match 3 proof of concept work in progress

http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/28782

the idea is a match 3 game where each piece had 2 aspects, a color and a number, either of which match when there are 3 in a row

this makes your brain do some interesting gymnastics while looking at the board

moving pieces to make matches doesnt work yet, but the check matches button lets you see what happens when a match is made as it will remove existing matches on the board, and the reset button will reset the board to generate new matches

Game is playable now

clicking on pieces will select them, clicking on their neighbors will move them and check for matches

currently not checking if a new board has existing matches until a piece is moved or the "check matches" button is pressed

added checks to prevent initial matches, next thing is to check to see if the board is a locked so no new matches can be made

currently you can move pieces when there is no match so the board can't be locked but im probably going to prevent non-match moves that in the future

It seems a bit too easy to make matches. Will the goal be to clear the board completely?

Played around with it a bit myself this morning. The idea of looking for two separate characteristics and matching off of either is pretty good. I would be concerned that you could have too many matches and it would be too easy (or impossible to play since matches constantly happen automatically) but it doesn't seem to be the case here.

Are you going to add obstacles, special blocks, or other tweaks to the design later?

Ty for taking a look.  I was also worried that matches would be too constant but in testing that wasn't the case.  I think the longest cascade I saw was maybe 6?

I'm probably not going to use the number and color mechanic.  I'm eventually going for puzzlequest style gameplay which will require me to replace tiles with special ones.  And having both numbers and colors would make the board much less readable.

Eventually I hope to replicate the gameplay of Marvel Puzzle Quest which is a well made mobile game that has asynchronous pvp http://iphone-game-cheats.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/marvel-puzzle-quest-hack.jpg

You can see in the graphic there are special "skull" tiles that have countdowns which do stuff if they aren't matched in time.  I think that is a great mechanic.  Also there are special tiles which increase your damage with each match, deal damage at the end of the turn, and prevent damage as long as they are on the board.

But of course being a mobile game its plagued with time gates and rapacious monetization pratctices.

Right now I'm using the Twine to create a game flow diagram, which is as far as I want to go in design docs at this stage

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/221516245/GameFlow/Match3/Match3FlowTest.html

So I know what to make.  Twine is meant for interactive fiction but it seems like a perfect tool for this kind of thing.

My tentative theme is 80's future "neuromancer" style cyberspace where the board is the "data stream" and your opponent is "server encryption".

Hah. You know I used Twine as an experiment in developing Stencyl tutorials once. It works pretty well but I didn't feel like reproducing all of the articles in Twine.