So a few years ago I developed a special version of 2048 for my best friend. I haven’t touched the website since then, but I was curious today and checked it out. You won’t believe what I found out!
Originally I made the game for my childhood best friend as a birthday gift. He was really into the game at the time and played a lot of variants of the game with different themes. He complained to me one day about how he couldn’t make his own variants of the game with existing tools because they didn’t save what he did. And that sparked my interest, because I’ve been trying to figure what I should get him for his birthday.
I decided I’d make a version of the game for him where he could login and save his customizations to profiles which he could switch to anytime. And if he ever switched devices he could login on that device and his profiles would still be there. I was a still a noob at web development so this was a big project for me at the time. But I decided to go for it.
It took more time than I’m willing to admit but I finished the game and I made a video revealing it my friend. He loved it! I made the game available through GitHub pages and the database was hosted by Firebase. There wasn’t much to do with the project after this so I forget about it and let it be for several years.
I haven’t logged into my Firebase account since I setup the site, because I assumed my friend would be the only one using it. But, I was going through my old repos on GitHub today, to see if there was anything I could add to my portfolio website and I came across this old project. Out of curiosity I decided to check the Firebase database and discovered there was thousands of registered users. I then googled “custom 2048” and realized my game was the SECOND RESULT!
I was so excited to see my old project going to good use, and I did not expect this. It just goes to show you never know if something is actually going to be popular until you post it, and sometimes you are very wrong. I’ve since found forum posts that link my site from people who really liked it and I’ve also posted about this on the 2048 subreddit.
For those who want to know about the game itself, here’s some more details:
2048: Custom adds lots of new functionality, including:
- Account creation powered by google firebase
- Ability to save game progress to an account
- Ability to change the image of each tile to any image you want
- Ability to save your tile customizations as a profile to your account
- Ability to switch between saved profiles
- Tile key that shows what each tiles image is
Here’s the link to the game if you’d like to check it out:
https://aidanspeakss.github.io/makeurown/
