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[Arnold]

Hey ho!

I've made this little prototype where i combined some ideas that i had. But right now i'm not sure if the Idea is worth pursuing any further. Please take a look and if you have any Feedback please tell me what you think.

Click and drag, or just click to drop tokens into the game-board. Same colored tokens can be match vertically and horizontally. Tokens "Level-Up" when they are matched vertically. Only tokens with the same Level can be match horizontal. If you run out of space the Game is over.

cheers!

Play Prototype v0.1
Play Prototype v0.2
Play Prototype v0.3
Play Prototype v0.4

[Ankmannen]

Hi!

First off, this is not my type of game since I personally suck at them. So I will not judge the idea.

What I wonder is:

Is there a way to logically keep the game going or is it predetermined by chance? From playing it for a couple of minutes it feels like I'm totally in the hands of the random colors than in putting some thought into where to place them? I'm also probably wrong!

// AnkMannen

[Arnold]

yeah - what is missing right now is a more ballanced spawn algorithm. Right now i have 5 rows meaning 3+2 possible matching positions horizontal. 6 Colors and 2 levels. I think what could make the game better are chain reactions. All matching games feel pretty good when big chain combos go off. i think i will need to find a way of making the game support these chain-reactions.
maybe i could allow level 1 and 2 matches awarding more points. could be even cooler to have endless level ups for bigger scores when matching horizontal... mhhh

[Quicksand-S]

As you said, I think the main thing that's missing is chain-reactions, or at least the ability to clear larger areas. As things are now, it seems like there's no way to get really good. No matter what you do, things will keep piling up. That said, I'm curious what your high-score is so far. Maybe I should have just played differently.

[Indievelopper]

I believe there's problem with the mechanics.

It really feels like you should just choose a column per color and hope the 6th one is not going to hinder you too much...

[Arnold]

thanks for the tips.

i made some changes to the core mechanic this morning, which seem to lead in the right direction. i removed the vertical scoring and added a sort of endless stacking. so you can level up 3 lvl1 tokens to 1 lvl2 token, 3 lvl2 tokens to a lvl3 etc, but you won't get any points for doing that. scoring only happens when you match stuff horizontally. every token gives you a fixed amount of points (50right now) and the level of the token is the multiplier. so a level 2 token will give you 100 points.

this makes the stacking mechanic only usefull if you then can build up a horizontal match to get the points. the spawning of the tokens right now is still random. i think some alternation of the spawning depending on the state of the board could be nice. on the other hand tetris also  uses this sort of random thing:
"Random Generator generates a sequence of all seven one-sided tetrominoes (I, J, L, O, S, T, Z) permuted randomly, as if they were drawn from a bag. Then it deals all seven tetrominoes to the piece sequence before generating another bag." (Source)

check out v0.2 here!

[Ankmannen]

Improvement indeed! I liked the v0.2 better. Still having trouble to get any scores since I, as mentioned earlier, suck at these kinda games.

[Arnold]

so yeah. i worked a little bit on the spawning of the tokens and pacing of the game. it should be much easier now to get some scores. next thing would be to try out some special tokens, bomb, color-bomb etc. we'll see

Play Prototype v0.3

[Quicksand-S]

I think the problem with this setup is that it's very easy to make a row unusable. There always comes a time when you have to put a piece down in a place you don't want to (which is fine), but you can never recover from it, no matter what you do (which isn't ideal). It would be nice to be able to get rid of circles vertically, somehow, so that I can "fix" bad rows.

Also, Tetris isn't completely random. Like your quote says, it gives you all the tetrominoes, one after the other, in a random order. What that means is that, in the original Tetris, you won't ever get another L-shape until you've gotten all the other ones first. That way, the game makes sure there is always variety.

[Arnold]

i think thats the mayor flaw of the game. all matching games work so good because you can remove rows on the bottom hoping for tokens on higher rows drop down to create new matches. i like the idea of having a more tetris style "drop into the gameboard" and only manipulate tokens that came from top, in opposite to lets say bejeweled, where you are able to manipulate all tokens.

maybe i need to introduce the idea of vertical matching again, but restrict it in a kind of way, because it was way too easy to remove tokens by vertical matching. tertris does it in an elegant way of having the user play agains the moving gameboard itself. in my game its more the player who fights his own mess that he creates (which also exsits in tertris).

mhhh i really don't know - maybe this whole mechanic isn't just working...

**** update

i've added another mechanic, a lvl 3 token transforms into a joker token that can be matched with all colors, think this is the last idea that i have to build the core gameplay! some feedback would be cool!

play v0.4

[Kinaetron]

I've just played prototype 4. The idea is quite neat and simply but, it did get quite boring for me. Specifically I really didn't feel challenged till I was 5 minutes  into the game. I think you should give more consideration to the difficulty curve.

[Quicksand-S]

Well, it's a lot better than before. It actually works as a game now.

That said, I didn't find anything enjoyable about it. Maybe sound effects and music would at least give successful moves a feeling of accomplishment. I don't know.

As Monkey_D_Daley said, the challenge doesn't show up for a while. It takes far too long for the other colors to come into play.

[Arnold]

thanks guys!
sure theres a lot of stuff missing, i just wanted to get the core mechanic at a bare minimum to work. after that it is clear that you can enhance everything, mechanic, graphics, sound - whatever you wish. but at this point i was uncertain if the gamedesign concept is worth to pursue.

i think the game can work as it its right now and as a result i will continue working on it. if i have more to show i maybe open a regular dev-log to show my progress.

thanks everyone for helping out!

cheers!