Understanding Threes: Developers release design archives

"We do believe imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but ideally the imitation happens after we’ve had time to descend slowly from the peak -- not the moment we plant the flag."

- an excerpt of a longer statement by the Threes development team. A new post has popped up on the Threes site which gets at the heart of today's mobile game landscape: Release a great game, and it won't be long before it's outright copied or reinterpreted, and that reinterpretation or copy is up on an app store. It happened to Threes, of course. "This fast, speed-up of technological and creative advances is the lay of the land here. That’s life! That’s how we get to where we’re going. Standing on each others shoulders," the developers write, "but piling on top of us right when the majority of Threes players haven’t had time to understand all we’ve done with our game’s system and why we took 14 months to make it, well... that makes us sad." Whether it's to show off the hard work that went into the deceptively simple game, or just as a contribution to the game design space, the post comes alongside a huge dump of emails between developers Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend -- including lots of design prototypes. The discussion takes in every aspect of the development process for the game. If you truly want to understand Threes, they seem to be saying, check out all the work we've done -- and then build on it.