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0 pointsnathan_f778y ago0 comments

Have you written any development posts like this? I'm sure everyone on HN would be really interested to hear your thoughts about this post, and how it compares to the development of agar.io. Did you sort of just get lucky with the game mechanic, or was it something that you put a lot of thought into? Was agar.io originally supposed to be a different game?

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Matheus288y ago· 4 in thread

There was a post with some technical details on Agar.io a while ago back when it was released (>2 years ago). A year after Agar.io I made Diep.io, which is also fairly successful (but not nearly as crazy as agar.io), so that points to it not being completely based on luck :)

I just make what feels fun. For a perspective on development cycle: the initial version of Agar.io took 1 week, while Diep.io took less than a month too (it was released a lot more polished than agar.io). Of course, they continued receiving updates for months, but the initial version was already fun.

While the initial version for both games was coded fairly quick, there were months of thinking about them before I even started coding, and from beginning of development to first version the gameplay plans didn't change.

hyperpallium8y ago

> initial version of Agar.io took 1 week

The protoype of my successful (non-game) software took 2 hours (though it percolated a while). But I still haven't finshed a prototype of my recent ideas, after years of research and development. Could it be that successful ideas are simple enough to prototype quickly?

But what about complex games, like Horizon Zero Dawn, or Zelda: Breath of the Wild?

It turns out they did prototype BotW... and not the beautiful 3d graphics or physics, just a 2d top-down version.

nathan_f77OP8y ago

Wow, I'm really enjoying diep.io, and I just realized it's extremely similar to the game in this post. The OP must have seen diep.io and borrowed a lot of game mechanics. But they still didn't do it right, because I only played their game for a few minutes, while I was hooked on yours. That's a very valuable lesson: the game has to be fun and engaging, and the technical details are almost insignificant compared to that.

bmsleight_8y ago

Thanks for agar.io - it cools. Any chance of a AMA or similar ? Would be really interested on the technical aspects (only 1 week! to minimal viable product) ? Also on the ad revenue ? (where it is not commercially sensitive ?) Also the fun stopping bots playing the game ? Your view on the great trick moves (and youtube videos), are these fake or are people really that good ? Do you play it much yourself ?

vinceguidry8y ago

I was just playing Diep, great game, thanks for making it! Glad you finally fixed the bug that was making the game crash my whole machine on OSX!

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