Comment by terabytest

11 years ago

Hey, author here! I'm pretty overwhelmed that this made it to the top of HN without me even thinking of posting it here :)

I made this game as a fun weekend project, inspired by another game called 1024 (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1024!/id823499224) and a spinoff called 2048 (http://saming.fr/p/2048/). I did mine to add animations to the latter, which was a bit hard to play without them.

I discovered Threes only today, and I had no idea it looked so similar. I searched a bit and it appears as if 1024 is also inspired by Threes, so my game is probably the last of a long chain of clones :P

The code is also open-source. You can find it here: https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/2048

Feel free to ask me anything, and thanks to everyone for the attention! :)

By the way, my highscore is somewhere around 6000. Admittedly, I'm quite bad at playing my own game :P

EDIT: Make sure not to get addicted!

EDIT 2: The game now has swipe gestures and vim keys support (added by @rayhaanj)!

147 comments

terabytest

Reply
phillmv  11 years ago

Holy shit I just lost like 45 minutes to this.

seventytwo  11 years ago

You definitely need to have some kind of counter for how many times someone has reached 2048, and out of how many games played.

  • gridspy  11 years ago

    Or an expansion on that. Keep track of how many 128s, 256s etc you've ever formed. Show them as big counters directly under the game with an animation when you create any of them.

    • benjamincburns  11 years ago

      Log scale histogram?

      Edit:

      Actually all you need to store is the highest block achieved, and the number of times it's been hit. For instance, if you've only ever generated 2 8's, then you know that you've had 4 4's, and 8 2's...

      Edit 2: Does the game allow four 2's to cascade into an 8? If so, maybe you could also store combo stats. It'd be way cooler to smash together four 256's than to smash together two 256's two times.

      Not sure how that plays into the histogram.

      2 replies →

jonalmeida  11 years ago

I can't tell if I despise you or admire you, all I know is that there was light outside my window when I first began playing this, and now it's pitch dark.

Upvoted you to show my anger! :)

primitivesuave  11 years ago

I haven't been this addicted to a game since Drop7.

pje  11 years ago

Please allow me to throw money at you somehow

gopalv  11 years ago

Programmer Step #2 - write an automated solver :)

vorg  11 years ago

> this made it to the top of HN without me even thinking of posting it here

Good for beta testing it.

Unlike with Threes, there's no real reason to use numbers since they're all powers of 2. If you used letters (A, B, C, ...) you could market it to non-HN sorts, and have a version of the game in a 5x5 grid, or, more to the point, in a 6x6 grid with letters A to Z. Most people in the world know the order of letters in English.

  • eru  11 years ago

    Good idea with the letters, but perhaps not necessary. People are happy with simple numbers. Just look at Sudoku which doesn't use A to I.

a13xnet  11 years ago

Great "time waster" - just got 5752 score from first try! Very well executed, who cares if its a clone! :) Great job!

filipm  11 years ago

Hi Gabriele, I created a mirror of your project with an easier memorable name at

http://2048.mx/

:-) Hope that's fine. It might take an hour or so for the domain to be accessible for everyone due to DNS cache.

rayanm  11 years ago

I've started playing threes a week ago. Both threes and 2048 are fun to play. Except that I think in threes the challenge starts earlier in the game and every step counts and you can easily get into a deadlock. Can't wait to see the source code and analytics. Maybe you want to add on the page the highest score :)

RealCasually  11 years ago

Very fun game! Love the dynamic, couldn't get higher than 256 though. Also check out Fives for Android--somewhat similar: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcg.fives

kaybe  11 years ago

Two hours lost at uni today and checking hn first thing back home... nooooooo! I will now proceed to waste time. Good job! :)

edit: Ok, some random friend just emailed me and told me to check out your game. This friend does not hang out at the online places I do. It seems to be on fire!

kngspook  11 years ago

Oh, _now_ you tell me not to get addicted! >:( You should've made that a splash page to the site, not an edit to a comment on the submission link.

But seriously, well done. :) Completely destroyed my productivity.

mzs  11 years ago

Just wanted to let you know (but wanted to wait before somebody would down vote such a comment here) that I really enjoyed your game, thanks and cheers!

AJ72  11 years ago

Totally cool, and addictive. Not exactly news, but at another level, completely HN worthy

SonicSoul  11 years ago

awesome game. I love the math

  2 * 1024 = 2048
  4 * 512  = 2048
  8 * 256  = 2048
  ..
  1024 * 2 = 2048
            20480 <-- minimum points

is there a elegant formula to get to the minimum required points?

  • dbaupp  11 years ago

    That's not quite the minimum points, since occasionally (10% of the time) a 4 spawns, instead of a 2.

crag  11 years ago

I just wasted 60 mins playing this game. And I think I'm hooked.

I hate you. ;)

mantrax  11 years ago

"EDIT: Make sure not to get addicted!"

Oh, no we have another Flappy Story in the making here!