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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

It's such a simple, wonderful game. There's a few key details that I think distill it into a masterpiece.

1. A three year old could learn to play in minutes. Simple to learn, harder to master.

2. Your best runs last the longest, so as a fraction of your overall time played your better ones are the biggest portion. You remember winning a lot of the time.

3. It's absolutely pure animal player vs player. There is no chat, no real teams, no organization, just outplaying one another.

I hope future game makers learn from this.

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It has some major issues unfortunately, including massive input lag and frequent latency spikes. This makes most deaths that occur feel very random, rather than the result of skilled play. These issues were around months ago, so I'm not sure it's simply the result of any recent virality referenced in this article.

lag/latency most likely due to combination of high/increasing traffic plus imperfect arch/code. but traffic is a Very Good Problem to have for a game, especially if his revenue comes from advertising, and is passive.

if I were him I'd focus first on identifying & fixing his bottlenecks, and consult a cheatsheet list like this to see if he's overlooked anything:

http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf

Lag spikes -- yes, definitely, and they're annoying. But are you sure the 'input lag' you're referring to isn't the small (by design) delay between moving the mouse and the snake moving?

It's similar to Agar.io, except with snakes instead of circles.

I definitely see the similarity. That said, I never liked agar.io. Slither.io's ability for the smallest snake to kill the one at the top of the leaderboard makes for a more rewarding experience IMHO.

It's interesting how replacing a single component from otherwise the same concept makes for 2 games with completely different mechanics, strategies and kinaesthetics.

agreed. Deep and introspective analysis aside, it's agar.io with snakes.

the fact that a small, new snake can kill a massive server leading snake makes it very unlike agar.io

In agar.io you can shoot fungi at a big blob, which makes them explode into smaller blobs. You can potentially take down a much larger opponent that way.

Although some games are full of bots, and my better games have been in those since it's easier.

I enjoyed the game, but it became extremely boring after reaching the #1 spot on a leaderboard. I probably played for 30 minutes before deleting the app. Kudos to the developer for his success though.

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