Aaron Kardel: [00:00:00] So take us back a little bit here. Why did you choose web design and development in particular as a career?
Gabriele Circulli: So it started when I was a kid. The real story going all the way back is that my mom took
Nate Kadlac: welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
Aaron Kardel: I'm Aaron Cardell. Today we're excited to speak with Gabriele Cirulli, the creator of the hit game 2048. Gabriele is a web designer and developer by trade, with his most recent career point being a part of the 1Password team.
He now works full time to maintain and improve his signature game, which he made when he was 19 years old. 2048 was a viral puzzle game back in 2014. And in succeeding years, the game was heralded as the next flappy bird. The mechanics were simple players would need to swipe and [00:01:00] slide numbered tiles on a four by four grid and combine them so they would result in a 2048 tile.
And I gotta say just personally like this is one of my favorite games, Gabriele's gonna tell us a little bit about recent updates to the game, which have. Gotten me re hooked to the game. Gabriele, we're thrilled you're here.
Gabriele Circulli: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Aaron Kardel: As I think you might know, often our first question on this podcast is what's your favorite game to play?
Gabriele Circulli: If I give you the current answer, it's going to sound a bit out of place, but it's actually Fortnite. I recently got hooked by Fortnite and it's, kind of game that I wouldn't have expected to get hooked on, But it's got some really fun mechanics. So I, I've been quite addicted to it.
I've been taking a break for the last few days. It's just hooks you.
Aaron Kardel: I love that. My son in particular is really big on Fortnite. I'm a little bit older than you, Gabriele. So back in the day for me, like the first person shooter game of choice was really golden [00:02:00] eye on the Nintendo 64.
So, have an affinity in that way, but I've been struggling to get into the fortnight with my son. I'm going to have to ask you for some tips later. Do you have a crew that you play with
Gabriele Circulli: It's actually a great way to connect with my friends that are abroad. So I come from Italy and I live in the Netherlands now.
So I have friends back in Italy and that's we make a point of playing every once in a while, just to, we get on, we chat and we play and it's fun. It doesn't take any mental effort. It doesn't, detract from our other commitments. But it's just a nice way to catch up.
Aaron Kardel: I just love that about some of the current state of multiplayer gaming.
It's just really a way to stay in touch with friends. And, my own kids we, try to limit their tech in other ways, but anytime they're playing with friends, it's no, this is your way of connecting now. we try to keep it available for that reason.
Gabriele Circulli: Yeah. And you and I were 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 [00:03:00] miss. That's not something that you find anymore out in the market. It seems like it's gone out of fashion. But it was very fun as well.
Aaron Kardel: 100%. Yeah, it is a different world. Take us back a little bit here. Why did you choose a web design and development in particular as a career.
Gabriele Circulli: 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, stuff like that. That's the time that we're talking about. And she took a course. I ran into her notes and I wanted to experiment with that. I used to use a front page, which has since disappeared.
It was like a web development software by Microsoft, like word, but for making HTML pages. That's how I got started. And then there was a period of time where I got really into. 3d [00:04:00] graphics and also 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 like digital art and development.
I got really interested in that. 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 and what we have today, even though PHP is still popular, but yeah, that's how I started
Aaron Kardel: In there something about it's just fun with PHP where you do a thing and it. It's like immediately ready and it works. And, there's some okay PHP code that's been written out there. Obviously Facebook did a lot with it and there's some that looks like spaghetti code, but there's just a very satisfying thing. I think of you write a thing and it's just ready, right? it feels powerful to create.
Gabriele Circulli: I feel like everything has [00:05:00] 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 front page.
And you could just open it up and design your webpage. It was clunky, but it felt like magic putting things together like that. And same with PHP as exactly, as you said, there was a feeling that you would just write some code and it would automatically work. It was much, a much shorter feedback loop, even though the tools that we use today make development a lot more streamlined, but I've noticed an increase in complexity, just overall, there's more architecture, there's more structure, there's more abstraction, there's more code in general, even though you write less code, maybe as a result of it.
It's quite different.
Aaron Kardel: It is quite different. And sometimes I wonder if done a lot more coding in my past and unfortunately I get to do today. So I miss it, but I, sometimes wonder like there's just so [00:06:00] much around it these days. it feels in some respects harder to get started than it used to.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong on that, but
Gabriele Circulli: it does. 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 it takes more effort.
Obviously. I think that comes with the maturing of the industry as a whole. So the tools change and the 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 more, you need to know more, you need to learn more, you 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 [00:07:00] 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 completely different tool set. It has to be bundled. It has dependencies. It uses a front end library and there's. Probably 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 more. It's a good question whether we need that much code. I did my best to keep it as light as possible, but it's changed. It's definitely changed.
Aaron Kardel: I'm just curious if I've got my information right. You were 19 when 2048 first came out.
Was that? Overwhelming for you to become the creator of a worldwide [00:08:00] viral hit at that age?
Gabriele Circulli: The whole experience was the best I could describe it is surreal. It came completely out of nowhere. I actually remember how I found out that 2048 was going viral, which is that a friend of mine from Portugal I'd met him a year before when I was traveling for a startup program, a friend of mine 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, something like that. 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 [00:09:00] think it took a couple weeks to a month for it to actually start simmering down, which was, as I say, 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 projects and ideas that existed already. And we can get into that a bit if you want. But the point is it was just a thing that I made in my spare time.
It was just for fun. It was just 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. It was quite stressful at the time.
As an experience. So it's quite cool that this can happen in this day and age given the internet and the global access to information, but yes, it's definitely an interesting experience.
Aaron Kardel: So like my first experience with 2048 10 years ago, I was working in an office [00:10:00] had developers were the primary people in that office.
I remember walking in one day and One of the developers who worked for me was playing 2048 and not trying to cover it up at all. Was that like, Oh no, box is here. I'm playing 20. He was just going to time. What is going on here? Numbers bouncing around. And then contrast that to a week and a half ago I'm on a plane coming home from vacation or holiday with my family.
And my wife is looking at my daughter. One of the games provided on the airplane was 2048. And my wife was like, what, she hadn't been exposed yet. And she's trying to like, what is she doing? And my daughter who's 11 quickly was figuring it out, but it's just been fun to see the progression over the last 10 years.
As you think about just coming up with a concept I think you've maybe used the words in the past of 2048 being a clone of a clone, [00:11:00] perhaps. Can you tell us more about just where the idea came from and what that was like?
Gabriele Circulli: Essentially the way it started is through a game called Threes 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 are 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. There 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. And it's important to say that Threes is the [00:12:00] 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 h rees got copied by another game called 1024 and that game also had very cheerful graphics and colorful dynamics, but it's 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 that 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 [00:13:00] scheme. And there were a couple 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. It was, you had to really think hard about how things moved and why. this last game that I mentioned is, 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 to 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, I think is the name that they went by.
And then I discovered 1024 and I started playing that on my iPad every moment of the day. And at some point I was like, okay, I really like this version of the game, the one called 2048, [00:14:00] but it's missing something. I just want to make it my own. So I saw it as a test of my own skills. I felt like I had a bit of a vision for what it could be.
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. 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 and There was a point in time where 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 I understand why it was difficult or why it was not working well in the other [00:15:00] 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 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 they posted it on hacker news and the rest is a history.
As they say, it just completely went out of out of my control in terms of going viral. So yeah, this is a game that was inspired by multiple games coming before it.
Aaron Kardel: It's I can just say personally from our prior conversation, it sure feels to me like you, you undersell your influence on it.
And it's commendable that you [00:16:00] give a lot of credit to games like threes and the other 2048 and some of the other inspirations along the way, but just I played threes a lot. I think you brought something very new and very compelling to the game and for, from my perspective, we'll just say don't undersell what you brought to it.
Gabriele Circulli: The way that I look at it is that we, as As a civilization, as a culture, we don't often do things that are completely original, like everything that we do are explorations on top of existing art. We literally stand on the shoulders of giants with everything that we do and that we experienced in daily life.
So I think 2048 is an example of that. I was able to take inspiration. I was able to be in the right place at the right time, because I think that also matters. And. 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 is coming [00:17:00] from things that existed before and we, 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?
Aaron Kardel: Yeah. And there was. One thing you and I have talked about previously, which is I'm almost offended on your behalf of just all of the people that have done their own 2048. That's basically no different than your game. It wasn't an inspired by, it was a literal, in my opinion, rip off of your game.
And there's Feels like thousands of rip offs out there. But it seemed to me like you had a very healthy point of view on that. And it just love to hear you share that with our audience.
Gabriele Circulli: So I would say that I personally don't consider any of these rip offs for a number of reasons. One 2048 was created in the same way as.
2048's [00:18:00] derivatives the creative process and the evolution is part, is just an instance of the same process. So it would not be fair to call them ripoffs in my opinion, the other 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 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.
It 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, I believe in respecting the kind of, or. Adjusting to the consequences of one's decisions. I think it's actually a great thing. And [00:19:00] it's partly what what should be credited for 2048 success.
The fact that it was so accessible and that it was easy to take it and just make it your own thing. So I think it, 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. Yeah, I think it's, As I said I mentioned the creative process, how we take things that are around us and spin them into new ways.
It's just an extension of that. And I think it was quite beautiful to see it at the time. I was pretty overwhelmed maybe too overwhelmed to understand what was exactly 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 [00:20:00] all of the versions of 2048 that exists, but just to remember that there are almost, I'm pretty sure there's literally thousands of them.
If you really look that each bring their own flair. So there's a 2048 AI, there's a 2048 with different animations. 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.
Aaron Kardel: Totally on the original game as you designed it, what's the highest tile that's achievable. And do you have any stats on like how fast that was achieved?
Gabriele Circulli: So I think I might be wrong. But I think it's 131, 000 and change. That's the highest style 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 [00:21:00] on discord. There's. There's only so many tiles that you can fit in a four by four board. And there's actually a way that you can calculate that. I think it's got to do with if you've got 16 tiles, you can only fit a tile that's two to the power of 16.
Again, I might be completely off. on the math. And if you if you bring the board down to a three by three, then you can only get up to 1, 024 before you run out of space. And you can imagine that if you increase the board, you get, I think let's see, eight more, nine more powers of two that you can reach.
So again, math is very vague. I, there are actually people in the 2048 community on discord that you can find through Reddit that spend a lot of their time. And this is to me, the most amazing and 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 [00:22:00] calculate the outcomes before they actually. happen. So there's a lot of randomness. What, 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 mathematician or 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.
Aaron Kardel: No, I'm super curious. It's only a two or a four tile ever that's generated, right?
As a new tile. What's the number you chose in terms of like, how often is it a two versus a four?
Gabriele Circulli: There is a 10 percent chance that you get a four tile. And the randomness that is used as the one that's provided by the browser, at least in the old version. So I used to use math. random in the [00:23:00] JavaScript quite interesting that I've seen a number of complaints that the random generator seems a bit stuck or sorry. It almost feels to people like it's actually not random. This is actually funny. It brings back post that I read once about how people used to complain that the original iPods 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 the way I understand it. So what it means is that we are as humans, we are 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 the developer actually do something [00:24:00] to make that happen.
Or yeah, does the game hate me? Is there something wrong with me? It's quite interesting. Yeah. But going back to your question, it's, pretty simple. It's just a random, I pick a random number between zero and one. And if it's over 0. 9, then I spawn a four and I just choose a random cell out of the ones that are available. That's it.
Aaron Kardel: I think my guess is every developer who develops a game that achieves some scale, even if they pick truly random number generator, like the best algorithm out there for generating a random number, they are inevitably still going to get somebody that complains like, Oh, you just use the off the shelf, random number generator.
And it's not that random. It's just something people complain about. Believe you, you took a while to step away from the game for a bit. And I think there was a solid period of time where you didn't have ads on the game. I think as I understand it, you came [00:25:00] back to the game at some point, added in ads over the time.
Can you tell us just a little bit about that progression?
Gabriele Circulli: Yeah. So when the game started in 2014, I used to still live in Italy. I just turned 20 a few days after the game came out and yeah the game had no ads, it had no Anything. Actually, it was just a, 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, your chance of a lifetime. You're experiencing something that we've never seen before. You need to do something about it. My, even my family and my close friends were saying, okay, you need to make money from this. It's your way 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 that when it comes to the discussion of 2048 versus Threes they still [00:26:00] think that Threes deserves more credit than it did. And 2048 stole its thunder in a way.
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 the concepts by myself. That's how it started. The stressful process of 2048 going viral caused me to.
Burnout for a little bit. And at the same, around the same time, during that same year, I moved to the Netherlands and I've still I'm still living there 10 years later. So it was a pretty eventful year overall when it comes to general life stuff, and 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 it's not viral in any particular sense of the word. [00:27:00] And 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 had 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 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've got to 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. I said, 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 [00:28:00] 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 catch up.
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. My, there was some kind of overreaction on my side to the concerns about monetizing, et cetera, but that's how I solved that.
I guess pretty stressful and pretty painful sense of uncertainty for myself. And that was actually my priority was just to find 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.[00:29:00]
Until about 2017, when I sold off the mobile app to a developer called Solibon in the US, and they are publishers of one of the most popular, if not the most popular, Solitaire app on iOS and on Android. And they decided to ask me to Give them the 2048 mobile app and they would develop it. And I thought it was the right deal at the time.
And I still think so because we have a pretty valuable partnership at this even to this day. I felt like it was a great idea because it took the. Pressure off of me. And it meant that 2048 could thrive on mobile without me having to think about it too hard or to get 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 [00:30:00] 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'd matured as well. I was now 25.
So it felt like I had the time to, 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's how they prefer the internet to be for them.
And 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 ad, the game performing properly would not detract from the game experience. This was a couple of years, a few years ago. And then 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 [00:31:00] with one password where I worked for about three years. And in at the end of 2023, in October, I decided. I wanted to quit. I've been thinking about this for another year beforehand, and I just felt like I wanted to spend time on 2048 because by, by now, by my, I guess my feelings and my all of the stresses and experiences from 10 years prior had time to be digested, and. 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 be working for myself and to be independent from this because I think what I would want for myself, but it's something that's quite rare.
And if I can make it last long, I'm going to be grateful. If I have to go back to a job, I'm also going to be grateful [00:32:00] for what I got in the mean, what I got to do and try in the meantime. So
Aaron Kardel: There's so many things to unpack there. First, I just want to say sounds on that journey, you've hopefully found a little bit of inner peace, which I think is the most important thing.
Anybody could critique like, Oh, you could have made so much more money or you could have done this or could have done that. But at the end of the day finding that peace and that mental health is so important and, to bring it full circle 10 years later, like now you're, Doing this full time.
You're working for yourself. Like how awesome is that? That's a great outcome.
Gabriele Circulli: It grants you a lot more freedom to, yeah to find what's right for you and to find the right rhythm. I have, I've struggled with stress at work. I am probably a bit of an overachiever or at least a perfectionist.
And especially for example, when I worked at one password I have massive respect for the team and I felt like a bit of a imposter in that team. Many people also told me they felt at the same [00:33:00] 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 that 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 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, or let's say what is good and what is the limit is is something that I'm still very grateful for.
Aaron Kardel: And over the past year, I think I first connected you with you over email maybe almost a year ago. And so I know you've been [00:34:00] working on a new version of 2048 for a while. And I, I'm addicted. I I've been playing a lot of 2048 since you rolled out the new version. You want to tell us more about the new version, what's changed and how you got some of the ideas for that?
Gabriele Circulli: 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 trying to show its age and you know how it is. The web industry renews itself both visually and technically every few years. And there [00:35:00] 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 graphics, but actually Thought that should change. And I, that was one of the starting points.
The other thing is again, this is March, 2023. So I felt like 2024 was coming up 10 years anniversary of 2048. I wanted to feel 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?
So I don't want to [00:36:00] redesign the game. I am pretty wary of I don't know, the second edition 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 maybe technically able to do 10 years ago.
But I have a vision for so I, for example, I really like smooth and refined animations. I worked really hard to implement a spring based motion in in the new 2048, which is a, 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, can I use that? And can I 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, I literally just sat down one evening.
I got inspired and I designed the new [00:37:00] 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 like 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. And I, 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 feeling of better is leading me in. And then I try to see if I can find the tools or the resources or let's say the design to actually make it happen.
It leads me down a lot of dead ends as I knew anyone who's done this kind of work will have experienced, but in the end, I think if you if you keep at it, it will eventually lead [00:38:00] 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 a fairly anxiety driven methodology to development, which is not the 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 that's, this is how I work. So it took a year. It took a lot of full 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 were the technology the technology to to do that. had become available. You can now do all of the graphical work in a separate thread in the browser using web workers and something that's called off screen [00:39:00] canvas. And that means that any ads on the screen will not, probably not affect the performance of the game.
There are still some instances where they do that I'm working on, but on most modern browsers and modern computers, they should not. The Interesting thing is that you cannot use vector graphics when you're drawing images on the, using the, 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 something that, for example, just 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 tile before optimizing that, and then I found Through going through a lot of hoops and a lot of weird code, I found a way [00:40:00] to use vector graphics, SVGs, 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 sank in and yeah 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 for two weeks, and you just don't know how to move forward.
And then [00:41:00] one day you, I don't know, you wake up. You try it out and it works. So that's how it goes for me.
Aaron Kardel: I, yeah, the finished product it did seem to me like the game was faster, so sharing a little bit of just the process behind that was super interesting to hear. Yeah. I was actually surprised to hear you say that the code base is like 10 to 15 times the size because Because it feels faster.
So that's that's cool. You obviously put a lot of attention into how you speed that up. I think you alluded to with me before maybe you had some frustrated longstanding players. What did you do to my game, Gabriele? And how, now that we're maybe a month and a half later, in my opinion, you still have the classic game available. So it's not gone. Like people can still play the classic game. What's the big deal, but how's that been a month and a half later. So
Gabriele Circulli: It took me a long time to figure out how [00:42:00] 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's always people that prefer for that 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 [00:43:00] feature that's been requested quite a lot, which is undo.
And that is something that I heard many people ask for and complain, I guess 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. The. But yeah, changing something is always a bit scary. And, I'm very open to feedback and I'm always listening and I'm always maybe overthinking 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 and there were bugs that, 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 [00:44:00] you would think it should all be working. And we could not get to the bottom of it.
So we had a zoom call and this is one, this is a user of 2048. Somebody who's been playing it for a long time. They made their time available. And 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 I, 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. And the other thing that I noticed is that people that some of the people that were initially skeptical about the new version eventually came around and said, okay, I actually like it.
It's actually nice. I think with everything it 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 chose to change it. What I was hoping is that 2048, the new version would [00:45:00] 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 percent of the player base has adapted to the new version and they're seemingly now 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. 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, 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 you're I have a couple browsers and a couple of devices that I'm like [00:46:00] in, in my cabinet that I can use for testing. But some of the bugs that come through are extremely obscure. And it's I literally spent three hours on a call with a, with another freelance developer last week trying to assess a bug where Safari did not show the tiles correctly, but only in some instances and only rarely.
So you could not. reproduce the bug even if you wanted to, except maybe once in a, in 10 times. And it took us three hours to come to the realization that Safari was had some really strange caching behavior when it was loading the SVG versions of the tiles that cause them to render into a completely blank image.
And so you can imagine like the, 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 [00:47:00] work will be going into in the coming weeks.
There are a lot of requests as well. For example, dark mode other requests 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 through next. Before I embark on longer horizon projects.
Aaron Kardel: That's excellent. The craftsmanship throws shows through and it's a really awesome to see. All right. So a couple weeks perhaps after the new version of 2048 with power ups came out there was an exclusive version for Amazon prime that dropped as the kids say. And can you tell us more about How that came about.
Gabriele Circulli: 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. [00:48:00] And we we thought that it would be nice to have a version dedicated to 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. That was an idea that that came up when I was thinking about what to, 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. It's 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 if it's preventing you from making any moves.
And then you can rotate the outer ring of the board in any direction. [00:49:00] And yeah, the development process was actually a 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 we decided to package this as a, what I called it a 2048 plus.
feel like 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 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 a lot, it allows people to come up with interesting strategies that I wouldn't have thought of. And it gets really creative. So we built I built this version pretty much alongside the the normal version of the, of 2048. They are part of the same code base.
They're Accessible through the same website. And we decided to release it one week after the [00:50:00] original game, because the whole release process was quite involved when it comes to putting online a completely new code base. 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 a, an import step that happened transparently. And then it took another week to release the premium 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, it was Extremely effortless. Once we had everything sorted out, it just involved me flicking a switch on my end and them flicking a switch on their end and then 2048 appeared on the storefront and. that's how it went live.
Aaron Kardel: That's so cool. And it sounds the party that you. Worked with previously on the mobile game has remained a strong partner to [00:51:00] you to this day. So it sounds like maybe that was less of a, just a one time sale, but some ways that you can work together over the longterm. So that's pretty cool.
Gabriele Circulli: 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 and bring it and push it forward.
Yeah, it's been great. It's 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. So I'm even just grateful for the flow of ideas. And for example, I'm not great at analytics and, 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 [00:52:00] forth. And that's something that I, I recognize the value of now, and I'm trying to expand just increasing, the amount of people that I know, for example, you and other people in the gaming community that are developers and that largely have experienced the same challenges, it's great to feel like.
There are solutions to them and maybe you'll find them easier if you have to, if you can just ask somebody for help instead of figuring them out on your own.
Aaron Kardel: Totally. That's been one of the most valuable things as just as we've been doing these podcast episodes is just connecting with people like you and being able to share things along the way.
Two last things, and we'll do these as quick hits. Maybe just a yes, no. What do you think the odds are that you'll create a new game in the next 12 months? Or are you going to keep iterating?
Gabriele Circulli: It's hard to give you a yes or no.I keep thinking about new ideas. I don't have any solid ideas yet.
My main focus is 2048 for now. I want to make sure that's great. Maybe, I would say maybe.
Aaron Kardel: There you go. see in a year. [00:53:00] Gabriele, if you want people to find you online to reach out directly where should they look?
Gabriele Circulli: The best way to get in touch is 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 if you have feedback about the game just email me. post your feedback in the form. I don't have a big social presence 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.
We'll see, 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.
Aaron Kardel: Gabriele, thanks so much for your time. This was a fantastic session and congrats on all the success.
Gabriele Circulli: Thank you so much. And this was great.
