Agar.io

[Matheus28]

Dev here, feel free to ask me questions.

[schneidmaster]

I think there ought to be a mechanism to make it hard to stay huge. I've been in a couple of realms where there are 2 or 3 behemoths just kind of floating around that are impossible to get rid of. I see that you drop off the leaderboard if you don't stay active but there should be a physical mechanism as well IMO - like maybe you gradually shrink over time.

[hadrien01]

Feature requests: choose the server (to play with friends), see map borders, super fast mode (twice the speed for everyone)

Great game!

[lobo_tuerto]

Just wanted to commend you on game design. It feels really balanced, and somehow it keeps the game interesting even after a _long_ time playing.

What I didn't understand is why it would disconnect me sometimes out of nowhere and reconnect me into another realm. It happened twice or thrice when I was on the leaderboard.

What dev stack did you use? Do you have a blog post with your math models for growing, speed, zoom, etc?

[andrelaszlo]

Why did you ruin my day? I had things to do!!!

[benhue]

Awesome game, our productivity has dropped massively since I sent it around the office. Any plans to invite people to the room you're in?

[madeofpalk]

How many different 'servers' or relms are there? Care to comment on how many concurrents any one can handle?

[_lce0]

I'm interested in how you made to balance the game? have you? or was it more of an emergent rule on itself?

[Roby65]

Can you describe server side technology? How many servers are there? How many players do you handle per server?

[taytus]

This game is so addictive that should be illegal. Great job!

[kittyboat]

Can you add a chat? Something like http://tagpro.gg 's chat (doesn't get in the way and disappears after a minute). I really love the game, though! :-)

[JesseAldridge]

I played for several hours this morning. It seems playing cautiously and defensively is the best strategy. But splitting frequently and being aggressive is a lot more fun. Maybe adjust the balance to reward aggression more?

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

I'd like to let a 7 year old I know play, but then she might learn how to spell swear words. Is that the worst that can happen? Haven't seen any porn blobs yet.

[pachydermic]

Brilliant - great concept and good execution. Awesome job duder.

[ToomSan]

Doyou have any other fun multiplayer games?

[dave135]

How do I add custom skins? Like those people called France with a France flag image :)

[anonymus789]

Since Pokémon and Mario are widely popular games, how about some skins for them?

[WorldWideWayne]

What's up with the statement about ad-blocking? Are ads part of the game or are you just trying to convince users to expose their browser to global malware and exploit delivery?

[egeozcan]

I ate "Russia", who was trying to eat "Putin". Then "Putin" ate me. This is so wrong but extremely addicting. http://i.imgur.com/oS7Ayl2.png

[xana]

While looking at the js source code and modifying it a bit I was able to program keys W A S D to move my cell around. But it doesn't work after a bit. The protocol is send the position of the mouse (which corresponds to the cell) to the server and then it calculates change over time to get a velocity. So if I move too much it starts going forever in one direction. Although this is using a quad tree implementation for collision detection the actual detection seems to be done on the server side and not the client. There is no websocket message to tell the server if you collided with another cell or if you "ate" some of the material that makes the cell grow. This is actually my goal in "hacking" the game was to pop to different locations to get as big as possible.

Also like everyone else I get connection errors. It's actually quite interesting. It appears this game is load balanced between three or four servers. The script makes a request to http://m.agar.io/?_=<timestamp> which returns the IP of a server used to initiate a websocket. It changes each time you refresh it.

[toxicFork]

Only sending input? That's great networking design!

[Matheus28]

Dev here.

There are at least 12 servers at the moment, but they're divided between several regions so you're probably only seeing the IPs of the servers in your region. Each server also has several instances of the game, it creates more as demand rises. The most used resource on the servers is CPU.

[Programmer119]

Where did you find the source code? I have been looking everywhere and cannot find it!

[avyfain]

I wonder if modeling this as a complex system with self interested agents and randomly appearing nodes could show some interesting emergent properties. At least it would be a worthwhile simulation. Does anyone know who is the creator of this game and whether the code is open source?

[neic]

A cool feature would be skirmish games: Generate a link for you to share with your friends and play together.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

You could use this for generating time estimates with agile. Simply add the time you would play agar.io to each estimate.

[tomsmeding]

That would really be a great feature.

[hamhamed]

A list of custom bubblies "poland;usa;china;russia;canada;australia;spain;brazil;germany;ukraine;france;sweden;north korea;south korea;japan"

[boyaka]

Here's some more, from this pastebin: http://pastebin.com/kXQDhQEr

Also Googled and found, thanks to TJjokerR on steamcommunity forums, that the list is in "main_out.js" in the source code.

Alphabetical order: 2ch.hk, 4chan, 8ch, 9gag, argentina, australia, austria, ayy lmao, bait, bangladesh, belarus, belgium, bosnia, botswana, brazil, bulgaria, byzantium, cambodia, canada, chile, china, cia, confederate, croatia, denmark, doge, ea, earth, estonia, european union, facepunch, feminism, finland, france, german empire, germany, greece, hitler, hong kong, hungary, imperial japan, india, indiana, indonesia, iran, iraq, ireland, isis, italy, jamaica, japan, kc, kingdom of france, latvia, lithuania, luxembourg, maldivas, mars, matriarchy, mexico, moon, nasa, nazi, netherlands, nigeria, north korea, norway, origin, pakistan, patriarchy, peru, pewdiepie, piccolo, pokerface, poland, portugal, prodota, prussia, qing dynasty, quebec, reddit, romania, russia, sanik, satanist, scotland, sealand, sir, somalia, south korea, spain, stalin, steam, stussy, sweden, switzerland, taiwan, texas, thailand, tsarist russia, tumblr, turkey, ukraine, united kingdom, usa, ussr, vinesauce, wojak, yaranaika

Order in which skins were added: poland, usa, china, russia, canada, australia, spain, brazil, germany, ukraine, france, sweden, hitler, north korea, south korea, japan, united kingdom, earth, greece, latvia, lithuania, estonia, finland, norway, cia, maldivas, austria, nigeria, reddit, yaranaika, confederate, 9gag, indiana, 4chan, italy, ussr, pewdiepie, bulgaria, tumblr, 2ch.hk, hong kong, portugal, jamaica, german empire, mexico, sanik, switzerland, croatia, chile, indonesia, bangladesh, thailand, iran, iraq, peru, moon, botswana, bosnia, netherlands, european union, taiwan, pakistan, hungary, satanist, qing dynasty, nazi, matriarchy, patriarchy, feminism, ireland, texas, facepunch, prodota, cambodia, steam, piccolo, ea, india, kc, denmark, quebec, ayy lmao, sealand, bait, tsarist russia, origin, vinesauce, stalin, belgium, luxembourg, stussy, prussia, 8ch, argentina, scotland, sir, romania, belarus, wojak, isis, doge, nasa, byzantium, imperial japan, kingdom of france, somalia, turkey, mars, pokerface

P.S. This game is going to be huge!

[mintplant]

After the MMO Asteroids incident [1], I had to switch off my network connection to reassure myself that it isn't fake.

If you're looking for a more in-depth experience, check out Osmos [2], the single-player game that probably inspired this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378475

[2] http://www.osmos-game.com/

[madeofpalk]

It doesn't appear your [1] MMO Asteroids link is correct. It's a comment about doing Cocoa dev for 10 years

[raffomania]

While having a quick look at the sources, I learned about the quadtree: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree. agar.io is using this implementation: https://github.com/silflow/quadtree-javascript to optimize collision detection performance.

[lobo_tuerto]

This is a really fun game. BTW you can use the space bar to shoot and divide yourself to _attack_ other cells.

[zongitsrinzler]

Wow, this is really fun.

Feature request:

* minimap

* visible world borders

[euphemize]

So I've played this game a few hours yesterday, and more on the day it came out here.

I logged in this morning again for a quick game, and it appears you've considerably shrank the "worlds" into smaller spaces. The game has changed completely for me, as it's about 50/50 that I will survive the first 20 seconds. It's gotten extremely tight in there and there's no more room to maneuver. If you're a big cell, it's almost impossible to die, as there is now always a stream of little guys that get trapped, then sucked in.

I really had a lot of fun "exploring" the worlds and occasionally bumping into another cell, or just crossing paths yesterday. I could go on long chases that would last a few minutes, which was a lot of fun. As of now (I tried the 4 regions), it's basically a reflex game. Splitting in half to "attack" I think is the cornerstone of this game (if you want to get big, you have to risk a bit), but it's so crowded now that it's prohibitively expensive/risky to do so, which sucks.

A small thing to consider for user retention: if I've carefully built up my cell to a respectable size, I will try to play smart and not leave my computer, grab water, go to the washroom, because I'm invested. If I die every 3 minutes, it's easy for me to drop it, forget about it and move on. I spent 60-90 minutes in a single game yesterday, and didn't want to "lose my work", if you see what I mean.

Awesome work (I think the small upgrades on the theme, names, etc. is awesome), keep iterating - but I think I'm going to get back to productive stuff now, because the game has lost most of its appeal to me.

[impish19]

I was trying to think of an analogy between the game and how startups/big-companies work in real life.

Start-ups are small in size, more agile and can navigate/pivot more easily. Big companies generally take time to pivot and ignore smaller opportunities to grow unlike the small companies. They also have the potential to gobble down small companies.

I wonder what's the most appropriate analog for the spiky cells.

[redredtiger]

Not sure what's going on, but on every server there are huge blobs freezing my computer, is there a bug or glitch or hack happening?

[sehr]

Yeah, unplayable.

Guess I'll have to get some work done today after all

[Arientar]

Same here. Huge blobs make this game unplayable.

[vnagpal]

same here.

[phaed]

I was USA and I was the king of the world, until a chick from Tinder took my attention away and Tumbler ate me up :/

[nsajko]

What exactly triggers re-absorption of your smaller cells after you divide? Sometimes a size differencr is not enough.

[wnevets]

Looks like osmos

http://www.osmos-game.com/

[emvein]

What is the tech stack of this game?

[iza]

The dev streamed the development of this game on Twitch, pretty cool to watch: http://www.twitch.tv/m280/profile/past_broadcasts

[metabren]

I really admired the selflessness of "dick feed" and "A Helper Cell". In a game where it seems that only being the biggest counts, these guys were helping the biggest get bigger at their detriment. Kudos.

[Rafert]

Nice, it reminds me of Osmos.