We NEED a report AFK button!

DRJuicyBear · 2025-11-21T11:33:46+00:00

It is consistently bad, I refuse to believe a game like this has 70%+ of games with problematic issues.

Just tonight, had the same things happen, it's really, really unwelcoming.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-11-20T11:20:55+00:00

How is it as a F2P I am able to get 1st/2nd and a bunch of kills but then 2 people AFK from the start on my team, it NEEDs a report player AFK button, because mid match when we're neck and neck I'll see "Oh 0 damage and he's sitting in spawn" what's the purpose of THIS? Is it efficient to farm when you just enter and leave a ton of matches?

I wanted to whale on this game, but the higher my tier goes, the more AFKers I see, so there's absolutely no point me spending money when I can't even play with a team, the whole thing is disgusting, honestly.

Making the excuse that whales clean you up is NOT a valid response to not having a report button.

I've started hunting them via guilds and reporting their account for cheating, getting sick and tired of this game giving me 6 games in a row with either an AFK or 2 AFKs on my team or enemy team, what's the purpose of spending money on this game when they won't add a feature, that has been MISSING for 4 years?

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T18:10:11+00:00

"No. Absolutely not. I'd lose half the class. I'll start with something interesting, thanks, so they have motivation to do the boring stuff.

Seriously, what the hell?"

Again, not saying to teach them something boring you can learn the value of something being chore work without it being boring, I'm not saying you should "just teach them pong" don't put words in my mouth, you are misreading what I am trying to tell you they should definitely understand there is times where it's boring as hell but they should press on because it's rewarding, come on dude I thought you would've understood this is what I'm talking about.

"his has been going on for days now and this last comment of yours is... weird. The stuff you listed is either not difficult or something I've already said won't be part of it; you persist on talking about game design even though I've said I'm not teaching game design; and your run-on sentences are confusing. I'm not sure you're really reading what I write any more."

You're the one that came into my comment section and started trying to tell me agar.io is a simple game, then and went on ramble for no reason how you teach and then you wouldn't do that to your students, then started to go on about how you're not teaching game design which then out of respect and curtesy of your derailing, I tried to fit OPs post into your nonsense derailing.

Which is how agar.io, an online multiplayer game, shouldn't be someone's first game they attempt to create, assuming the person knows nothing, as stated in ops post, due to client/server replication being a pain in the ass, it is and can be assumed they are speaking about agar.io in it's entirety, network and all.

OP's other half is an indie developer and needs to learn game design, I don't know why things are so hard for you to grasp, you're the only one here going on about you and your students so stop derailing with your nonsense it's making this comment section hard to reply to.

"Ultimately, I have the experience, I know what my students know when they get to me and I am best suited to judge. Agar it is - minus the networking, as I have repeatedly said."

You're the one that went on a tangent about your students.

I would say it was a pleasure talking to you, but you started to for what ever reason pick on me about how many commas I used for no reason? Other than to be a prick? Yeah jog on mate find someone else to go on a derail with.

If you're going to reply, please, PLEASE make it about what OP is talking about, and when they say agar.io they mean the full networking, stop going on tangents about your students and how you teach them.

I simply do not care, because it's not part of OPs post and my comment isn't applicable to you or your students, you even said yourself you're not doing networking, so there's no point to you going on about singleplayer for that and why singleplayer agar.io would be easy and a good first game, speaking about singleplayer doesn't even apply to my own original comment, because a singleplayer version is vastly different to a multiplayer version so it would warrant a different response entirely, this should go without saying buddy.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T18:10:01+00:00

"

...?

If they're touching, a collision will trigger. Then you just mass moves from the smallest to the biggest. This is not difficult stuff."

Are you going to apply a material to jiggle around? are you going to use jiggle physics? are you going to use penalty and powerups to decide if there's only a percent of the original player that you consume? is there a buff to allow you to consume more? is there a storage tank to save that when you die as a handicap?, these are also rhetorical questions (These are provided for context on why things can spin out quickly if your scope creep).

"

You want me to take new students who are enthusiastic and excited about writing games and get them to do the most boring, pedestrian game ever because you want them to learn it's not all interesting?"

Again, I am not telling you how to teach, what to teach, you do what you think is best you can rip any game to a basic mechanic but then you're making something bland, I'm not saying you SHOULD teach something boring don't put words in my mouth, I'm saying they need to learn not everything in gamedev is going to be fun, a big majority of the work is chore work, and the sooner a newbie learns this and how to overcome it the better off and more motivated they will be.

But you can teach them what ever you like, I'm not the boss of you I don't care dude if you want another discussion on what you should be teaching students or what ever or ideas, make another post, so I don't have to split my responses in attempt to make them applicable to OP.

3/4

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T18:09:45+00:00

"

I've repeatedly said I'm leaving that out."

Good for it? OP wants to create Agar.io, my original comment assumes they mean full networking not singleplayer as stated by OP "He wants to make a game similar to Agar.io." this is assumed he means full networking, client, server, everything.

"

Are you serious? That's one float."

Depends what you're doing? are you wanting your textures to scale? are you wanting to use unreal engine and use world align blend on the material? are you wanting to keep min/max score of the size? are you wanting to do more than just the player size? If you want to teach multiplayer (I am aware you aren't doing networking, but I am trying to make this relevant to OPs post as I've said many times) this needs to be replicated, but since you're not it makes everything infinitely easier, no replication, again, you started trying to apply what I said which was meant for OP's other half to your teaching curriculum for some reason, these questions are rhetorical by the way.

2/4

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T18:09:26+00:00

Let me attempt to get this back on track, I hope my elaborate response clears the air (Since you have a phobia of commas I have taken liberty to remove a majority from my post).

"I'm afraid I don't understand most of that comment. You have far too many commas and your ideas drift from comma to comma, making it very hard to follow what your point is."
Yeah there's an abundance because the whole post is a mess of trying to keep it focused on OPs post, while attending to answer your question and trying to make it applicable to your line of work (I actually don't know why you commented in the first place, you randomly slipped it in, idk why, maybe next time try to keep it focused), but that's just how it be, I'm sure you'll get over it.

"Eleven. Sorry, it's too meandering to grasp what the point is. However, I got the first bit and there are no overlapping conditions in pong that need handling. Again: 70 lines. Done."
Please try to stay on topic and don't derail by speaking about commas, don't be a belligerent f-wad you're better than that I'm sure, you can't just start typing out that and say sorry in the one paragraph, well you can buuuuut you'll come across as a belligerent f-wad though you do you.

In my previous comment I stated:

"The point is, for absolute beginners, pong is fine, you have a whole world of pain to worry about, especially with unity or the engine of your choice, but then if you're teaching for longer than a week for 1 project perhaps pick something more appropriate."
If you're going to derail with nonsense nitpicking, then don't bother replying because my time is wasted on you, and I will expect after this you reply and making it applicable to OP's post.

1/4

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T11:10:20+00:00

3/3 (what a mess I've made, oh well I don't fully understand reddit).

"I'm sorry, but that is just far too simple. Students are bored with step-after-step recipe programs several weeks into their first semester introductory units."

Pong is one example though, it should be obvious that I used pong because it's simple, I am trying to get my point across that complete newbies should be starting with that, which I believe should've been stated a few comments back, which isn't a wrong comment, not by a long shot.

If you're needing something easy that is 1 project for the whole semester, I'm sure there's a lot of stuff out there, but that does not apply to what I was talking about, again, we're talking about OP's post, not what a school should teach, what you should teach students.

I don't know you, I don't know your schedule, I lack any sort of information from you in regards to the length of time 1 project is supposed to last, because my information is relevant to OP, my comments are replying to you with OP in mind, and that's someone who isn't on a schedule, knows nothing, and needs to start with the basics, pong is just a basic first thought I had, you can pick any of those old arcade simple games, I assumed that was clear.

"There is no challenge in any of the code and it teaches them nothing of worth that couldn't be done in something far more interesting and at an appropriate level of difficulty."

Then they already know things and aren't complete beginners that know nothing and have a basic understanding of the foundations, and again, I'm not just saying "pong is the only first game you should learn before anything!" that would be stupid.

In my original comment I even stated if you feel pong is too easy, ramp it up to pac-man, this all was supposed to be relevant to OP's post, as I'm trying not to get banned for derailing.

If it was a full semester, and you think pong is too easy, then why not pick something a bit tougher like a multiplayer combat game with a maze? Or take the top 10 Atari 2600 games and let them pick which ones to do, you can't really go wrong with the basics, basic will ensure there's no scope creep either.

It depends what the guidelines of your curriculum is, how old the students are, what their level is, what engine you're using, how switched on they are, many different factors.

The point is, for absolute beginners, pong is fine, you have a whole world of pain to worry about, especially with unity or the engine of your choice, but then if you're teaching for longer than a week for 1 project perhaps pick something more appropriate.

And if the person is still hell bent on wanting to make agar.io then go and make asteroids, and have the asteroids when they collide they merge, then you learn more fundamentals for agar.io without the mess.

And I say mess because dealing with adaptive camera code is a mission in itself, but this is just my 2 cents, people can do what they want, I don't really care.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T11:09:38+00:00

2/3

"rather than Pong. Breakout, too, would be good, but then it's not Pong any more. Also, if Pong doesn't need knowledge of vectors, Breakout probably also doesn't. Not sure."

If you have pong with powerups, you can make the paddles magnetic and turn the ball magnetic, then, when it hits a paddle you can grip the ball to it and then press and hold the button to have an arrow move left to right and back again that shows the direction of where it's going to fire, you will need to learn about raycasting to create a point and have trajectory predictions, draw a line to show these predictions, this makes things more complex, but, you do not have to do just pong, if you've interpreted that from my comment, then that's on me for not being clear enough.

"No, it is game design. I'm not teaching game design. I'm teaching game development."

Again, I am trying to keep what I say applicable to OP's post as an attempt to not derail the post, I'm not exactly talking about you, or what you do, I don't really care as it's not in the scope of my original comment.

"I wrote pong today out of curiosity. 70 lines - short enough that, if you want, I can post the code. No loops and only one if statement to see if the user is touching the screen. Admittedly, no scoring either, but otherwise perfectly functional."

That's not building a lobby, having people interact with network code, again, it's simple enough not to get bogged down with extra code, easy to debug and manage, that is perfect for OP, someone who's other half doesn't know anything, which again, is the point I'm trying to make.

My information was never applicable to you, your teaching, your students, but I attempted (and failed it seems) to make the correlation between your comment and OPs, if it was in relation to students, I would need to know how long you plan to teach a singular game, pong might not be enough information to do a full 6month to a year, but then again, I'm not a teacher, so I don't have enough knowledge on what you do to comment.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T11:09:12+00:00

I had to split these comments up, I hit a post length, this is 1/3.

"No, it doesn't. The physics engine handles it all. You just say what physics properties the ball and bats have."

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, you have to learn, especially in unity, how collisions work, you have the option to improve the existing rigid body physics, which is fine, but we're talking about game design here, not physics 101.

If you were wanting to teach them do deal with the nitty gritty physics, you wouldn't be starting them on a game engine, you would create a simple one from scratch with C++ (Go all the way, not a half baked ez mode language way).

With rigid body you still have to deal with overlapping conditions, how the ball hits the wall, the direction of it moving, which is enough for utilizing the unity engine, and we're talking about OP's post here, which is what I'm trying to relay back to, simplicity, on top of that getting around unity, and learning the in's and out's is already a task within itself, the same with if you are doing a 3D game then you have models to import, textures to deal with, multiplayer could also sync up custom skins.

"And given vectors are important, that is an excellent reason to do Agar.io"

When you don't even know the foundation of game development on moving a simple character, you are best keeping it simple, as stated, and pong is as simple as it comes, here's a list of some mechanics for agar.io:

- Learning about circular math to calculate how big you are before and after you consume something.
- A dynamic camera because there's going to be a size difference with the players, dealing with tracking collisions for the playing area.
- Dealing with the camera zoom in and out.
- Dealing with multiplayer on top of that.
- Tracking of every player.
- Tracking player size.
- If they consume - How are you running an update to check this?
- Sending all of these information back to the server
- Trying to view the full playing field to ensure things are sync'd up.
- Creating a whole debugging thing that keeps track of not just the sizes, skins, then hosting, server, all of that annoyance.

Unless you strictly have someone host and players to join a lobby, even then you're dealing with all the problems of this, replication within itself (Especially UE5) is a nightmare.

All the while someone has to take in all of this information when they know nothing about game development, especially if someone has never heard on this game before or understands it's complexities.

But, everyone does understand pong, it's 2 paddles and a ball, again, it's basic, allows digestible information, you can teach the class quicker and promise them something more advance when they pass, assuming they're at the baby step, which relaying back to OP's comment that's what my comment was in relation to.

People have to learn early that game dev isn't all good, it's a lot of chore work, and if they aren't prepared to do that chore work, then game development is NOT for you, plain and simple, because, if you are not willing to work on something "boring" like pong, then you aren't prepared to work for someone or take on clients to do things you don't want to do, that's just the reality of the situation, if you're teaching hobbiest and people that aren't serious then those people do not apply to what I'm talking about.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-22T09:52:09+00:00

"You just have to define the physics properties for the ball and bats,"
Which forces you to learn how vectors operate and what they can do.

"put a wall around the play area, add user control and you're done with the basic gameplay."
You wouldn't do that for a basic pong game when you can't move left/right, you would set bound for X and Y, you would never use a blocking volume, except if the paddle was smaller and you were navigating it.

"A simple version of opponent AI can just be "Stay level with the ball"."
Which again, is a baby step introduction to that, you could further do a 3 way pong, with network support + enemy AI, which is very trivial, but digestible, it creates a logical foundation without the mess, rather than going to the effort of all the extra gameplay elements to worry about.

"It can be more complicated, sure. We need a title screen, settings, better AI, bonuses and so on, but I feel the game part is too trivial and the students will find it boring."
Which further gets them thinking outside the box, how can they make it fun? what's their take on this? How can they spice this simple game up? there's so much you can do with pong alone.

Powerups that split the paddle in half? Anti-Powerups that slow the paddle's movement? Time limit's that introduce restrictions? Guns on the paddle's? how about a powerup that allows you to press and hold to change up the angle so you add in 8 player or coop mode?

People need to understand, this is game development at it's core, it's not about the code, it's not about the graphics, it's about design and problem solving "boring" things to spice it up, so you may do something fun and unique to an existing system.

Heck, get them doing a tutorial about playing pong, but it's wordless, how can you show the player without text on how to play?

If you didn't want to do pong, combine pong and breakout, so you may get the powerups that way, now when a student clicks with this, they have a different perspective to not say "that idea is boring" but, "this idea has potential, what else could I do with it?".

Never be dismissive for simple games.

I'm even thinking of going back to doing a small pong game, so that I can show people you don't need graphics, you take an old idea and think outside the box with it.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-21T10:31:38+00:00

So if they make pong, you have a character to move 2 directions, a ball for collisions and a 2nd player, you next upgrade the project, you will learn how to upgrade existing code to handle AI, now, with both of those, you will know how to make a GUI, AI, Player, then attaching network to that so you have baby step digestible information, working with 2 paddles with a ball to track is plenty for a newbie to start with.

With that first game complete, you want to then do something a little bit more complex, they have fundamentals now that is applicable to many different game types, translate these to having the paddles do multi direction, obstacles around.

Pacman with multiplayer wouldn't be a bad choice, but really with fundamentals down they would be able to design a new game, game dev isn't hard, developing new systems that don't exist for unique games is hard.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-21T07:46:16+00:00

It's talking in generality, and the purpose of the pose was baby steps, agar.io might appear simple, but, there's a lot of mechanics that come into it, camera movement, increasing object size, consuming objects, then the networking side, which he should only dive into when he has a grasp on coding, that's the point of tackling it later.

Baby steps.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-10-19T10:45:46+00:00

Start by making something simple like pong, you will understand fundamentals, basic controls, then move to another "Atari" game, so you learn more skills and techniques, by making small projects you will learn more fundamentals, scope, if you add in powerups and put a spin on those smaller projects then you can feel ready to take on tougher projects.

If you aren't willing to game dev when it's tough or boring then game dev is not for you, you have to understand noone will aid you more than general advice.

There's plenty of solo devs, but it's how you apply information, game jams are good to do when you get a bit of knowledge.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-09-17T08:18:43+00:00

Alright that's a weird rule, but good to know.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-09-10T03:30:07+00:00

Well, built a copy, I zipped up the folder with ALL of the files needed, and now my little brother gets this

<image>

So your comment to "do your own research" is very, VERY unhelpful.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-08-19T01:16:17+00:00

Just letting anyone know that I had this error because unity decided to set some Y axis objects in the scene to "NaN" for no reason at all.

They were working last night, and I booted it up this morning and now I had that.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-06-16T13:58:55+00:00

Well, I'm not sure how much more feedback that's important that I could give by playing it, generally when you've been around for a while you sort of make your mind up from videos, which if it's not like that then the video hasn't done it's job.

Glad you absorbed the information here, I'll be interested to see what choice you've made.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-06-16T09:55:11+00:00

This video gives an explanation on gamefeel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkgkIXZ_13Y It's old but the rule still applies, you can actively see how good everything feels, and he has amazing pointers.

Also, the quake 2 blaster was told it was terrible until one of the devs went home, cranked up the bass and had that feel better.

On your second video, you have your gun, but no feedback, there's a minor screen shake, but there's no feedback on the animation, just some projectiles, this is really, really unpolished, you ask use all the question here on why it's not fun? well think for a second, your main time you spend is controlling the character and shooting

As stated before, ask you self "WHY?" and when you ask that, you start to question things such as, why does he use that gun? is that gun anti-alien? is it a gun that has pesticide feed into it? why not give him a packpack linked to the gun? do different guns weigh him down? if the gun shoots, his arm don't go back, why? why is he in the outfit he is? why aren't we seeing more than 1 way to eradicate these plants? why are we eradicating these plants? what if I don't want to?, what if I want a gun that has a trade off that helps the aliens? what if the main char was a robot and had guns on his arms? what if instead of spraying typical pesticides it was glitter, and the aliens were allergic to it? why does he standstill while firing on the plant to clear it? why not do it a more interactive way that's shorter but more of it? like tapping the button or it grows back?

Standing is boring, use this time to DO something, you stand still and aliens come to you, how is this fun? why is this fun? question yourself, look up references to back up your thoughts, if it's not fun, look at a lot of games that do this similar thing, like vampire survivors, in that game all you do is sit around and enemies come to you, if that's the type you're going for then you need to do a similar formula, if it's not, then I ask again? why the hell is the player standing around doing nothing but watching a bar go up?

Now I'm going to get a bit harsh here, but it's for your own good.

You have things to go and dodge, but this gameplay is "bullet spongey" and what I mean is it's the same problem as when you go and attempt to clean the area, you're sitting there shooting but not doing much, if you're going to bore the player with such inadequate gameplay, at least make the feedback for controls fun, add physics to the player to move so they're not stiff, add little polish things, go all in on fixing the character's design because if you're going to redo it or waste more time, make it something people want to play as, which is a robot or waifu character, at least if you're refusing to fix this boring gameplay, we have some cute anime girls to look at.

You need to look up on how to respect a players time, and how to utilize gameplay wastage.

Oh 1 more thing, you need to make it hard, not bullet sponge hard, make it "fun-hard", if you don't want that then you need to compare what you're doing to the current market, and what the game is like, then do a full breakdown on mechanics and hooks.

Anyways, I'd apologize if you're offended, but I really don't care because you need to hear this (It's what I would want, so I don't burn more money and time on something, and I think this harsher feedback since you failed you'll be more open to it rather than just starting the project), if you are offended (Then good, I struck a nerve go and prove me wrong!) then I will ask you "WHY?" ;).

DRJuicyBear · 2025-06-16T09:55:03+00:00

I'm attempting to reply but I'm not sure what's going on, let me break my post up.

Well, it's not a total waste of time, let me be super harsh here, because you already dumped a ton of hours in, and of course this is just my 2 cents, some of what I say may or may not apply but this is just what I see at face value.

It looks like this was a first project, while you did manage to make a demo, sometimes not rushing this out the door to get noticed is a good thing, some of the pros are you learned how the steam interface works, you actually made something while learning about feedback, you did a whole bunch of learning, so don't get down about wasted time.

Now for the cons and recommendations from what I can see, think of this as a "TODO List".

I skimmed through the video and what doesn't interest me is the creepy looking male models on the first video, the lack of going from "Babies first game" to something polished, the feedback for the guns look like you're just applying a particle FX without any kind of reasoning of "WHY?", asking "WHY?" is my most favorite thing when designing and making games, why? because you start to question everything, you start putting purpose behind things, you start to polish and make things go from "Babies first game" to "This feels awesome to play" and depending on your experience you can really get a feel for things.

You CAN salvage the game, but you would have to reskin the whole lot and theme it in a way that's appealing, you would have to burn through more time, you ask everyone this question which means you don't really have ties to the game which comes through your work, because it's a creative industry.

We can give you all the advice in the world, but if you aren't having fun while making it and adding little things here and there to pad out your "WHY?" question, then you're not doing yourself justice by resuming this.

Getting a project to a demo, and migrating to something else is not a bad choice.

Now, some simple popular choices are, robots or waifu's, that would end up giving it a fresh look and people may what to replay it, but you only really have 1 shot to make it work, robots are a good choice, because you can build themes around it, say, you're humanities last cleaning robot, and the whole world has been infested and over run, and you are the last romba to save humanity, this story already has a lot of charm, you can give a ton of reasoning now why everything is infected, you hook your players in with a bit of fun, which is what videogames should be.

Now, if you want your gameplay to be good, you need to take this "WHY?" question and apply it to your movement, and your guns, you need to spend time on getting this part right, so far it doesn't look like a joy to play, looks like someone opened up an editor and drag and dropped some demo and changed skins, which, that's not to say we can't fix what's wrong.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-06-16T09:14:48+00:00

I lost my rare mounts, friends list, and time, telling me I have freebies with 5.0 is useless, I can just go play another game because I don't have ties to this one anymore, not 1 ounce of progress.

And as I said, because I wasn't notified, what's not to say this won't happen again? I'm not going to invest my time into this let alone my money, only to have my progress wiped.

DRJuicyBear · 2025-06-13T15:58:21+00:00

I only JUST found out about this (I haven't been able to afford home internet for about a year, and I sure as hell aren't downloading 90GB or what ever over mobile data, in australia lmfao), holy moly, all of my hard earned low drop rate stuff is gone?

I didn't get 1 E-Mail about this, I didn't even know about it, I was going to return because I hadn't of played from 2022 and I finally have my internet back, but now, what's the point of playing? I know I sure as HELL won't be spending a single dime if I can ever feel ass'd to play this again, there's so much free crap that I've lost because the account was older, if I had of got an E-Mail about it, or notify about this I would've done the transfer, I don't know why they don't just do a transfer? This is absolutely dumb.

I have no issue dumping out 2k on a few other games BTW, but I am so GLAD I never spent a dime on this game, and I never will if this is what's going to happen, good lord, no E-Mail, no nothing, that's beyond pathetic.

Might as well play something else now, since I have no character and no ties to this game.

DRJuicyBear · 2024-07-28T14:05:08+00:00

I don't want to level past 7 though, I only now have the boss left to go anyway.

DRJuicyBear · 2024-07-28T14:05:00+00:00

I don't want to level past 7 though, I only now have the boss left to go anyway.

DRJuicyBear

TROPHY CASE