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Please, don't use the term 'an io game'. It really makes no sense.
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"
The author didn't fail, he just changed direction slightly and is still working on the game. A more apt title: "A story about how I tried to get into game development and didn't finish yet"
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I suppose I'm arguing against the adoption of such a vernacular. It's just a web game.
There are millions (ok, maybe not) of web games. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
I suppose I'm arguing against the adoption of such a vernacular. It's just a web game.
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 .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.
This seems like a case study in premature optimization
The question is whether you can come up with something more fun than a top-down multiplayer shooter. It's not like there's a shortage of those.
For some reason, the latest fad in indy browser games seems to be parking games. Truck parking. Tank parking. Airplane parking. Crane parking. Maneuvering large vehicles around, slowly. This is at least not warmed-over 1980s console gaming.
Here's a nice piece of work in WebGL.[1] It's quite good visually, but the gameplay is buggy. It also takes minutes to load.
It's more like he saw a type of game that made a lot of money that seemed not that technologically advanced and thought he could replicate the monetary success and this part was like a lot of apps - it's not the making of the app that is hard - it's making an app that people want/need to use in numbers to support the development. I mean no disrespect because his team did succeed in producing an online only game so th…
It seems so obvious reading his post that he went at this backwards. The basic idea of developing and iterating on a lightweight MVP is completely absent. I'm genuinely curious - because I see this error replicated all the time when engineers try to take a side project to market - why otherwise rational people do this. This approach is obviously doomed to failure. I understand that as programmers we enjoy solving tec…
Even the famous MVP is just a catchy name for market research that has gotten out of control due to the unfortunate decision of putting "product" in the acronym.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose I'm arguing against the adoption of such a vernacular. It's just a web game.
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…
Also it's just a bad name in general, since those style games can be hosted anywhere.
The author didn't fail, he just changed direction slightly and is still working on the game. A more apt title: "A story about how I tried to get into game development and didn't finish yet"
I think that getting the controls right is what will matter the most in the end. Until then the game will go no where.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are millions (ok, maybe not) of web games. 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.
Multi-player browser game.