Atomic Brawl
March 2011 – Present
The Project
Atomic Brawl is a collectible online strategy game, kind of like a cross between Magic: The Gathering and Chess, with a modern twist and a quirky theme.
With 180 unique cards to try with a wide variety of abilities, there are nearly infinite deck combinations to try against the AI or in competitive online matchmaking. Works on PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
Launched in fall 2013 after an extended private beta period, Atomic Brawl has recorded over 38,000 games played to date.
My Role
As one of two co-founders of Atomic Brawl, I did everything. Concept, game design, prototyping, business model, game mechanics, animation, design, communication protocols, compression algorithms, clustered deployment, databases, payments, and much, much more. We hired out for illustration and sound design, but everything else was done by one of the two of us (and usually both).
No pre-existing game framework fit with our vision of a casual browser-based game, so we built the entire game from scratch. We created a flexible HTML5 & CSS3-based rendering and animation engine for the game client, and a powerful game rules engine to build all the card interactions on the server.
Key Technologies
- Paper Prototyping
- Node.js
- CoffeeScript
- HTML5
- CSS3
- Web Sockets
- ØMQ
- MongoDB
- Nginx
- Linux