Can someone please enlighten me? The number one 2048 app in the iOS store is by some company called Ketchapp. It looks pretty much the same (very similar). Did they all clone the web version by the op? Has op released his own version after a month? How does he expect to climb up the charts?
2048, success and me
131–140 of 233 posts
Re: 2048, success and me
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...]we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant[...] Really? So '2048' changed the world. I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days. How many apps away from world peace?! ps. Developers are the only group of people w…
I agree. In the realm of games, Starcraft and Counter Strike changed the world, largely contributing to the creation of a new industry, where e-sports professionals can make a living playing games. 2048, while a great creation, has not changed the world in any significant way.
> has not changed the world in any significant way
Adding the "in any significant way" qualifier essentially means you agree that 2048 changed the world.
Re: 2048, success and me
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that your second point is vitally important for creators (particularly new developers) to spend time thinking about. For a long while I was caught in the trap of believing that I wasn't any good because none of my work had "taken off" as much as the work I would hear about on HN or TechCrunch, etc. It's a dangerous place to be, particularly because it can lead to a lack of motivation and ultimately debilitatin…
As a developer submitting to Show HN, there are some projects that I expected to take off and some that were mere novelties. Two of my biggest projects were things I didn't expect to make a bleep, yet the project that I considered most useful [0] never went anywhere [0] https://github.com/kolodny/nip
For "nip", I suspect that is because it quite literally is "plumbing" of a sort that people have their favourite tools for from before, whether it's awk, sed, perl, or any other language interpreter that can easily take an expression on the command line (e.g. ruby can pretend to be both awk and sed of sorts with the right command line options).
It looks neat, but it'd appeal to people who spend most of their time doing stuff with node anyway, and doesn't have other scripting alternatives they prefer for one-liners.
There's a ton of inertia for those kind of tools. E.g. even though I prefer Ruby, I tend to use awk for one-liners because I can expect it to be available "everywhere", and because I have "muscle memory" for dozens of common patterns because I started using it so long ago.
That's not a criticism of your tool - just some thoughts on reasons why it might be harder to get attention for that kind of tool.
Re: 2048, success and me
#134A few thoughts as someone who has developed games for iOS, Android, and the web: In today's world, if you want to retain implicit ownership of your product's name, a simultaneous triple-platform release is not optional, it is required. It must be performed in precisely the following way, or your launch will fail: - Register your game's domain before announcing it to the public. - Next, upload your iOS app to iTunes C…
Regarding your Phonegap remarks in last paragraph. Are the described problems in Phonegap or in Phonegap Build? What about local Cordova?
Re: 2048, success and me
#135gabrielecirulli's success has been one of my favorite moments I've witnessed on HN. Congratulations to him, it was/is an amazing phenomenon. I also think we can take a few important lessons here to take the tech world a little more out of the shadows. 1) As a few have said, show your friends the source code and say "if you could learn to do this, you could have made 2048". It's not too intimidating of a codebase and…
It's not only "not intimidating", it's actually a prime example of good quality code. See http://blog.danieljanus.pl/blog/2014/04/02/2048/
Re: 2048, success and me
#136A couple of OT thoughts... 1) It was very odd seeing something go from the HN "new" page, to the front page, to seeing people talk about it on twitter, to hearing about it from friends who have no idea what a "github" is, to my mom asking me to help her download this new game all her friends are playing. I still don't know how I feel about it. And yes, for some reason I feel like I have some sort of ownership simply…
Regarding point 1, to add to that weirdness, all of this closely followed the massive App Store success of Threes, which 2048 is nearly a clone of (and I understand that Threes is nearly a clone of another earlier game).
Threes! was the original, not "nearly a clone".
Re: 2048, success and me
#137A couple of OT thoughts... 1) It was very odd seeing something go from the HN "new" page, to the front page, to seeing people talk about it on twitter, to hearing about it from friends who have no idea what a "github" is, to my mom asking me to help her download this new game all her friends are playing. I still don't know how I feel about it. And yes, for some reason I feel like I have some sort of ownership simply…
> [...]we need to remember that (hubris aside) what we do everyday, even if it's just a side project we did for fun one evening, has the potential to change the world in an instant[...] Really? So '2048' changed the world. I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days. How many apps away from world peace?! ps. Developers are the only group of people w…
I have this feeling that developers change the world more often than Cartoon/TV-heros save thew world these days.
It's probably correct. How many fictional heroes are there, compared to how many real world developers?
ps. Developers are the only group of people who are so disillusioned to collectively think that their products change the world.
Lots of non-developers think their efforts can change the world:
http://right-brain-law.blogspot.com/2013/07/i-went-to-law-sc...
http://admissions.uoregon.edu/majors/political%20science "Get Ready to Change the World"
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/donors/change_world.shtml "10 ways an arts degree can change the world"
Do you have a real point to go with the bitter cynicism?
Re: 2048, success and me
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. In the realm of games, Starcraft and Counter Strike changed the world, largely contributing to the creation of a new industry, where e-sports professionals can make a living playing games. 2048, while a great creation, has not changed the world in any significant way.
> has not changed the world in any significant way Adding the "in any significant way" qualifier essentially means you agree that 2048 changed the world.
I guess it has to be implicitly added as soon as we speak about changing the world. At some level everything change the world and then the expression loses its meaning.
Re: 2048, success and me
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visual design is important in games. Novel game mechanics are important in games. In this case, I think the mechanics were the difficult thing to create. And the mechanics took months to refine. Looking at the history of Threes -> 1024 -> 2048, I think the business incentive for copying and polishing existing game designs is clearly superior to the business incentive for designing a novel mechanic. Why make a novel m…
There's several extenuating circumstances no? One, as original as Threes is it's unfortunately super easy to clone. 2048 being made in a weekend being proof. Yes I know it's not an exact clone. Let's say then it was very easy to make a similar game. There are plenty of popular games that aren't easy to clone quickly. So I'd argue the lesson there is consider making something hard to clone. Also, he open sourced the g…
Do you think ease of cloning is the correct metric to optimize?
Put another way, if a game developer thinks this: "This would be a really fun game! But it would be too easy to clone, so I guess I will not make it. I'll do something else." Is that a thought process that you would support?
Re: 2048, success and me
#140Awesome success story ! Inspiring !!