How a Tweet Turned Into the Best New Multiplayer Game in Years

One of the weirdest, coolest, most hyped multiplayer games in years is here, and it started with a tweet:

"Contemplating building a game entirely with friends on twitter/fb. Totally open and 'Mad Lib' style. Could be fun or totally awful."

The tweet, posted by Mike Mika a little more than a year ago, was followed by another. It showed a crude red box among white and gray platforms.

"Where to go with this?" it read. "I’ve started a new project, it draws a red box. Thinking platformer. #helpmedev."

"I think the red box needs to make a critical choice, and the narrative flows from there," he tweeted to his 236,000 followers.

With that, development began.

Great ideas and half-baked jokes poured in. Maybe you could rent movies from the red box. Maybe instead of running/jumping on platforms, all it can do is hang/walk on the ceilings. Add a morality system and some in-app purchases and you’re done.

Mika read them all, added a few, and posted another screenshot. A green box joined the red one, with gravity and collision detection. He’d piqued peoples’ interest. Suggestions poured in. Someone added the hashtag #IDARB to collect ideas, creating a handy acronym for "It draws a red box."

Suddenly, surprisingly, #IDARB went viral. Mika didn’t know it, but he was creating more than a game. He was creating an exciting new way of developing games.

It’d be easy to consider this a stunt, and in some ways, it is. But Mika and Other Ocean have accomplished something almost unheard of: They built an incredibly fun, playable game in very little time, drawing the best ideas from the people who ultimately will play it. This upends traditional game development, with its big budgets, hushed development and long lead times, and could become a new model.

"If we have an idea, 10 minutes later we're trying it out," Mika says. "It’s like improv. People throw ideas at us, and we try to interpret those and incorporate them into the game in a way that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the game, but adds to it."

In the 13 months since Mika sent that first tweet, #IDARB has become a chaotic, competitive multiplayer game that calls to mind Super Smash Bros. and basketball if you played them while shaking cans of soda and rickrolling friends.

The premise is simple: Two teams of up to four players apiece score points by shooting a ball into a goal. But the execution—a frenetic combobulation of crazy ideas that’s as fun to watch as it is to play—is brilliant.

This is #IDARB. It’s available now for the Xbox One. And it is unlike anything you’ve ever played.

Mika didn’t set out to create a great multiplayer game, let alone pioneer a new way of creating games. Until now, he was perhaps best known as the guy who hacked Donkey Kong so his daughter could play as Pauline.

"I'm still shocked that it got the reception it's gotten so far," he said. "People really like the game."

Awareness grew following that first tweet on Jan. 3, 2014, and #IDARB changed daily as Mika incorporated ideas. "I thought it would be a fun, brief thing to just try to put in all the ideas and just see what would happen," he said. He tried a shooter-deathmatch. An adventure-platformer. Something with branching morality trees.

Still, it wasn’t coming together. There was no shortage of ideas, and many of them were fun—but nothing that would hold your attention for more than a few minutes. Five days in, Mika had a game in which four soda cans navigated their world via an exploding soda fizz mechanic. But what should they do? Brandon Sheffield, a game designer and editor of Gamasutra, suggested adding a ball—something players could carry and steal from each other, with a goal at each end.

"I LOVE THIS IDEA," Mika responded. "Gonna run with this."

Mika added the mechanic and posted a Vine video, knowing he was onto something. The twitterverse thought so too; the ideas became sports-centric, bizarre versions of NHL94, Sensible Soccer, or NBA Jam. For a time you maneuvered the ball by shooting it, but that idea fell flat and Mika pulled it. He refocused on sports mechanics. Carrying the ball. Passing the ball. Shooting the ball.

#IDARB was finally taking shape.

"When I dropped the ball into the game, it was a moment where I realized what the project was capable of being, rather than what it was up to that point," Mika said. "It felt more like a sport, and I understand sports mechanics. When we showed it to other people, too, everyone—but especially non-gamers—instinctively grasped that a lot more than running around and shooting each other."

Chris Charla, head of Microsoft’s ID@Xbox initiative, was fascinated by what was happening. He and Mika are old friends, so he asked if #IDARB could be ported to the Xbox One. It didn’t seem to matter that no one, least of all Mika, knew where the game was headed. Within a week, it was running on Xbox One development kits.
It was a gamble, but Charla considers Mika “one of the best mechanics designers in the entire game industry.” He wasn’t worried in the slightest.

"Obviously I have a lot of faith in Mike as a designer," he said, "but the kind of ideas bouncing back and forth, and how fast Mike was iterating, I just knew it was going to be hilarious."

Two months later, Microsoft invited #IDARB to its indie showcase at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. People loved it. At one point, the cheers coming from the #IDARB booth drowned out a presentation Major Nelson, director of programming for Xbox Live, was giving in the next booth over.

"People were just blown away by how stupid it was," Mika said. "There were so many dumb things in it. We had temporary audio that we probably shouldn’t have been playing. We had weird sayings that didn’t make much sense. But it was a bizarre enough mix that it attracted people to play."

Everyone had ideas. Mika fed them all into a spreadsheet, tracking what it was, who suggested it, how crazy it was and how easily it might be implemented.

It was around this time that the online phenomenon Twitch Plays Pokemon reached critical mass. Thousands of Twitch viewers controlled a single game of Pokemon running on an emulator, entering commands through the streamed game’s chat. A discarded Other Ocean game riffed on this concept using Twitter. Given that #IDARB was, essentially, Twitter Plays GameDev, it seemed fitting to extend that reach into the game itself.

"It allows us, as we play, to invite anyone around the world to join in and do stupid stuff to the game," Mika said.

Each game gets a unique alphanumeric hashtag, displayed in the corner of the screen. Spectators use this hashtag with keyword “hashbombs” like #reverse, #freeze, or #clown in tweets or Twitch chat to make wonderfully strange things happen in the game. They can turn the ball into a bomb, for example, or invert everyone’s controls. They can have a crudely-pixellated Rick Astley croon “Never Gonna Give You Up,” because who wouldn’t want to do that?

Like the new assist trophies and other power ups in Super Smash Bros., hashbombs add a layer of chaos and chance to a skill-based game. More importantly, they turn spectators into participants. You aren’t watching the action and awaiting your turn, you’re influencing the game. (Yes, you can turn off the hashbombs, but what's the fun in that?)

The game came together in about a year, and the version that won so many fans at GDC was built in less than eight weeks. Mika shattered any notion that creating a fun, playable game requires a big budget, a big team and a big timeline.

Not everyone was happy about that. Mika recalls a developer at GDC bitching that people ignored his “absolutely gorgeous” game to play something that “looks like shit.” Even people within Other Ocean resented seeing games they’d spent years honing falter, even fail, while this weird side project got all the love.

What these people too often overlook is people love #IDARB because it’s so damn easy to pick up. The learning curve is essentially flat. Controls are simple—move with the control stick, one button jumps, one button passes, pull the trigger to shoot.

"There’s all these other controls doing other things, but all you really need to know is jump and throw," says Glen McKnight, a developer who worked with Mika on the game. "You’re able to play the game with just those two buttons, and probably do fine. A lot of games aren’t that way."

Mika attributes that simplicity to his experience with mobile games like Maze Finger and Dr. Awesome. Mobile has brought non-gamers to gaming and allowed us to play in places and at times—on the train, while waiting in a lobby somewhere—that require a low barrier to entry. Making a game easy to understand is paramount, especially given that #IDARB is designed to be played with friends.

Matches are quick and engaging. The game is snap to learn, and ensures everyone—players and spectators alike—has fun. It deserves all the praise it’s gotten so far.

For all its crazy ideas, #IDARB is incredibly refined. Core gameplay has changed very little since that GDC build nearly a year ago, allowing Mika and Other Ocean to focus intently on ensuring everything looks, feels, and plays just right.

There’s just one stage: a 2-D vertical arena with platforms, walls, and a goal at each end. It sounds simple, and it is, but Other Ocean spent months studying heatmaps of how players moved around during hundreds of games, making minor tweaks. They added platforms you can jump through, for example, after players reported frustration at bumping their heads. And they made subtle tweaks to, say, cause a player to get dizzy when another player jumps on their head.

"Not a lot of developers get a chance to get non-developer feedback at a point where you can still make changes," McKnight said. "I worked on so many console games that by the time you got to sharing with people, you heard the ideas, you loved their ideas, but you were way past the point where you could do something about it."

The two things that took Mika the longest to hammer out are the game's AI and how it handles online multiplayer. For AI, the simplest solution ended up being the best. The code is tiny, and essentially says, If I don’t have the ball, move toward the ball. If I’ve got the ball and I’m close to the goal, shoot the ball. Online multiplayer is a bit more complicated, but draws from Other Ocean's experience porting one-on-one fighting games like Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection to Xbox Live.

#IDARB uses a couch vs. couch system where one team of as many as four people (a couch) plays a locally formed team (another couch) of similar size. This simplifies network communication to minimize lag and ensures everyone is in the same room. It’s a smart compromise that maintains the local multiplayer spirit of the game while allowing online matches.

But for all its success here, it should be noted that crowdsourcing may not, and perhaps should not, replace conventional development methods. Much of #IDARB‘s success can be attributed to the dev team’s expertise transforming a hodgepodge of ideas into a game. Ideas are only as good as the execution.

The simplicity of the game’s engine was key, too. The faster an idea can be incorporated and tested, the faster you can determine whether it’s worth pursuing. Not every game lends itself to this—there’s no way a Halo title ever will be crowdsourced—but open development is changing how indie games are made.

Kickstarter and Steam Early Access have shown the merits of involving a game's community from the early stages of development.

"#IDARB is a logical conclusion of the way developers and the community are getting closer and closer together," Microsoft's Chris Charla said. "Obviously a lot of games really value community management and listening to the community, and with this game Mike was able to say 'let's just take that to a logical extreme and have the community design the game.'"

Now a cavalcade of developers are following that lead, sharing projects on Twitter through game development hashtags like #gamedev and #indiedevelopment.

“There’s hundreds of projects being shared with [the hashtags],” Mika said. “It’s awesome to watch the dialog between people who are following, and developers talking to other developers. I think that’s the future of game development.”

Mika and his crew at Other Ocean had a ball making #IDARB and think they’re onto something here. “We already know it’s a success,” he said. “It’s a playable game that we enjoy. It’ll go out, and the people who have supported us will probably love it. We just hope we get the chance to do it again."

They don’t lack for ideas. There are hundreds that didn’t make it into #IDARB. The standing joke is Mika will make #IDARPG next. And come to think of it, a motley band of adventurers wandering a distant land ruled by real-time tweets would be one hell of a lot of fun.