A fun 2d retro game where you have been kidnapped and your limbs have been cut off and you must collect limbs found on the ground or kill the guards for their limbs your goal is to escape and kill the final boss who is the king.
Rewrote Text and captions to sound more human
Making the game less ai by rewriting the affected parts
Adding some new features and improving on gameplay and improving the performance of the game on low-end devices
Working one some gameplay fixed and fixing some bugs
Completely Rewrote my code as when i shipped it the reviewer said it was over 30% ai now fixed it and its now below 30% ai
Fixing General Bugs and Fixing The boss fight
Working On Fixing The readability of the captions and fixing the tips and the tutorial for the game along with improving the layout of the game
Guns are in. You take one off the first guard you kill, and firing it wakes the whole zone so you build a silencer out of a sleeve, a spring and an oily rag. The king’s an actual fight now too, he winds up before every move so you can dodge it and one of them rips a limb off you and chucks it on the floor. He used to one-shot you if you’d gone full animal, so that’s gone. Checkpoints on every zone now, plus a pile of daft bugs fixed.
Binned the black hole game after about a day and started Quarry instead. You’re a scientist who got kidnapped for something you built, they took your limbs, and you escape by tearing limbs off whatever you can find. Animal ones jump higher and hit harder, but the guards can see you’re not human anymore, which is basically the whole game. First playable version was rubbish. Every gap was too wide to clear, so you couldn’t actually finish it. Since then I’ve added five zones, a king to fight at the end, guns you loot off dead guards, and a silencer you build out of a sleeve, a spring and an oiled rag. Also spent way too long moving the gun sprite up four pixels because at hip height it looked like something else.
Changed the Game Completely and moved onto another game idea as the other one didn’t seem to be working out
heres a sneak peek below
1 September
Today i completely redesigned the UI and also added two new features
aug 29
completely remade the banner today — scrapped the old one and rebuilt it from scratch so it actually holds together. after that i cleaned up the code, tidying things up and cutting out the rough bits, and did some general improvements across the game while i was in there.
more features coming soon.
Fixed the big bug where growing your hole past a certain size would whiteout the entire screen — turned out the camera and the glow effects were both scaling wrong at high mass. While I was in there I added a bunch of new stuff: kill cam replays when you die, comets and binary planets that mess with gravity, a tracker that shows when a rogue hole is hunting you, and permanent achievements on top of the regular quests. Hosts can also now tweak gravity strength, arena size, and bot count before opening a station. Caught and fixed a couple of sneaky bugs along the way too, like eat sounds losing their punch on big absorbs. It’s all live on the GitHub Pages link now.
Turned out if you’d already played a round and went back to the menu, you’d hear every bot in the background eating dust at full volume — the sound code treated “nobody’s watching” as “max volume” instead of silent. Fixed.Also added a pile of new stuff to actually do out there: dash (E key, quick burst forward, costs mass), wormholes that teleport you across the map, random supernova blasts that shove everything outward, a gravity slingshot off planets for a free speed boost, slow mass decay if you’re running away with the lead, a shockwave when you eat something way smaller than you, and a token bounty on whoever’s currently #1.
Spent this session on polish and cleanup. Reworked the UI and CSS myself — set up a color palette with variables so the whole game re-themes from one place, and simplified a lot of the styling.
Also fixed a performance bug: the game ran fine in Safari but lagged in Chrome. Turned out canvas shadow-blur is way slower in Chromium, so I cut it off the small stuff (dust, particles) and leaned on the additive glow instead. Runs smooth now.
Still fixing the plinko bonus round and cleaning things up. More soon.
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
