Comment by Matheus28 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matheus28 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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 ?

:)

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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