From Viral Sensation to Full-Time Passion: The 2048 Story

Hi! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hello everyone. I’m Gabriele Cirulli, the creator of 2048—the simple number puzzle game that went viral back in 2014.

I work as a web designer and developer, and most recently I was with 1Password. But I’ve now quit my job to focus full-time on revamping 2048 and making it a lot better for new and old players alike.

2048 is very simple to play. Players would need to swipe and slide numbered tiles on a 4x4 grid and combine them so that they would result in a 2048 tile. Once you hit 2048, you win! But you can keep going if you want to and challenge yourself even further.

What game are you enjoying right now?

It's going to sound a bit out of place, but it's actually Fortnite. I recently got hooked by Fortnite and it's a kind of game that I wouldn't have expected to get hooked on, but it's got some really fun mechanics, so I've been quite addicted to it.

It's actually a great way to connect with my friends that are abroad. I come from Italy and I live in the Netherlands now, so I have friends back in Italy. And we make a point of playing every once in a while just to chat and play. It’s fun and it doesn't take any mental effort. It doesn't detract from our other commitments and it's just a nice way to catch up.

When I was younger, there used to be local multiplayer games where you could just invite your friends over and play for a while. Those are actually something that I miss, but that's not something that you find in the market anymore. It seems like it's gone out of fashion. But it was very fun as well.

Why did you choose to be a web designer and developer?

So it started when I was a kid. The real story going all the way back is that my mom took an HTML web development course and the web was a completely different thing back then. So you might remember those HTML pages with GIFs as backgrounds, animated word art titles and stuff like that. That's the time that we're talking about. And she took a course back then.

I ran into her notes and I wanted to experiment with that. I used to use FrontPage, which has since disappeared. It was like a web development software by Microsoft but for making HTML pages. That's how I got started. And then there was a period of time when I got really into 3D graphics and Photoshop. So I started browsing forums that had to do with that.

And eventually I fell back into web development when I found forums that were dedicated to all sorts of digital art and development. And I got really interested in that. And I just really enjoyed the process of designing a website and then building it and making it interactive. Back in the day, we used to use PHP. That was a whole different set of tools than what we have today, even though PHP is still popular. But yeah, that's how I started.

The powerful feeling of creation and the new generation of coding

I feel like everything has changed when it comes to web development. When I started, it was even before WordPress was popular. There was this software called Dreamweaver, which was similar to what I mentioned, FrontPage, and you could just open it up and design your web page. It was clunky, but it felt like magic putting things together like that, and the same goes with PHP. 

There was a feeling that you would just write some code and it would automatically work. It was a much shorter feedback loop, even though the tools that we use today make development a lot more streamlined. However, I've noticed an increase in overall complexity. There's more architecture, more structure, more abstraction… there's more code in general, even though you write less code maybe as a result of it, but it's still quite different.

I think there's a much bigger learning curve and there is a much higher step to get over when it comes to achieving some kind of level of production-quality software. If you start from scratch and you want to get to a point where you're employable in the industry, it takes more time and effort. Obviously, I think that comes with the maturing of the industry as a whole.

So the tools and techniques change, and you have to learn how to do more with the same things. It's probably the same as other fields when it comes to engineering, although I'm not an expert in any other sort of engineering—if you can call my software “engineered” in any way. But it's just… today, you need to know more, you need to learn more, need to pay attention to more.

The particular thing that I've noticed with the JavaScript landscape is that it changes every few years and it changes quite rapidly. So even keeping up to date with that is quite difficult. It was actually quite interesting to compare the code base of the original 2048, which was a vanilla JavaScript application. No dependencies, no package manager, no libraries, just JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

And the code that I wrote for the new version of 2048 uses a completely different toolset. It has to be bundled, has dependencies and uses a frontend library. I haven't counted recently, but I think it's 10 to 15 times bigger as a code base, not including the library code. So the code that I wrote by myself is 10 to 15 times larger. It begs the question: do we need that much code? I did my best to keep it as light as possible, but it's changed. It's definitely changed.

How did it feel to create a viral hit when you were 19?

The whole experience was surreal. It came completely out of nowhere. I actually remember how I found out that 2048 was going viral. A friend of mine from Portugal, I'd met him a year before when I was traveling for a startup program, texted me on Facebook and he said, “Congrats for 2048. It seems to be trending!” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And then I checked my Google Analytics page, and it looked like there were about a thousand people on the page at the same time. And the number just kept on growing. The way that 2048 went viral was that it landed on Hacker News.

And since after landing there, it just got picked up by, first of all, the developer niche, and then eventually bubbled up into the mainstream. And it just never stopped once it started. That's the feeling that I got. It just never slowed down. I think it took a couple of weeks to a month for it to actually start simmering down, which was, as I said, quite surreal.

I have to contextualize this by saying that 2048 was just an experiment for me. It was just a toy project that I built based entirely on pre-existing ideas and projects. It was just a thing that I made in my spare time. It was just for fun, a test of my own skills. And to have something like that immediately propelled into the mainstream without any way to predict it or any expectations that it would happen is quite a strange and I would say, also stressful experience. So it's quite cool that this can happen in this day and age, given the internet and global access to information. But, yes, it's definitely an interesting experience.

Can you tell us more about the game being based on pre-existing projects?

Essentially, it started with a game called Threes, which was made by another developer. This game is, on the surface, quite similar to 2048, but has a lot more detail to it. It's a game where you don't actually play with powers of two. You start with tiles with the number one and the number two, you join them and then you slowly rack up numbers. I think the power of two multiplied by three. That's my understanding of the formula. So it's quite different. The mechanics are slightly different as well. You don't move all of the tiles in a single direction all the way. They just move by one cell at a time. It's a game that is quite finely crafted and seems to have been a lot of work that went into it, and it's got really fancy graphics. I've played it a couple of times.

It's important to note that Threes is the starting point of this type of game. I do not know if there are any games that came before Threes that share similar characteristics. But the interesting thing that happened is that Threes got copied by another game called 1024. That game also had very cheerful graphics and colorful dynamics, but its implementation resembled the standard 2048 implementation a lot more. So you start seeing tiles moving all in the same direction and they merge when they touch, and they're all powers of two.

And then there's another game that came along the way called 2048, which is where it gets confusing. This was a game made by somebody who was part of the same web development forum that I was part of. And this person made essentially what looks like my version of 2048. And it's the game that I got inspiration from. The differences are that this game didn't have animations, and it had a different color scheme. And there were a couple of bugs in terms of how the tiles slide on the screen. Sometimes they would get stuck in each other, and in general, because of the lack of animations, it was extremely hard to follow the action on screen. You had to really think hard about how things moved and why.

This last game that I mentioned was my first exposure to the concept and going back all the way to Threes. I had actually not seen or heard of this game all the way through until after I made 2048. So I was not directly influenced by Threes, although indirectly I was because of this chain of two other games that got inspired by it.

And so what happened is that I started obsessively playing 2048 by saming. And at some point, I was like, “Okay, I really like this version of the game, the one called 2048, but it's missing something.” I just want to make it in my own way. So I saw it as a test of my own skills. I felt like I had a bit of a vision of what it could be but it was just a vague idea in my mind. I wanted to change the colors. It used to have a blue color scheme, and my version of 2048 ended up having a warm color scheme. And I've stuck to that color scheme pretty religiously over the years. And that's how it started.

Self-set challenges

So my challenge was, can I make the animations great? Can I test my skills as a developer? Can I make the colors appealing? And I actually nearly gave up. This whole development process took about five days throughout the course of a week. Most of the work was during that weekend.

There was a point in time when I felt like I was about to give up because I could not crack the algorithm to get the tiles to move in exactly the right way and now understand why it was difficult or why it was not working well in the other version of the game. So it took me a while to figure that out. I remember the moment when I figured it out. I remember the relief of finally having the game work as expected.

And, yeah, after a few more tweaks, I just put it online on GitHub and that was it. That was my game. I posted it on a website called Designer News, which has since disappeared. It was a news board like Reddit, and I just asked for feedback. That was the extent of my question. I did not think that the game would be popular, but after that somebody picked it up and posted it on Hacker News and the rest is history, as they say. It just completely went out of my control in terms of going viral. So yeah, this is a game that was inspired by multiple games coming before it.

On improving on others’ pre-existing work

The way that I look at it is that we as a civilization don't often do things that are completely original. Like everything that we do are explorations on top of something that already existed at some point. We literally stand on the shoulders of giants with everything that we do and that we experience in daily life. So I think 2048 is an example of that. I was able to take inspiration and be in the right place at the right time because I think that also matters. 

Generally speaking, I don't feel like it detracts from the value of the game to credit the influences that it received. Yeah, everything is coming from things that existed before. And it's actually my favorite part of the creative process to just take something, look at it for what it is, and then think, “Okay, what else could it be? What else could I make with it?”

What do you feel about so many people making clones of your work, which is also “a clone of a clone”?

So I would say that I personally don't consider any of these ripoffs for a number of reasons. One, 2048 was created in the same way as 2048's derivatives, the creative process and the evolution are just instances of the same process. So it would not be fair to call them ripoffs in my opinion. On the other hand, I think I stand by the decision that I made when I made 2048 open source under the MIT license when I released it. That decision was made before I knew that 2048 would become popular. And I have to be honest, I would probably have evaluated that decision differently with the benefit of hindsight, purely because when you have something like that, it can bring a lot of positives.

It being open source, however, also brought a lot of negatives. But generally speaking, I think I stand by the fact that it's open source, and that comes with consequences. So I believe in the act of adjusting to the consequences of one's decisions. I think it's actually a great thing and it's partly what should be credited for 2048’s success. The fact that it was so accessible and that it was easy to take it and just make it your own thing. 

I don't have statistics or information about this, but I think it introduced a lot of people to the concept of programming and just how easy and rewarding it can be. And I think just the fact that an entire community could be built around something like this and it could grow purely by word of mouth and by people experimenting is a pretty beautiful thing in its own right, in my opinion.

At the time I was pretty overwhelmed, maybe too overwhelmed to understand what exactly was going on. But looking back, it's actually awesome. I don't dive in very frequently. I haven't recently looked at all of the versions of 2048 that exist. But just to remember that there are almost, I'm pretty sure there are literally thousands of them if you really look, and find that each brings their own flair.

So there's a 2048 AI, there's a 2048 with different animations and there's a 2048 that tries to make the game as hard as possible by putting the tiles in the worst place imaginable. That's really fun. And I think that's also what's at the center of the open source culture.

What’s the highest achievable score on your game?

I might be wrong, but I think it's 131,000 or so. That's the highest tile that's achievable. I might be off by a couple of powers of two, but there's a limit to the tiles that you can achieve. I was actually chatting about this with the 2048 community on Discord. There are only so many tiles that you can fit in a 4x4 board and there's actually a way that you can calculate that. If you've got 16 tiles, you can only fit a tile that's 2 to the power of 16. Again, I might be completely off on the math. If you bring the board down to a 3x3, then you can only get up to 1024 before you run out of space. And you can imagine that if you increase the board, you get, I think, eight or nine more powers of two that you can reach. So, again, the math is very vague. 

There are actually people in the 2048 community on Discord that you can find through Reddit that spend a lot of their time on calculations, and this is, to me, the most amazing thing, because my brain explodes when I look at it. They spend a lot of time working out the math of 2048 in order to come up with strategies and systems to beat the game faster and to calculate the outcomes before they actually happen. So there's a lot of randomness. So what you can do is you can predict all of the ways that the randomness could manifest and then you've got a way to predict the game and to manage its outcomes. So this is amazing to see.

And yeah, I've only scratched the surface of this. I'm not a mathematician and I don't have any sort of math skills other than the ordinary levels. So it's amazing to see that people have been able to find such depth in something that I would have never imagined had even had this much depth.

Technical randomness in number generation

There is a 10% chance that you get a 4 tile and the randomness that is used is the one that's provided by the browser, at least in the old version. So I used to use Math.random() in the JavaScript API. It's quite interesting that I've seen a number of complaints that the random number generator seems a bit stuck or it almost feels to people like it's actually not random. 

It brings back a post that I read once about how people used to complain that the original iPod’s shuffle mechanism used to play the same song multiple times, or at least it didn't feel random, like the way it repeated songs. And that's actually interesting because I think, again, to my understanding, I'm not into statistics at any academic level, but I think the feeling of repetition is actually a feature of randomness because randomness is not evenly distributed, at least, that’s the way I understand it.

So what it means is that we are, as humans, really attuned to detecting patterns in the things that we see and that we experience. So to us, it feels very infuriating when you're trying to move a tile out of the way and the two spawns, or the four even spawns in exactly the worst place that it could be spawning. And then you start wondering, “Okay, is the developer actually doing something to make that happen?” or “Does the game hate me? Is there something wrong with me?” It's quite interesting.

When did you start putting ads on your game?

So when the game started in 2014, I still lived in Italy. I just turned 20 a few days after the game came out. And yeah, the game had no ads. It had nothing, actually. It was just a webpage. The success of the game and the way that it went viral brought a lot of pressure on me. So a lot of people were saying, “Okay, this is your chance of a lifetime. You're experiencing something that we've never seen before. You need to do something about it.” Even my family and my close friends were saying, “Okay, you need to make money from this. Why are you wasting such an opportunity?” And I was pretty torn because of what I explained in regards to the games that had existed and how I felt like I couldn't fully take credit. And there are still people who, when it comes to the discussion of 2048 vs. Threes, still think that Threes deserves more credit than it did, and 2048 stole its thunder in a way.

Torn between monetization and morals

At the time, I was simply very torn on whether I deserved the credit and whether I deserved to make money off of something that I had created, even though I didn't feel like I fully generated a concept by myself. That's how it started. The stressful process of 2048 going viral caused me to burn out for a little bit. Around the same time, during that same year, I moved to the Netherlands, and I'm still living here 10 years later. So it was a pretty eventful year overall when it comes to general life stuff.

I had just started a new job over here in the Netherlands, and I simply focused on that as a way to recover some semblance of normalcy. Eventually, 2048, like everything, died down. It's still popular, but it's not viral in any particular sense of the word. And it essentially went on the back burner for me when it comes to my focus and my priorities, because I was just really busy with work, and I think a part of me was avoiding looking at it because of the stress that I'd experienced. And I developed a sort of feeling that I didn't really want to take a look inside the box because it was scary and stressful to do so.

Creating a monetized mobile app

A few months after releasing the game, I decided to make a mobile app. And that was initially how I decided to compromise with the voices in my head and around me that were saying, “This is the chance of your lifetime. You gotta make money from this.” So I thought, “Okay. I didn't feel like I had put enough work into the original version to be able to claim it and to be able to monetize it. Okay, let me do a little bit more work and then I can claim it as my own.” So I built an entire mobile app, still using the same structure of the game as it was, but the app was a bit more complex. It took me a month to build instead of a week. And that felt like it gave me justification to at least have some kind of advertisements on there and see what happens.

At the time, it was not the most popular 2048 app. The one that sort of ended up topping the charts on the App Store was the one by the French developer Ketchapp. And so I just made this app as a way to find a middle ground that felt valid for me. And obviously there's a lot that can be said about whether that is the right middle ground or whether there was some kind of overreaction on my side to the concerns about monetizing, etc. But that's how I solved that, I guess. And that was actually my priority—finding inner peace. I didn't particularly care about the money, and that's how the mobile app appeared.

I took a break from 2048, or at least from working and thinking about it actively until about 2017, when I sold off the mobile app to a developer called Solebon in the U.S. and they are publishers of one of the most popular, if not the most popular, Solitaire app on iOS and Android. And they decided to ask me to give them the 2048 mobile app and they would develop it. I thought it was the right deal at the time, and I still think so because we have a pretty valuable partnership.

Even to this day, I feel like it was a great idea because it took the pressure off of me and meant that 2048 could thrive on mobile without me having to think about it too hard or get too stressed about it. The web version of 2048 is still mine and it's still the most popular version on the web as far as I'm aware. And until, I think, 2018 or 2019, I did not really involve myself with 2048 very actively. Those are the years when my perspective on advertising started to change. 

So I had taken enough distance and I had matured as well. I was now 25, so it felt like I had the time to reflect on what happened and look at it from a distance. And I felt advertising on the site did not bring any major issues with it. It is something that people can opt in or opt out of. I fully defend, for example, the use of ad blockers. If people choose that that's how they prefer the internet to be for them, I understand it. I think ads can be quite intrusive at times. I just felt like the presence of ads, as long as they keep the game performing properly, would not detract from the game experience. This was a couple of years ago.

At the time, I had been working at various different jobs, always as a web developer and as a web designer. My latest job was with 1Password, where I worked for about three years. And at the end of 2023 in October, I decided I wanted to quit. I'd been thinking about this for about a year beforehand, and I just felt like I wanted to spend time on 2048 because, by now, I guess my feelings and all of the stresses and experiences from 10 years prior had time to be digested. I felt like I wanted to do more with it. I felt like there was a chance to improve the game.

So that's how I decided to quit my job and then work on it full-time. And I've been doing this for about a year now. And I don't know, maybe it will last a few years more. Maybe it will last forever. I have to say I am really grateful that I have the opportunity to work for myself and to be independent. But it's something that's quite rare, and if I can make it last long, I'm gonna be grateful. If I have to go back to a job, I'm also gonna be grateful for what I got in the meantime.

How does it feel being independent and working on your game full-time?

It grants you a lot more freedom to find what's right for you and get the right rhythm. I've struggled with stress at work, and I am probably a bit of an overachiever or at least a perfectionist. And especially, for example, when I worked at 1Password, I have massive respect for the team, and I felt like a bit of an imposter on that team. As many people also told me, they felt at the same time, because everybody was trying to do their best. And I try my best as well. I want to make products that really shine, and so that can be a profoundly inspiring experience to go through, especially being around people who are way better than you at what they do and how you can learn from them.

But it can also be a very stressful experience when you feel like you're trying to keep up with the quality levels that you see around you. So that stress hasn't left me, because I did carry some of that into working on my own with 2048. I still set a pretty high bar for myself, and that's something that I'm working on letting go of or at least finding peace with that as well. But yeah, the ability to just be able to decide when and where to work and how is something that I'm still very grateful for.

Are you working on a new version of the game?

Yes, I am! So the inspiration for this version of the game came during a trip that I took in March. It was, I think, the first time in a long time that I'd taken time off from work. Because I don't tend to take holidays. I need to be taking more time off. I'm going to be forcing myself to take more time off in the coming years. But I've been able to take my mind off of work and my mind wandered to 2048 and how I could make it more interesting. I was still pretty satisfied with how the game worked, but I felt like it was starting to show its age and you know how it is. The web industry renews itself both visually and technically every few years, and there is a sense that what was modern 10 years ago is not really modern now, even though it's still functional. The old game works pretty well.

But there was one thing I noticed. The ads made the game slow down and I didn't like that. Obviously, with the way browsers work, all of the resources and all of the things on screen are competing for the same CPU cycles. So you can't really prioritize the game's graphics or the advertisements’. But I actually thought that should change and that was one of the starting points.

The other thing is, again, this is March 2023. So I felt like 2024 was coming up, and that’s the 10 year anniversary of 2048. I wanted to see if I could do something to pay some kind of tribute to the original 2048. So my idea was, “Can I make a version of the game that stays entirely true to the concept?” I don't want to redesign the game. I'm pretty wary of second editions of a game that changes the mechanics that made the game great in the first place. I wanted to steer clear of that. But I thought there's a lot that you can do with the design that I was not technically able to do 10 years ago.

Making improvements

For example, I really like smooth and refined animations. I worked really hard to implement a spring-based motion in the new 2048, which is, you could call it a physical simulation of the process of a spring bouncing. And you can do a lot with that. So Apple uses it very prominently in their operating systems and it's one of the things that I think makes them quite pleasant to use and makes the motion feel extremely natural. So I wanted to see if I could use that and make it great.

The same with the graphics, and this all happened, by the way, during that fateful trip that I took in March 2023. I just sat down one evening, I got inspired and I designed the new board of the game. And it largely looked just like the board that you see on the live game now. So it all happened at once. I think it's part of how inspiration works. It comes in bursts. And once you hit on something that you really like, you're like, “Okay, this is it. This is what the blurry vision in my mind was trying to lead me to!” That's how I tend to work. I don't use any sort of structured or step-by-step design process. I generally feel that something could be better. And I have a vague idea of what direction I should go to. And then I try to see if I can find the tools or the resources or the design to actually make it happen. It leads me down a lot of dead ends, as anyone who's done this kind of work will have experienced.

But in the end, I think if you keep at it, it will eventually lead somewhere. The 2048 that we have now took a year to develop compared to the five days that it took to make the original. So you can imagine how much work went into it. I think in general I'm a pretty slow developer. I take my time and I have a very, I would say, anxiety-driven methodology to development, which is not that great. I don't recommend it. It's not the best. I worry about how things could break before I even build them. And sometimes I wish I could just throw stuff out and test it instead of making it perfect at first. But this is how I work.

Working on graphic quality

So it took a year. It took a lot of false starts. For example, I really wanted the graphics to be crisp and I really wanted the performance to be completely independent of the ads' performance. And I found that there was technology to do that. You can now do all of the graphical work in a separate thread in the browser using web workers and something that's called OffscreenCanvas. And that means that any ads on the screen will not affect the performance of the game.

The interesting thing is that you cannot use vector graphics when you're drawing images using a separate thread. And that meant that I could not achieve crisp graphics for the tiles on 2048 on screens that are high resolution. So that's a detail of the development process that is actually something that took me weeks to figure out. I started by having the same image of the same tile at three or four different resolutions. And then I found that was extremely unbearable from a bandwidth point of view because it meant downloading almost a megabyte for each style before optimizing that. And then I found through going through a lot of hoops and a lot of weird code, I found a way to use vector graphics, SVGs I mean, and render them to an image using the browser itself. So this all happens in the browser. You download an SVG and then you turn it into a PNG or a bitmap and then you send it off to the other thread where it can be rendered. So it's all those things.

I guess I went through a similar process for achieving the animations and the springs. All those things took a long time to refine and that's where most of the time was sunk. And yeah, while the tools helped a lot, they also made things more complicated. As I mentioned, the code is 10 to 15 times larger. And these things that I mentioned are part of the reason why.

But yeah, I would say the development process overall was a pretty even mix of happiness about the results and joy in seeing things come together and total despair when things just don't work and they don't work for a week or two and you just don't know how to move forward. And then one day you wake up with a thought, you try it out and it works. So that's how it goes for me.

How did you strike a balance in making a result that would satisfy both old and new players?

So it took me a long time to figure out how to release the game in a way that would not upset the community. I felt like I had something to show that would be better than the original and that people would eventually warm up to it. The process of releasing something new is always scary and you feel very vulnerable, especially after you've worked on it completely in secret for over a year. I had hinted at it on the website, but I'd never shared anything and I didn't want it to be seen until the last moment when it was perfect because I didn't want people to get the wrong impression. I think there are always people who prefer things don't change. And that was why I kept the classic version online. And I plan to keep it there. It doesn't cost me anything extra to do. So it will not change. But I think that's actually what people want.

The other thing is this new version of 2048 includes power-ups. So that is, I guess, a pretty fundamental change to how the mechanics of the game works. It's completely optional, so it doesn't affect your gameplay if you choose not to use it. It also brings a feature that's been requested quite a lot, which is “undo”. And that is something that I heard many people ask for and complain about, that the old game was really hard to play without undo. And I completely understand it because I'm pretty bad at the game myself.

But, yeah, changing something is always a bit scary. And I'm very open to feedback and I'm always listening and I tend to overthink in terms of how I could be doing better and what I should be doing next. So I opened up a form for people to give feedback and there's a link on the site because initially I was just worried that the game was not going to work, that there were going to be bugs that would break the experience for people.

So I thought, “Okay, let's make the feedback loop as short as possible so that I can get the signal as quickly as possible.” And it helped a lot. I met some really interesting people along the way. I was able to actually collaborate with someone because there was a bug where the game just would not work. This was in the latest version of Chrome, so you would think it should all be working. And we could not get to the bottom of it. 

Fixing tricky technical issues

So we had a Zoom call. And this person is a user of 2048, somebody who's been playing it for a long time. They made their time available. This was great because we actually found out that it was just a setting in Chrome that prevented the game from working and that some people might also have this setting. So after that call, I was able to then set up a page on the site that tells you “Your browser is not configured correctly. Here's how you fix it.” And so things like that definitely make me feel a lot better about being able to receive feedback.

Reactions on game release

And the other thing that I noticed is the reaction of some of the people who were initially skeptical about the new version. When it eventually came around, they ended up saying, “Okay, I actually like it. It's actually nice!” I think everything takes getting used to. And it's completely understandable that if you're used to how a particular piece of software works, you don't want it to change unless you choose to change it.

What I was hoping is that with 2048, the new version would just embody so much of the original that it would not need to be rolled back. And I think, according to the statistics, I haven't really taken a deep dive into this, but I think I would say 99% of the player base has adapted to the new version and they're now seemingly comfortable with it. I still receive messages along the lines of, “I prefer the old version and I didn't want you to change it.” I usually reply by saying, “The old version is still there. Go ahead.”

It's actually great feedback because it helps me understand where I can improve the part that I'm still working on. And I'm I guess I'm currently taking a bit of a mental break because the development process was quite a lot of effort for me, so I'm taking some time away from the computer before I start working on this again.

Future plans

There are some performance issues that I need to look into, so those are the things that I really value in terms of feedback. So if you're playing the game and it doesn't work, let me know. I'm trying my best to figure it out. It's quite hard because when I have a couple of browsers and a couple of devices that are in my cabinet that I can use for testing.

But some of the bugs that come through are extremely obscure, and I literally spent three hours on a call with another freelance developer last week trying to assess a bug where Safari did not show the tiles correctly, but only in some rare instances. So you could not reproduce the bug even if you wanted to, except maybe once in 10 times. It took us three hours to come to the realization that Safari had some really strange caching behavior when it was loading the SVG versions of the tiles that caused them to render into a completely blank image. And so you can imagine these bugs are obviously happening for a sizable but minor part of the audience, and finding the tools and the resources or even being able to trigger them reliably takes a considerable amount of time.

So that's where a lot of my work will be going into in the coming weeks. There are a lot of requests as well, several examples are; a dark mode, others request for easier access to a non-power-up mode, which is, by the way, it's there, and some other things, some performance improvements that I need to make. So those are the things that I'm going to get to next before I embark on longer projects.

Can you tell us more about the exclusive Amazon Prime version of the game?

So roughly a year ago, the people that I worked with for the mobile 2048 app got in touch and mentioned that Amazon was interested in doing something with 2048 for their web games section on Prime gaming. And we thought that it would be nice to have a version dedicated for Prime members with some extra features, some small design tweaks and things like that.

Interestingly, the development process for this exclusive version of 2048 is what actually spawned the idea of power-ups in the first place. So that was an idea that came up when I was thinking about how to provide some extra value for Prime members. And then over the course of coming up with the various power-up ideas, I decided to distribute some of them throughout the normal standard game mode and some of them remain exclusive for Prime members. So this version includes three new power-ups on top of the ones that you already have access to. You get a bomb that clears a section of the board, you get to teleport a tile, which is useful if you need a tile to get out of the way or if it's preventing you from making any moves, and then you can rotate the outer ring of the board in any direction. And yeah, the development process was actually pretty straightforward.

The team over at Prime Gaming were really responsive. They were really open to all of the ideas that came up. And we decided to package this as what I called it 2048 Plus. I wanted to steer clear of the word premium because I feel like that word is overused. Plus feels nice because it's 2048 plus some extra stuff. And I looked at the idea of adding extra power-ups as a way to let me put some extra toys in the sandbox and let people play with them how they think will suit them.

And the nice thing about that is it allows people to come up with interesting strategies that I wouldn't have thought of and it gets really creative. So we built this version pretty much alongside the normal version of 2048. They are part of the same codebase, and they're accessible through the same website. And we decided to release it one week after the original game because the whole release process was quite involved.

The release process

When it comes to putting a completely new codebase online, you have to make sure that things migrate correctly. For example, the data that I used to store the state of the game in the original game had to come up in the new game and the formats were not compatible. So there was an importation step that happened transparently. And then it took another week to release the Plus version of 2048, because we wanted to really make sure and do some QA testing and make sure that everything worked perfectly for Prime members.

And that's how the release process went. In the end parts, it was extremely effortless. Once we had everything sorted out, it just involved me flicking a switch on my end and then flicking a switch on their end and then 2048 appeared on the storefront and that's how it went live.

His feelings on the Amazon partnership

It's been a very valuable partnership. They've helped me with a lot of things. I am still providing support where needed but they've mostly been almost entirely driving 2048 mobile on their own and the app has evolved beyond what I myself could have done in those years. So I'm still pretty happy that they managed to take control of it and bring it and push it forward. 

I think this type of job can get pretty lonely if you don't have anybody to talk to or anybody else to work with. Some are even just grateful for the flow of ideas. For example, I'm not great at analytics or looking at the statistics and making observations, and sometimes they help me with that and things like this. It's just nice to have a back-and-forth and that's something that I recognize now, and I'm trying to expand and increase the amount of people that I know.

It's great to feel like there are solutions to problems you can’t fix on your own and maybe you'll find them easier if you have somebody you can call for help for instead of figuring them out on your own.

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

The best way to get in touch is to go to 2048 and press “Give Feedback”. You will find an email address that you can email me at. If you want to talk directly or have feedback about the game, just post your feedback in the form. I don't have a big social presence. That's something that I might work on. I've stayed a bit off of social media recently, but yeah, maybe there will be more profiles coming up in the future. But that's the best way to get in touch with me now and I'm really open to any sort of feedback or questions.