T w e n t y S i d e d

On Tuesday I talked about messing around with the game Threes! and making variants of the established gameplay. If you didn’t read that entry, then the short version is this: I felt the game was too random, and I experimented with ways of making outcomes more related to player skill and less about the benevolence of the random number generator. I ran some simulations but didn’t come to any interesting conclusions. Then yesterday I ran a few more, and now I think I have some useful results. But first, let’s get caught up:

It turns out that I wasn’t the only person to think of moving the game to powers of two. Someone made 2048, which is also built around joining powers of two.

One of the points I made was that there were a lot of variants of the game that you could make. Threes! is a charming little game, but the given mechanics could be altered to make dozens of different games. What if tiles moved as far as possible, instead of just one space? How do you handle multiple combines in a single move? Where are new tiles added? How far in advance should the player see upcoming tiles? What if the goal was reversed, so you wanted to fill the board in as few moves as possible? What if we added powerups or space-clearing combos, like we see in Chime, Bejewled, or Lumines? What happens if we make the board larger? What if the player is told to achieve a win state, rather than delaying an inevitable lose state?Roughly, instead of playing to the highest score possible, your goal is to make a single tile worth x points. What if we give the user an undo button?

And so on.

Basically, we could make a hundred different games here. Some will be okay, some might be great, and many will be terrible, random, or boring. A big part of game design (in any genre) is in being able to figure out which mechanics will lead to stimulating play. So how do we find the right design?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experimenting with Threes! Part 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

NOTE: This post is a little less thought-out than my usual programming posts. This was written pretty much on the fly as I was experimenting with stuff and not after I’d reflected on it. I’m not even sure it will make sense. Give it a try.

Today we’re going to be talking about Threes!, an iOS game. I haven’t played that version, but I’ve played this web-based clone. For the purposes of this discussion, you should probably go play the game, get addicted for a few days (everyone does) and then come back here once the mania passes. It will be easier to follow the discussion that way.

After doing that, you might want to read this article from Touch Arcade that talks about how someone who wrote an AI to play the game, which revealed some interesting things about the mechanics.

If you don’t have that kind of time, then here’s a basic run-down of the gameplay:

You play using the arrow keys. Tiles will attempt to move in the given direction. If a blue slides into a red (or vice-versa) they merge to form a 3. From there it follows a simple pattern of matching like with like. 3+3=6. 6+6=12. 12+12=24. 24+24=48. And so on. The trick is that every time you move, a new tile is added to the board. If I shift the pieces up, then a new tile slides in on the bottom row. The game ends when the board fills up such that no more moves are possible.

So your apparent objective is to keep merging tiles to make ever-larger numbers. But the actual challenge is to simply merge tiles faster than they appear to keep the board from filling in. If you play a couple of times, you’ll probably get a score of a few hundred.

You normally expect your scores to go up as you play a game. Over time, your skill improves and you’re able to do better. Except, that’s not quite how things went for me. Sure, I repeatedly broke my high score, eventually playing a game all the way to about 7,500It’s been reported that scores in excess of 21,000 are possible.. But mixed in there were still a lot of 150-point games. When that kind of thing happened I always assumed that I had stopped paying attention. But this kept happening, no matter how hard I “tried”. Some games dead-ended early and some went a long way, and my results didn’t seem to line up with how much effort I was putting in.

This makes me think that the game has a huge element of luck. I wanted to play around with this idea, so I decided to make my own version of the game so I could explore the mechanics.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experimenting with Threes!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.