Hey everyone, I'm Fabio, a very long time lurker here.

Today I want to celebrate and share with you a game that I conceived more than 8 years ago.

Now, don't get me wrong, it didn't take that long to actually build it, but it took all this time to publish it, because, well, life happened...

So, what is it about? It's a game where the main goal is to sum the number that matches the one in the center until the board is cleared out. Numbers get removed from the board when the sum reaches or goes over 50. Sounds easy?

It all started back in 2014 when the game 2048 got published (which just recently celebrated 10 years! [1]) and, after playing it for a while, I started thinking about building something similar; but I didn't want to create one of the many clones. That intention didn't last long, as I totally forgot about it and worked on other projects.

Then after a couple of years of mainly working on backend stuff, I wanted to experiment a bit with React and that new thing called React Native: that was an occasion to finally think about a game to build with them! And there it was, some initial concept sketched on paper, then in a spreadsheet file, and then some code that brought it to a "digital" life. It was 2016. And it stayed there for all this time.

That was only an experiment, never meant to be published, and it again faded out from my mind pretty quickly because of other things I was working on (watch out for that shiny object syndrome!).

Until recently, when I was cleaning/organizing a bit some folders and repositories, and that project came up again. It was ugly, but I still enjoyed playing it, so I decided to refresh it a bit.

But this time if I was doing it I'd have to publish it at some point, no matter what. So here we are.

Even though I ended up rewriting most of it, I still kept it in React (and Next.js) deployed on Cloudflare Pages; and I'm finishing polishing up the mobile apps a little bit (will be ready soon!) built in React Native and Expo. While the backend is a vanilla Rails API with Postgres and Redis, nothing too fancy.

After all this time, it's just so refreshing to finally being able to share it.

I'd say that the big take away of this story is to "just do it" and press that "publish" button at some point! And yes, it could be built&published in a weekend, or maybe even less with a LLM; but that's not the point :)

I'd love to know what you think about it. I'll try to answer to everyone during / before the end of the day.

A small trivia: today's %d+%y=50

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934746