2048 Author Blog readme Light Game Popular Reason

This year, 20-Year-old Gabriele Cirulli, living in Italy, self-study web development and UI design. 2048 of the open source version was first put on the Github, since this triggered a global frenzy, a variety of shanzhai versions have been online. For more information, you can visit his Twitter, personal blog, and GitHub.

The following translations from Gabriele Cirulli's personal blog:

The last few weeks were pretty crazy and long for me. In March, I produced 2048 games for fun and released an open source version in GitHub. Over the next few weeks, more than 23 million people have played the game, accidentally becoming a worldwide hot topic.

This time is the most exciting time for me, but also let me stress the most time. It's great when millions of people play the game you create and like. This will be the motivation for most people, including me, to continue to create new things. But at the same time, when you create something that is known to the world, it means you are facing a new set of challenges, and if you have never experienced this kind of stress, you may be overwhelmed by the attention and expectations of others.

In this article, I will share with you my experiences, the way I deal with them, and the personal and professional aspects of the analysis, I will also share how the mental process changed my mind, let me to make this game.

This is a very long article, but I hope this article will bring some meaningful ideas and can help those who may face similar problems.

How did it all start?

I used the weekend to write 2048 games, just for fun. I was attracted to two games before, they were 1024! and 2048. I like to play these two games, I want to use a different visual display effect and faster animation to create my own version, just try to do it myself. At that time, I didn't know there was a game called Threes, it was the prototype of all this kind of game (including 2048).

Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend, as developers of threes, have shown that they devote a lot of time and effort to developing the game. They have recently expressed their threes about the current status of the most recent of the imitators. I understand their feelings, I also to their efforts in creating threes and painstaking care to express their heartfelt admiration. 2048 do owe them.

In the process of making 2048, I decided to host the project to Github and complete the project through Github. Since this is a project that is mostly based on other people's work, I don't want to make it a private project.

When I finished the game, I posted it through Github Pages and posted it on Designer News just to see how the feedback worked.

Outbreak

The following day, I received a message from a friend, let me look at the Hacker News home page. Someone posted 2048 there and is now in the top spot. As you can see from the Google Analytics report, thousands of people are now on Hacker News's website. I can't believe what happened.

Although this is like the Internet common Explosion news, came fast, I still spent a whole day to see the status of this post. I was very excited to see that the number of concerns continued to rise, and there was a bit of fear.

I was completely shocked by those positive comments. Everyone is talking about how much they like the game, they just can't stop and even play at work.

The next few days

I think the interest in 2048 will soon pass, but the next few days, everyone's enthusiasm is consistent. In fact, we are more concerned about the game. In a sense, 2048 has not only become a hot topic among Hacker news readers (it has become the third-most-popular topic in Hacker News history) and has been widely discussed in Twitter,facebook and even online. It was a little uncomfortable to see that it was becoming a global topic.

At the same time, my inbox is beginning to be filled with letters from players who like the game, and some developers want to get my authorization to develop mobile apps to make money.

The first question I faced was what I should do with the 2048 game and how I would respond to those emails. Although 2048 is a small project for me and I have no hope for it, people around me suggest that I should take this opportunity to make a good profit.

Personally, I don't like the idea of making money with the 2048 game because it's based on someone else's game.

Another thing that bothers me is that I have to give up my other projects to focus on the 2048 game. At that time, I was doing a freelance project, and focusing on 2048 meant I had to stop the project or end it.

Make 2048 mobile phone games, that is I unfamiliar with an area, even so, I must be fast enough, so as to become the first 2048 of the hand tour. The idea scares me because it makes me jump out of my comfort zone and I know nothing about the problems I'm facing.

These two reasons have been torturing me for days. I don't think there is any way to get out of this pain, and any decision I make will get me into trouble.

On the one hand, I can take this opportunity (and it looks like it will be the only time in my life) and get paid back, at the cost of misleading the players so that they can't tell which game is the original idea.

On the other hand, I can do nothing to continue my life. And I know that I will regret it when someone tells me later that I missed the chance.

In the end, I convinced myself that I decided not to do anything because I thought it was the only way to put an end to the pressure I was facing. I decided to let the game continue to open source, and I do not do mobile phone version.

After making that decision, I felt more comfortable immediately. It made me feel that I had made the right decision and that I would not regret it.

Back to the original point

In the next few days, I still feel relaxed.

During that time, the mobile version of the game has come out. Many of these phone versions have not even been approved by me, or by the developers of other reference games, and some of them point to imitating my game. After seeing the reaction of the threes developers to this, I feel that it is not caused by me, it is very good, the original decision is indeed correct.

A lot of people around me don't think so. My friends and family think my decision is terrible, but at the same time I think I just lost a chance that I wouldn't want to have a second time.

At first, their opinions would not annoy me. I know that the way I choose to get rid of the pressure I've had before, and in my mind, it's more important than money or fame.

But the feeling didn't last long. A few days later, the problems that I thought I had managed to get rid of were back, even worse than before. I began to regret wasting this opportunity, and I felt that my actions had disappointed the people around me. What makes me feel worse is that 2048 games that were made by others have topped the App store.

A glimmer of hope

I have been crazy about my situation, but I have reason to be happy.

Even though some people don't care about making money from other people's work, there are still a lot of creative people in the open source community who care about where the game comes from. They just want to make the game better, even take it to a whole new level.

I was much happier to see countless versions of the 2048 games appearing. I am very happy to play a variety of versions, happy to see what they can create a strange game.

People are passionate about the remake of this game and make it into a variety of completely different versions. It is a happy thing to discover that other people are trying to carry out what you create, especially if your work brings people happiness, and you enjoy it.

Change your Mind

Thanks to the efforts of my family and friends, I realized that the only way to make me feel like I didn't lose a chance is to accept it and create a mobile app. I won't do it for the money. In fact, money doesn't matter to me. What really matters is that I didn't waste a chance, whether it was a success or a failure.

People think about me that way? In every interview, I say that I will not earn a penny from the game for moral reasons. I think if I change my mind, I'll be considered a hypocrite, and I really don't want to be that person.

The hardest thing is that this decision will betray the people I expect. After all, I changed my mind and did something I had said I would never do. It took me a couple of days, but the last thing I accepted was that I didn't change my mind about money. I chose to do it in order not to let me feel missed a chance in the following days.

Because of my decision, people who have taken my past words to heart and admire the decisions I make are likely to feel cheated. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this article: I want to give an explanation of the conflicting choices that have been made.

I wish I could explain my behavior by making this decision. If not, I hope to at least help people understand how it all came about.

Development and application

I still think it's not good to keep the game as it is just packing it into an application. 2048 is not my game. On the contrary, it belongs to the countless contributors who believe it, and I have no right to take it for my own use. If I want this decision to look reasonable, then I have to seriously consider how to create this application.

Finally, it took me a whole month to develop, from the beginning of a little bit to the final careful grinding, excellence.

As a web developer and without any experience in mobile phone development, I couldn't start off with a formal IOS or Android app. So I decided to use PHONEGAP. PHONEGAP allows you to use HTML,CSS and JavaScript like web development to build a mobile app.

The problem with using PHONEGAP is that if you want to build a seemingly decent application, you're going to have to spend a lot of effort. Luckily, I want to make a game, which means I don't have to think very carefully about the interface effects on different operating systems.

I want this app to have a menu, because it's not a good experience to put players in the game directly when the app is started. A menu can also let me introduce new game mode, which will give the game luster.

I want the game logic to be generic so that when creating a new game mode, you just define an object and then insert it into the core of the game in a similar "hook" way, and it's very easy to modify the performance behavior.

I finally started a little bit from scratch to build the core of this application. The only code I keep from the open source version 2048 is the code that moves the tiles, which gives the player an authentic experience. Since the application's code is currently closed (but I might be able to open it in the future), it would be unfair if I used the code that someone else contributed to.

The code base was finally found to be 3 times times larger than the Web version, and most of the code was new.

In building this application, I found a lot of ways to improve and streamline code and interfaces. I really want to put these optimizations into open source version 2048. I also want to refactor the Open-source 2048 code to make it a wealth for the open source community.

If you're interested in the last game I've implemented, you can download IOS and Android. Version. I hope you will like it.

Summary

Hopefully this article will give you some interesting new ideas behind the 2048 boom, even if the way I deal with this situation may not be the best way.

Most of the choices I make are based on my own feelings, and the goal is to solve my own problems, not to get anything out of the project.

I hope this article is a reasonable explanation of how and why I made every decision, and I want to be able to help anyone who encounters these problems to understand what they are facing.