Chonks and more chonks!
BattleChonk updates
Earlier this month, we took BattleChonk out of preview and uploaded it to our main site! You can play it directly at:
https://www.2weeks.games/2weeks/battle-chonk/
And thanks to your playtesting and feedback, we've shipped a number of new features over the last several weeks. Some highlights:
- A lot more info! Iconography and descriptions for dice upgrades, chonk powers, and player stats.
- You can now upgrade and level up your trainer - increase your attack, defense, and health, and get more stat boosts as you reach new levels!
- We've added landscape support, so you get a nice widescreen layout if you turn your phone or if you play on a PC.
- Lots of other polish, tuning, and bugfixes scattered throughout.
We've got more ideas and would love to hear more about what you think too! We'd love to hear what you think in the 2weeks Fun Club:
Chonk.io network test
We're incubating a fun new project in the "chonkiverse" called Chonk.io.
The concept is an open world multiplayer RPG where you can go collect and level up your chonks with other players. Building this requires a lot of new tech, but we already have exciting progress to show!
We have a network test up. It lets you create a your trainer, choose a starter chonk, and explore the open world with other players! You can check it out in your browser right now:
We'll be monitoring the backend for technical issues, but if you run into any, we'd love for you to mention them in the Fun Club as well! We'd also love your ideas for what you'd like to see in an open world Chonk game!
Behind the scenes technical details
We're really excited about the new tech we've built for Chonk.io - we've shipped multiplayer games before, but our existing multiplayer games have been "peer-to-peer," meaning one player hosts a multiplayer session and other players join them.
To do the kind of open world multiplayer game where players can come and go whenever they want, we needed to build a way for our servers to host the game. There are a lot of different technical approaches to doing this, but we're really happy with where we landed:
The chonk.io server is implemented in the Tweaks engine, just like all of our games, and compiled to WebAssembly, the same technology we use to power our games in your browser. The new capability we've built is the ability to host WebAssembly in the cloud (specifically Cloudflare Workers) without needing a browser. This lets us keep our really fast development pace, affordably host games for lots of players, and share technology across multiple platforms.
We're really excited about the potential of portable WebAssembly - we now have the ability to run a single build in multiple different environments. It opens up interesting possibilities for new platforms down the road too. Maybe our games can come to even more platforms in the future? Stay tuned!