Two guys made an MMO: The Growtopia Postmortem

So, being the master of game marketing that I am, I’ve carefully been totally silent here on my blog about my latest game, despite being released five months ago.

growtopia_banner

The game now regularly hits 3,000 players online at once and has been financially a huge success.  (At least by my humble standards!)  It’s been a top 1000 grossing US App Store game for the past four months and doing similarly well on Android – all without being featured and zero paid advertising.

 11-9-2014 update:  We’ve grown!  We now regularly hit 40,000 players online, have 5+ million users and around 300K daily active users.  80 million+ worlds have been created by users.

 2-2-2017 update:  We’ve grown more!  We now regularly hit 65,000 players online, have 20+ million users and around 500K daily active users.  450 million+ worlds have been created by users.

Today I’m finally sitting down to document how this project took shape as well as the trials and tribulations.

September 8th, 2012: Six pictures

After my highly competitive multiplayer online game Tanked was more or less finished,  I began thinking about a new game.  Something that would capitalize on the networking client/server experience I’d gained but apply it to a fresh idea with simpler controls that would be more accessible.

Despite Tanked being 3D, I decided to do the game in 2D – faster development and we could target even very crappy mobile devices.

With Tanked, I felt my fatigue in “doing it all, alone” was the cause of my non-existent marketing efforts (I’ve STILL never done a youtube video for Tanked?  REALLY?!?!), as well as reluctance to add the final layers of polish.  I needed a partner, someone to provide a mutual motivation as well as handle the artistic needs of the project.

So with that in mind, I presented six mock-up screenshots to long-time IRC pal and fellow indie, Mike Hommel, aka Hamumu to entice him to come aboard.

Here are the original shots (created using stolen sprite rips mostly) for your viewing displeasure (I’m no artist!):

concept0concept1 concept2 concept3 concept4  concept5

We changed and improved the ideas represented in these mockups over time, but stayed focused on the general goals.

He agreed to give it a shot.  Like so many indie collaborations, I suspect he was worried we’d never reach beta. Hell, me too!

I think I predicted 4-6 months to finish it.  This is usually where I would chuckle at my foolish naivety and admit it took years longer than expected but… not this time?!

The reason things went so smoothly?  Well, I guess probably because we had very few “unknowns”.

In the past, we’d both already made 2d tile based platformers, collision code, networked games, mysql based projects and websites, and done cross platform development.  Using my Proton SDK insured we could run on eight platforms (nearly) out of the box.

We figured the only real unknown was what our max player limit would be and how things would scale up.  I had guessed conservatively, 600 players online would be our max.  Luckily, I was wrong, the original server actually was able to handle much more.

September 15th, 2012: Networking and collision are functional

growtopia_dev1

The above shot shows four instances running around in the same world.  All graphics are just DrawRects for now.  The collision is incredibly simple and as a result gives us very few problems later as we tweak it for special tiles and items later.  The game is written in C++ with GL/GLES.

I think one reason this project went so fast is I was able to fight the urge to go overboard on everything like I usually do.  There are no fancy 2d physics.  I mean hey, we’re not making Limbo here. It would be overkill.  I think it helps that I had already done the box2d physics platformer thing in a previous project so I didn’t really feel like I had something to prove, if that makes sense.

I’ve never actually met Mike in person, he’s in California and I’m in Japan.  But if anything, that probably helped – we are able to work on the code base (he programs too!) in (roughly) day/night shifts which helps avoid svn code conflicts.

We use IRC and Google Docs to communicate – spreadsheets for tracking hours and financial stuff, and the drawing board to share screenshots and ideas.   The best part is we have a full history of everything we’ve done, that’s where I’m getting most of the screenshots for this article!

September 21st, 2012: GUI designs

growtopia_ev5

The GUI starts to take shape via Hamumu’s mockups.

October 18th, 2012: Doors, signs, chat, inventory, and one kind of lock working

growtopia_dev2

In roughly five weeks, the game looks pretty similar to its current form.

November 30th, 2012:  The game is stealth-released on Android as a free beta after three months of development

We were unable to use the original name we wanted (Buildo) as someone else was sort of already using it.  After a VERY painful few days we finally agree on Growtopia.  I really couldn’t get anything done during that period, strange that stress of finding a game name could grind everything to a halt like that.  I was never totally satisfied with the name, but it’s very searchable so that’s a perk.  The domain name was taken so we had to live with growtopiagame.com.

growtopia_dev3

IAP is disabled initially as we expected to reset the universe a few times. (We ended up never having to do that)

There were no “World Locks” yet, so people tended to clump together in little towns, locking their areas with the smaller lock types.

Despite the total stealth release (I didn’t even mention the beta on my website) the player base quickly grows.  It’s the perfect design for PR slackers like us,  very viral in nature due to the social aspects.

January 9th, 2013: The game is released on iOS, and the word beta is removed from the Google Play description

The release!  We get a boost from Touch Arcade, Pocket Gamer and IndieGames who all post our teaser video.  (we sent it to them and a few other sites, that was pretty much it for our marketing campaign)

We stress out as we watch the users online grow.  200 users, 300 users.. 600 users online at once!  Will the server die?  We upgrade our server three times in two weeks to handle the increase, wondering if after the initial surge we’ll need to go back to the cheaper one.  Servint, our data center, did a great job of quickly migrating us from server to server as needed.

Life after release, where we are now

Like a newborn, we found the game screaming for our non-stop attention.  We find ourselves constantly putting out fires and dealing with issues. 600 hundred forum posts a day to read, hundreds of daily support emails.

There is no finish line, there is no “done” – we’ve basically worked full time on the game since its release.

Our game has an extremely sensitive virtual economy that could be decimated in only hours by a rampant bug.

A single server crash can cause an hour of lost work per player online.  A single day roll-back on a busy day now would mean instantly vaporizing SEVEN HUMAN YEARS worth of effort.

These things weighed very heavily on me in the beginning.  I had trouble sleeping and would check the server throughout the night to make sure it was still running correctly.  After a while though, you sort of reach a certain level of numbness/comfort with it all.

I guess I’ll forgo the usual “what went right/wrong” and just illuminate the most important/damaging events and how we dealt with them.

If it’s possible, it shall be drawn

Well, we knew it had to happen.  I appeared in their world and gave them five minutes to remove it, but secretly I was sort of proud, it’s sort of a developer achievement to have someone miss-use your creative tools like this.

growtopia_penis

As our player count grew, we found our player discipline tools inadequate.  Over time we beefed them up.

The problem with tape

taped

Instead of simply muting people, we thought it would be much cooler to visually duct-tape their mouth shut.  When they attempt to speak, only muffled noises come out.

The end result wasn’t what we expected.  Being duct-tape quickly became the goal. When players saw us, they’d mob us yelling obscenities, hoping to be taped.  We had to make a new rule: “If you try to get taped on purpose, we’ll just ban you” to keep it under control.

The item duping

Due to a bug a patch introduced, it became possible to log on with two instances of the same player for a short while if you did it at EXACTLY the perfect time.  Within hours a group of Asian players had figured it out and were duping like mad.  I remember using google translate on Growtopia related Korean message boards trying to figure out the method used.

growtopia_dupers

Knowing it was happening, but not understanding the modus operandi was VERY stressful, we had to spy and watch them doing it.  We figured it out and patched the server.  We hand deleted the ill-gotten gains as best we could (we didn’t want to roll back!), but it quickly becomes impossible to track as items are traded.  For a while, we had the server report anyone with > 100 world locks and we’d just assume they were holding duped items and punish the account.  Nowadays that wouldn’t work because many legitimate players have earned that much wealth through normal gameplay.

The bedrock bug

One day fairly early in Growtopia’s lifetime (I think it was still in the wide beta on android) we made a horrible mistake with user security levels which let anybody destroy bedrock and white doors.  (Normally a player can’t destroy these tiles, as means player can fall out of the world at the bottom, and can’t enter worlds the normal way)

Twenty minutes had passed before I’d noticed the frenzied broadcasts that excitedly shared the bug – not only were people destroying normally impenetrable blocks, those blocks were giving seeds, which would grow into trees that would eventually yield more of the forbidden blocks, letting the user place them!

This bug really didn’t cause too much damage, but we were running around fixing holes in levels and replacing missing entrance doors for weeks.  We also added a filter that would remove those items from peoples inventories.. but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is still a bedrock tree growing somewhere out there and you do still see the occasional bedrock piece missing from older worlds.

The IAP hackers – “Someone is giving away world locks”

Like most developers,  I’ve grown used to the idea knowing that people are pirating my games.  I don’t stress too much, it doesn’t ruin the experience of others for the most part.

But if thousands of dollars worth of gems are stolen via fraudulent means, it has a real impact on us as it is pumped into the game economy.

We’d watch would-be thieves dump their contraband in remote locations.  We’d wait (invisibly) and see who came to pick it up, track down the persons main hideout and ban them all.  Eventually we upgraded our server to do full IAP receipt checking, but life had a certain cops ‘n robbers taste to it for a while.

We still have issues with stolen credit cards and chargebacks, but it’s now at manageable levels for the most part.

The Tapjoy hack

Tapjoy is a great way to let players watch a 20 second commercial, to buy gems using their time, and only if they choose to.  (They get 90 gems, we get 5 cents, or whatever)  However, due to me using it wrong (similar to IAP, I was using my code from previous single player games I worked on rather than custom stuff with full server verification) it was very vulnerable to client hacks, as illustrated in the image.

growtopia_tj

I wasted a lot of time writing code to detect hacks and such, when I should have just re-implemented Tapjoy the correct way, which I eventually did anyway.  It now runs flawlessly.

Scamtopia

The virtual economy made item trading and bartering very important.  The original release had no secure way to trade, only “drop trading”.  Naturally scamming was prevalent. We told people “Never drop trade with people you don’t know!”

We introduced a robust trading system as quick as we could.

trade_system

The blueberry hack

Due to a server vulnerability, it was possible to hack a client to give you unlimited blueberries.  (Basically, when using it to eat, a special case happened where it didn’t check if you actually had any left)

We were perplexed why a certain group of players had so many blueberries, it didn’t make sense… someone eventually emailed us and explained the trick and we quickly patched it.  Thanks, sir.

The wall hack

It turns out the first thing that people do in a game like this is use a memory scanning utility (a “trainer”) to locate important memory addresses (speed, X/Y position, etc) and modify them.  We realized wall hacking would be possible, but didn’t think it was a big deal due to our lock/ownership systems. (If someone gets into your locked area, it doesn’t really matter, the server wouldn’t let them take anything)

However, players liked to drop items around their worlds, which presented juicy targets for wall hackers.   We quickly combated this with clever server + client hacks which worked pretty well, but in the end we removed all doubt by adding full A* path finding on every single player movement.  (this wasn’t possible for speed reasons until the V2 server upgrade.. more on that later)

The black day – the rollback

But it wasn’t the hackers or credit card fraud that did the worst damage.  It was us!

On February 23th our worst nightmare became a reality.  We’d inadvertently made some changes that caused certain very cheap items to give out a high number of gems when “recycled”, this created an infinite money loop.   As soon as it was noticed, someone “broadcasted” it which meant every single person online knew how to earn unlimited gems.   The entire economy was trashed in only minutes.

We had to roll back almost 24 hours worth.  (We do automated backups daily.. and sometimes I do extra backups before a serious patch, but today I didn’t for some reason)

That weekend was dubbed “Apology Weekend” and we worked quickly to add perks and gems bonuses to try to make it up to the players.  If you ever see a “Rollback Plaque”, it was earned by someone on that weekend.  We wrote a program to restore all gem purchases that had been wiped, with double the gems.

rollback

This was a wake-up call to more seriously test things before patching.  It’s tough trying to surprise your audience with something new (we’re very secretive) and yet wanting to properly test it.  We now do have a fully functional beta test server that we can route normal players into.

That day was easily the absolute worst for me personally.  I’m  happy to say we haven’t had another roll-back yet.

Too many users

In mid April we hit 2,000 concurrent users on weekends and our server began to buckle.  Round trip to punch something could take a full second and people were constantly being disconnected.  We added live profiling support and narrowed down the slow down to world creation and enet packet sorting.

We decided I would write a “V2 server” upgrade in a separate svn branch that would take advantage of multiple cores;  it made no sense that our hardware had 16 cores and 32 threads but our entire Growtopia server process was run in a single thread.

Meanwhile, Mike would handle running the active game, adding items and preparing to move them over to the new server.

We had a lot riding on the V2 server, would it really solve our problems or fail miserably?  It’s very difficult to fake 2,000 users, so we released a client upgrade that could smoothly switch between the old server and the new beta one.

When things looked good, we just pushed a button and switched the real database over to the new server, if it died, we could just switch them back.  Anyway, it worked beautifully and we haven’t outgrown it yet.

Here’s how I explained it to users on our Facebook page: (it was actually only a software change, we didn’t change hardware.  But this was the result as far as latency and gameplay)

new_server

The freemium dilemma

After railing against slimy abuses of the freemium model myself, I vowed to do it ‘right’.  Here is what we did:

  • Only one soft currency, that can be earned in the game.
  • No paywalls, you really can get every single thing in the game without buying stuff. But more than that, the game is fun and works fine without paying – no slogging along at a snail’s pace and grinding required to do stuff.
  • $10 is the biggest IAP.
  • $30 limit per day limit to help situations like “my kid bought $500 of stuff accidentally”, as far as I know, no major mobile freemium companies do this, but really, they all should!  Actually, Apple should probably send a “ARE YOU SURE? Click OK to allow more IAP in this game” type email after anybody spends too much in a game to verify it wasn’t a mistake or a kid.
  • No annoying push messages, spamming, email sharing, etc
  • No popups asking you to buy stuff.  No pressure selling. Don’t buy stuff, you really don’t have to.
  • The expensive status/vanity items don’t have any special powers as compared to the cheap items, they just look different, which in a situation with hundreds of thousands of players to compare items with, is a real value, of sorts.  The rarity creates the value.
  • We don’t want whales, we want schools of tiny fish who will pop in a few bucks now and then.  If a customer ends up spending 5 cents an hour that would be great, and I think a decent value.
  • We want to make enough to continue working on the game and adding content/events instead of the normal “release and forget” model.

A few times we saw someone making daily purchases that seemed strangely high and emailed their Google purchasing account email directly to verify that everything was ok. (We thought it might be a kid using a parents’ device)  I don’t think we ever got a reply.  I think Apple and Google should be doing the emailing really, they have more and better information than we do.  We will disable IAP on any account by request. (the option won’t even show up in the store in that case)

I think overall we “did it fairly right”, but I still have moral reservations about this model and know that we’re exploiting certain kinds of vulnerable individuals due to the nature of open-ended purchases, even if you don’t need them.  In a single player game I don’t think it would ever be justified to extract $100 in IAP, but in an MMO where we have players with 1,000+ hours logged and who purchase presents for others, I think it isn’t totally unreasonable for an informed adult to spend that much.

But what is the line?

This is game where a kid can do a /broadcast and instantly be visited by fifty or more REAL people hanging on his every word because a prize is going to be given away.  He or she can run any kind of game within Growtopia and have complete control over these guests, ordering them around and banning at will.   I’m proud we created mechanics that allow something this amazing but also humbled by the damage this power could do to someone vulnerable.  My own son (he’s nine) has spent $40 of his own money in Growtopia over the 200+ hours he’s played.  He’s given most of it away to his “friends”.

If he’s learned a real friend doesn’t require a World Lock,  maybe it was a worthy investment.

Giving away too much

A problem with our single currency is you can make around $3 of IAP per hour farming in the game.  Our richest player has never spent a dime, and has $1000 usd worth of gems.  I’m sort of proud of that on one hand, it illustrates our game is REALLY free and not a trick.  But on the other hand, I don’t know what he should spend his 1,000,000+ gems on.  If we add a 100,000 gem “Vanity item” in the store, eight year olds are also going to be pressured to use IAP to buy that essentially worthless item to keep up with the Jones’.  (Worthless as far as functionality, but .. well, the value as trading power due to the rarity and cost is very real in a multiplayer society like this one)

It will be a challenge to figure all this out.

Email support system woes

Originally we handled support emails by replying and bcc’ing eachother.  This .. doesn’t scale up very well.  Eventually we setup with desk.com and now we can give much better service.  When a customer forgets to tell us his GrowID, we can just look through his history and grab it.

mailbox

The future

It’s not yet written, John!

All I know for sure is I chose the perfect person to collaborate with and our combined efforts have definitely resulted in superpowers.  Llike when spandex wearing heroes stand close together they can shoot larger balls of lightning.  It’s like that but totally different.

In the five months since Growtopia’s release we’ve had 3.5 million+ worlds created by nearly 400,000 users.  Last Saturday we set the record with 65,000+ hours logged in a single day.

I don’t see any shortage of ways to improve the heart of Growtopia, which is about giving useful tools to the player to let him or her be creative with both strangers and friends; but each addition and tweak is now taking increasingly long to test and safely deploy due to the size and scope of the existing user base.  We can’t make any mistakes now, especially with huge additions going in this weekend.  No rollbacks.
-Seth

Growtopia was created by Seth A. Robinson and Mike Hommel.

Additional reading: I answered a ton of GT questions asked by players back in 2014 here

Update:  In 2017 we sold Growtopia to Ubisoft.  I wrote another blog post about why!

56 thoughts on “Two guys made an MMO: The Growtopia Postmortem

  1. Marble

    Such an interesting read!
    Thank you for sharing.
    I’ve always been curious to know behind the scenes of the mind of such an amazing innovative developer.
    I’ve always known game developing would take immense dedication, intelligence and persistence, but wow, I never really thought of the after care.
    Running a regularly updated MMO seems to be the toughest of all.
    Its inspiring to see all those hurdles you’ve overcome.
    It’s awesome to see how much you truly care about the game and players, even to the point of checking throughout the night.
    I hope the inevitable extreme success you will accomplish throughout the years doesn’t change you.
    You are truly a gem amongst a flock of greedy saddists in the AppStore.
    Your wife and kids are incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful intelligent man to look up to.

  2. CYGNI

    WOah cool you guys used Megaman X 5 and X 6 as sprites for your mock up screenshots, great old memories and that sprite charachter’s name is Dynamo by the way but still why can we only kill when the Deathamtch special event is on

  3. Jonny D

    Marble forgot to say “I love you”. :D

    Seriously, it turned out great. I hope this kind of attitude catches on with more devs. Personally, I can’t stand games capitalizing on inherent human weaknesses concerning risk and perception (e.g. gambling) without appropriate concession to what should be the real point of games. That was surprisingly wordy, but I mean it.

  4. LuckyStar

    This was very interesting.
    Read it 2 times!
    I’m glad with the ideas you had, or otherwise I would like this game that much!
    I love that there is only 1 CURRENCY! And it’s not a freenium game, like deepworlds!
    This is a very good game, often updates, lovely graphics, just too good! Also, no ads?!?
    You sir, are very intelligent, and you have put LOTS of work into this game!
    So continue to make great games, as I shall play them!

  5. Brodie

    Very well written!
    I’ve always wondered what it was like “Behnd the scenes” of Growtopia, but this just explains it all. As much work as you two have put into making this game, you still find the time to (Kindly) tend to your players wants and needs, and deliver them the best experiance yet! I’m very excited to see the future of this game and how it’ll change along the way… Looking foward to it!

  6. Illusion

    I completely agree with Marble!

    This is such a wonderful piece of writing to read and experience behind the scenes. I love the humor you placed in it!
    It is at most interesting to see the art change to *cough* average art *cough* to what it is today.

    Wonderful to see you care and kindness placed for the players, with that care, you have created and inspired the best community I have ever seen.

    Thank you for not keeping us in the dark. I’ve seen quite a few games unwilling to answer questions, but you answer the most you can. I question everything, and I’m very glad and satisfied I get answers.

    Please keep up the wonderful work! ^_^

    One day, all games will follow after you and you shall be the king! I have hope! ^_^b

  7. Pingback: GameDevDad » More Heroes!

  8. fackcastil

    Hey I Love Growtopia ♥ And Hey Seth Or hammu You Can Visit to my world ?Abd Today is my Birt Day ! I Want You Gift ! pls My World Name :LM
    Visit Please ~~

  9. Sami Alissa

    You helped me so much Thank you a lot
    Please guys visit me in SAMIALISSA / COOLJERK / 9ATS9 / SAMIALISSA3

  10. annabirdy01

    (I was going to refrain from commenting because of the date, but Hey, only 3 days from the last post, not TOO bad…?)
    Ahh….I remember the days when a jetpack was worth a world lock, there wasn’t a trade system (and scammers seemed to be lurking around every corner….O.o), there were only a few mods, and lava was…’square-y’ (I MADE A NEW WORD!!!). I know I’m not the ‘oldest’ player out there, and I think I’m not a true beta-tester, either (Does early December count? Hey, it’s before the release date!)! But, I would just like to say that this is truly the most FUN game I’ve ever played, I literally have recommended it to EVERYONE, (i.e. moo37, which whom hasn’t gotten on in several months…-_-) and it’s just very original and addicting. My favorite types of games are the ‘creative’ ones, and I love being able to chat and hang with other users. Yeah, there’s a couple growtopian bullies out there, but there’s also tons of good-hearted people who want to build with ‘ya. This is a great game to compare to Minecraft (which I’ve not played very long at all, I started because I heard it’s like this game :D), but I personally think it’s so much BETTER. Yes, yes, yes, I’m sure you get MILLIONS KA-JILLIONS and BILLIONS of people going, “I love this game, so fun! OMG awesome visit my world BLABLABLA!!!” and I guess I wanted to say something profound.
    Obviously, I didn’t think of anything. :O
    …AND TO BE ABLE TO SAY I SAID MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE ‘ROUND HERE…
    HI

  11. IcyIce

    Hey ! I like this game ! :D ! Can we buy gems using mobile phone ? Please make it available . Some people don’t know how to use credit card or something like that . So … hope we can buy gems using mobile phone . Haha :D ! (Username : IcyIce) ;) .

    *I hope we can play Growtopia on PC*

  12. Trevor Gerbjörn

    Now i know about rollback plague its awesomly cool to read it
    Username LoneFrog
    But make peoples dont call others noobs maybe like newbs or new players etc

    Best wishes LoneFrog

  13. theninjakidj/jjolivas

    I love growtopia. Whenever I get bored of it it just pulls me back in. Also its the only way to communicate with some of my friends as I moved away from them 2 months ago. I joined in like February 2013 or before with my account jjolivas. I remember when you could punch to kill. It was so much fun. I was a real noob back then. I tried to convince my friends to play at school in sixth grade. I remember I was in the rollback. I didn’t understand what it was and how rare those rollback plaques were. So I destroyed all of them :p. Haha. So eventually my friend stopped playing and I did too. Then I forgot my password to jjolivas (retrieved it once again) then I made a new account. theninjakidj. I wanted it to be theninjakidjj but their wasn’t enough space. I spent a decent amount of money on this game but now I want to earn it legit. Theninjakidj joined in the harvest festival. I was a noon but I understood how much some stuff was worth now. Except the moon cakes. I wasted those things and ate em. Because I was a noob. Eventually I learned how to play good. First splices cyclopean visors. Then jet packs. Then fairy wings all the way to crimsons. I didn’t really like the look of rippers. I sold them today for a moon mask because I couldn’t miss that chance. I’m currently making more wings. Also trying to get a ninja set. Thanks for readying everyone! This has been my growtopian life. Cya in growtopez – theninjakidj. PS. I might eventually get a birth certificate. PSS. My story world is space pikachu please donate in pikaart.

  14. Joseph

    hi i love Growtopia and your work is amazing, I am 12 and my birthday is tomorrow i would be honored if you could just email me thank you

  15. AzureFlazh

    Hi @Seth Im AzureFlazh In Growtopia And I Really Love Growtopia Its So Fun And I Invited Many Of My Favorate Friends To Come And Play Growtopia……

    GROWTOPIA IS SO AWSOME!

  16. CHRlS3

    Hey.. My IGN is CHRlS3 (With an L) and I am just saying, I love this game! Keep up the work seth.. All the heartfelt hours trying to accomplish that goal.

  17. Devilshock

    Wow this is a realy good story I’m loving this.
    And Seth are you still playing the game?
    Maybe you can visit me sometime.
    My world name is devilshockcity.
    I’m still building it just started.

  18. Eiffel Valentino

    I never knew about the release, nor the Rollbacks, and the Square Lava blocks. I also never knew that Growtopia was actually Buildo With Cheese (I love Cheese)! But this story is so inspiring about how you did till now. You made a big success in this game. I really like the mechanics of this game (Not Freemium, No Ads, No Notifications so we would’t be disturbed with Growtopia, and Only earns money by Tapjoy and IAP without asking them to do it; they simply do it if they want to).

    I know this game when my brother is playing it, and I feel like want to try it. Turns out I really like this game because it’s like Minecraft (which I used to like before playing Growtopia) but only Minecraft isn’t free, we have to pay $26.95 for each account! So I started playing Growtopia more frequently because it is very very very free. I started playing this game after Harvest Festival event ends and coming to Halloween Event. That time, I never use my money to buy gems, so I get wings and a World Lock after a long time. Now I have like 6 Crimsons that I am going to sell it (although I’m not lucky yet).

    Last thing I would want to say, you don’t have to pay to be famous, you can get it in game! All you need is Time, Skill, and Luck. Please be friendly on our friends, because kids play this game too including my Sister (only 6 years old!). This game also full of Scams, because so many bad peoples (sorry) out there want anything they want in the easy way. So be careful on communicating with so many peoples. Rubie earned everything she wants in RUBIESITEMS because she is doing the hard way which is farming. Currently I have a world named EIFFAM that is still work in progress that everybody may check it out a bit. It’s jammed though so you can go to my world if you know the name. This is Eiffel (my GrowID) talking to you. Thank you for your cooperation! Cheers!

  19. ShadowHelm

    Very fun Indeed I still remember I made jetpack trees and I got tons of wls but i sold the wls for a Horse I still Wonder why are wls Payment for rare items I just thought is it for making worlds? My username:ShadowHelm (i wanted it to be ShadowNecro but i couldn’t /cry or /crystalseed XD CRY THOSE CRSTALSEEDS)

  20. therandomguyinthecorner

    hey man that was a awesome MMO i wish i could ask you a few questions on the game (i have a reaserch project on it LOL).

  21. PotatoDuck

    2000+ Hours spent and still counting ^.^ That shows how much i am into this game! All the best for the future :)

  22. Shadowlaser

    My username is Shadowlaser if anyone will ask I loved reading this I really get how the game was made now

  23. Jeremy Blaauw

    Amazing blog! Unfortunately, I joined gt after it was released 1 year already… I would’ve loved to join when it just came out!

  24. Knead

    Wow.. This Game had been a HUGE impact of my life. I’ve been addicted to it when I have played it for a few days. It had changed alot of my personalities and thinking about the possibilities. I have been playing about 8 hrs and above DAILY. Except when I have school. I have also remembered the first time I have gotten my world lock and my first wings.. Fairy. All of them came from my past friends. If I remembered their usernames. I would just repay them back much more than what they deserved. I would thank them sincerely, since they led me to my best friends. It’s very rare to find a very Trusted person.. Which I was glad to find 3 of them at the same place. It was a bit heart breaking when they had to quit for 3 months. But, they CAME back! Seth. You have my honor.

  25. Mark Giam

    Awesome Behind-The-Scenes story about Growtopia…Anyone can advise me on programming games? Like what kinda games are the easiest to program for a beginner? and What game maker is best? other advice also welcome! :)

  26. Phoenixss53

    Hi this my ingame name too, iv loocked up all blogs you both have written. Pretty intresting i must say but there are still some glitches and id like to talk about something, and i cant wait when you will start the event when you can for a new mod. I know you are proboly thinking im gona be like @pixelmorph or other mod that destroyed other property to steal an item but the only reason i wana be a scamer is because im tired of my friends losing items to scamers. At first it wasnt so actual but now its actuly so annoying that you cant know, can you world trade with this guy or cant with that guy. If we could talk any way i will, so cya.

  27. Phoenixss53

    Mark Giam i am a programmer and first thing u need is a powerfull serf\ver or PC socond thing is a powerfull engine and third thing you need to know how to and what to programm.

    P.S

    easiest thing to programm is an indie game

  28. LE CITRON!!!!!!!!!!! (French for 'The Lemon')

    WOW MOST AWSOMEST GAME LOVE SO MUCH!!! I NEED ROLLBACK PLAQUE!!!!! COME SEE ME IN MY WORLD GRENINJA285!!!!! THANKS SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS GAME!!!!!! FROM YOUR BIGGEST FAN LE CITRON. And if your short on your dough come to greninja285 to buy a room for 2 big locks or a CLOTHING ITEM. THANKSSSSSSSSS… Maths reference GROWTOPIA > minecraft

  29. Pingback: Seth answers Growtopia questions (FAQ) | Code Dojo

  30. TrynaGO

    It is SUPER ULTRA MEGA GOOD blog . I read all of your things into your blog ; Pretty amazing !
    And wanna say something : I broke bulletin board that you signed 1 week ago . I was so sad cuz u come Growtopia like 1 months/1 times . I scared cuz i thought i wont get it again . I will be happy if you sign again ; world name is GHOSTUNAMK .
    #LuvYouSeth

  31. Sapo

    Missed those good times one of the best games I ever played, thanks for making a masterpiece like this Mike and Seth!

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