I'm looking for examples of web games with slick animations and / or an elegant aesthetic. Think 'Two Dots' or 'Monument Valley'. Bonus points if your example performs well on mobile as well.
Unfortunately the site is no longer up with flash having been sunsetted, but you can still find the collection on the internet archive or other places. It takes a little more effort to set up than it used to but they are still playable if you're dedicated.
I have an unfinished personal project of a game built with the Rough.js library for a hand drawn feel (everything is drawn programatically, there are no sprites or images) and I think it looks not bad. Since I had a baby it's kinda on hold indefinitely, but it is playable on desktop and mobile, and I almost finished a decent level editor for custom courses:
Squiggle Golf is fun! Would be great if users could opt-in to get emailed with the new level once it's ready. You can bcc all of them in a single email to avoid costs (I'm not sure if this would work).
Thanks a lot! I think the current setup generates the level based on a hash of the date, so you should get a new level at your local midnight hour based on your browser's reported timezone. There might be some small issues around daylight savings times or leap seconds since it was pretty quickly hacked together.
You can play the game completely offline as a PWA and still get a new level every day (and you can in theory also play an infinite number of past and future games if you just change the url params). It was inspired by the pre-NYT Wordle where the game was always playable offline and you still get the same game as everyone else that day, but instead of using a fixed number of possible words/games, it makes levels with a seeded PRNG using the date.
If I find the time to work on it again I'll add the level editor so people can share custom levels, and a backend so you could sign in and share your levels or daily scores. But with my growing family I'm too busy for the foreseeable future, so it may remain as just the proof of concept that it is right now.
I saw someone else mention Orisinal the other day (probably also on this site) and it reminds me of why the old internet was so much fun - I believe someone in high school shared it and it was a fun discovery to tell your friends about.
Doubt this is what you mean but I recently did an excessively polished Reversi implementation: https://luduxia.com/reversi/
This is a mobile friendly custom renderer, with FXAA, depth of field, subsurface scattering etc. and I still got more headaches from CSS than anything else. (The other game https://luduxia.com/whichwayround/ is the same engine).
The whole thing was a proof of concept to understand the current challenges with the space.
Thanks! That would make us about the only people apparently!
Coming from native apps the tough lesson of this exercise is just how disposable websites are from an end user perspective. It really is not enough to have something for people to play with, you must give them a reason to come back again.
I dunno that it fits under "elegant" but visually https://corru.observer/ is one of the most striking web games I've ever played, and it's entirely built using vanilla JS and CSS techniques.
Somewhat related question, how do people find good web games anymore? In the old days you would peruse the highest-rated stuff on websites with Flash game collections (Miniclip, I think EbaumsWorld?) These days I'm aware of itch.io, but most of the games are... small and not very good? I would love to have a curated list of good ones instead of sifting through piles of hobby projects.
My ability to find "good" games on Steam, as opposed to just... games, is really bad also. I don't know if it's Steam's fault or my fault. But I just want to play good games and I just want to be able to find games that are good in the same way another game is..
Basically how do I find more lovingly-crafted top-down RPGs where you get stats and level up and stuff? I literally don't know?
Whether it's consumer trends or technical accessibility, it seems to be more of a "wasteland" than it was 10 years ago. [Old man shakes fist at clouds.] Meaning more "small and not very good games" or a focus on simpler concepts à la Wordle.
Did developers move to mobile? Was there something about Flash that reduced the barrier to entry that we have lost? Did consumer preferences change? Is this all anecdote and the indie game scene is thriving?
I spent many years in mobile and then recently decided to try the web stuff.
I believe the web is now Wordle or bust, by which I mean you need a wordle type sharing mechanic or you will not get repeat players. Players of webgames seem overwhelmingly to jump from one to the next, and while it is easier to get that first play session than from mobile app stores it is much harder to get them back. This is not helped by monetization on the web being awful.
An exception to that is the crypto space, which seems to not generate too much money either and suffers from the related phenomenon of players involved mainly to acquire things to express themselves. Some form of UGC seems a necessity moving forward.
Flash represented a very fixed target that was easy for everyone to reason about. (On mobile this is one reason iOS is much easier than Android). Typically the game itself wouldn’t even resize, it was just hosted on a page that did. It got a understandably bad name with tech people but as an art tool with programming embedded it was actually very good, just not a secure delivery platform.
The result is the web has barriers of entry low enough to keep competition insane while being complicated enough to deliver premium experiences on that it is practically impossible. Not a winning situation.
On Reddit (and similar) you can search for the question, then when you find games you like, join their Discords and look for a #games channel where people post their similar interests.
Roblox has lots of custom games, but they mostly prove that polish matters.
That's so much work though! And I still have to sift through lots of stuff that I don't think is any good.
I feel like there is a very open niche for a game-review site that takes strong opinions on this stuff and just tells me what the highest-rated games are by people who also like the games I like.
A Dark Room is pretty high up on my list. While it's a very bare bones interface, its visual design is intentional and consistent through different stages of gameplay.
It may not me the most slick and elegant, but it had a very nice, minimalist design, and I deeply enjoyed the gameplay.
Continuity was a small platformer, in which you needed to rearrange the levels in the form of a sliding puzzle. It was programmed by some Swedish students and published as a Flash game on Kongreate. In 2010, the same year, in which Steve Jobs published Thoughts on Flash.
Thankfully the guys programmed a sequel for iOS, Continuity 2: The Continuation. It was even better than the original, using the iPhones rotation sensor for additional gameplay options. With iOS 11 Apple removed support for 32-Bit-Apps, book burning a huge part of iOS's early legacy of creative games, including Continuity 2.
Lesson: Never trust Apple with games or with history.
Beautiful from a simplistic and deep philosophical understanding, but Everyday the Same Dream(2009?) by Molleindustria Games was the first video game I saw that was like, whoa, that's deep, and helped me understand it more as an art form. The ending is very dark as well. https://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everyday...
Slowroads, I play it once a week for a half an hour or so. It's very zen and incredibly well done https://slowroads.io/ (bottom left you can change scenery, car etc.)
Solarmax 2 made the strongest aesthetic impression among the flash games I can recall - abstract, well-eased animations (including map transitions), strong lighting to avoid the Flash sprite look, and a soundtrack of piano and strings. The creator's site is still around and has a video:
The sound design also stood out to me even among proper RTSs: in particular, the appropriately distant explosions that aren't irritating when repeated. Stereo panning was an interesting touch.
That was the tail end of Flash, so it was cross-platform (Adobe Air) and doesn't run in Ruffle.
The mentioned Monument Valley reminds me of Wonderputt. There was a whole genre of those 'elegant orthographic' Flash games.
CrossCode runs on HTML5 canvas and nw.js. Not only is the pixel art really good, the game runs incredibly well even on low speced PCs given its unique stack, even though it is fairly demanding since both combat and puzzles requires fairly strict timing.
The tradegy is that most of the games I world suggest were in Flash. A generation of art lost due to bad standards. A time where the demo scene sat alongside the web creating these constricted dedications to tiny bandwidths.
There was a beautiful game like the ones you mention that I found once on /r/webgames . However, I am unable to find it again. It was about roaming around a forest, and it was changing with the seasons.
As part of a Humble Bundle promo about 9 years ago, they released DustForce using asm.js, running fine in a browser. That game has really nice animation and, in my opinion, very pleasing color choices.
Unfortunately the site is no longer up with flash having been sunsetted, but you can still find the collection on the internet archive or other places. It takes a little more effort to set up than it used to but they are still playable if you're dedicated.
https://archive.org/details/orisinal-morning-sunshine
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I have an unfinished personal project of a game built with the Rough.js library for a hand drawn feel (everything is drawn programatically, there are no sprites or images) and I think it looks not bad. Since I had a baby it's kinda on hold indefinitely, but it is playable on desktop and mobile, and I almost finished a decent level editor for custom courses:
https://squigglegolf.com/