Melk is an experiment built for the browser. It is a collaborative path building game which takes place across multiple device screens.
Melk is an experiment built for the browser. It is a collaborative path building game which takes place across multiple device screens.
We were trying to build something that will move the kids from playing on one device to collaborating with friends on multiple devices. It started with the basic idea of connecting all the screens together to create one unified game. We built a very minimal board game where the objective of the game is to connect all the shrines on the screen by clearing obstacles across devices to create a unified path across all the screens.
Kids now a days are more focused on playing on a single device then playing together with their friends. So we created a game that spans across devices and lets everyone play on a single canvas. The kids needs to interact with other players and form a strategy based on whats happening on different devices. They need to collaborate and come to a common solution to solve the given problem.
On the other hand, we created this as a browser game that works just as a native game. The advantage of this approach is, the game is cross-platform and works on any device with a browser. May it be a android or a ios device. This helps kids with any type of device come together and play. And for us its a added advantage as we can ship this game on a very larger scale with less efforts, just hit horlicks.heroku.com and get going.
Apart from building a unique concept for getting kids to play together, the game brands horlicks in a very unique way. There are clans which have different skills eg. Taller, Stronger, Sharper. Based on this varying skillset across clans the kids need to think and play according to the skills of the clan they select. Hence in a way or the other including the moto of Horlicks of being taller, stronger and sharper.
We used a very unique set of stack to build this game, which included heroku, node.js, socket.io, html5 canvas
Melk runs on any given browser that has html5 support, be it chrome or safari.
We used HTML5 canvas for speedy and pixel-perfect animation.
Heroku is where all the backend and the files of the game resides.
Node.js is used for all the server side scripting and for programming the game logic.
We used socket.io for easy socket programming for connecting all the players to the server and vice versa.
Is a small js library we wrote while building the game for mapping all the screen resolutions and getting actual dimesions for uniformity.