Get together with up to seven pals for some meteoric mayhem - all made out of JavaScript.
Multeor is a multiplayer web game developed by Arjen de Vries and Filidor Wiese and designed by Arthur van't Hoog. The idea of the game is to control a meteor crashing into earth. You score points by ensuring you leave the biggest trail of destruction. Up to eight players can connect to a single game simultaneously.
Multeor is written in plain JavaScript using HTML5 Canvas and backed with a Node.js server to manage the communications between the desktop and mobile devices using WebSockets.
Rather than using one of the many game libraries, Wiese built entirely from stratch. "We decided not to use a prefab game engine," he says, "which means rendering the graphics, detecting collisions, keeping track of entities and coding a particle system for the explosions.
"Not depending on a specific game engine was great fun: it gave us a lot of creative freedom and we definitely learned a lot because of it."
