mr.io

At first glance, it's clear what mr.io was meant to be. Still, I can't deny the charm and addictive gameplay of the game.

I remember that it was probably the only project that was so well-planned from start to finish. My supervisor presented the idea, and then we broke it down into the smallest possible tasks and estimated how long each would take. The planning process took quite a while, but it was really effective and accurate. This plan turned out to be a huge asset when it came to getting a publisher on board. Not even my naive, youthful honesty got in the way.

After my supervisor's great presentation, the publisher asked some technical questions to check our experience and skills. That's when I got to speak, and I think I was doing pretty well until the last question. Mr.io was being developed on Photon, and the publisher wanted to know more about our experience with this framework. I answered that we had none. "So what tools have you used before for online games?" I replied that we had never made any online games before and were completely new to it. I saw the panic in my colleagues' eyes, but it turned out to be unnecessary — the publisher signed the deal with us anyway.

Photon was actually pretty user-friendly, and we quickly got the online gameplay working. We had a lot of fun with it because mr.io was shaping up to be a good game. Now, don't get me wrong — it was still a clone of slither.io with the skin of the most popular plumber in the world, but a few ideas made the game more interesting and intense. During development, I was also in charge of stress testing, where many bot instances connected so I could optimize the remote call procedures. Interestingly, the stress-test bots later evolved into AI, and I wrote a small system based on behavior trees. I even thought about developing it as a side project, but I never had enough time for it.

Today, you can't play mr.io, just like BrixAR. The name, which was supposed to help attract players, now works against it — it's hard to find any information about the game. The project came and went without much attention, but in some way, it stood out from other similar clones due to its quality.