Last weekend, I built a clone of a popular game called 2048. I wanted to make something that people would enjoy, or at least get a chuckle out of when landing on it. Something people would share with their friends. It was a no-brainer to mash up one of the most played javascript games and one of the most popular TV shows. Here is the result (WARNING, audio is auto-played).
Autoplay
To balance ridiculousness and lolfactor, I had to make the decision of whether or not to automatically start up the GoT theme song. Technically, its very bad practice to play something without the user’s permission, but on the other hand, if you’re clicking on “2048 Game of Thrones Edition”, what else can you expect? If you launch it during a meeting or in the classroom, you pretty much deserve it.
Assets
How long did it take me to modify the game to my liking? Not very long. The code was very clean and straightforward, and the longest task was choosing images to use for the tiles, and cropping them to the correct dimensions. To make things interesting for the actual players, I made the tiles represent character deaths chronologically. A walk-through of the past 3 seasons of sorts. The game leads up to the death of a character everybody hated since the start of the show, something I thought players would want to reach. I encourage anyone with free time to give modding this game a shot. There is even a Udacity class that teaches you how to do it. Google it.
Bitcoin/Dogecoin Donations
As I wrote about in a previous post, I began to fiddle with crypto-currencies in the past few months. To spice thing up, I added donation buttons, and to my pleasant surprise, actually got enough to buy a cup of coffee. It was quite easy to embed these buttons, and I would recommend every indie developer and blogger to implement these, as the donation process takes about 2 seconds if you have a digital wallet — much easier than PayPal or credit card forms.
Traffic and Backlash
To spread the word about my game, I made posts to a couple of fan-boards, reddit, 4chan, twitter, hacker news, a pair of other news aggregators. This was minimal, and I was able to do this very quickly.
Over three days, the game got a little over 1000 unique users, with a peak of 50 concurrent users. The most traffic (around 40%) came from Reddit, although it seems reddit users were also the most inactive in terms of comments. I saw multiple comments with people proclaiming how awesome it is. On 4chan, the post generated the most conversation, but also got flagged and removed very quickly, with one guy being very very upset, and commenting: “Keep your cancer at home”. Thanks 4chan…
The new advanced Google Analytics hit the user demographics right on the dot, with most users being “technophiles”:
Some other stats:
15% mobile users (of those, 60% iOS users)
80% Age 18-24
85% Males 15% Female visitors
10% Returning visitors
More Clones and Ridiculousness
I watch quite a lot of shows, so it would be interesting to see what happens if I create more TV-show themed versions. Perhaps it will give me some insight into how popular each show is, how its fans compare in tech usage, and when it starts to die out.
Thanks for reading and look out for more Luke Weil themed 2048s!
Check out my github: https://github.com/lukeweil
Check out my twitter: https://twitter.com/weilluke
