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Cart #36983 | 2017-01-31 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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I'm very happy to finally get MATCH3 off my chest! Holy god. Been working on it since about June/July 2015, just coming back to it again and again. Similar to TRAIN. Ugh. But it's now done enough for me to call it a day and call it a #1GAM for January 2017!

Itch page is here.

Controls
Z to advance any screen that's not the actual gameplay. Arrows move the cursor. Z rotates the cursor 90 degrees. (It should 'just work' at the edges.) X swaps the two tiles under the cursor. You have 30 seconds to get as high a score as you can! The more tiles are popped at the same time, the higher your score will be. This game should not require any colour distinctions, although it will probably make it easier if you can distinguish colours. Everything is shaped differently, even the highlight that shows when tiles are popping.

Commentary
This game is something I've been working on for a very long time indeed. On and off over more than 18 months, though it certainly doesn't look it. I'd come back to it, try something, get frustrated, give up for months, and so on.

It's an interesting one. I got the basic mechanics of it working pretty early on. Kept getting a bit lost as to how many types of tile I wanted, how I wanted the end state to work, and persistent bug where matches in the last row or last column wouldn't be caught. (It was not an off-by-one error!)

Still a bug here or there, but I'd say it's pretty playable. Runs on a 30-second timer. Please enjoy!

P#36984 2017-01-31 18:13 ( Edited 2017-02-28 22:51)

Not bad! Just a suggestion: You can make P2's control pad just hot-swap in the direction you press. That would give players the kind of immediate control they'd need, especially in a timer-driven experience.

Alternatively, you could do "Twist Mode" using O/X to rotate a block of 4 tiles, too; which would work better with the 1P-only control scheme.

Does the timer still continue, even when players can't move (match is formed, awaiting drops)?

P#37267 2017-02-07 16:18 ( Edited 2017-02-07 21:20)
  • looks good, simple and clear. maybe rework the layout though (center the board?)
  • 30 secs is very short!! especially when cascades are slow and paralyzing. that would work with a faster game (with touch/mouse for instance) but here I think 90 or 120 seconds would be a minimum.
  • it seems only the first tile above drops down (instead of the whole column). isn't this a bug? another option would be to only replace those that are gone. that would bring less cascades but could speed up the gameplay. in any case it feels wrong right now.
  • I'm not a fan of the tetris attack selector box. here's a faster option: a single cell selector, (o)+ dir to actually swap. change the cursor when (o) is pressed to make it intuitive:
    [0x0]

    overall this is not far from a game I would play for a while and come back to.
    hope that helps :)
P#37284 2017-02-08 08:05 ( Edited 2017-02-08 13:41)

Interesting feedback folks, thanks! This forum unfortunately doesn't send notifications when people comment, apologies for the late response.

I don't normally use the second control pad for games, but a hot-swap might be nice all right. Rotating a block of four tiles (I feel like this is a LUMINES thing?) would be a sweet modal option, but might involve a serious amount of reworking.

I should centre the board, that's a holdover from when I was thinking that the board could size up/down for different 'levels' of play.

Hmm yes, the timer is probably a bit short to have good fun with as the non-creator (at this stage I mostly play it to test it, naturally).

About the tile dropping, the tile repopulating is probably overcomplicated for what it needs to do. I'd say what you're seeing is an artifact of that. It is intended for tiles to 'drop', it's just that tiles also repopulate into empty spaces. So possibly the drop only gets one tile down before tiles below are repopulated. When I had only drop, no repopulate, it worked fine, but then the game got into unplayable states too often/ended too quickly. Hmm.

That's a pretty indepth suggestion on the cursor thing. I'll think about it. I seriously considered just making it never rotate a few times, long after I had actually done all the work to make that possible. >.< Because I'm not sure how useful it is in the end.

Always great to hear from people! Thanks so much for taking the time.

P#37942 2017-02-28 17:51 ( Edited 2017-02-28 22:51)

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