax

So this is a unique world for all players? Like an artistic MMO? This is extra-cool, a piece of art made by people around the world -atraxgames

Nice bit of minimalist brain rot. Have some upstars. -swizzcheez

this is a good gam -evelyn-jolli

Neat. Quite unique. Technologically a marvel for the available time. To be honest, though, I don’t get the purpose of it. -wrongcoder

WrongCoder I left you a bunch of messages in rooms but you didn’t reply :(

This was fantastic. How did you even put this together in the time available? -StuStutheBloo

Cool stuff with Firebase! I have just started checking out BaaSes myself and this just reinforces my idea of just how fast you can get up and running to prototype new concepts. Haven’t seen Bacon.js before, looks interesting. Would be nice to see some more in-depth post-mortem on this :) -Legogris

It might be cool to make a way for people to have a local version of this for their own social group. I don’t know what that would achieve, it just seems like it would work somehow. -nintendoeats

Wow, beautiful. Defies definition. Thank you! -CherryNukaCola

Fun! Felt a bit like geocaching :P -Hegemege

Now that’s a fun guestbook :D -gerritg