Sure, yeah. The reason I started building them… The very first game I’d built was this one called Generals.io. It’s still live, it’s still running to this date, it’s still somewhat popular, I believe. And how that started is I believe my sophomore year of college we had a break, we had a week-long break in the fall semester, and I was just hanging out on campus with some of my friends. We didn’t really have much going on; we were honestly just kind of messing around all day, not really doing much… And one day we were sitting in this room together and we go to this site, iogames.space, like I’d just mentioned. And we were looking through .io games, because we were just playing these casual games together for fun, and we happened upon this game called kingz.io.

The way kingz.io works is you’re on this 2D board, and you control this one square that’s called your king. And every square that you own will slowly generate army units for you. Maybe you can think about it like Risk; you control territory, the territory generates army strength, and you can move that army strength around the map to conquer other territories, and ultimately other player’s kings. So the way you beat someone else in this game is you take an army to someone else’s king, and you attack their king with a stronger army. If you conquer anyone’s king, you become the new owner, the new ruler of all of their territory.

The game starts with usually 8, 9, 10 people, and slowly it goes down to 4 people. Then at the very end you have these two massive empires, battling each other, both trying to find the other person’s king.

It was a fun game. I played it a lot with a couple of my friends. We got really high up on the leaderboard. We were starting to figure out what the best tactics were for this game, and stuff. But the game wasn’t too popular, and we felt like there were a couple pain points about the game. One of them was that the game pace was way, way too slow. I think the way they had it set up was that one move took two seconds, I believe… And you can think about that, you can imagine making a move and then waiting two seconds for it to happen; and you can only make 30 moves minute.

[ ] For young people like us who are used to playing these super fast-paced action games, like first-person shooters, whatever, it feels way too slow. We get impatient. So that was kind of an annoyance.

There were some other things that happened, like there were some bugs in the game that I don’t really remember, but… You can imagine - bugs in the game, it’s a little bit annoying to play. Sometimes you would spawn in a location that would basically be impossible to win from, which is annoying, because it’s like “Why?” This could be controlled. With a little bit better map design, you could make it a little more fair for everyone. In their defense, it’s pretty hard, because all the maps are randomly generated…

So there were some pain points like the ones I’ve mentioned, and basically at dinner one day someone jokingly mentioned that I should build a better version of Kingz. And everyone was like “Hah-ha… Yeah, that would be cool, right? Imagine if…” And then I started thinking about it more seriously, and I was like “You know, this game isn’t that complicated.” I have the engineering background to do this, I already know how I would implement this, and it would be a fun thing to do, and I have a lot of game development background. I’ve been making games since I was basically 13. I would imagine that’s how a lot of people get into software engineering.

I also had the free time to do it, because again, this happened to be during that break from school, in our fall semester, so I just decided one day to do it. In three days I built a version – okay, so that’s where the name Generals.io comes from. It’s kind of a tribute to the original Kingz.io game. And then in the first three days I built a simple version that was similar to Kingz, but was a lot more fast-paced, and fixed some of the issues that we’ve been talking about… And I kind of just threw it up on some sites. I think I sent out a couple emails maybe, I probably posted it on Facebook, and it got a little bit of traction in those early days. But I was just working on it; I kept on working on it. I would implement new features, implement new game modes… For example, I added replay, so you can go back after a game and replay the entire game, and share replay links with your friends, and see exactly what other people did, things like that.

Eventually, one day - I wanna say it was the January after that fall semester - someone found my game (Generals.io) and posted it on Hacker News, and it blew up. It was the number one post on Hacker News for like probably that entire day. I woke up that morning and my friends were texting me like “Yo, Generals is really slow right now. Can you check the servers?” and I was like “Yes, of course.” So I go in and I check the servers and I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong, and eventually I realize that there’s nothing wrong; it’s just that there are like 50,000 people playing on this $5 server that I’ve rented…