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Wow, excited to see a shout out on HN for something I created! I'll try to answer any questions you have, especially technical questions about running a game w

Wow, excited to see a shout out on HN for something I created! I'll try to answer any questions you have, especially technical questions about running a game with thousands of users on Node. (Edit: spelling)

Lockyy 14y ago
I am really liking the new website, I like the "I would just prefer to make an account" to get around facebook/twitter. I would prefer it to be the default, but I'm really happy you've included that for people who don't have either. As a sidenote, is Doodle or Die still infested with pictures of sonic going fast?
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  We have a reporting system to get rid of those few bad apples from 4Chan (amazingly most 4Chan players love the site and play legitimately).
  - Lockyy 14y ago
    Well a fun game can make anyone sit down to enjoy it I guess.
tlack 14y ago
Great site! Can you tell us about the technology you use to run it, such as db, npm modules, server configs, etc? Sometimes I wish sites had something like a colophon that described how the site was made.
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  I agree about a colophon! We have a lot of this information on our About Page but maybe that's not the best place for it. http://doodleordie.com/about http://doodleordie.com/about I'll reply to each technology separately to make it easier to reply to questions about a specific tech.
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  Database: Mongo We're using a 5 GB instance at MongoHQ with backups to S3. Mongo is insane fast compared to what I'm used to with MySQL, and I love the JSON-based query syntax over SQL. Not being able to do relational-type queries has made some things more difficult, like building "Top 10 List" of arbitrary data is a bit more tedious.
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  Server Config: 1 GB of RAM vm at Joyent. This much ram has been perfect. We've actually had 1000 people playing at once on our first machine which only had 256 MB of RAM.
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  NPM Modules: mongodb async - no more insane levels of nested indents when doing async javascript express - middleware ejs - templating system logging - very simple logging module i wrote more than a year ago when there weren't good logging modules for Node yet. knox - for storing doodles and static assets on S3 uglify-js - compress that client-side javascript stylus - much nicer way to write css. variables, functions, mixins, etc. everyauth - authentication - supports more than we could ever want but we're just exposing Facebook and Twitter for now. useragent - we only support modern browsers, sorry IE users! shortid - module I created to give us very short unique ids that are not guessable for chain sharing, like http://doodleordie.com/c/Eih5TDOHk http://doodleordie.com/c/Eih5TDOHk or http://doodleordie.com/c/1hODyac94#1to4 http://doodleordie.com/c/1hODyac94#1to4 moment - nice time references, like "7 days ago" canvas - we render doodles on the server and then save those pngs instead of accepting pngs from the browser because people figured out they could send us any image they wanted. ansi - doodles above a certain number of brush strokes we convert to ansi and echo in our console log. This is my favorite feature of the whole site, especially because I got my start in online communities in the 2400 Baud BBS world when ANSI art ruled.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- dc-tech-fan 14y ago
  Retain users: More than 70% of our daily visitors are return users, but we do need to figure out some way to notify users when their chains are complete, etc. We'll probably ask for email for this. Do you have other ideas? Yes you get to keep your hearts in Ghost mode. It's for people like me who are embarresed about how bad they draw. Fun fact: I made this game because I wanted to make a game and my art skills are so bad I hoped instead I could get players to create the art for the game.

Lockyy 14y ago

I am really liking the new website, I like the "I would just prefer to make an account" to get around facebook/twitter. I would prefer it to be the default, but I'm really happy you've included that for people who don't have either. As a sidenote, is Doodle or Die still infested with pictures of sonic going fast?

dc-tech-fan 14y ago
We have a reporting system to get rid of those few bad apples from 4Chan (amazingly most 4Chan players love the site and play legitimately).
- Lockyy 14y ago
  Well a fun game can make anyone sit down to enjoy it I guess.

tlack 14y ago

Great site! Can you tell us about the technology you use to run it, such as db, npm modules, server configs, etc? Sometimes I wish sites had something like a colophon that described how the site was made.

dc-tech-fan 14y ago
I agree about a colophon! We have a lot of this information on our About Page but maybe that's not the best place for it. http://doodleordie.com/about http://doodleordie.com/about I'll reply to each technology separately to make it easier to reply to questions about a specific tech.
dc-tech-fan 14y ago
Database: Mongo We're using a 5 GB instance at MongoHQ with backups to S3. Mongo is insane fast compared to what I'm used to with MySQL, and I love the JSON-based query syntax over SQL. Not being able to do relational-type queries has made some things more difficult, like building "Top 10 List" of arbitrary data is a bit more tedious.
dc-tech-fan 14y ago
Server Config: 1 GB of RAM vm at Joyent. This much ram has been perfect. We've actually had 1000 people playing at once on our first machine which only had 256 MB of RAM.
dc-tech-fan 14y ago
NPM Modules: mongodb async - no more insane levels of nested indents when doing async javascript express - middleware ejs - templating system logging - very simple logging module i wrote more than a year ago when there weren't good logging modules for Node yet. knox - for storing doodles and static assets on S3 uglify-js - compress that client-side javascript stylus - much nicer way to write css. variables, functions, mixins, etc. everyauth - authentication - supports more than we could ever want but we're just exposing Facebook and Twitter for now. useragent - we only support modern browsers, sorry IE users! shortid - module I created to give us very short unique ids that are not guessable for chain sharing, like http://doodleordie.com/c/Eih5TDOHk http://doodleordie.com/c/Eih5TDOHk or http://doodleordie.com/c/1hODyac94#1to4 http://doodleordie.com/c/1hODyac94#1to4 moment - nice time references, like "7 days ago" canvas - we render doodles on the server and then save those pngs instead of accepting pngs from the browser because people figured out they could send us any image they wanted. ansi - doodles above a certain number of brush strokes we convert to ansi and echo in our console log. This is my favorite feature of the whole site, especially because I got my start in online communities in the 2400 Baud BBS world when ANSI art ruled.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

dc-tech-fan 14y ago
Retain users: More than 70% of our daily visitors are return users, but we do need to figure out some way to notify users when their chains are complete, etc. We'll probably ask for email for this. Do you have other ideas? Yes you get to keep your hearts in Ghost mode. It's for people like me who are embarresed about how bad they draw. Fun fact: I made this game because I wanted to make a game and my art skills are so bad I hoped instead I could get players to create the art for the game.