AsherVo

Have you checked out Star Billions? Really cute + quirky game that handles storytelling on mobile super well. Neko Atsume does that too.

Also Undertale, hands down, no question.

Close Castles has been an interesting experiment. ( www.closecastles.com). It started out as a fun little side project, but it turns out that creating a compelling, balanced, multiplayer RTS is actually a pretty exhausting activity. So nowadays I work on it in sprints! I'll spend a week or two tweaking numbers and testing new rules and playtesting with friends... but then I burn out pretty hard. It's currently been on the shelf for five or six months... and I'm already itching to pull it out and try some new ideas!!

I've never been able to get passed 768 :(

Though our friends over at ThreesPorn have offered a few times to "coach me" and help me overcome my limits.

I attended the University of Southern California, Interactive Media Division. In addition to learning A TON about quality game design, I also made a ton of friends and got my first job (at thatgamecompany) through the connections I made at the school. I highly recommend it!

1st: the internet has named those tiles "giants" which I love and that's how I'll be referring to + tiles for the foreseeable future.

2nd: The giants are the most random element in the game, so the game design has a very sensitive relationship to them. One of the fundamental goals for Threes was to make the game very skill based. It's very possible to combine skill and randomness in a very satisfying way, but it's one of the hardest problems in game design. I think the current design (giving you a preview of 3 possible giants) isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.

3rd: (side note) I love randomness in games when you can control it slightly. Like in Hearthstone a common ability is "deal damage to random enemies" which feels totally luck based... except for the fact that you have control over the number of enemies on the field. It feels great when you successfully manage to change the odds in your favor.