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2048, success and me

gabrielecirulli.com

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Re: 2048, success and me

#51

Post by iambateman »

spiek wrote: post #20
iambateman wrote: post #14

I added that thing to my homescreen and played it as an "app" for weeks. The only problem is 2048 gets really boring once you have a framework for how to do it. It's nice to see the background of how he was feeling during that time. The (relatively muted) outcry of "derivative" never felt fair to me. His game is more fun to play than Threes. Millions of people agree.

It's funny that you say that 2048 "gets really boring" after a while, but that it is "more fun to play than Threes". It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power. edit: for clarification.

2048 for me was about a week or two of daily play and then done.

Re: 2048, success and me

#52

Post by beaumartinez »

swalsh wrote: post #11

He seems so worried about taking someone else's credit, that he's missing the value HE brought to the table. He made the game approachable. The visual style of the game made it more fluid, which made it more approachable. At least to me, the two games he derived his own from don't seem to pull me in the same way. The app has a similar appeal. In games, there's a lot of value in visual design... he got the visual desi…

This is very well said, and a very good point.

Not all derivative works are strictly bad, in the same sense that copyright infringement (eg, downloading an album on The Pirate Bay to try it out) can be a gateway to purchasing content (albums, concert tickets) a consumer wouldn't have otherwise.

Re: 2048, success and me

#53

Post by jader201 »

kohanz wrote: post #13

Thanks to the help of my parents and my friends, I realized that the only way to get over this without feeling like I had missed an opportunity would be to embrace it and produce an app. I wouldn’t be doing it for profit, though. In fact, that is not what matters to me. I'm slightly confused, because he repeatedly states that profit is not a motivator, but then that menu screenshot of the app shows a "Remove Ads" but…

I totally see where the OP is coming from.

12 years ago, I built a site I had absolutely zero intentions of making money from. I had an interest in an upcoming video game, and thought it would make a perfect mate for an online community. So I reached out and found a talented guy online that was also interested in the game and also had the skills that I didn't (web design), and in a couple months, we launched.

After about a year or two, money became a necessity: the popularity outgrew the free bandwidth, and I was forced to find paid hosting. So I started accepting donations. But that wasn't quite enough to cover the costs, so I added ads to help supplement the donations.

But surprise, as the popularity grew, the revenue generated from the ads and the donations coming in started to largely outweigh the costs, and now I'm making a pretty decent passive income from it.

I could easily scale back to just donations now, but since the ads are there and pulling in quite a bit (for a site mostly on auto-pilot), I have no intentions of scaling back.

(I will say, though, that I don't go to the extremes that most do to monetize their site. The ads are only in the forum area of the site, and are only in two to three locations. No interstitials, no videos, no popups/unders, etc. And they're located at the top, bottom, and right vs. right in the middle of the content. Pretty much anything that would annoy me (banners don't annoy me) I keep off the site.)

I'm not saying the OP is making money out of necessity, but just that I understand going into something with the intentions of it just being a fun side project, and then later realizing the potential of making money from it.

Re: 2048, success and me

#54

Post by pdkl95 »

spiek wrote: post #20
iambateman wrote: post #14

I added that thing to my homescreen and played it as an "app" for weeks. The only problem is 2048 gets really boring once you have a framework for how to do it. It's nice to see the background of how he was feeling during that time. The (relatively muted) outcry of "derivative" never felt fair to me. His game is more fun to play than Threes. Millions of people agree.

It's funny that you say that 2048 "gets really boring" after a while, but that it is "more fun to play than Threes". It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power. edit: for clarification.

And yet, while the games are obviously based on the same mechanics, I find 2048 to be the better game because it is simpler. 2048 gets right to the point, and is trivial to understand. This is an important design point that is often missed: games often work best when they can be easily discovered. Stuff that slows that down (unnecessary complexity, a UI that slows down how fast you can iterate on mistakes, etc) can impact how "annoying" the game is perceived to be.

(I do they're both good games, though, and could see how either could be preferred)

Re: 2048, success and me

#56

Post by nkuttler »

napolux wrote: post #32

IMHO It's to late for the "official" apps. So many clones out there (let's call them clones, even if they're maybe based on the original code). I think that this is a big missed opportunity for him (even if he had enough "success" from the original game alone)

Indeed. I just installed the official one and won't be using it. Ads, small numbers. I use one from estoty entertainment lab which is ad free afaict.

Re: 2048, success and me

#57

Post by habosa »

gabrielecirulli'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 might make some more people want to learn to code.

2) If you've ever met anyone who didn't see the point of open source, the 1000s of 2048 derivations are a public monument to FOSS. I have tried to explain to my friends a million times what Github is, but then all I had to do was say "yeah for that clone someone just forked the original repo and changed yellow to blue" and suddenly they get it. I know that leaves out the part of open-source where people contribute back to the original but it's a good starting point.

3) This, or some variation of this, is why many of us do what we do. The power for a few thousand keystrokes to become a worldwide phenomenon with the only cost being $0.00 and some time. It's amazing how much influence you can have from behind a laptop monitor. When people explain why I code/blog/read HN for fun, what i tell them is that programming gives you an amazing sense of mental potency. 2048 really maxed out the gauge on how potent you can be.

Re: 2048, success and me

#59

Post by sergiotapia »

FilhoDaPuTa wrote: post #43
FilhoDaPuTa wrote: post #24

I have been playing the 2048 for Android in the Top 1 of 2048 apps and now tried this guy original. Well it sucks.. the original programmer 2048 is so slow and laggish in comparison it makes it unplayable for who's coming from the other one. Visuals are also better.

Why are you down voting an helpful critic to the programmer. Only praising comments allowed ?

Your username is kind of against the rules here. Maybe a mod can help you change it?

Re: 2048, success and me

#60

Post by adwf »

spiek wrote: post #20
iambateman wrote: post #14

I added that thing to my homescreen and played it as an "app" for weeks. The only problem is 2048 gets really boring once you have a framework for how to do it. It's nice to see the background of how he was feeling during that time. The (relatively muted) outcry of "derivative" never felt fair to me. His game is more fun to play than Threes. Millions of people agree.

It's funny that you say that 2048 "gets really boring" after a while, but that it is "more fun to play than Threes". It's interesting that the balance and effort that went into Threes resulted in a game that (to me) is more complex and possesses more staying power. However, it is still regarded as not as good as a game with more immediate gratification and significantly less staying power. edit: for clarification.

I'm always wary of game designers who espouse "balance" all the time. The only place you ever need balance is in a multiplayer game as people like be on an even playing field.

In single player games however, too much striving for balance can lead to a very boring game. One of the classic failures in this regard was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It had a balancing mechanism for all the enemies in the game, so that they leveled up in step with the player. However, this meant that every single monster was almost the exact same challenge, all the way to the end. ie. You may have leveled up and increased your damage output, but the monsters have increased their hitpoints and it still takes the same 3 attacks to kill anything. It removed all sense of progression from the game.

So it just goes to show that too much balance can really bore people! You need to hook a player and get them interested by giving them a sense of progression, of achievement.

Some ways that you can give a sense of achievement is by letting them work out optimal strategies, min/max'd character builds, etc. These can be unintentional or artificially included (eg. super weapons near the final boss fight).

tldr; People like a sense of progression, even if that is achieved by having an unbalanced game.

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