Tap Derby is a multi-player "roll-a-ball" derby game based on the classic penny arcade style machines. Compete against 7 other players to carefully aim and release the ball to land in the different colored holes.
When you successfully sink the ball your horse takes a few steps on the track. Keep sinking the ball to win the race! With practise I managed to win in under 1:20, although it took a few attempts (and I was beaten by other players in my first few goes)
The developer wrote this interesting piece on the making of it:
"I got hooked with agar.io some time ago and got interested in online/multiplayer technologies. So I decided to write my first own online game from scratch.
I already had a Linode (what a wonderful service!) virtual server instance and I started to study technology options. I wanted to build the game on top of a browser, to learn more about HTML5. I ended up evaluating HTML5 gaming frameworks and picked up the most popular one - Phaser. PIXI looked very promising at first, but seemed to lack some of the features I needed. Besides, Phaser is using PIXI under the hood, it helped me to make the decision.
Then, backend. As said, I already had a Linux server available. I have quite a lot of experience on PHP/Apache, but quite soon everything started to point towards Node.js. It should offer better performance and - most importantly - it has a nice socket.io support for lightning fast messaging between a server and a client. Those of you who don't know, Node.js is a lightweight web server (like Apache) and you code it with Javascript.
I wanted also to secure possible future extensions, like user authentication, so I decided to wrap everything in PHP on the server side. I picked up Lumen framework, which is a lightweight version of popular Laravel.
To summarize, the client contacts Lumen PHP code via Apache, which then returns HTML to browser. Browser loads and runs Javascript, which communicates with Node.js instance on the same server via socket.io messages.
It was pure fun. Thinking now, I made really good choices. Phaser has lot of features and a active community. Node.js was very easy to code. Socket.io seem to be robust and very easy to use. Lumen keeps things in order and offers future database and authorization extensions."