There’s buzz aplenty across the interwebs with the launch of this new Mozilla game experiment: BrowserQuest.
Summarised by Paul Rouget as “a tribute to classic video games with a multiplayer twist”, it certainly lives up to expectation. Made by French agency Little Workshop, this game oozes attention to detail!
The world contains a number of visually distinct areas, each with an appropriate backing track and, of course, new set of baddies to bash. An achievement system helps prod the player along, with armour and weapon upgrades rewarded as one progresses.
Canvas, Websockets, Local storage, Web workers, HTML5 Audio and CSS work in harmony to deliver this extremely fun (if quite easily mastered) homage to Zelda-esque RPGs, and multiplayer to boot! You can check out the source code for yourself on github.
Behind the scenes sits node.js, with players balanced across a number of servers. At the time of writing, according to the server dashboard, there are around 1700 fearless warriors hammering three servers with no noticeable lag 
I experienced only one bug where it was impossible to return from an area of the map, but a simple browser refresh found me back amongst the fray, with zero progress loss.
There’s more to say, but I’ll not spoil the fun – go play it!
BrowserQuest – a massively multiplayer game experiment
Write-up/accompanying post
Server load-balancing dashboard
Source Code
The game is really well done and I’m not trying to rain on anyones parades here but don’t you feel that things made with HTML, CSS and JS get way more credit than it really deserves.
As a game I don’t think it’s that fun, really. As an accomplishment of what possible with our new tools it’s great. But the general public don’t care about that. Games/Communitys similar to this has been around for a decade thanks to Flash.
Would you call an exact replica of this game built with Flash ‘extremely fun’? This might just come down to personal preference and I’m not trying to ignite a flame war and I really like all the work you guys do with CreativeJS. Just a friendly reminder that content, not tech, is really what matters.
Fun is fun. When Flash games were prevalent, no one complained that there had been funner games on the Amiga. We’re getting further away from native code, Flash was one step away, and native browser capabilities are a step further. We feature quality JS projects with no judgement as to whether they’re better or worse than the equivalent Flash projects.
Then we agree, Seb. This certainly is a quality JS project. It was just the phrasing that I reacted on. Ofcourse it’s personal preference what you consider as “extremely fun”.
Speaking of Flash and games, thanks for the latest podcast. Good stuff!
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