@Veert

Big redesign + feature passRepainted the whole UI — it was reading way too “safe dark-mode template,” so it’s now themed around eclipse observation expeditions instead: brass, khaki, oxide colors, stencil title font, manifest-style panels. Gameplay’s untouched, just the look changed.Also shipped a bunch of stuff that had been on the list:personal best (mass + survival time) on the menusettings: quality toggle, volume slider, minimap on/offkill streak popup when you’re on a rollfree color picker for your holefirst-time tutorial popupauto-lowers quality if your fps tankspower-ups: speed, magnet, shieldtimed matches and last-hole-standing modeteams (red vs blue), no friendly firedaily challenge — same seeded world for everyone each dayFound and fixed two real bugs while testing: the shop wasn’t updating your token count after a purchase, and timed matches were miscalculating rank when multiple people hit the clock at once.

UPDATE — CSS rebuild + progression system. Review sent it back saying my CSS looked too AI-made, so I rebuilt the styling myself and actually learned how it works — set up a color palette with variables and re-themed the whole game in one line to prove it. While I was in there I added a progression system: tokens you earn each run and keep between games, side quests for bonus tokens, a cosmetics shop (colors and orbiting shapes, no pay-to-win), and an end-of-run plinko round that multiplies your run tokens (minimum 1x, so you can never lose them), plus arrow-key/WASD movement and a pause button. Biggest headache was the plinko ball not landing in a slot — the physics were using the display size instead of the canvas’s real size — fixed once I matched them.

UPDATE — Multiplayer is live (online, with room codes)
Summary
Blackhole.io is now real online multiplayer. Create a room, share the code, and someone on another device joins and you can actually eat each other. Not bots — real people.
Breakdown

moved the whole game simulation onto a server so it’s authoritative (server decides what’s real, clients can’t cheat)

clients now only send their mouse target; the server sends back everyone’s positions

create/join a room with a short code, each room is its own isolated game

added interpolation so other players move smoothly instead of teleporting between updates

bots still fill empty rooms so it’s never a dead lobby

deployed the server to Render and the game page to GitHub Pages, wired together over WebSockets

What fought me
The networking logic wasn’t even the hard part — deploying it was. Getting the GitHub Pages page to actually talk to the Render server took forever. The site kept opening my README instead of the game, the WebSocket wouldn’t connect because it was still pointing at localhost, and it had to be wss:// not ws:// or the browser silently blocked it. Bunch of small things that each looked like the whole thing was broken. Once the client finally connected to the live server and I saw a second black hole move on my screen, that was the moment.

Note: Server May Take some time to start up

Working On fixing the lag caused by the advance gravity effects

Spent today getting Blackhole.io off the ground. You’re a black hole — you eat dust, grow, and start pulling in bigger stuff.

Got the core loop working: move toward the mouse, swallow anything smaller, get bigger. Made growth area-based so it doesn’t snowball out of control in ten seconds.

The part that ate my time was gravity. I didn’t want stuff to just slide toward me — I wanted it to actually orbit and spiral in. Took a lot of fiddling with the numbers before it felt right instead of floaty.

About 7.5 hours in so far. Next up: making the other black holes smarter so it’s not just me alone out there aswell as a multiplayer version so you can play with your friends