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Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

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Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#31

Post by mgiannopoulos »

Having seen their games ripped off and cloned dozens of times within a few weeks, the developers of popular iOS/Android game Threes could be responding with lawsuits and anger.

Instead, they are expressing grief (having been accused of cloning the... clones), understanding of how ideas evolve and an awesome release of 45,000 words of internal discussions, sketches, prototype designs of their work of 14 months to get to release.

If you're interested in game design, this is pure gold.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#32

Post by WildUtah »

This is a shamefully non-responsive web page design for a company that builds mobile apps. The sidebar is set to cover the main text even with my page width set to almost 1000 px wide. Even worse, the sidebar is a fixed position and on top element that I can't scroll away from or out from under.

I expect better web design from the team behind Threes, which I bought and liked.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#33

Post by powera »

From the very end - these guys sound REALLY bitter:

"""If you read this whole thing. Thank you. Wow. If you scrolled down here and skimmed it or just wanted to see if there was a prize at the end, well, you're here. It's about the journey, man.

Hopefully this post points to what we're getting at when we say that making these tiny games is littered with hard and painful times that are full of uncertainty and self-doubt. You never know if something is really going to work. It's not easy. But cloning or ripping off a design in a week, that's a bit different isn't it?"""

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#35

Post by moron4hire »

Gracana wrote: post #13
smacktoward wrote: post #7

> We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality. But here is some hard truth: none of that matters. Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is what you have produced at the end of all th…

> Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that's not the point they're trying to make. They're not saying "respect our efforts," they're saying "we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable," and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.

If the game were very superior to the clones, they wouldn't have to explain why. Games are like jokes, in that way.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#36

Post by nashashmi »

Okay, Okay. I get the crying from the threes developers and all, but there is a key difference between why 2048 did phenomenally well and threes didn't.

2048 is a game that was HACKED together and displayed on HACKER news and made open source for the sole purpose of independent HACKING, and indie creativity.

In fact, 2048 has got to be the best case study of how HACKING went viral, not so much about how the game went viral, even if that is what theoretically happened.

From that perspective, the THREEs game is just collateral damage and not really what matters here. The Threes game's developers in effect are all crying about how people are misusing their ideas, copying all the wrong details, and not copying what is the true flattery of the game in the first place. And they wrote a blog post to brag about it all! But little do they understand that people (hackers) take what they like and leave the rest.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#37

Post by krallja »

smacktoward wrote: post #7

> We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. I played Threes, and I liked it. And I feel for these guys having to watch everybody and his brother pile on to the idea they had to work so hard to tease out into reality. But here is some hard truth: none of that matters. Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is what you have produced at the end of all th…

> Threes makes you swipe-swipe-swipe after every game to get your score and "sign" it (why do I care about signing it?) before you can play again

At least on iOS, you can choose "Autosign Scores" in the Options.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#38

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

baddox wrote: post #30

> We wanted players to be able to play Threes over many months, if not years. We both beat 2048 on our first tries. I was addicted to Threes when I first got it. I played dozens of games per session, and multiple sessions per day. So it was definitely addictive. But, as it turned out, I only played Threes for about as many days. The flame that burns brightest burns out the soonest, I suppose.

I play Threes less often now too, but when I want to play something (eg waiting at the bus stop), I crack open Threes.

It's a super well polished game that you can play with 1 hand.

Re: Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

#40

Post by prezjordan »

I felt the same sentiment when 2048 first landed. I was shocked at how no one had really heard of Threes!

Then the developer put "Gameplay similar to Threes" or something like that on the page. I thought it was a nice gesture.

But, overall, I felt for the Threes developers. I'm glad to see this posted to HN.

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