Sherlock

I've watched an awful lot of Sherlock the past week. One more episode in season 2 to go. He was pretty fun to watch in the new Star Trek movie.

Dev Journal - This reads better.

This is actually closer to the original style that I had in mind. The whole thing was supposed to be like reading from an old book of legend where this figure made the town to be what it is today. Since it is such an old tale the entire game would presented as if you were reading from a book that was handwritten.

I think I will continue down this path.

Treasure chest looks a little too close to the wood. May swap it out for a gold coin.

Dev Journal - Match-3 Bonus Equation

bonus = (matches - 3) x 2
For some reason this silly bonus equation took me a lot longer to figure out than it should have. Essentially if you get 3 matches in a match-3 game, you get no bonus. That's 3 points. If you get 4 matches in a match-3 game, I wanted you to get 5 points. In this case: 3 + ((4-3) x 2) = 5. If you get 5 matches in a match-3 game, you would get 7 points and 6 matches gets you 12 points. So on and so forth!

This is the bonus equation! So simple!

Dev Journal - Old Game Engines

I decided to go through some of the older game engines that I build many years ago (this one was May of 2010). I had built it in a way where creating new puzzles and releasing a batch of new puzzles would be "easy". It's strange that I never thought about doing it until now.

Thank goodness I built an editor for this thing. I should probably put a "turn off sound" button in here... shouldn't be too hard... maybe for part 3. I'll release it into the wild in a day or two.

Dev Journal - This doesn't read well.

Did a simple art swap. This does not read well. Will need to experiment some more.

Dev Journal - Match 3 Quest Stuff

Just some drawings from my design journal. I should probably come up with a name for this game. I feel that it's going to be something that I just plunk away at over an extended period of time, which is quite different from the "rush to finish" I get in other projects.

Dev Tidbit: The percentages you see in the second picture are loot table drops. What this means for this game is that when the board generates a new layout, it's not simply "random blocks". It will actually pull from a table based on percentages. The reason is that you wouldn't want a randomized table where getting "treasure blocks" has has the same possibility of getting "quest point blocks" or "wood resource blocks". Allows for level balance.

Some Doodles From Lunch

Did some doodles during lunch today including trying out a Photoshop brush I downloaded and drawing icons for my match-3 game.

Working from home with baby strapped to my chest.

Match 3 Game Mechanic Working - VIDEO

Match-3 Game - Mechanics Working! from Alexander Shen on Vimeo.

IT WORKS. EHMERGERD.

Match 3 Game Mechanic

I've always wanted to make a match-3 type game and I was able to get this working on the train ride into work. Ultimately what you're seeing here is the "hardest" part of the match-3 mechanic, which is the game being able to find matches and mark them as such.

It was thanks to talking to my coworkers Keith and Peter a few weeks ago that got me inspired to tackle the challenge. I never had a good idea of how to do it, but their explanation really helped. I'm very excited.

What you're basically seeing is a generated board and my console log marking which ones need to be destroyed. It's working. IT'S WORKING!