Please add a way to link to these chains! Some of them are quite funny and worth sharing.

+1

After the competition we plan on adding this and other requested features like a better drawing tool and ipad support.

Fantastic game. If I may, I would enjoy more colors, and/or overlapping colors to mix/kinda fight over transparency issus.. but that's just the wanna be painter in me. I want it to be more like actually painting.. and that just gave me a brilliant idea for destorying ms paint and whathaveyous....

also, my productivity just dropped to zero...

And another idea. What if I wanted to compare my stream to my friends, see if we shared any common threads at one point?

Oops, I think I just broke it. I scrolled right down the list of past chains (utterly ingenious, by the way) before finishing my newest task and submitting it, and now I get an internal server error.

same here. I did the same thing, but I think it's probably just that the server crashed, while I was drawing. I'm trying to resubmit every few minutes. Hopefully my epicness won't be lost

edit: oh wait, it's back up

edit2: damn, down again. Express error: http://cl.ly/2d122W2x3l0y253o0y3O

I fixed the error - the logs were too damn big. I should have turned off 100% logging. I'll fix after the competition is over.

That is awesome! We hope to create a Hall of Fame site to go along with after the competition.

This is a favorite of mine, though I know it as "Eat Poo You Cat".

A narrower marker or a real color selector would both be nice.

The server appears to be down now, though.

It's a type of Exquisite corpse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_cadaver

According to wikipedia the original version was text only, while I think the pure image version is most common on the internet, but the alternating version is definitely the most fun to play! :)

I've always thought a fascinating thing about the game is how certain images are so iconically associated with particular words that they'll make it through several iterations. (Such as the zombie example elsewhere in the thread -- once a zombie appears, it's so recognizable that it sticks around.)

Unicorns also persist remarkably.

This will add a color selector:

javascript:for(var i=0;i<6;i++){for(var j=0;j<6;j++){for(var k=0;k<6;k++){txt = '#'+'0369cf'.substr(i,1)+'0369cf'.substr(j,1)+'0369cf'.substr(k,1);$('.tools').append("<a href='#drawing' data-color='" + txt + "'style='width: 5px; height: 5px; padding: 0; spacing: 0; background: " + txt + ";'></a> ");}}}

Awesome, great work! One minor thing: if you draw outside of the canvas you lose the drag event and have to click to draw again. Makes drawing in large areas frustrating.

I was also confused what the ordering was, and I still find the output a bit difficult to follow. I didn't know if I should find my picture and read up, or read down.

This is really great, I've been playing for the past hour. If you guys made this into a scalable site with a few more features, you might have a hit on your hands.

You must draw: collapsed trampoline with piss all over

It started off as the Sun.

I love this game.

I'm kind of impressed with how quickly I encountered dicks. I guess this is chat roulette 2.0. Really fun and impressive work otherwise though.

An easy way to make the thread interesting again is to describe them as rocket ships, or pickles, or...well you get the picture.

Tracking 'latest' changes would be nice, once you've played for a while, it's hard to find all the recent updates.

Also, I like identifying pictures more than drawing. If there are others who like drawing more, it would be nice to be given a preference so you get those more often, e.g. "I prefer identifying/I prefer drawing".

An excellent game. I also second the idea for saving them, perhaps bash.org style?

Couldn't sleep last night, stumbled across this, laughed my ass off until I was tired, slept like a baby. Great fun, and thank God for making so many people hilariously terrible drawers.

And wondered what would result if we could have a chain with say Vermeer/Michelangelo/Da Vinci/etc. In fact the history of art can be summarized as a doodle chain, if we want to be very silly!

Also, there's no surprise that it's addictive, because you didn't include a natural place to stop. Every time you submit something, you're immediately given something new to do, no break inbetween! Of course people are going to have a hard time stopping.

Edit: Let me also add, it's not immediately obvious that there's a way to see what becomes of your chains if you don't keep going.

(Also there's too many people who will just totally ignore what they're supposed to do, but others have already said that and I have no idea what you can actually do about that.)

Edit: Also, the mismatch between the drawing box size and the display box size can be a problem if the boundaries of the picture matter.

I think it would be good if you added support for (or just switched to :) ) starting with a description rather than starting with a drawing. I think that tends to be funnier. Especially here -- the drawing interface is annoying, so people will start with something that's easy to draw rather than something more interesting. (Whereas I think people will be more willing to draw something complicated if they already have a description. I certainly am. :) )

Edit: Might I also add, that starting with simpler things is implicitly encouraged also means you get long chains of things like "balloon... balloon... balloon...".

Two ideas. Maybe some people would like only to draw or only to describe doodles. Though I don't know how this would affect the game. And a troll button for marking intentional chain-breakers. If enough people mark the troll then you could remove his image/description and recover the chain.

Some of my favorite (parts of) chains: http://i.imgur.com/52307.png http://i.imgur.com/SnT6r.png http://i.imgur.com/KhMql.png

Was playing with my kids and a few dicks popped in, give it some warning guys!

I'm happy to answer any questions about the game or using Node.

Where did you host your mongodb instance at? How has your experience been with no.de?

Nooo, it's dead! 500

It's back. In 8 hours we did not have time to build it for scale. Each image is stored in Mongodb as a base64 image.

I hate to ask, but why store images in a database?

You can greatly decrease your load by making each thread link-able and then linking to each, not displaying _all_ of them each time.

Thanks for the suggestion.

We plan on doing that after the competition. It's crazy that it works at all the way it is now.

What you see was built in about 8 hours, at a bar, using an iPhone for internet.

If you can manage to keep the last few displaying, and not link all of them, it would make for an easier time viewing your recent drawings. This game is a blast seeing how these threads develop.

Very nice. Played this game on paper at a big family reunion. It was hilarious.

You might want to include more object requests that contain words beyond "shit", "piss", "nigga" (oh yea, it was there!) ... etc. Seriously, the concept is cool, your drawing requests are ridiculous.

The drawing requests are the descriptions of other drawings, not generated by the system.

It might help perceived performance to load the drawing widget before loading all the previous chains... as it is I have to wait for the entire page to load before I can start drawing again.

This was also the premise of the site: http://brokenpicturetelephone.com/

Unfortunately it's been "under development" for about a year...

How is this a game? It's awesomely entertaining, but I'm not sure it's considered an actual game if there isn't some sort of goal.

...even if the goal is 'have fun' :)

Nicely done you sucked me in for a few drawings :-)

Have you seen http://thesentencegame.com/ ?

Really loving it, haven't laughed so hard in a while! But then it fell over :(

Similar to:

BrokenPictureTelephone.com

Was a great game back when it actually existed.

Seems like more die than doodle.. HTTP 500's.

Victim of our own success! We had no idea how popular this would be come. We expected a few hundred drawings and we already have over 3000!

I restarted the node service and it should be back now.

when the box closes in on you does that mean you took too much time? is that the "or die" part?

This is awesome! You got my vote

It censors all of my penises!

You mean in 8 hours they learned Node, JS, MongoDB, git and built a penis recognition algorithm? I suck at coding :-(

Haha no penis recognition in 8 hours. But don't abuse that - it kills the fun.

when I tried to draw "procrastination" it killed the server, apparently.

looks like its suffering with load at the moment!

wonderful. how can I contact you?

@dylang on twitter

it is extremely slow, how come?

Because it's on HN's frontpage. I was playing this the other day and it was fine.

Yeah but what does that mean:

- the No.de instance is not good enough for that traffic

- Node.js can't handle the traffic

- the game doesn't scale

Or it was coded in 8 hours. . .

But isn't this one of the selling points of node.js? From their site:

"Node's goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the "hello world" web server example above, many client connections can be handled concurrently."

I've noticed a few sites hosted at no.de go down after hitting the HN front page. I'd like to know the answers to the questions posed by the grandparent.

Part of the issue might be that Joyent's virtual Node servers, at least the ones used by Node Knockout competitors, have 120 megs RAM.

That makes sense. I didn't know that. Thanks.

And we coded it in 8 hours, at a noisy bar in DC, using an tethered iPhone for internet. There's no caching, no compression, heck the images are stored as base64 in mogo as strings. We had NO IDEA this thing would take off the way it did.

Bug report: Drawing lines erases big bits of the drawing near to the line (on iPad). Eg, draw a NE SW diagonal, then draw another diagonal NW SE, the first one gets erased.

We didn't have time to test on ipad or other mobile devices. The prize for most votes is an ipad2 so if you vote for us (top right corner of the page) you might be helping us build the ipad version.