Aster.io

A multiplayer team based asteroids game. All the fun of the original asteroids now online with as many friends as you can fit on your screen! This game is based on a web server running express.js on node.js. We utilise sockets.io for asynchronous game events such as key presses and explosions as well as broadcasting the game state to the clients to keep them running at a buttery smooth 60fps. The elegant simplicity of our final design belies the convoluted design process that went into building it. We iterated through a number of server designs and network architectures, exploring choices such as low level high performance C code, a python backend with several different network stacks sitting on it as well as a number of other pure javascript solutions. About 8 hours after the start of the hackathon, after our 3rd back to the drawing bard clean sheet beginning, we finally found the current design to have the necessary mix of power, accessibility and customisation. We proceeded to built the game inwards in the style of the Channel Tunnel, with David working down from the front end and Sebastien and Gareth building up from the foundations of the server. We met in the middle about another 8 hours after that, after some frantic rearranging to get the interfaces to line up between the two halves. We got 1 player reacting to keypresses and from there it was a fairly smooth progression of adding features and polishing our product.

Thanks for playing Aster.io, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!