Inspired by agar.io and Osmos. Eat food and get big enough to absorb other players. There are 20 bots in the game that go after nearby food and nearby smaller players. Bots can be antimatter, which makes you both smaller if you collide with it. Click and hold to boost, hold space for autopilot which takes you to the nearest food. You slow down as you grow, but not by a ton.
Map is a 1024 radius circle. 4096 food parts are on the map and one is added every time another is eaten (so long as there is less than 4096 already.) Food distance calculations are done on the client, and the map is split into cells where the first iteration splits the map into 4 squares and the next splits each of the last into 4 more squares. The map is split 5 iterations, so there are 1024 cells (some outside of the radius of the circle, but not a big deal) which makes each one an area of 64x64 studs. All of the food in all nearby cells is evaluated rather than the entire map. It would take about 2 million food for you to become larger than the entire map. Bots respawn as antimatter when the majority of the map isn’t antimatter to try to balance the mass.
I would like some suggestions and feedback and ideas about what I should add or change to make it more fun and interesting, and then also some things to sell.
The speed feels slow relative to the size of the players, so it feels a little tedius when you have to wait 2 minutes to just reach the next player or bot. A leaderboard would also help so that players have an incentive to keep playing.
I also keep getting random lag spikes every few minutes. I’m guessing that’s caused by food generation?
I’ve added black holes (and 10 more bots.) Black holes are difficult to see. They are unlabeled black neon circles and if you touch them they absorb some of your mass and get pushed away. If antimatter collides with it then it gets smaller rather than larger. If antimatter destroys a black hole, another one appears randomly somewhere else. These should provide more of a threat to large players who would otherwise be bored.
For the game to not be boring it would have to expand beyond the objective of “Eat things and grow to eat bigger things”
Just like agar.io or slither.io or mitosis Its fun while you’re winning then you just give up.
Customization can help a little bit.
Players don’t like slowness in these kind of games. Faster progression keeps them more interested. You’re dealing with kids who have short attention spans.
Music and sound effects for various actions can help with immersion.
Make use of the ROBLOX leaderboard to get players and clans involved
Maybe add temporary abilities you can collect like magnetic to absorb nearby cells?
Last I played, your field of view was the whole map, limit it.
added forced topdown that zooms out as you grow and made a scrolling background out of the skybox that using big decals on 2048x2048 parts 1000 studs below. somewhat concerned about seams between decals because I can tell when one ends and another begins from a stripe.
also added splitting and shooting mass. still wondering about recombine logic after splitting. currently large cells eat small cells quickly and similar sized cells very slowly. mass shot by pressing W is able to shrink black holes.
I think the “trap” pieces should be more obviously displayed. I ran into them more than once because they blend into the map, and because I didn’t know from their appearance that they were dangerous. Perhaps make them a more obvious threat somehow.
made the background rotate slowly and follow your mouse. added camera interpolation and client-side cell position interpolation because smooth camera alone made your cell look super jittery.
Really boring with 2 players. This is probably not surprising. Since the map has no distinguishing features, maybe you could resize it to make it bigger or smaller to suit the number of players dynamically. Would probably really help your player count ramp.
Antimatter bots - not sold on this being fun. Why do they eat matter pellets? Shouldn’t that make them smaller?
Grey pellets - are these also antimatter? I couldn’t tell. There are lines of them so they seemed special
Black holes - I don’t think these are an improvement over the spikey cell balls in agar.io which are arguably more interesting because they provide shelter for small players while being obstacles for large players. Maybe if they had gravity and got bigger as they ate things it could be interesting.
The lines on seems of your skybox are really distracting. Check the alpha channel on the border pixels. At least this is what I assumed the lines going down my screen are.
I was thinking about scaling the map based on the number of players. It would make sense.
Antimatter bots are a way to take mass out of the system since the total amount of matter in the game is constantly increasing from regenerating food. I suppose something neat I could do would be have them shrink from food but be able to absorb black holes rather than shrink them. Physically/realistically this might not make much sense though.
Grey pellets are not antimatter. Food currently takes no sides.
I could allow smaller players to hide inside black holes that are larger than them, but that sounds weird physically. Black holes are just a way to provide some threat to the largest player, otherwise there is never any danger and you’re invincible.
The skybox is from a toolbox search on “skybox” and it’s one of the first “this is rated as a high-quality item” things that show up. I’ll need to copy it and re-upload it to try to fix the problem if that’s what the problem is.
I can sell a gamepass in the future to allow players to be antimatter (assuming it’s worth keeping?) but right now I haven’t made anything to buy yet.
I think the bots could be interesting if they were somehow controlled by players.
For example, pressing E could carve 50 mass off your blob to create a harvester bot that gathers energy for you for 60 seconds and then returns to you. Or maybe the longer you hold E the bigger bot it spawns.
Another interesting idea is an offensive bot that you spawn that doesn’t take mass from other players but forces them to split.
Harvester bots could collect up to a certain amount of mass before returning, and seeker bots could steal mass from larger players and then return with the stolen mass so long as the larger player doesn’t shoot them with W. Splitting a larger cell in half might be too much, but stealing a part of it sounds cool.