How Web developers make games from "2048"

The past few weeks have been a long and crazy time for me. In March, I made a game called 2048 for fun and released it as open source on Github. In the following weeks, it unexpectedly became a worldwide hit and over 23 million people have played it.

This period of time has been the most exciting and stressful in my life. It's a great feeling to know that something you've created is being played and enjoyed by millions of people. For most people (myself included), it's a great motivation to keep creating new stuff. At the same time, when something you've created becomes world-famous, you have to face a bunch of new challenges. If you've never faced this kind of pressure, the attention and expectations can be overwhelming.

In this article, I will share with you what I went through and how I dealt with it, both personally and professionally. I will also explain what made me change my mind and make a mobile version of this game.

This is a long post, but I hope it brings some meaningful ideas and helps others who may be facing similar problems.

How it all began

I wrote 2048 on the weekends, just for fun. I had been drawn to two games before, 1024 and 2048. I loved playing both games, and I wanted to create my own version with a different visual presentation and faster animations, just to see if I could do it. At the time, I didn't know about a game called Threes, which was the prototype of all such games (including 2048).

Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend, the developers of Threes, have proven that they put a lot of time and effort into the development of this game. They recently expressed their dissatisfaction with the current situation of Threes's imitators becoming popular. I understand their feelings, and I have sincere admiration for the effort and hard work they put into creating Threes. "2048" really owes them a lot.

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

Once I finished the game, I released it through Github Pages and posted it on DesignerNews, just to see how people responded.

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The next day, I received a message from a friend asking me to check the front page of Hacker News. Someone had posted 2048 there, and it was now at the top of the list. Google Analytics showed that there were thousands of people on the Hacker News site. I couldn't believe what was happening.

Although this was one of those breaking news stories that came and went as quickly as the internet usually does, I still spent the entire day checking the status of this post. I was very excited and a little scared to see the number of followers continue to rise.

I was completely blown away by the positive reviews. Everyone was talking about how much they loved the game and how they couldn't stop playing it, even during work hours.

The next few days

I thought the interest in 2048 would fade quickly, but over the next few days, the enthusiasm has remained the same. In fact, people are paying more attention to the game. In a sense, 2048 has not only become a hot topic among HackerNews readers (it has become the third most liked topic in the history of HackerNews), but it has also been widely discussed on Twitter, Facebook, and even offline. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable to see it gradually become a global topic.

At the same time, my inbox began to be filled with letters from players who liked the game, and some developers hoped to get my authorization to develop mobile applications to make money.

The first problem I faced was what I should do with the game 2048 and how I should respond to these emails. Although 2048 was just a small project for me and I had no high hopes for it, people around me suggested that I should take this opportunity to make a fortune from it.

Personally, I don't really like the idea of ​​making money off of 2048, since it's based on someone else's game.

Another thing that bothered me was that I had to give up my other projects in order to focus on 2048. At the time, I was working on a freelance project, and focusing on 2048 meant I had to stop that project or end it.

Making 2048 into a mobile game was an area I was unfamiliar with, but even so, I had to be fast enough to be the first mobile game of 2048. This idea scared me because it would take me out of my comfortable life, and I had no idea what I was going to face.

These two reasons tormented me for days. I felt there was no way out of this pain and any decision I made would get me into trouble.

On the one hand, I could take this opportunity (which seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity) and reap the rewards, at the expense of misleading players about which game was the original idea.

On the other hand, I could do nothing and move on with my life, knowing that I would regret it later when someone told me I had missed this opportunity.

Eventually, I convinced myself that I was going to do nothing, because I thought it was the only way to end the stress I was facing. I decided to keep the game open source, and I would not make a mobile version.

After making that decision, I immediately felt better. It made me feel like I made the right decision and I won't regret it.

Back to square one

I continued to feel relaxed over the next few days.

At that time, mobile versions of the game had already been released. Many of these mobile versions did not even have my consent or the consent of the developers of other reference games, and of course some of them were pointed out to be imitations of my game. After seeing the reaction of the Threes developers to this, I felt that it was not me who caused all this, and it was great that the decision I made was correct.

A lot of people around me didn't see it that way. My friends and family thought it was a terrible decision, but at the same time I thought I just threw away an opportunity that I wouldn't want to have a second time.

Initially, their opinions didn't bother me. I knew that I had chosen a way to get rid of the pressure I had experienced before, and in my opinion, this was much more important than money or fame.

But it didn't last. A few days later, the problems I thought I had gotten rid of came back, even worse than before. I started to regret wasting this opportunity, and I felt like I was letting people around me down with my behavior. To make matters worse, a game called 2048 made by someone else topped the AppStore charts.

A ray of hope

I'm driven crazy by my situation, but I have reason to be happy.

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

I've been much happier seeing the countless versions of 2048 being created. I've had a blast playing all of them and seeing what weird games they come up with.

People are passionately remaking the game, making all sorts of completely different versions of it. It's a blessing to find that other people are working hard to make something you created a reality, especially when your work brings joy to people and you enjoy that feeling.

Change of mind

Thanks to the efforts of my family and friends, I realized that the only way I could not feel like I missed an opportunity was to take it and create an app. I would not do it for the money. In fact, money is not important to me. What really matters is that I did not waste an opportunity, regardless of the ultimate result of success or failure.

What do people think of me? In every interview I've ever given, I've said that I'm not going to make a penny from gaming for ethical reasons. I think if I changed my mind I'd be considered a hypocrite, and I really don't want to be that kind of person.

The hardest part was that this decision would make people who had placed their hopes in me feel betrayed. After all, I changed my mind and did something I had said I would never do. It hurt for days, but the biggest thing that made it work was knowing that I didn't change my mind for the money. I chose to do it so that I wouldn't feel like I missed an opportunity later in life.

People who took my previous words to heart and admired the decision I made may feel cheated by my decision. This is one of the reasons why I wrote this article: I want to explain my contradictory choice and the special circumstances under which it was made.

Hopefully the context of my decision will explain my behavior, and if not, I hope it will at least help others understand where this came from.

Develop applications

I still think it's a bad idea to keep the game as is and just package it into an app. 2048 is not my game. Instead, it belongs to the countless contributors who believe in it, and I have no right to take it for my own use. If I want this decision to be justified, then I have to think carefully about how to create this app.

***, it took me a whole month to develop, from the initial little bit to ***'s careful polishing and striving for perfection.

As a web developer with no experience in mobile development, I couldn't make a legitimate iOS or Android app from the beginning. So, I decided to use Phonegap. Phonegap allows you to build a mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript just like web development.

The problem with using Phonegap is that if you want to build an app that looks decent, you have to work very hard. Luckily, I wanted to make a game, which meant I didn't have to think too carefully about how the interface would look on different operating systems.

I wanted this app to have a menu, because it's not a very good experience to just drop the player into the game when the app starts. A menu would also allow me to introduce new game modes, which would add to the game.

I want the game logic to be universal, so that when creating a new game mode, I only need to define an object, then embed it into the core of the game in a similar way to "hook", and can easily modify the performance behavior.

I ended up building the core of the app piece by piece from scratch. The only code I kept from the open source version of 2048 was the code for moving the tiles, which gives the player an authentic experience. Since the code for this app is currently closed source (but I may open source it in the future), it would be unfair if I used code contributed by others.

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

While building this application, I discovered many ways to improve and streamline the code and interfaces. I really want to incorporate these optimizations into the open source version of 2048. I also want to refactor the open source code of 2048 to make it an asset to the open source community.

If you are interested in my latest game, you can download the iOS and Android versions to experience it. I hope you will like it.

Summarize

Hopefully this post has given you some interesting new perspectives on the popularity of 2048, even if my approach to the situation may not be the best one.

Most of the choices I made were based on how I felt and were designed to solve my own problems rather than what I could gain from the project.

I hope this post will help explain how and why I made each decision, and help anyone else who has these issues understand what they are facing.