Favimon (a browser game)

December 16, 2010 10:13 AM

Favimon (a browser game)
Favimon is a browser-based game in which you battle your favourite websites, building a collection of icons as you attempt to conquer the web. Gotta cache 'em all!

Favimon is coded in jQuery and PHP. It looks best in Firefox 3.6 or higher at the moment, but should work in any recent browser. I'm still adding things, so any suggestions or bug reports would be much appreciated.

posted by oulipian (9 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by sveskemus on December 16, 2010: Gotta Catch Em All!

Biggest thing, let me switch the active fighter. Other than that I'm just curious about how each site gets it's stats. I figured it was by popularity when Ask was a ton more powerful than my own site, but Google was the same as the fighter you start with.

Also, I was expecting to hae to capture them and not just destroy them. This is Pokemon after all.

Is the starting fighter just really strong to make sure I have a chance of beating someone?
posted by theichibun at 11:15 AM on December 16, 2010

I loved this while I could play it - it was posted to the front page earlier. Maybe it was just flooded by MFites, but it seemed to start hanging really quickly - not sure if we just dented your server there, or what, but I look forward to playing it more and thought the concept was brilliant. (Attempted in Firefox 3.6 first, then Chrome, then IE.)

As far as suggestions go, I'd love a save feature. If you have to reload, your built up army disappears and you're back at stage one.

Also - I know some people in the discussion on the fpp were saying the attacks/strengths of each favicon were random, and while there was some randomization in there, I liked that they still seemed site-specific in many cases. Did you make a custom list of attributes for each site that is then randomized? How many sites are included?
posted by zylocomotion at 12:46 PM on December 16, 2010

Hey, thanks for the feedback, and for posting it to the front page. You can switch the active fighter, when it is your turn. The game uses a custom database of websites - I'm still adding to it, but there are over 1000 websites in there so far. Each site in the database is tagged, and the tags determine which moves they have. Some sites have their own tag, but most are tagged 'search', 'shop', 'webdev', etc. The health/attack/defense/speed stats for each site depend on its prominence in the database.

The starting favimon is fairly strong to make sure you aren't beaten in the first fight. You can also randomly find 'shiny' or 'lucky' favimon which are stronger.

Adding a save feature is the next priority. I would also like to add 'badges' which would be assigned based on how many favimon you've collected, etc.
posted by oulipian at 1:00 PM on December 16, 2010

Oooh, badges. : ) Great ideas! Playing it, I loved how some sites seemed to have tags that fit the sites well, but going through 1000 sites (damn impressive!) to personalize each one does seem kind of labor-intensive.

I was only able to complete, at maximum, two full battles: furthest I've made it without a hang is halfway into my third battle. I'll try again and see if I can't duplicate the error message I received.

Got it:
Unable to start another process
Maximum number of processes reached, refreshing in 10 seconds.

Game would hang in different places, so I don't know if that is going to offer any clues (e.g. after searching, after new favicon appears (before its stats show up), mid-battle, etc.).

BTW, I am not the one who posted it to the front page - you should thank sveskemus.
posted by zylocomotion at 1:50 PM on December 16, 2010

Thanks! The game got linked on a couple of high-profile websites this afternoon, and my website is currently overloaded and not working - hoping to get it back online soon. The reason it crashed in the middle of the match is because the game uses AJAX to load data while you are playing, and my hosting provider is currently limiting the number of processes.

The database contains most of the top-visited websites (google, facebook, digg, etc), as well as lots of other websites I was aware of, and ones I particularly liked. I tagged each site in the database (there are about 100 different tags), and then each tag has a number of associated actions. Many websites have their own tag, so they have especially specific actions.
posted by oulipian at 2:09 PM on December 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ah, I see how to switch now. That needs to be more obvious. And possibly a message asking if I really want to switch in case I click my active one on accident.
posted by theichibun at 4:40 AM on December 17, 2010

Thanks for your comments, suggestions and enthusiasm! I've added a FAQ which clarifies some things.
posted by oulipian at 7:12 AM on December 17, 2010

For anyone interested in following along, I've created a Twitter account for the project, @favimon.
posted by oulipian at 11:01 AM on December 17, 2010

Hello again December thread... I just wanted to say thanks again for everyone's feedback and interest in my weird little web game. Favimon has been awarded "Most Original Game" in the Mozilla Labs Game On 2010 competition!
posted by oulipian at 6:28 PM on February 3, 2011