
Vanar.io – Realtime multiplayer browser game: Agar.io meets Asteroids - snowak
http://vanar.io
======
degenerate
This is pretty fun :) -- the controls are definitely more challenging than
Agar.io, which uses the mouse for movement. I would caution the author to be
ready for the possibility of a DMCA letter from Minclip [1], the company that
now owns the rights to the game and is aggressively attacking all "clones" of
the Agar.io game. Vanar.io seems different enough, but the letter has some
strong wording such as " _The URL is a deliberate attempt to create a false
association with the Agario game, take advantage of the goodwill and
reputation in the Agario game and divert users of the Agario game to the URL_
". Discussion and another example is on reddit [2]. So far the only Agar.io
clones sent a letter are ones that directly copied and used the javascript
code, so hopefully that's not the case here.

[1]
[https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/d028f601f93e201186b4a75b...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/d028f601f93e201186b4a75b85ad48281e5349b4/2015-07-30-Agario.md)

[2]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Agario/comments/3f7oys/miniclip_sta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Agario/comments/3f7oys/miniclip_starts_dmcaing_clones/)

~~~
Bjartr
Has miniclip gone after clones that don't use the deobfuscated client source
from the original?

~~~
degenerate
Doesn't seem so. I'll update my post wtih proof if they do.

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Bartweiss
Honestly, I think the balance needs some serious changes here. Size ->
slowness is a strong mechanic for Agar because you have to engulf enemies, but
it's not much of a handicap in Vanar.

I'm comfortably sitting on top of the leaderboard gunning down anyone who
crosses me, because they can't outrun my bullets and turn speed. The best
small players are doing some pretty cool bombing run stuff with guns -> speed
-> shield, but it's often not enough. They hit me 1-2 times quite skillfully,
and then I clip them once and they die.

edit: Possibly US East just hasn't learned how to dogfight. I restarted a few
times and can reliably top the leaderboard in a minute or two.

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highace
Too hard to control the ship using the keyboard, mouse movement like in agar
would be loads better.

~~~
erikb
Upvote because a reasonable discussion point, but I deeply disagree. If you
want easy control you can already play agario. Having some more complex games
is also good.

~~~
egeozcan
Yes this is more complex but mouse could have been an option for an easier
transition.

In the long term, however, I think that a player who is experienced and used
to the keyboard controls would be way better than someone with equal
experience (and skill) but used to playing with the mouse.

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IshKebab
It's like Subspace but no-where near as good. And 10 years later.

[http://www.getcontinuum.com/](http://www.getcontinuum.com/)

~~~
mizzao
And the successor to Subspace, Infantry, which has unfortunately wound up in a
black hole.

~~~
nogridbag
Oh wow, Infantry.. I remember playing that for a short period. I prefer ARC
(Attack Retrieve Capture) - a classic 90's multiplayer ctf game.

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Michael_0
Unplayable with non QWERTY keyboards, please don't forget France and Belgium.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZERTY)

~~~
pubby
It works with the arrow keys for me.

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solidangle
It's not as fun as agar.io in my opinion. The biggest problem is the balance
in this game: in agar.io big players are discouraged from attacking small
players, they're too slow to catch them and the risk of splitting is not worth
it. It's incredibly easy to attack a smaller ship in this game and there is no
risk.

The mutual destruction in this game is an annoying mechanic in this game, yet
you keep shooting at players with a similar size as there is a chance they
wont react quickly enough.

It looks incredibly cool, but it needs some more balancing to be as fun as
agar.io.

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ninguem2
"Y U Block ads"? I have adblock on by default and I planned to spend a couple
of minutes on the page just to see what it was like. I am not going to land on
a random page with adblock turned off. If it bothers you so much, find a
different revenue source.

~~~
kbutler
I block ads, that's my choice. Sites can choose to nag if ads are blocked,
that's their choice. I can enable ads for their site, or I can go elsewhere.

You and I can't make them find a different revenue source.

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lucaspiller
Interesting game, I'm pretty impressed with how well the Canvas 2D performs
here. I tried writing a clone of Gate88
([http://www.queasygames.com/gate88/](http://www.queasygames.com/gate88/)) for
the web four years ago, but even on high end machines it wasn't performant
enough. Time to revisit it I think.

You can play what I built here (it's single player against the AI):

[http://lucaspiller.github.io/88etag/](http://lucaspiller.github.io/88etag/)

The controls are:

Arrows - move

D - Fire

Q - Place turret

W - Place mass driver

Here is the source:
[https://github.com/lucaspiller/88etag/blob/canvas2d/applicat...](https://github.com/lucaspiller/88etag/blob/canvas2d/application.coffee)

~~~
nacs
Try Pixi.js [1] or one of the many frameworks that use Pixi.

It's really high performance (uses Webgl by default and falls back to canvas
if its unavailable).

[1]: [http://www.pixijs.com/](http://www.pixijs.com/)

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Benjamin_Dobell
Was #1 on the Asia server for a couple of hours before quitting:
[http://imgur.com/LXzwvei,p8wesZU,MsOfwrE](http://imgur.com/LXzwvei,p8wesZU,MsOfwrE)

Fun initially, but it does seem far too easy to remain #1, so I lost interest.

You're basically just searching for #2 to try get a huge score. But you're
pretty indestructible. I think huge players need to have their attack strength
debuffed a bit; you'd probably need to lessen the rate of score decrease to
compensate.

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notduncansmith
Firstly, congrats to the author on launching a nice polished game!

I think what's missing from the experience (compared to Agar.io) is the
suspense. In this game, I find myself kinda drifting all over the place (and
moving quickly). I'm terrible at other drifty games like Mario Kart, etc, so
it could just not be as fun because I'm not as good :) But the speed
difference definitely contributes to the lack of suspense, which makes it a
much less compelling experience for me personally.

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rane
Played it for a short while and in contrast to agar.io, I don't see any depth
or strategy in the gameplay. You just go around shooting stuff.

~~~
Kiro
What's the strategy in agar.io?

~~~
aesthetics1
It's actually very strategic. You'll start having "a-HA!" moments after you
have wasted quite a bit of time there.

One of the first things I realized is that a very small cell can safely hide
near the largest cells in the game. Since the larger a cell, the slower its
movement, the small cells can use the larger ones to shield them without risk
of being devoured. Kind of a host/parasite relationship. Just eat their scraps
until you're large enough to go out on your own.

There are many other little nuances you'll pick up on, but I won't spoil it!

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phantom_oracle
For the few who are used to playing games with keyboards, they will dominate
this game.

For the rest of the people, who have spent years in fast-paced FPS games (that
strongly use the mouse), the controls will be troublesome and prevent gamer-
joy.

Afterall, it may be challenging for the first few times (and possibly fun),
but who wants to be the small-fry who gets pwned ALL the time.

So here is my suggestion for alternate controls, for a game where you need to
adjust aim rapidly, if you expect hundreds of players in each world:

 _Mouse = navigation_

 _Mouse right-click /spacebar = shoot_

Maybe there should be a constant-speed similar to agar, but if you are keeping
the acceleration feature, perhaps you should add braking also, which gives:

 _a = accelerate_

 _s = brake_

 _d = shield_

3 buttons + mouse; seems a lot simpler to me IMO.

I would like to keep playing this, but with these controls, I'd much rather
play agar.io, which is simple/easy/fun.

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felixangell
Controls are a little funky, would be nice to have some kind of particle
explosion when your ship is destroyed. Probably a little more satisfying than
just flipping straight to the "play again" screen.

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reustle
It is hanging on the loading screen for me

edit: Also, typo in about.txt (vanario.io)

~~~
nicgutierrez
Same here.. Is there any reason why it could fail behind proxy?

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SunShiranui
The controls feel frustrating to me, perhaps the mouse would be more fitting
to this kind of gameplay.

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marxdeveloper
Fun game.. got to a little over 7k then accidentally hit refresh instead of
taking another screenshot
[http://puu.sh/jkiEJ/fb05f05d1e.png](http://puu.sh/jkiEJ/fb05f05d1e.png)

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lubos
I would really prefer to use mouse to move around like in Agar

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keehun
Nice game, except that for me, the lag is terrible. About 700-1000ms.

A lot of big players on it, and impossible to get going because death is
almost imminent upon spawning!

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emerongi
Pretty cool. Got to ~2000, but the ship's size was still relatively small.
It's hard to dominate in this game though (compared to Agario).

~~~
pests
I dominated. Quickly got to first place and soon I was sitting at 8/9k score.
When you get that high you have a constant drain on your score at about
25/second.

It got pretty boring as small ships could / would run away and any bigger
ships were still much much smaller and I could win just through attrition.

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th0br0
P2P fights are too much a case of "the bigger one wins" IMHO. The ships aren't
maneuverable enough given the high rate of fire.

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lpedrosa
This is pretty cool. Any plans for releasing a blog post about building the
game, or even the source?

~~~
clemlais
Not really an answer but the creator of agar.io described succinctly his stack
: server in C++ with libuv for the networking.

~~~
erid
The stack used is on the about
([http://vanar.io/static/1fc701fd042fb05f82ea26624089a4ffdd2f3...](http://vanar.io/static/1fc701fd042fb05f82ea26624089a4ffdd2f32bf/about.txt)):

\- NodeJS for web server \- C++ for game server \- Redis for data storage \-
Nginx + Varnish for caching and routing \- Websockets for client <-> server
communication \- UglifyJS for source code compression \- Planet icons designed
by Freepik ([http://www.freepik.com](http://www.freepik.com))

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sparaker
I have so much delay playing this, its almost impossible to play.

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column
Very intrusive image to tell me ads are not intrusive. Okay.

~~~
ben0x539
Don't worry, I thought the same and turned off adblocking and checked again,
and the ads are even more intrusive.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
There's no such thing as unintrusive ads, anyway. They all add unacceptable
amounts of user tracking.

~~~
egeozcan
Isn't this actually a business opportunity? Supplying non-animated, non-
tracking ads. I also imagine one could allow the publisher to accept params to
make the images match the target site's color scheme.

~~~
mikepurvis
There are boutique ad providers like the Deck which go this route:
[http://decknetwork.net/](http://decknetwork.net/)

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t_fatus
Nice one, might be useful to add keyboard layout options !

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igl
Wow. This is the first time i played a really cool and addicting
websocket/webgl game. Most games try to be too big for the current state of
the platform. This nails it!

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yellowapple
Keeps stuttering for me. Otherwise is fun.

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madprops
i made one too [http://armtrak.net](http://armtrak.net)

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bronson
Different screen aspect ratios seem to be an issue? I'm guessing some players
can see more of the game board than others.

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brianzelip
Awesome! asteroids on socket.io!

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jaketaylor
the controls though...

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curiousjorge
would be nice if you could play with only a mouse. that was a huge plus for
agar.io

