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Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game

asherv.com

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

#61

Post by MBCook »

krallja wrote: post #37
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.

That didn't come about until the first patch though. It was a rather large annoyance during the early stages of my 'addiction'.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #58
benched wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise UI that gets in my way. It's even worse if it's for my own good.

That extra swiping did get in my way, and I would say it was one of the only flaws in Threes. Luckily, they added an option to turn it off in the 1.1 patch so you don't have to deal with it anymore.

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by userbinator »

jagt wrote: post #42
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…

Right. So we're on hackernews celebrating ripoffs and clones.

Standing on the shoulders of giants. Civilization has always advanced itself in this way.

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

#64

Post by MBCook »

ghshephard wrote: post #26

I loved threes, Played it for close to 20-30 hours during winter break. As soon as 2048 came out, I managed to get to 2048 on my second try based on my experience with threes. I play 2048 in my browser whenever I have a spare 5 minutes, and when I'm on the Bus, I still frequently hop into a quick game of Threes. The mechanics of the two games are very similar, and obviously 2048 is a direct descendent of threes - but…

> But, Threes does have some "issue" - one is really poor startup times. It's slow enough that I am more likely to play 2048 in my browser, than bother firing up Threes on my iPhone. The piece assignment in threes, is also somewhat less pleasing to my experience than in 2048, for whatever reason.

I'll admit that still puzzles me. I'm not sure what Threes is doing but it does seem to take an inordinately long amount of time.

Adding a 'loading' spinner just emphasized that I was being forced to wait.

It's actually effected my playing. If I go to open Threes and it pops straight up (it was still in memory) I'll play a quick game. But often if I get that 'startup screen' I'll immediately exit the app and do something else like check Twitter or Safari.

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

#65

Post by MBCook »

steven2012 wrote: post #20

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…

I was actually rather surprised that it took almost 3 weeks for Threes clones to start showing up. It's not like the app came out of nowhere, it was discussed on Mac and iOS game blogs before release and was featured in the App store almost instantly.

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

#66

Post by DanBC »

GuiA wrote: post #46

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…

They shipped the first version. They then decide to ise the term "rip offs" - even though people developing one of the first very popular rip offs claim to have never seen Threes!

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

#67

Post by frou_dh »

MBCook wrote: post #58
benched wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise UI that gets in my way. It's even worse if it's for my own good.

That extra swiping did get in my way, and I would say it was one of the only flaws in Threes. Luckily, they added an option to turn it off in the 1.1 patch so you don't have to deal with it anymore.

Swiping remains to score and then save your board. Yes, text input is a bit much!

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

#68

Post by MBCook »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #38
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.

My play has gone down too, but for me it's because I seem to have hit a plateau. I managed to get a 768 once a few weeks ago, but haven't been close. Most of my recent scores have been 8-9k when my highscore is over 20k. It's kind of discouraging that I can't get near my score again.

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

#69

Post by zemo »

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…

This is an essay from a craftsman to other craftsmen. Your position is not one of a craftsman, it is one of a salesman.

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

#70

Post by MBCook »

DanBC wrote: post #66
GuiA wrote: post #46

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…

They shipped the first version. They then decide to ise the term "rip offs" - even though people developing one of the first very popular rip offs claim to have never seen Threes!

Are you referring to 2048?

They said they were based on 1024, and 1024 explicitly launched with an app store description along the lines of "Why waste your money on Threes, we're free".

EDIT: Found the quote. Surprise surprise it's no longer in their description.

"No need to pay for ThreesGames. This is a simple and fun gift for you, and it’s free."

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