7 ms·
A game that almost died during Covid and how I made it an app
- nonidit 5y agoYou're a little late. This game already became a twitch hype going by the name GarticPhone.
- jordanwallwork 5y agoI played the idea under another name a while back too, Scrawl
- irjustin 5y agoOh wow there's people literally livestreaming now. I'm surprised and impressed.
- asutekku 5y agoNeat, but there are literally multiple of the same game available. Just google ”broken telephone drawing game”. What new does this bring?
- dave84 5y agoPlayed the game as Drawing Evolution on AirConsole over the pandemic, will check out this version.
- thih9 5y agoCurrent title looks like clickbait to me, I'd replace it with the subtitle, "A reflection on 1 year of writeydrawey".
- thiago_fm 5y agoEverybody was playing GarticPhone while the author was developing "the game that almost died". Things developers are the worst at: 1. Market research
- mnd999 5y agoSure if you want to build a business. If you just want to write some code and have a bit of fun with friends and learn a few things then it doesn’t really matter. I built something similar during Covid, another parlour game we call “Colander of Death” (it probably has many other names). It’s never gonna go viral but we had fun with it.
- stochaztic 5y agoAs the person who built the version that got popular enough for the Gartic company to build a competitor, I can say some developers are also the worst at having any design sense whatsoever, or adapting to competition ;). I am morbidly curious if the simple website ads are sufficient--unlike myself and this author, they clearly have a lot more than just one person working part-time on their version, so presumably it brings the company money somehow.
- iainmerrick 5y agoHardly “everybody”, I for one hadn’t heard of Gartic until now.
- cableshaft 5y agoSo yeah, not everybody, but it's definitely not an unknown game. 747 viewers watching Twitch streamers play or playing along with the streamers right this moment. I've also seen it a lot higher than that. Pretty sure it's the most popular form of this game at the moment, besides the Telestrations board game. https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Gartic%20Phone https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Gartic%20Phone
- alexdbird 5y agoI’m a little surprised no one has mentioned the canonical name for this game: Exquisite Corpse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse
- alisonkisk 5y agoThat's a different game.
- williesleg 5y agoPoor choice of words asshole.
- ChrisRR 5y agoSooooo Drawful?
- sokoloff 5y agoFor casual family game nights, there’s a flip book and dry erase marker version of this called “Telestrations” which I can highly recommend. (No connection other than happy user.)
- m_eiman 5y agoThe comments here along the lines of "there's already a game like that" are a bit annoying. I'm pretty sure that you can say the same about just about any game created today, and somehow people still make new ones and sometimes they get lucky and have their game become popular. What's the point of dumping on someone's work like this?
- KMnO4 5y agoThere's something about the article that I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it sounds too much like an ad, maybe it's the hyperbole, like the author is suggesting he single-handedly "saved" this game from "certain death". It's not hard to imagine the criticism if the situation were different. Imagine the headline "How my startup will save millions of companies on the brink of death by providing a way to have meetings remotely". The expected response would be "What about Zoom?".
- esrauch 5y agoI feel like the "I saved a silly game my friends play from certain death during the lockdown period" is just a priori such a fun and light hearted claim that it's ridiculous to respond to it the same way you'd respond to "I saved the global economy"
- tantalor 5y agoThe writing is easily confused: > The game that almost died The author meant: "The game my friends and I had to stop playing because of social distancing" To the reader sounds like: "The game that everybody in the world stopped playing" > my friends and I used to love playing a nameless pen-and-paper game Meant: "my friend and I did not use/know/have a name for this game, we just call it 'the game'" Sounds like: "this game has no name; nobody else in the whole world plays it" > I thought building a version of the game might be a good creative outlet. Meant: "I like building games and making a clone of this would be fun!" Sounds like: "I did not bother to check google, so I had to build one myself." > proved good enough to spread organically through friends for the next few months Meant: "My friends liked it" Sounds like: "None of my 'friends' told me I copied a well known game" > Writey Drawey might not have existed without the digital shift we’ve made over the last year Meant: "If not for pandemic, I would not have made this thing" Sounds like: "I am unaware this game already existed in many forms"
- gota 5y agoA list of names for this game, or games closely inspired by it that rely on similar mechanics - some of which have been named elsewhere in this thread: - Eat Poop You Cat [1] - Telephone Pictionary - Telestrations [2] - GarticPhone (.com for link) - Drawful - Drawception - Mutabo - Cranium (according to wikipedia [3], at least) I'm sure the list can be way longer [1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30618/eat-poop-you-cat https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30618/eat-poop-you-cat [2] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/46213/telestrations https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/46213/telestrations [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#Variants
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fsflyer 5y agoThe href is wrong for the paragraph: Visit the site: https://writeydrawey.site https://writeydrawey.site The href is missing the 'e' in drawey.