Inspirations for iiit the riiich

Agar.io (left), Osmos (right)

According to the description, "iiit the riiich is best described as a mashup of agar.io and battle royale".  In this post I want to go in a bit more detail what inspired the game mechanics. iiit the riiich started as part of the Eat (the) Rich! game jam and as such I had two ideas in my head:   

1) when you eat something, you grow

2) when you eat something, you also become what you eat 

I wanted to express both: in order to you eat "the rich" you cannot avoid becoming rich yourself and others, who share your ideological fervor will come and chase you. Other "eating games" such as Tōru Iwatani's Pac-Man (1980) or Lingdong Huang's Normal Human Face Simulator (2017) would have provided valid starting points, but the viral multiplayer browser game agar.io (2015) by Matheus Valadares, which spawned a whole wave of similar "io" games, seemed to fit well. Before that, Osmos (2009) combined the "eat to grow to eat" mechanic with an audiovisual immersive experience and Spore (Will Wright, 2008) as well as flOw (Jenova Chen, 2006) have employed similar mechanics.   

Whereas in Osmos, the controls remind of Asteroids ( Lyle Rains and Ed Logg, 1979) and accelerating causes the player to shrink, agar.io has a much simplified control scheme: just move the mouse in the desired direction. And because I wanted the game to be short and brutal , I  incorporate the "shrinking area" mechanic known from Battle Royale games like PUBG: Battlegrounds by Brendan Greene (2017) (agar.io also has a Battle Royale mode since 2018, which I discovered later).

These are the game mechanics ingredients for iiit the riiich.