Archive for the 'The Making of TheBroth' category

Tada! After weeks of preparation, story board rewriting, composing, recording, cutting, editing, we now have our very first video about TheBroth! Read and even watch it right here! Read more

TheBroth utilizes the concept of parallel worlds in order to provide for hundreds of users to play in the same room simultaneously. This article explains why and how. Read more

We have recently added chat to TheBroth. Yay! Interestingly, all the females we asked about whether they’d like to have chat at TheBroth excitedly agreed, whereas males wouldn’t respond as favorably.

As some visitors commented, TheBroth really is just like one big sociology study - anyone ready to write a PhD on this? ;-)

Well be that as it may, TheBroth now has chat in every room and we’re ready to share with the world how we did it. In an associated tutorial article we’ll demonstrate how you can easily add Ajax-powered chat to your own site!
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With TheBroth, everyone can open their own room. Upon doing so, the room owner has the option to show the global mosaic in their room, or to create a unique mosaic that takes place exclusively in their room. For the latter, the room owner has the option to select the tile colors by uploading an image that is used to define the tile colors.

As developers of TheBroth, the public room with the global mosaic is basically “our” room (technically, it really is no different from any other room), and we had to make a decision which tile colors to use. Read more

TheBroth features a player rating system which allows players to give each other positive or negative feedback based on behaviour. For example, a player intent on destroying others’ work would receive negative feedback, while a player co-operating with others to build a piece of digital art may receive positive feedback. The player rating system is known as the ‘Karma system’. Read more

One of the first cool features that we were eager to implement was a snapshot function, so we could preserve the transient masterpieces that were being created in front of our eyes. Read more

One of our goals was to allow players to position and align tiles with pixel-perfect-precision. We wanted to be able to automatically “snap” tiles to adjacent tiles, if the player opts to do so: If you hold down the shift key when you drop a tile near where you want it to go, it will automagically align next to the closest tile. No more squinting! This article describes how we implemented this functionality using JavaScript on the client side. Read more

This article reveals what the TheBroth’s tiles are actually made of.

Technically, each tile is a “div”, a standard HTML block element. Using CSS, we define its width and height, a background color, and borders.

The borders are used to create a subtle 3D bevel effect that makes the squares look more like tiles. Read more

This article reveals how TheBroth’s tiles are animated, so you see them whiz (or “fly”, as we call it) around the screen. Read more

As TheBroth is a multiplayer, near real-time application, we need to synchronize players with each other and with the system, so that each player sees the exact same thing in their browser. Read more