I'm the guy that made Agar.io, and I personally hate that term, but I don't think we'll ever win the war of getting people to stop calling those browser MMO games "io games"
I taught at a summer camp that had a curriculum focused on playing and modding Minecraft. One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting the kids to stop playing Agar.io for long enough to play Minecraft.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
At least you're better off than those guys who created the "pc" market category, only to have those two letters come to mean their competitor, and not them.
Or an 'i game', a game that takes only input and provides no feedback. Like waving your hands in the air and pretending you are playing a VR game; or a Karate kata.
But the problem with this name is that the 'io' part is entirely based on the url - would one still call this 'genre' an 'io game' if the url to it doesn't end in '.io'?
I think the history goes: agar.io and slither.io were surprise smash-hit games that both featured simple, drop-in-and-play multiplayer HTML5 with a dedicated .io domains. They inspired literally hundreds of copycats that each set up .io domains to signal that they were following they genre. The genre has become so popular that "io game" is now a term.
I was introduced to this by my friend's (USA) elementary school age kids last year - they showed me a lot of games on the .io TLD. mope.io was popular for a time - it's seems pretty pointless from watching people play it over the shoulder.
Isn't this just normal evolution of language? Like how terms like "uppercase" have meaning even though we don't keep letters in cases (most of us anyway!). It's not like every domain extension has to match a game genre, but if, by fluke, it became what happened for "io games" ... That's how words get their meanings. Which is a long way of saying I disagree that it's strange!
It's a specific genre of webgame though, something is or is not an "io game" it's more than where it's hosted, it's more than whether or not it's an HTML5 game or multiplayer.
A genre is precisely a collection of artistic attributes that occur and are repeated mostly as a historical accident (usually after a pioneer explores the space and follow-ups revisit) and are shared among a collection of works -- they are hard to concisely label with precise descriptive terms so their audience seeks a fairly arbitrary label to describe the collection. "io game" seems reasonable enough to me.
Just the same as (made up example) "Up-tempo minor-seventh-key highly-distorted guitar arpeggios with four-on-the-floor beats and legato vocals" gets called "wailcore" or something, the kids playing these aren't going to say "HTML5 games with an emphasis on large counts of concurrent players, with gameplay arising from emergent behavior of players instead of a large investment in story, art, or game mechanics." a hundred times to their peers -- even if they could consciously notice these attributes and articulate them that way.
They'll start saying "you know, it's kinda like agar.io" "I haven't heard of that is it like <whatever>.io?" "Yeah, exactly" suddenly you have a community of players of "io games". I don't really understand how anyone would expect anything else here.
Genre names never are any good. You can't usually distil the detail of what makes a genre into a formula, and you can't distil that formula into a short enough descriptor.
How do you describe a particular genre? The one obvious thing this particular kind of games had in common when they appeared was the .io domain, thus the name.
Go to cursors.io, agar.io and slither.io. Now find a short phrase to describe all three.
Obtuse enough not to realize that a subculture produces its own tropes. If "gg games" acquires enough of an identity, they way io has, then yes, outsiders might start referring to gg games.
