Show HN: DotBigBang – Multiplayer game engine with 120fps and 2 second load time

I assumed this would be unusable on my phone, but it actually works great!

And nice work on the load time. Every time a non-photorealistic game takes more than a few seconds to load on my desktop, I get unreasonably annoyed.

Note: I don’t think I’d ever want to really play a first person 3D game on my phone, but it’s fun to see that it would be possible.

bobbydigitales · 2 years ago

Thanks! We work hard to make it work well on all our platforms. I can get 120fps on my Samsung Galaxy S23 on simple games!

Yes FPS can be a bit hard on mobile devices, but a lot of younger players only play e.g. Minecraft on phones!

If you want a 3rd person experience, this is a nice one for an ambient experience: https://dotbigbang.com/game/cab2b545338144d68fb8934801a1cd97...

And this is a good 3rd person game: https://dotbigbang.com/game/567aa34f2ee14adbb2cb1ea87cc65eff...

phatskat · 2 years ago

Honestly, I really enjoyed COD mobile when I played and was pleasantly surprised with the 3D on a phone experience. I’m interested to see what cool and unique things people will make with this :)

quadcore · 2 years ago

Impressive. I like the 3rd person game better. Both runs fair on my pixel 2.

anymouse123456 · 2 years ago

FYI, ran great on an oldish Pixel 5. Nice work.

kosolam · 2 years ago

Oh so awesome!

How long did it take to build this, and how many people? My brother was interested in game development and I wanted to send him something inspiring, but not "I will never do this in a million years"

bobbydigitales · 2 years ago

It's actually a complete game development platform. The game I posted was made using only the tools available on the website. The game editor is multiplayer and runs in the browser.

Overall it took a long time as it's a complete platform, engine, tools and editors, multiplayer system and website! I do free game dev mentoring though and I can be reached at https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bobbydigitales

meheleventyone · 2 years ago

The game that’s linked was built on dot big bang itself by a team of two developers and one artist with occasional help. The total dev time to make it was about six months, a lot of which was spent refining the game and making sure it was super solid as we launched it with a livestream in front of thousands of people!

Games on dot big bang come in a variety of shapes and sizes though. You can make something in a couple of hours or take your time. For some smaller examples:

This fun puzzle game was made by one of our community for our summer game jam: https://dotbigbang.com/game/0c4038a5fe064711ba339b1e1c2bbd74...

We also run a weekly scripting challenge in our Discord for tiny experiments on a theme, here’s a pachinko potion mixing game that got made for one: https://dotbigbang.com/game/69153d59db5b45f3aa4485e8af2dafa1...

schemescape · 2 years ago

Hey, I work with bobbydigitales on this (along with a bunch of others) and had a hand in making a lot of the games including Diamond Wars linked here so if anyone has question about gamedev on dot big bang please ask away!

If you’re interested as a developer and want to know how we plan to support you we have this landing page: https://developers.dotbigbang.com/

bryan_w · 2 years ago

If Meta was still allowed to buy things, you'd be billionaires. This is pretty much as good as their horizon platform but can actually run on my phone. Good job

Thanks! My DMs and bank account are open :)

Exuma · 2 years ago

parasti · 2 years ago

This is very cool, but doesn't actually load in two seconds. I would have been really impressed if that part was legitimately true.

Thanks! Load times obviously vary depending on your connection, hardware and so on. I expect two seconds is true for bobbydigitales. We’ll continue to optimise loading though so it’s great for everyone.

maccard · 2 years ago

I'm on a z flip 3 android device with 500mbps WiFi, and seeing closer to 20 seconds than 2 seconds on all the links shared here.

Thanks for trying it out! I see a 2 second load time on Chrome on my macbook air on WiFi, what device and browser are you using?

Firefox Android on a Samsung S7. Varying loading times is obviously completely normal. I was just hoping to see an optimization deep dive based on the title here.

nextaccountic · 2 years ago

Is this after deleting the browser cache?

mentos · 2 years ago

I think the https://www.dotbigbang.com/game ‘101 tutorial’ is down?

NathanFlurry · 2 years ago

Looks like https://dotbigbang.com/game (no www) works

Thanks! Where did you get the original link from?

Looks awesome! I worked on Krunker.io a few years back (which had a UGC aspect similar to this), love seeing more people picking up on the < 5s time-to-fun mechanic.

Thanks! Krunker is super awesome! What parts did you work on?

I was employee #1, worked on basically everything that wasn't actual gameplay (core engine, matchmaking/servers, WASM-based anticheat) and left mid-2020. I work with a lot of non-web games nowadays, but I really miss building for web (esp with WebGPU & WebTransport in the mix now).

Hope we cross paths at a conference at some point!

aduermael · 2 years ago

Oh, I didn’t know Krunker had a UGC aspect, I need to test this. Super short time-to-fun is really awesome. I’m working on a UGC platform too, and it’s one thing we do consider / try to improve. However, our main point of friction is the sign up process (checking for DOB at least). It’s mandatory when bringing people together (realtime multiplayer), especially with chat features enabled. Has this been considered for Krunker?

antifa · 2 years ago

> breakdown of major features

This link only shows:

> Now that we released @_dotbigbang_ v0.8, I thought I’d spend a bit of time to go over what we’ve launched so far and what we have left to do before we get close to a 1.0 release! ()

And a single gif. I wouldn't call this a breakdown. It's not really a last or anything.

Hey! Thanks for checking it out. Twitter broke threads for people who aren't signed in sometime this year so unless your signed in, they will only show you the first tweet in a thread. Previously you could use Twitter as a place to post general information like this, but since they broke it I should really move the information somewhere else!

Thanks again for the feedback. We moved this information to our blog now: https://blog.dotbigbang.com/2023/10/10/dot-big-bang-v0-8/

It’s a Twitter thread so the rest of the breakdown is threaded as replies.

They didn't show up for me.