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Comment by mdaniel

1 year ago

This is just incredibly fun, congratulations! It reminds me of "Really Bad Chess" which I also love: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noodlecake...

Two things, one on-topic and the other off-topic:

The thing which makes 2048 moderately easy to reason about is that incoming pieces are always "1". However, this game appears to spawn in random pieces, with random point values. I tried to follow the to-and-fro of the design blog in order to find out why this is, and I get the impression it's for avoiding getting the player stuck, but it does have the disadvantage of making planning incredibly hard. The good news is that by reading the blog I finally understood what was going on with the screen shake

off-topic: that "Subscribe to me blog" modal is not only bad UX (imho, of course), but also doubles down on the UX tire-fire by resetting my reading position to the top of the page. It's almost enough to warrant a command-w right there. Just one datum, but it for sure made me sad

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mdaniel

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animuchan  1 year ago

Thanks a lot for the kind words!

I was afraid people would abandon good runs if too long, so started spawning 4 and 8 sometimes to speed it up somewhat. (There's 180-odd entries participating in the compo, so even 10 minutes of play time per entry is a huge commitment for people looking to vote on most / all games.)

Re: Subscribe popup: this is the sole reason I'm looking to migrate from Hashnode! All of their UX "improvements" are egregious, but this one surely takes the cake. I very much agree with your sentiment.

When I joined, it was a nice technical writing-oriented site, but these days it has entirely succumbed to terrible product managers. E.g. their blog post editor's main function is seemingly to upsell their generative AI wrapper.

  • cjpearson  1 year ago

    Thanks for sharing!

    I'm seconding the "incredibly fun" comment, but I would keep the occasional big numbers. It probably took me an hour to finish the game and I wouldn't want to slow it down further. The little extra bit of randomness/luck it adds is nice too.

    When it comes to the UI, I was a bit confused about how the gameover and piece removal works. I guess if there are no legal moves it removes a piece?

    Also, the multiple move mechanic where the last piece to move is automatically preselected sometimes tripped me up a few times and caused me to accidentally downgrade a piece.

    • rob74  1 year ago

      The king will "kill" one of your pieces if he has no other legal moves, but only if you are not one move away from losing. I also noticed this very late, same as noticing that you only need one piece with value 1024 to win the game, because another one is already on the board ~

  • mdaniel  1 year ago

    > a huge commitment for people looking to vote on most / all games.

    I wanted to say that I went to vote for your game but they seem to only support GitHub login and their GH app does crazypants shit like "Act on your behalf" versus the much more sane "user:email"[1] or whatever which would prove that I'm a person without granting some rando website "sure, bro, take GitHub actions for me"

    So, my HN upvote will have to suffice for Internet Points of Appreciation

    1: https://docs.github.com/en/apps/oauth-apps/building-oauth-ap...

    • alcore  1 year ago

      The site only requests read access to your email, as the login flow message _actually_ shows.

      The "act on your behalf" statement is GitHub's standard message for all GitHub apps, regardless of whether they actually ask to be granted any permissions that would let them perform such actions. There's a "learn more" link right at that statement, that would've explained pretty much exactly this. I find it curious that you bothered to venture into docs and link them, but did not bother to click _that_ one to understand what's actually going on.

      It says, i.a.: "The GitHub App can only do things that both you and the app have permission to do.". Since the site only asks for read access to your email address, it cannot actually do anything else. As simple as that.

      4 replies →

    • animuchan  1 year ago

      Thank you! :) And yeah I'll ask the orgs why does the bot request these permissions, might be an oversight.