Magic In The Browser

Inspiration

Magic2015 on steam has annoying connectivity issues. Plus it sucks that you have to install steam and/or install magic natively to play with friends. Why not play on the browser which is operational on a lot of platform? Plus fix those connectivity issues. That would be fun.

What it does

Connects people to play Magic in the Browser together

How I built it

Three.js is the 3D library, websockets is the network protocol, golang serverside code. I have the multiplayer networking code for a generic multiplayer browsergame on github here: https://github.com/PiusNyakoojo/golang_multiplayer_template and had to modify it to make this game. Everything else I did from scratch from the beginning of the competition, and without pre-thought/pre-planning.. Thus a lot of optimizing could be done

Challenges I ran into

Deploying on heroku, ugh i've done it before and wrote the process but for some reason something's not going through. Anyway, that really sucks that I can't just give you a link now... [Edit: If you go to status.heroku.com you'll see that they're out of maintenance right now (20/9/2015).. i.e. it's probably not my fault.. Even my other herokuapps are offline] I didn't have enough time to do the logic the gameplay.. Rather, just a simple setup. You can play cards but it doesn't matter how many land cards you have.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Setting up a lobbying system for the first time. Making animations

What I learned

How to set up a lobby system. How to make a card game.

What's next for Magic In The Browser

I don't know. I came here knowing what i wanted to make, and i've made it. The company responsible for Magic, i.e. the card images etc.. They may not like if I developed this further and got a large fan base.. it may reduce their fanbase on the native application game. I think it was fun to build considering it's my first real game for the browser. But in all honesty, I know I could make this an awesome experience, i.e. great functionality for the user. So I think whatever i'll do next will be more challenging.. I'm looking forward to 3D browser based games that are comparable in performance and awesomeness as native applications