Doodle or Die - our "bizarrely addictive" Node Knockout game

[jtwb]

Please add a way to link to these chains! Some of them are quite funny and worth sharing.

[jvc26]

+1

[ImprovedSilence]

Fantastic game. If I may, I would enjoy more colors, and/or overlapping colors to mix/kinda fight over transparency issus.. but that's just the wanna be painter in me. I want it to be more like actually painting.. and that just gave me a brilliant idea for destorying ms paint and whathaveyous....

also, my productivity just dropped to zero...

[ImprovedSilence]

And another idea. What if I wanted to compare my stream to my friends, see if we shared any common threads at one point?

[RyanMcGreal]

Oops, I think I just broke it. I scrolled right down the list of past chains (utterly ingenious, by the way) before finishing my newest task and submitting it, and now I get an internal server error.

[arnorhs]

same here. I did the same thing, but I think it's probably just that the server crashed, while I was drawing. I'm trying to resubmit every few minutes. Hopefully my epicness won't be lost

edit: oh wait, it's back up

edit2: damn, down again. Express error: http://cl.ly/2d122W2x3l0y253o0y3O

[enjalot]

I get one too t.t

[diiq]

This is a favorite of mine, though I know it as "Eat Poo You Cat".

A narrower marker or a real color selector would both be nice.

The server appears to be down now, though.

[starwed]

It's a type of Exquisite corpse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_cadaver

According to wikipedia the original version was text only, while I think the pure image version is most common on the internet, but the alternating version is definitely the most fun to play! :)

I've always thought a fascinating thing about the game is how certain images are so iconically associated with particular words that they'll make it through several iterations. (Such as the zombie example elsewhere in the thread -- once a zombie appears, it's so recognizable that it sticks around.)

[moozilla]

This will add a color selector:

javascript:for(var i=0;i<6;i++){for(var j=0;j<6;j++){for(var k=0;k<6;k++){txt = '#'+'0369cf'.substr(i,1)+'0369cf'.substr(j,1)+'0369cf'.substr(k,1);$('.tools').append("<a href='#drawing' data-color='" + txt + "'style='width: 5px; height: 5px; padding: 0; spacing: 0; background: " + txt + ";'></a> ");}}}

[RobertHubert]

http://roberthubert.com/zombie-apocalypse.PNG

[dc-tech-fan]

That is awesome! We hope to create a Hall of Fame site to go along with after the competition.

[yesimahuman]

Awesome, great work! One minor thing: if you draw outside of the canvas you lose the drag event and have to click to draw again. Makes drawing in large areas frustrating.

I was also confused what the ordering was, and I still find the output a bit difficult to follow. I didn't know if I should find my picture and read up, or read down.

[city41]

This is really great, I've been playing for the past hour. If you guys made this into a scalable site with a few more features, you might have a hit on your hands.

[jarin]

You must draw: collapsed trampoline with piss all over

It started off as the Sun.

I love this game.

[ColinDabritz]

Tracking 'latest' changes would be nice, once you've played for a while, it's hard to find all the recent updates.

Also, I like identifying pictures more than drawing. If there are others who like drawing more, it would be nice to be given a preference so you get those more often, e.g. "I prefer identifying/I prefer drawing".

An excellent game. I also second the idea for saving them, perhaps bash.org style?

[nachteilig]

I'm kind of impressed with how quickly I encountered dicks. I guess this is chat roulette 2.0. Really fun and impressive work otherwise though.

[jwcooper]

An easy way to make the thread interesting again is to describe them as rocket ships, or pickles, or...well you get the picture.

[BasDirks]

Couldn't sleep last night, stumbled across this, laughed my ass off until I was tired, slept like a baby. Great fun, and thank God for making so many people hilariously terrible drawers.

And wondered what would result if we could have a chain with say Vermeer/Michelangelo/Da Vinci/etc. In fact the history of art can be summarized as a doodle chain, if we want to be very silly!

[Sniffnoy]

Also, there's no surprise that it's addictive, because you didn't include a natural place to stop. Every time you submit something, you're immediately given something new to do, no break inbetween! Of course people are going to have a hard time stopping.

Edit: Let me also add, it's not immediately obvious that there's a way to see what becomes of your chains if you don't keep going.

(Also there's too many people who will just totally ignore what they're supposed to do, but others have already said that and I have no idea what you can actually do about that.)

Edit: Also, the mismatch between the drawing box size and the display box size can be a problem if the boundaries of the picture matter.

[Sniffnoy]

I think it would be good if you added support for (or just switched to :) ) starting with a description rather than starting with a drawing. I think that tends to be funnier. Especially here -- the drawing interface is annoying, so people will start with something that's easy to draw rather than something more interesting. (Whereas I think people will be more willing to draw something complicated if they already have a description. I certainly am. :) )

Edit: Might I also add, that starting with simpler things is implicitly encouraged also means you get long chains of things like "balloon... balloon... balloon...".

[JoeCamel]

Two ideas. Maybe some people would like only to draw or only to describe doodles. Though I don't know how this would affect the game. And a troll button for marking intentional chain-breakers. If enough people mark the troll then you could remove his image/description and recover the chain.

Some of my favorite (parts of) chains: http://i.imgur.com/52307.png http://i.imgur.com/SnT6r.png http://i.imgur.com/KhMql.png

[emp_]

Was playing with my kids and a few dicks popped in, give it some warning guys!

[dc-tech-fan]

I'm happy to answer any questions about the game or using Node.

[jwcooper]

Where did you host your mongodb instance at? How has your experience been with no.de?

[jakubmal]

Nooo, it's dead! 500

[bryogenic]

You can greatly decrease your load by making each thread link-able and then linking to each, not displaying _all_ of them each time.

[dc-tech-fan]

Thanks for the suggestion.

We plan on doing that after the competition. It's crazy that it works at all the way it is now.

What you see was built in about 8 hours, at a bar, using an iPhone for internet.

[bsmith]

Now getting a 500:

Express 500 Error: notConnected

    at [object Object].executeCommand (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/db.js:708:41)
    at Collection.findOne (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/mongodb/lib/mongodb/collection.js:753:11)
    at /home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:143:16
    at MongoStore._get_collection (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:92:19)
    at MongoStore.get (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/connect-mongo/lib/connect-mongo.js:142:8)
    at Object.session [as handle] (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/session.js:319:11)
    at next (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/http.js:198:15)
    at IncomingMessage. (/home/node/local/lib/node_modules/express/node_modules/connect/lib/middleware/bodyParser.js:74:9)
    at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:61:17)
    at HTTPParser.onMessageComplete (http.js:133:23)

[jazzychad]

Very nice. Played this game on paper at a big family reunion. It was hilarious.

[cing]

This was also the premise of the site: http://brokenpicturetelephone.com/

Unfortunately it's been "under development" for about a year...