When you design something complex, your eyes and mind have to examine and make decisions on every detail. Even if the decisions took much less time than someone's later analysis, it's still a decision and there was still a significant amount of conscious or unconscious thought surrounding it.
Notice I said 'unconscious' thought? In this case, analysis is even more important, to help drive out a discussion on elements that nobody's really had yet. You might balk at calling someone whose obviously just 'threw something together' a genius, but the hand and eye and mind that threw something together like that managed to do something that thousands of others try and fail.
That's not seeing random patterns - that's double-blind testing. Well. Kinda.
Maybe the "random" distance between starting the game and the first pipe coming up is also just a function of how far along a loop you are when you start playing. Did you check the timing or when you started compared to the background, for example? If it's completely random, that's actually very interesting. At the same time, however, it doesn't seem like there's any purpose for that, either.
I'm guessing that this is the only game Dong has released and there's no way for us to look at his previous work to help confirm/deny his genius status. It also doesn't look like he's going to keep releasing games. I think I read somewhere that he's not really open to interviews either. Oh well. It's looking like it might be one of those internet mysteries that will remain unresolved forever.
Super Ball Juggling: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/super-ball-juggling/id733348...
Shuriken Block: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/shuriken-block/id636374339?m...
It was really in the clones that I noticed the flaws: Some are very well done and polished but were not fun... too easy and boring, or too hard and annoying.
When I started doing my "exact clone" I saw why - for such a simmmple idea it's very hard to balance. That's why I think the original author deserves more credit than he got. I personally would never call him a plagiarist and thinks he deserved every cent he made.
> Apophenia /æpɵˈfiːniə/ is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
The term is attributed to Klaus Conrad[1] by Peter Brugger,[2] who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to represent the human tendency to seek patterns in random information in general, such as with gambling and paranormal phenomena.[3]