Fear not. I don't plan on pulling a flappy bird. Although I now kind-of understand what Dong Nguyen might have felt like, even if at a much smaller scale.
Your game is amazing! I really enjoy it. Ported it over to Firefox OS so that people in 16 countries can be introduced to it. https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/2048~/
I did not sleep last night. I did not work the whole of yesterday (well, I resigned from my job yesterday). Please keep the game up till I start my new job.
The Flappy Bird Effect: When a simple game rises in popularity leading other hackers to build an AI and multiplayer versions of it leading to its own demise.
We should expect Gabriele Cirulli to be in Rollingstone next. :p
When I was in college, me and my project team mates used to go to this fabrication workshop for project work once per week. I was kind of a counter strike addict in those days. The workshop was inside an old building and at one particular spot, I used to feel like hiding behind the wall!
I guess it was more like, an impulse, not a conscious thought. So I had an impulse to do it, but never actually thought about doing it, and didn't realize what I had almost done until I was at a complete stop.
Well first of all it seems easy enough to do. The concept sure is easy. Then you find that it's actually quite interesting and new to you. Then, perhaps most importantly for the addictive effect, is that making the moves and going from dieing to restarting the game is so fluent/quick that it's just long enough for you to think "ah, I'll do one more, this wont won't take long". That plus the fact that it's really not that easy to win made it highly addictive for me.
I will add to those:
* sometimes system gets stuck and no competitor is found (well - maybe there really is no one else)
* once board was loaded, for competitor blocks were moving so fast as if computer would play or some sort of bot
I'm having some difficulty getting competitors, with no indication of how long it will take to find one, and when I did find one, about 3 seconds into the game I was told I lost with my opponent having performed no moves. I feel like this needs some work.
Hey author here! Sorry for the buggyness, this is my first stab at realtime. I can confirm that everybody you're playing is a real person. I wasn't sure how to simulate latency for testing so that could be the source of the issues. I also have a mix of server/client msgs being sent, but plan on moving it all to the server except for moves.
In the game I played, the winner did in fact have more points, but their tiles were a strict subset of the other player's (64,4,2,2 vs 64,32,16,8,4,4,2,2), so its not really clear what the scoring mechanism is.
All the players I played against play blazingly fast, seems almost just mindless bashing. Is it just me who actually takes their sweet time thinking about every move?
"Use your arrow keys to move the tiles" ?
How about a few more words about rules.
How do you pick which tile you want to move?
And btw, when I tried, two tiles with same numbers were NOT merging most of the time.
Other times it seemed that the entire row was moving. Then again, I could not figure out how to select a tile to move. Mouse seemed to work but only sometimes. Perhaps accidentally... Too buggy or just big time lag.., or just big time lag..
So when there was only 15 secs left, I got 4xxx points and my opponents only got xxx points. Then I was told I was lost (because I got no possible move I assume) and he was won, but that is really a bad game-winning condition because there was no way my opponent would got 4000 points in 15 secs.
So why not let the game clock finish before the game tells who is the winner?
There's some bug ending games early, so this is pretty much a button mashing contest. Also, when games end early, it doesn't properly declare the winner. I assume something's broken in detecting if the board has no moves: http://i.imgur.com/4XBGCzI.png
- With a clear point advantage still both players get declared winner
- After one move I was declared loser, while actually I made the only move and it was a valid one as well, with loads of options left (as it was the first move)
- It thinks the game is finished on random occasions.
Why not? That would be awsome. There's already a python repository for interfacing with bots, and it works using unix socket. It's here: https://github.com/matslindh/4096
I'm not sure 1vs1 battle matches is the best idea (it's not chess), but it shouldn't be too much hassle to make it into a platform that tracks the highest scores, best averages etc. It could be divided into different time controls (1 sec per move, 3 minutes per game etc.). The point would be to see who could make the best AI.
It could have a simple flask app, or similar, that just shows the high scores and makes it possible to reserve bot names (so other people can't play as you.)
I'm just putting ideas into someones (noones) head. But if people who's currently/who wants to play with 2048 AI responds to this, I might make an effort to get it starting.
