Doodle God is a video game. You’ve probably heard about it lately. Maybe this will refresh your memory:
The premise is exceedingly simple: you’re a god in a doodle universe, with the four classical elements in your hands. You can combine elements with each other to produce new elements. Such combinations can be physical (lava + water = stone + steam) or metaphorical (fire + water = alcohol). There are 111 elements to discover in addition to the first four. The full walkthrough takes ten minutes to find them all:
What I find very interesting is the many details that were designed for the sole purpose of making the game self-marketing. The game developers advertise two million plays in its first two weeks, which is pretty impressive (most 9+ rated games on Armor Games end up in that range). And I had personally never heard about the game before, nor seen any advertising for it. Unless a Facebook post by a friend counts as advertising… oh, wait, it does!
The main details I found are:
- It’s freely available online. If people can play it for free, there’s a higher probability that they mention it to other people, until someone wants to use it on an iPhone.
- It’s cheap. This is a strong statement: want to play this on your morning commute for less than a dollar? Sign here. Instant impulse buy.
- There’s a buy button on the game screen. Seriously, that’s what “Available on the App Store” means.
- It takes a while to finish. There are 115 elements. Finding the final element requires you to find the one combination you didn’t find among all 12996 possible combinations. It means you might want to keep playing on your iPhone Monday morning.
- It’s not frustrating. If you’re stuck, you can ask for a hint that shows you several elements and tells you there might be a combination in there. You can only ask for a hint every three minutes, so you don’t solve everything at once.
- It’s tied to Facebook. You can share any new element combinations you discover from within the game. They appear on your Facebook profile, which means your friends will see it, ask themselves what happened, and try out the game.
- It’s obviously designed for the iPhone. Everything happens through taps and drag-drops. You don’t have to wonder if the iPhone version is as good as the PC version you’re playing: what you are playing is the iPhone version.
- There are multiple rewards. When you’re tired of finding all elements, maybe you’ll start looking for he other rewards: element groups (easier to find, since there are only 14), element reactions (harder to find them all), fun easter eggs (Dinosaur + Human = Dinosaur + Blood) or clever quotes that appear every time you perform a reaction.
Did I miss any? Please mention it in the comments!
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- Handwriting – Apple’s new License Agreement : how can a game be both flash and on the iPhone?
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
Hi, I have just bought this game on iPod Touch. It’s great. But in number 7. you say that it is the ‘same’ as but the iPod version is longer. Instead of 115 there are 196 things.
@NamAdNats: thank you for your comment! There are indeed 196 elements to be discovered now. At the time the article was written, the PC game was still in version 1.0 which only had 115 elements.