51–60 of 218 posts
Having a foot in the indie game developer community and another in startups, it's fascinating to see the HN comments in response to this post. The indie game developers care about originality, passion, the sweat and hard months of work, the dedication to the craft. I think the point of Asher's essay is to show how much love and effort went into it, and that they were indeed the first to ship a full, polished game wit…
I have a friend who works at a successful mobile gaming company (not Zynga). He freely admits that what they do is rip off whatever games are most popular. Period. End of Story. They even have a SWAT team that will go out and build prototypes in days and launch them on the App store as quickly as possible to get some users. They've even launched games with the exact same name as the popular game in hopes of tricking…
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…
> 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.
> 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…
I think the largest takeaways on the crazy, viral successes of simple games like 2048 and Flappy Bird is that if the game is designed for the player to lose (at least most of the time) then playing again should be dead simple. If your game is really that addicting, anything between the end of one game and the start of another is an obstacle.
> 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…
> I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat.
I've never played 1024. Could you explain how it "sands [the ideas] down" and and "is easier to grasp"? I found Threes simple to grasp, and it sounded to me from reading the essay that 1024 actually had more features. I would expect that would make it slower to learn.
> Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined
This is certainly true. I've found Threes did a pretty good job of this. My only complaint was the 'signing' process at the end which was fixed with the first patch.
> I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how not to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners.
I didn't see this post as a "here's why clones suck" thing. I took it as a "here's what it was like for us to make our game". Only the prelude mentions the clones, the rest is just a development log. I'm glad they included that preamble, because I've been curious about their thoughts.
Basically, I didn't see this as a message to customers but a 'here's what game development can be like' post.
> Customers don't give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price.
Ah, but how they measure "best" matters. I adore Three's presentation and I think the polish they put on it was well worth it. I see it as a sign of the amount of work they put into the whole product. I was happy to plunk down $3.
On the other hand 1024 and 2048 look like prototypes to me. Drawing a few colors of boxes and making them move around the screen isn't hard. If 2048 was the only game to exist, they would have a higher barrier to get me to pay $3 as from screenshots (all you get in the app store) it doesn't look like it's worth it.
As a general note, it was clear a lot of thought and time went into Threes, but I'm amazed they had so many different visual designs and concepts along the way. There are at least 2-3x as many as I would have guessed.
I also kind of liked the argyle idea. That was rather neat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Threes makes you swipe-swipe-swipe after every game ... before you can play again I actually took that de-emphasised retry loop of Threes to be a lovely touch of "humane" game design. A lot of us are probably familiar with an unconscious just-one-more insta-retry reflex, and while that does keep you in a game, there's a fair chance of the conclusion being quitting it on a bleary-eyed low note after your last-last-l…
I despise UI that gets in my way. It's even worse if it's for my own good.
Luckily, they added an option to turn it off in the 1.1 patch so you don't have to deal with it anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The thing with 2048 is a bit different though. It wasn't just a game craze, it was people playing with algorithms. Making a funny/curious clone of the game had become the game for some.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The trouble is that the essay takes a while getting to that point - up until then it sounds like it might be a little bitter. I was about to skip to the end myself when I ran across the 'change of tone'.
Then again, it might have seemed even more bitter if it came after all the discussion of their work.