Connected Worlds - Parallel Universes

Online multiplayer match-3 game where you and your friends or enemies connect three worlds back into one.

OK m.e.:  make it !

Start.



August 24 (06am)
Finally made some progress with syncing data on multiplayer.
Lost about 8 hours of finding a bug in handling turns and gave up on the fix and made a work-around.

Version 3 first time that data is synced!

> 20 hours left!

Game (versions)

Hello All,

Just now I uploaded the multiplayer online match-3 game to Ludum Dare.

The Ludum Dare Page


Best regards from
M.E.

Ludum Dare 30
Connected Worlds

Parallel Universes:  a post-mortem

My goal was to make a match-3 online game so that you can play with multiple friends. Using the information from the other players you could make descissions but you have to watch out for the time.

Lesson learned from Last Ludum Dare (29) was to keep it simple. I went for platformed with way too much animation and level-coding.

From working with the Nuggeta engine I was pretty confident I could use that system for this game.

Well, I stand corrected. I still don’t know what is the cause that I cannot change turns but it took about 8 to 10 hours to (not) find.
After sleep I ditched the Turn system from Nuggeta and was planning on the AI.

What did go well:

• GUI system using Stencyl Forge behaviors TextField and Listbox
• Publishing to 320x480 iPhone 3gs early on gave me position information on the GUI elements
• One scene and dynamic creation of actors
• Actor behavior to avoid repeating code
• Code block to do the AI

In the process I extended the Nuggeta Extension so that I could get a list of rooms without joining each-and-everyone. That was also a pain to debug since there were too many rooms where the player was logged into.

In the end I ditched the A.I. and put efforts into the Property System of Nuggeta.

That worked like a charm and I could focus on getting the turn-based-system into a property system. It wasted too much time, but at least I had something that worked!

Conclusion: the Nuggeta extension was giving me too much problems to make a decent entry, although I was successful with Nuggeta in the past.
I have a working game, but the graphics are terrible. The first LD I took part in (28) was split into 16 hours of graphics and the rest on code. The LD30 was 3 hours graphics and the rest code.


I still had fun doing the LD 48-hour competition and hope to join more.

Best regards from
M.E.
PS. Yes, I do know that I still have time to turn it into a JAM entry, but life goes on
(Hyperlink contains all the work-in-progresss versions)

Multiplayer Match-3 (Click on image to start)