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.
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