I actually took that de-emphasised retry loop of Threes to be a lovely touch of "humane" game design. A lot of us are probably familiar with an unconscious just-one-more insta-retry reflex, and while that does keep you in a game, there's a fair chance of the conclusion being quitting it on a bleary-eyed low note after your last-last-last-for-real attempt goes worse than your first.
Their little cooldown there struck me as very much designed rather than a lack of knowledge about how mobile games "should be". People making games of Threes quality level are no dummies when it comes to the details.
Luckily, they added an option to turn it off in the 1.1 patch so you don't have to deal with it anymore.
That was my initial reaction to that statement as well, but upon reading on I realized that's not the point they're trying to make. They're not saying "respect our efforts," they're saying "we spent a year on designing this to be challenging and replayable," and they go on to provide evidence for their claims of superiority.
It's actually a big compliment, too. It signifies the design is conceptually sound and as small as it could be.
The thing with 2048 is a bit different though. It wasn't just a game craze, it was people playing with algorithms. Making a funny/curious clone of the game had become the game for some.
This is the critical point missed by calling 2048 a clone. Of course it's a clone, and that's what makes it so interesting.
2048, in isolation, isn't that much fun; it captured interest for a while, but what made it gain popularity was being so simple that it lent itself to a hundred variations. Every one of those is, in some ways, more a "clone" of 2048 than 2048 is of Threes, but the meta-game has become fun in ways the game itself isn't. Just look at things like Flappy 2048, or Numberwang 2048.
I don't think we can know why 2048 became so popular and Threes fell in its own shadow. Maybe it's a sign that open source and free as in freedom have finally registered with the general consumer on an emotional level, though I doubt it. If we knew for sure then we could make such better toys that the kids ignore the box.
I think this is an important reason not to dismiss the Web as a platform.
See how easy it is to shoot down someone's opinion and state your own?
Then again, it might have seemed even more bitter if it came after all the discussion of their work.
All they want is a good game, and for many of them that game is 2048...
Threes remains interesting. It is a better game.
> I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat.
I've never played 1024. Could you explain how it "sands [the ideas] down" and and "is easier to grasp"? I found Threes simple to grasp, and it sounded to me from reading the essay that 1024 actually had more features. I would expect that would make it slower to learn.
> Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined
This is certainly true. I've found Threes did a pretty good job of this. My only complaint was the 'signing' process at the end which was fixed with the first patch.
> I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how not to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners.
I didn't see this post as a "here's why clones suck" thing. I took it as a "here's what it was like for us to make our game". Only the prelude mentions the clones, the rest is just a development log. I'm glad they included that preamble, because I've been curious about their thoughts.
Basically, I didn't see this as a message to customers but a 'here's what game development can be like' post.
> Customers don't give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price.
Ah, but how they measure "best" matters. I adore Three's presentation and I think the polish they put on it was well worth it. I see it as a sign of the amount of work they put into the whole product. I was happy to plunk down $3.
On the other hand 1024 and 2048 look like prototypes to me. Drawing a few colors of boxes and making them move around the screen isn't hard. If 2048 was the only game to exist, they would have a higher barrier to get me to pay $3 as from screenshots (all you get in the app store) it doesn't look like it's worth it.
As a general note, it was clear a lot of thought and time went into Threes, but I'm amazed they had so many different visual designs and concepts along the way. There are at least 2-3x as many as I would have guessed.
I also kind of liked the argyle idea. That was rather neat.
Threes then seems more like a combination of this concept and a 15 puzzle.
I see. That's now how I play so I wouldn't have thought of that.
At least on iOS, you can choose "Autosign Scores" in the Options.
I agree with this, and the "copy, then improve" mindset, along with the customer-centric view, has some great similarities to the "shanzhai" culture in China:
http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/shanzhai-s-role-in...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Shanzhai
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
On the Internet, I see this same remix philosophy manifest itself very strongly in the creation and propagation of memes.
I think the largest takeaways on the crazy, viral successes of simple games like 2048 and Flappy Bird is that if the game is designed for the player to lose (at least most of the time) then playing again should be dead simple. If your game is really that addicting, anything between the end of one game and the start of another is an obstacle.
So, while they could probably make the game restarting interface more streamlined, the part where you're playing the game is something subtly deeper that unfortunately doesn't become apparent until you've put some time into it.
IMO, the original developer's mistake was the "build it and they will come" strategy.
Even if you built the perfect game, the "cloners" hussled more to get people to play their game, and got traction faster.
Just because you build the perfect product, does not mean that people will use it.
We call it "marketing" and "luck"
This is such facile commentary on the metagame. Any armchair designer can come along and recite a checklist of attributes that any "well-designed" game must satisfy.
But the fact is that gameplay is much more important than metagame and the gameplay of Threes is much better considered. It's a deep game yes, and maybe that's not for everybody, but it doesn't fail as a mobile game. I play it on the tube all the time, and it works fine just to put it away and come back to it.
It doesn't have be better or even different for a clone to be successful.
Someone copies it exactly and starts making money off it. Or more likely, 100 different people. What's your response to that supposed to be then?
If investments in innovation and design result in returns only for cloners, they will not be made, and we will all suffer.
It is simply false to say 'all they care about is how to get the best product for the best price'. They also care about cool new stuff. Unfortunately, they don't connect the two.
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 that work. What makes it better or worse is how it stacks up relative to the competition -- even the competition that is shamelessly riffing off your core ideas -- not how much sweat you put into it.
And I gotta say, having played 2048, 1024 and Threes (the Android versions, at least), I think of the three of them 1024 stands up the best. It takes the core ideas in Threes and sands them down into a game that is easier to grasp and plays faster, without becoming so simple (a la 2048) that it becomes a game a script can beat. 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; 1024 just moves you straight on to the next game. Mobile games need to be simple and streamlined, and 1024 understands that imperative better than Threes does.
I say all this to help others understand why I would point to this essay as an example of how not to respond to a problem like a barrage of cloners. It's because this essay sees the world entirely from the developers' perspective -- look how hard we worked! Look how long we labored! Look how subtle our decisions were! -- which is exactly the wrong angle.
You want your communications to speak from the customer's perspective, not from your own. Customers don't give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price. So if you put your heart and soul into something, and then someone comes along, tweaks your thing and makes it better, the way to respond isn't to ask people to respect how hard you worked; it's to look closely at the new thing, understand why people like it better, and then bring that understanding to your next iteration or your next product.