Free to play: why iLuckyStones is a free web app
This time we're not talking about levels, drops and spikes. We're talking about why.
Freedom, first of all
The choice to bring iLuckyStones back not as an app, but as a free web app, comes from a clear wish of its author: to express freedom above all. Freedom from the constraints of individual platforms, from rules that always end up favouring whoever owns the platform. The wish to get past limits and constraints.
For players, freedom means playing with no strings attached: a challenge with yourself, free from the purchase or subscription costs that are more and more common today. You open an address and you play. No account, no data to hand over.
We believe in the pleasure of being free, of experimenting and sharing, like sailors on an ocean full of opportunities and possibilities.
Honest, about costs too
We're just as honest about this. The project wasn't born to make money, but out of a passion for bringing back to life an experiment, a game created years ago. Still, we have to admit it: everything has a cost, even ideals and good intentions.
That's why we chose to include advertising that isn't intrusive but rewarding. Watching a spot through to the end gives you extra lives to play with. But since freedom comes first, you're also free to close it and give up the extra lives.
The goal is for the sponsors we find to cover the platform's yearly costs, and the research and development to create new games and new entertainment.
How the game was born, in the author's own words
Alongside freedom we like to put honesty. So here is how iLuckyStones was born in 2014, told by the person who created it.
«At the time I was studying how games for iOS and Android were made.
I experimented, making every kind of mistake. I tried platforms and tools: it was a constant cycle of trying, experimenting and trying again. After a lot of experimenting I decided to get serious and move from theory and tests to something concrete, with the imagination and the hope that people might like it and that it might be a success.
I liked the idea of making something in the style of the '80s, the games you found in arcade cabinets or in bars. I had lots of ideas but, as they say, mostly confused ones.
One day, walking in the mountains, I picked up a stone. It was flattened, it almost looked like a head, a flattened head in fact. I put it in my pocket and in the days that followed I used it as a stress reliever.
Back then I also often met people or friends who, hoping to improve their financial situation, played numbers in the lottery or similar games, perhaps inspired by chance events or by dreams.
And so, probably without even realising it, I linked the stone with luck, and therefore with numbers. Then I thought that, beyond numbers, every one of us sometimes needs chance, which perhaps doesn't exist, to point us towards some suggestions: thoughts that inspire and motivate.
With all these ingredients I began designing the game that later became iLuckyStones.»
That flattened stone is called Lucky today. And the thoughts the author imagined back then are the same thirty you find at every level you clear.