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Comment by bendmorris | Hacker News Reader

Last weekend for the Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition "Beneath the Surface," I created an online stealth game. Building even a simple multiplayer game in 48 hours was a very ambitious goal but I'm very pleased that I was able to pull it off.

In Hide-n-Stab, everyone looks alike, but some characters are harmless NPCs while others are fellow players like yourself. Your goal is to find other players and kill them by stabbing them in the back, but whenever you attack, you'll be revealed as a player for a short time.

You can play in your browser, and I'd love to hear your feedback: http://54.244.244.60

The game was created with Haxe, using the HaxePunk game engine, which I'm a contributor to.

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I like this type of game, reminds me of Spy Party. Suggestion: don't allow the characters to walk through each other. If a player tries to stab you and fails, the fight just becomes walking through each other and trying to turn around fast enough to stab the other guy in the back, which isn't really fun or strategic.

Yeah, honestly it reminds me of what spy party had the potential to be. I haven't played it in a while, but it was really a disappointment.

I love the concept, though the speed boost mechanic destroys the stealth mechanic that I think you were going for. Those who eschew stealth and just get good at knife fighting mow down everything in their path, dummies and stealth players alike.

occasionally my character will start moving in a direction until the reach an edge, and I cannot make them move other than to stab or make the other animation, and I have to reset the page, because even if the char dies, usually it will not accept the c as input, or the char will immediately be stuck in one place upon respawning.

This seems to maybe not be happening any more though. Maybe you fixed it? Or maybe it was just due to traffic.

Also, the highest score I've gotten is 22, though that streak started with only 6 other players (and ended with 10 or 12).

I (hopefully) just fixed that movement bug. Good to hear that it doesn't seem to be happening any more.

22 is great! My record is somewhere in the 30's, and I've been playing for a week :)

Is the source code available anywhere? What did you use for the server?

Source is available here: https://github.com/bendmorris/hide-n-stab

Both the client and server are written in Haxe, which is compiled to Flash (for the client) and Neko VM bytecode (for the server).

I like the game its ideas but why are you still actively developing and encouraging others to develop in Flash? I don't want to come over as offensive, but it is a dead platform. Uncertain what the LD-jury judges on, but they should incorporate technology stack in the final results. In your case, you would get a few points off for using Flash.

Are you familiar with Haxe? I target the Flash platform because most people have the plugin installed and it makes distribution easy. But Haxe is capable of compiling to multiple targets, making it easy to write a single code base and from that create apps for flash, mobile, or desktop. The great thing is that I can use the Flash platform now, while it's still very common, but avoid being locked into it in the future.

There are plenty of developers still actively producing and releasing games in Flash - the fact that it can cross compile to iOS, Android, and Mac/Windows desktop applications with a single codebase is pretty compelling.

Haxe and Unity also do this, but I would hesitate to call Flash a dead platform - it's just not the flavor of the month right now.

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