aeiowu

I got my BA in Graphic Design at Iowa State University. I studied for a couple years at the University of Iowa prior to that, floating between english, writing and art.

I started a company with friends in my last year at ISU intuition games and later Mikengreg. We all met at the Virtual Reality Applications Center, which was sort of the unofficial hub for geeks who liked doing weird stuff with computers.

I'm a big proponent of getting a well rounded education in a lot of things, especially if you want to be a game designer!

Thanks! :)

It's been working out pretty well. One concern was that it might cannabalize sales of the paid version in some way but it seems to help out the paid version. It is nowhere near the kind of reach that we'd of got if we released the original version for free, but that's some hindsight nonsense. We're definitely happy we made a free option for people to try, I feel it has been financially worth it and has really increased our audience. Now I even see Threes on the train sometimes!

We don't have comprehensive data on that. So for now let's say it's you, triferatu! Congrats! :) Until someone else self-reports in this thread otherwise.

Yea maybe a few times tops though.

That definitely sums up our feelings at the moment. To add a little more story though:

I first saw 2048 when someone linked it to us from HackerNews. I saw hundreds of comments and got that bitter taste in my mouth. We knew about 1024 –the game that 2048 is based on, 1024 is a clone of threes– the day it came out. Instead of reading those comments the first thing I did was play a round of 2048. I beat it my first try. It was too easy and I thought people would eventually tire of a "broken" game. I felt better for a little bit but then went back and read HN. After going through enough of it, even reading people talking about Threes and how 2048 is a ripoff, I felt pretty low.

I had the same reaction back when Ninja Fishing cloned Ridiculous Fishing. Ninja Fishing felt bad and wasn't well designed so I thought it might not eclipse RF that much. Ninja Fishing did really well and that same low feeling struck hard.

The difference then with RF though was that our game wasn't released yet so the feeling really festered and haunted us. Threes had been released and it shortly became the most successful game I've worked on. There was always that silver lining, that people really dug the game and were truly loving it, that dispels a lot of the broken-heartedness. I still consider myself incredibly lucky, and counted my blessings even back then.