I would like to keep it secret for now, it will be important for the story.

Surprises are good! Speaking of story, how story rich are you planning? About the same ratio of story vs play as in Zelda games?

As a fan of elemental magic and GB Zelda titles, I'm really liking this. Love the stone texturing on the map screen. What's the last element in the logo? (Darkness? Void?)

[The Game]

As a novice programmer I figured making a match-3 game would be a good and simple learning experience. I also fell in love with an idea of creating a generic, run-of-the-mill, match "puzzler"; which would unexpectedly start breaking the 4th wall, glitching, "rebooting the phone", deconstructing itself, and similar fun stuff. With some semblance of a short story too (dialog driven).

2-3 months is what it was supposed to take, so naturally I'm now on month 16 (of on and off) developing this thing. During this time the core idea kept changing, the scope kept shifting up and down, and a ton of time went into learning the unknowns. When I say "novice programmer", think: "hasn't used arrays until 9 months into the project... for a grid based game".

The Game

Solomeow's Magic Blast has you join Solomeow - a cat wizard-familiar-thing, who's keen on becoming your friend, your pal, your best buddy. Together you'll grow in magical powers through copious amount of match-2 levels. All the while developing your relationship (or not).

The core of the game is solving match-2 levels, gaining numerous upgrades to make the levels easier/funner, and occasionally engaging into simple dialog with Solomeow between levels.

I went with Match2 because I find them funner and faster to play than the classic match3 (bejeweled, candy crush) I also didn't want to endure the tedium of watching random matches fire off by accident while testing.

Goals

I find these types of games to be all about juice and fireworks, while "solving puzzles" is just a Skinner box facade which creates a very strong compulsion loop. One of the main inspirations for Solomeow's magic blast has been watching my partner play games like Candy Crush and Toon Blast nearly daily for years. Also me getting stuck in them far past the point of novelty or fun.

I'm creating a finite game, and hope to escalate the compulsion loop into a crescendo of dopamine rewards. Until it peaks and all comes crashing down in a hopefully satisfying finale, releasing the player from the loop and desire to play further. No idea if I'll succeed with this, but that's the driving force.

At the least I'll create a finite matching game with some twists on, and slight departures from the popular mechanics of similar games. For better or worse.


What has been done so far

The core and supplementary mechanics to play levels are mostly complete, so I'm moving on to level creation soon. Currently getting a hang on organizing scenes in Unity, grasping some more plugins, doing UI work, planning out monetization...

A lot of the art and UI work has been done, but I have yet to tackle the story bits in detail.

Spent a fair amount of time on spells, as these "explodey bits" are the funnest to interact with in these types of games. However, they're too often boiled down to merely line cleanup, area cleanup, some combination of the two, color cleanup and whole board cleanup. (RPG matching games aside).

   

   

I decided early on I wanted to utilize a magical theme. The original idea was to have the player explore combining various elements into different spellcasting effects (think Magicka, Invoker from Dota or the wizard from Gauntlet). Eventually I dropped that in favor of a simpler spells-and-mana system. Matches of 5 or more pebbles can net you 1-3 stars (mana), which are used to pay for spell casting.

Spells range in their effectiveness from randomly targeting to precise, from weak to devastating. Occasionally they have other effects as well (like swapping, shuffling, granting extra turns, etc). Currently there are around 20 different spells of which the player can choose to hold up to 5 (chosen between levels).

I'm polishing as I go mostly because I can't help myself and seeing pretty stuff on screen motivates me.

Tech used: Unity 2018.3.12 with some plugins mostly for polish. Illustrator for graphics.
Performance wise I'm aiming for 30FPS on my old lower-end android device (samsung galaxy grand prime) which I'm just about managing so far.


Devlog

I find myself occasionally running out of steam, and really want to get going with some other projects. Hope writing about Solomeow's development helps me maintain productivity and finish it in the following months.

I love reading, but spending so much time reading stuff online (and in games) I've become loathe to pick up a book. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks though, mostly non-fiction.

Rewired seems very interesting.

+1 for Corgi Engine! It was a godsend in working on a platformer with no knowledge of how to do custom physics. It's well documented and commented, and as a complete novice I found it relatively easy to work with.

It's really hard to generalize. But some organizational tools for inspector/hierarchy are always useful for any project (depending on your needs and preference. I use QHierarchy, it's alright but not great). A tweening library (I use DOTween). And probably some extensive camera-control plugin won't go to waste

Though not turn-based, some material I found interesting was the Spelunky book in which the creator goes about the process in more detail. Also the noclip documentary.

There's also some interesting GDC talks about procedurality, roguelikes, etc.

I've heard good things about the book @Play: Exploring Roguelike Games so that might be of interest, but I haven't read it.

I do freelance graphic design work and gamedev around that (so it switches between full time, part time and none at all). Have been programing for only two years or so. Steadily working on my first solo game for the past year with two more on the back-burner waiting their turn.

Aside that I spend a lot of time: cooking, taking daily (very) long walks and hikes with my partner (or we otherwise spend time together), writing a bit... and spending far too much time passively on reddit and youtube (usually digging through gamedev or some-other-interest related stuff).

Entertainment wise watch some shows and play a game every now and then.

Got my hands on Breath of the Wild, been playing for a few days. Controlling link is fun, I love exploring around, but it's already getting stale and I think I'm about to drop it soon. With only 20 spent spirit orbs, I'm at a point where I just want to skip all the shrines and just get beefy enough to check out endgame content.

Love the theme and feel of this!

Don't know much about alchemy (though I've recently been pondering to read the "Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz" and dive a bit deeper), but I do subscribe to a lot of hermetic philosophy, so naturally this project interests me.
I also very much like the games inspiring this, so for now just posting to follow. Not many games with true mystical occult themes out there.

I usually sift through a lot, and leave a short comment when I want to be updated further on projects I deem interesting. And even with those I often don't feel like I have much useful feedback to add so I mostly just observe.

If I may say it, unless a devlog-thread is particularly busy, I don't think that even a small "that's great" is superfluous: it tells the author that people are reading (or at least looking at) their thread, and gives at least a little bit of feedback.

Very much agree with this

I complete most games I play. Most of the time, I gauge well what I'm going to enjoy before starting. These are usually shorter games anyway (2-20 hours).
Others get a fair shot, and I don't mind ditching them at any point. Usually due to a mix of being repetitive and having lackluster stories.

Well greatness is something I have a bit of an understanding of: if art is to be "great" to be art, that is quite a non-definition as we could say that the biggest ball of twine is great

You're mixing up art in general and the sublime in art. Additionally you're building a strawman to argue your point.

Not all art resonates with everyone or is understood by everyone. Renaissance paintings go over my head as I'm oblivious to the form and its history. I just usually can't see (or be bothered to see) in them what someone who has been studying the same for over a decade sees. Which is pretty much what Schoq says in his comment about "dumb children".
This still doesn't make me think renaissance paintings have no artistic value.

Gave Vampyr a decent shot, but after 22 hours I just felt like it was wasting my time.

From my understanding of sublime it would sooner be a meticulously executed juxtaposition of logic and emotion (sublime is about greatness). While a "shocking, overly emotional" piece falls firmly into kitsch.

That said, I personally like it when my emotions are stirred, and seek that out. But just because something was designed to tug at my heartstrings doesn't mean it will leave me in awe or add some generosity to my life, which I expect from art to do.

Life is Strange 2, now that all 5 eps are out. My sentimental ass is loving it so far (mid 2nd ep), but I feel it's quite buggy and timing of events keeps messing up my playing pace (and/or vice versa).

I think there's a slight problem with the foot stand in front of the chair not blocking the view though - I would move it a bit further away as a cheap solution

+1