Remember the game 2048? You slide numbered tiles around on a grid, combining them until you have one tile with a value of 2048 (although it’s possible to go higher). Legend has it that 2048 was created by a bored teenager in the space of a weekend to see if he could program a game from scratch.
It only took a couple of weekends for [David] to get Tiny2048 up and running. In this version, each RGB value represents a number value, and input comes from a rudimentary gesture detector — tilt it this way and that to move the LEDs and combine the ‘numbers’. As you might imagine, it was a bit tricky to use colors to represent numbers, so each one had to be sufficiently unique.
[David] says that the LED matrix is a string of WS2812 LEDs in a grid formation, controlled by an ESP32-S3-MINI-1. Although this may be overkill, [David] broke out a bunch of IO at the top of the board so it can be used in the future as a dev board. Be sure to check it out in blinkenlight action after the break!
That looks very fun. I think my spouse and kid might get me to build a larger version for them.
🙂
That sounds great! I’d love to see it if you do :)
why is he using esp32 s3 mini 1?
The riscv 10cent (CH32V003F4U6) or attiny would be soo much better for this job.
for dev board i get it. for simple good loking game the is the way to go so much cheaper.
btw I am not mad. Just speculating some options if you dint know already. ;-)
I did think about using something (much) simpler, but I few other projects in mind for them which will take advantage of the esp32. If this was only going to be used to run the game then I’d 100% agree but because I’ve manufactured a few of these boards I want to have plenty of flexibility to use them for other things too.
“Legend has it that 2048 was created by a bored teenager in the space of a weekend to see if he could program a game from scratch.”
Well-documented truth, by contrast, has it that he spent that weekend crudely cloning the indie game “Threes!” (without the nuance that makes that game good).
If you don’t think developers should be allowed to make money from their work, or even get credit for it, that’s fine I guess. But then why persist in showering yet more undeserved credit on the wrong person, years after this was all widely reported?
This is at least the second time HaD has amplified this horse poop; it really rubs me the wrong way.
https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copycats-clones-mobile-games
I didn’t think this article says what you think is says.
While you paint Gabriele Cirulli, the aforementioned ‘bored teenager’, as someone who ripped off the game Threes, that article makes it quite clear that his game was developed independently, without him ever having played Threes. Instead, his game was one of many clones and imitators of Threes (“It was only a matter of weeks before the arrival of the imitations: Twos, Eights, 1024, 2048, 2048 Doge, … Over a year of work, and it took just three weeks for the first clone to appear.”)
In this context, Cirulli just made his own version of a game he had already seen from another developer, in a style he liked. He appears to have made two decisions that caused the game to go viral, though: He used the MIT license out of simplicity, and he put it on github.
The article you linked goes to great pains to point out that the original developers of Threes bear no ill will against Cirulli, and, in fact, managed to get Threes to sell well in the wake of Cirulli’s 2048’s popularity, and that Cirulli has never profited monetarily from his viral game – unless you count his being able to move from Italy to the US for a short time for a job with a Y Combinator startup, and now living and working in Amsterdam, a path that likely opened to him because of his game, as profit.
Cirulli may not have been the first, but he appears to have been one of the first to release his game under an open source license on a popular development platform. That seems like something to celebrate, does it not?
Er, this was meant to be a reply to Bobtato at https://hackaday.com/2024/08/17/2024-tiny-games-challenge-its-2048-but-with-leds/#comment-7343825
Yep that’s why my post wasn’t about him (other than pointing out his implementation wasn’t very good).
My post was about HaD‘s campaign to credit him, specifically, with /inventing/ what was someone else’s recent work.
Apart from anything else, it’s a disservice to readers who might want to implement this game themselves, because it’s promoting a worse, dumbed-down version of the real source material.