dang 12 years ago

I know that some of you are sick of 2048, but I think this series of variations on a theme is one of the more interesting things to have spontaneously appeared on Hacker News in recent memory, so I've turned off user flags for this story.

Yes, it's a game, and a lightweight game and a knockoff at that. But the creativity with which the experiments have responded to one another is real. We would love to see more of this kind of thing happen on Hacker News; in my mind, it's what it was made for. If HN could be a hotbed for such experiments and improvisation, who knows what might become of it.

  • edanm 12 years ago

    Also worth noting that this is one of those cases where HN spawned something that is very popular outside of HN.

    It makes me incredibly happy (and proud, if that makes sense) to see random family members and friends, definitely not HN geeks, playing this game. E.g. my Aunt.

  • danielweber 12 years ago

    While I have issues with how 2048 started as a copy of someone's work, the way people keep on doing versions of it to show off to other people with a "look what I did" seems exactly to meet the "hacker" in "Hacker News."

    • stefantalpalaru 12 years ago

      Almost everything starts as a copy of someone's work. Threes can be seen as a combination of Tetris and sliding block puzzles like '15'.

iLoch 12 years ago

Anyone else get motion sickness while playing? :/

  • Pfhreak 12 years ago

    Yes, that rotation is nauseating.

  • themadcreator 12 years ago

    Alright, for those of you that are experiencing nausea while playing this version of 2048, I've added a "toggle nausea" button to disable the rotation of the board.

  • antjanus 12 years ago

    yeah, pretty bad.

vlasev 12 years ago

I have an idea. What if you made this but every time you add to a block, it's height also increases (perhaps linearly with the power of 2)

rocky1138 12 years ago

This is cool! The only problem I have is that the greens are too similar :(

  • daturkel 12 years ago

    I'm colorblind and absolutely can't differentiate them at all :(

  • themadcreator 12 years ago

    Okay, I updated the colors so the dark green is darker.

    • daturkel 12 years ago

      Thanks! This is an improvement.

themadcreator 12 years ago

A lot of people are commenting that the colors are too similar. This is partially due to the prismastic color scheme we chose. The specular phong shading model throws them off a bit as well. Here are the current color values:

    #ffffff
    #ffff00
    #9aCD32
    #2faa2f
    #20B2AA
    #1088fF
    #7b68ee
    #9932cc
    #800080
    #8b0000
    #333333

Any suggestions on a different scheme that has a natural progression and are sufficiently dissimilar?

  • frozenport 12 years ago

    Adding numbers would help tell apart tiles.

yeukhon 12 years ago

An idea I have for this 3D version is to add weight to the game. If one side is heavier the platform should move toward that side. If the user cannot balance the platform after certain amount of time the user will lose the game as the platform will flip over. This will make the game more challenging. As a player I often end up keeping all my tiles on one side.

  • themadcreator 12 years ago

    Cool idea! I plan on adding some rigid body physics to this library.

  • dpedu 12 years ago

    Ever play "Leverage"? It's a board game along those lines.

primitivesuave 12 years ago

This is easily the most interesting version of 2048 I've seen so far. I really like that there are no numbers displayed on the tiles - after a couple minutes of playing, it becomes intuitive which tiles are at which height.

  • awwducks 12 years ago

    Not sure what it says about the colored version of 2048, but I found myself doing much better than the numbered version. My strategy didn't involve as much reading as it normally does. Maybe just one or two moves ahead each time.

shocks 12 years ago

This is great, but the colours at to similar. Perhaps use some more distinct and vibrant colours? It's difficult to read the board at a quick glance.

pokpokpok 12 years ago

value should be presented as Z height of the tile as well

  • themadcreator 12 years ago

    Wouldn't the occlusion of the shapes behind it be confusing?

    • pokpokpok 12 years ago

      a little bit, but they don't need to get too tall and it would look interesting

    • icefox 12 years ago

      It could be negative height which would work very well and not obstruct any view.

pvnick 12 years ago

Love it! Although the two shades of blue threw me off a couple times, since they're so similar.

feacompare 12 years ago

Really easy to use code! I've used seen.js for a rotating shape in the banner of my website http://feacompare.com I still can't get it to load a .obj mesh but that will be even better.

japhyr 12 years ago

I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, but this is the most fun version I've played so far. I'm not sure what I'm doing because I can't keep track of the order the colors appear in.

  • themadcreator 12 years ago

    There's an ordered palette of colors below that matches to the 2^N values from the original. Plus you get used to it after a couple minutes =).

    • icambron 12 years ago

      I did manage to get 2048 the first time through, but I made several mistakes thinking I'd be able to merge a couple of purples that weren't really the same. It's less of a problem when they're right next to each other, but when you're thinking ahead, it's easy to get a little lost on the spectrum.

ericclemmons 12 years ago

What makest his variation fun, compared to others, for me is the incrementing hue. For some reason, it's clearer how to combine them than when they're numbers.

awwducks 12 years ago

Not sure anyone cares very much, but I like to see the tiles beyond 2048.

I got 4096 here on the bottom right.

http://imgur.com/e6DcCL5

  • awwducks 12 years ago

    Sorry, no luck at 8192.

    http://imgur.com/UcufCpj

    • themadcreator 12 years ago

      The tiles should start to cycle through the colors again after 2048. From 2^12 - 2^22 it does triangular prisms, from 2^23 and beyond it does pyramids.

      Are you only getting white shapes after 2048?

z3phyr 12 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, Why its not 2.5D ?

sadfnjksdf 12 years ago

I made more points by just going counterclockwise through the arrow keys over and over: 5368

nkg 12 years ago

If you did it with colors, you could do it with playmates!

pcurve 12 years ago

Just when I thought I kicked my 2048 addiction...

Great job. I love it.

arfliw 12 years ago

Would be way better with numbers on the tiles.

arfliw 12 years ago

23360 - anybody do better?

wololo_ 12 years ago

these 2048 variations gotta stop pumping in the frontpage

  • gcb0 12 years ago

    I've seen it as a seenjs example... whats wrong with that? better than fizzbuzz.