Why do I make games? Because I want to present the world with new ideas. Sure, it won't be as innovative as the cell phone, internet, the compass, or any other great inventions, but all my games try out something new, an unique concept that has not been presented up to now.
Everyone knows the casual game Bejeweled. In this match-3 series you can clearly see it evolve through it's different installments, gaining a space theme in the second game and a fantasy theme in the third. Its second installment would be the game that would get me into these endless puzzlers, with Meteos, an early DS game, at the absolute top. I wanted to make a game like that for my own, and I prototyped this little idea in Game Maker:
The rules are a bit hard to explain, but here I go: you go look for a line of recurring sequences of colors in a grid of squares. By clicking and holding your mouse, you draw a line through the squares to select such patterns. For example, red-blue-red-red-blue-red would have red-blue-red recurring two times, and thus would score you eight points (the length of the pattern * the amount of times the pattern reoccurs). It's pretty fun once you get it, the problem is communicating these rules to new players.
Everyone knows the casual game Bejeweled. In this match-3 series you can clearly see it evolve through it's different installments, gaining a space theme in the second game and a fantasy theme in the third. Its second installment would be the game that would get me into these endless puzzlers, with Meteos, an early DS game, at the absolute top. I wanted to make a game like that for my own, and I prototyped this little idea in Game Maker:
The rules are a bit hard to explain, but here I go: you go look for a line of recurring sequences of colors in a grid of squares. By clicking and holding your mouse, you draw a line through the squares to select such patterns. For example, red-blue-red-red-blue-red would have red-blue-red recurring two times, and thus would score you eight points (the length of the pattern * the amount of times the pattern reoccurs). It's pretty fun once you get it, the problem is communicating these rules to new players.
A very early, unimpressive version of the prototype.
Writing the code for this system was pretty hard. It involves a lot of specific logic specially made for this game, something I hadn't done much before. Therefore, I am really proud of the result. Instead of using a data structure, I just used some plain strings to get started, although arrays also play a big role in checking the validity of a move.
However, squares weren't the ideal for this. A square has four sides. Considering the player also enters a square at one side, that leaves three options. And in a corner or at the sides, the amount of options is severly limited. Hexagons have six sides, increasing the amount of tiles a player can jump to from the current tile.
However, squares weren't the ideal for this. A square has four sides. Considering the player also enters a square at one side, that leaves three options. And in a corner or at the sides, the amount of options is severly limited. Hexagons have six sides, increasing the amount of tiles a player can jump to from the current tile.
Early example of the selection mechanism.
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Operative validity checking and gem selection, and replacing them with other colored hexes.
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The hexagons brought it's own problems. How do they fall? If they just stack on top of each other, in a few moves, the whole field will be swiss cheese, again limiting the options. If they just slide to below, how does that deal with crystals who fall straight on top of each other? The only option in deciding they fall left or right would be with randomness, something that should be avoided in a puzzle game like this.
This led to some downright epic bugs- like this one here, which I've called 'Waterfall'.
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This is the "Cube Stack" bug, which makes all hexagons stack in such a way that they look like cubes.
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An example of Sumico's selection method- green selection indication and arrows. From the game Sumico by Ludomotion.
| This is where the inspiration from Sumico comes into play. It's another hexagon puzzle game, this time based around making sums with numbers and modifiers on the field. (It slightly reminds me of one of my other games, Mathventure.) In this game, hexagons only stack when landing on top of a hexagon in it's own column. Other hexagons are just ignored, which results in touching the tips of the hexagons in other columns when falling down. During play, you don't notice this clear abnormality, and so it worked excellently for Hexaria. More problems arose. If the player could think just long enough to make a move, it would possibly result the player making moves involving 100+ tiles, resulting in ridiculous scores. Endless puzzle games almost never give you time to think. Tetris is an example- the game lasts as long as you do, but the time for each separate move is limited. As you play, the time for each move gets much shorter, and on level 20 blocks hit the floor directly at the start of the turn. (Bejeweld does give you as much time as possible, but does not give the player all information, in particular the blocks that appear from the top when you make a match. Hexaria doesn't do that too, but there are so many blocks on the screen and so many moves possible that it doesn't matter anyway.) |
Thanks to Sumico, I learnt a few tricks to get a logical play experience. For example, when you select a tile that has already been selected, the move is undone up to that point. A block records it's position in the sequence, so it's pretty easy to to program this on top of the correction engine. When you undo the sequence, all hexagons who have a number higher that the selected hexagon is reset. Since the player already has a mouse button pressed and the mouse position is important in the game, there can be no separate undo button, so this is a really inventive alternative.
During development I also had to port the project to a new version of my development tool because of a stupid bug which would cause music not to play (I still don't know why). Porting a small, well structured project to the new version of Game Maker is way easier than porting a large, messy project (which caused me not to be able to port Micro Massive), but it caused my single most important script to break (the one that checks the validity of the sequences). It had, however, it's upsides: I could play with audio volume, the game is pretty fast and I could start porting Hexaria to other platforms should I ever want to.
In Bejeweld Twist, there is a Blitz mode, which gives you five minutes total. There is no way to lengthen the time limit, and only one threat exists on the field that can end your game early. A similar setup is used in Hexaria's main game mode, internally called 'Swift', but addressed in the game as 'Normal', 'Hard' and 'Expert'.
There are two differences between the three difficulties. The first is the time limit. Respectively, each mode lasts three, four, and five minutes. This is done because 'casual' players want to play quick games, so three minutes is doable while five is a bit long. The second is way more interesting, and I think this one is not explored too often in these kind of games: the amount of unique blocks on the stage are respectively three, four and five. Increasing the amount of blocks on the stage really ramps up the complexity of the game, as well as the amount of possible moves you can do.
In Bejeweld Twist, there is a Blitz mode, which gives you five minutes total. There is no way to lengthen the time limit, and only one threat exists on the field that can end your game early. A similar setup is used in Hexaria's main game mode, internally called 'Swift', but addressed in the game as 'Normal', 'Hard' and 'Expert'.
There are two differences between the three difficulties. The first is the time limit. Respectively, each mode lasts three, four, and five minutes. This is done because 'casual' players want to play quick games, so three minutes is doable while five is a bit long. The second is way more interesting, and I think this one is not explored too often in these kind of games: the amount of unique blocks on the stage are respectively three, four and five. Increasing the amount of blocks on the stage really ramps up the complexity of the game, as well as the amount of possible moves you can do.
The other main mode is Zen. If you've played the mode in Bejeweled, you know it can really become an addiction combining gems without a goal. In Bejeweld 3, there are also several features that make you relax even more- of which in Hexaria the mantras return.
Zen is also the general theme of the whole game- from the main menu to the pause menu, everything is executed with as little text as possible, and tries not to interfere with the background by using lots of alpha. Lastly, the fireworks effect is used, while otherwise the background is mainly animated, with a big gem on the main menu- a rotating starry sky.
Zen is also the general theme of the whole game- from the main menu to the pause menu, everything is executed with as little text as possible, and tries not to interfere with the background by using lots of alpha. Lastly, the fireworks effect is used, while otherwise the background is mainly animated, with a big gem on the main menu- a rotating starry sky.
The near-final main menu!
There where also a few scrapped modes- 'Arise', involving the stack to rise (not unlike Panel de Pon), and 'Descend', with blocks dropping out of the sky (not unlike Meteos), where the goal would be to prevent the stack getting too high. The main reason they where scrapped was a limit of time, since I decided to turn in Hexaria as a project for my school. Also, the idea of a free mode (not unlike 'Simple' in Meteos) where you set all available rules yourself would still be a good idea. Lastly, a puzzle mode was planned where mathed gems were not removed from play, but you simply had to match each gem at least once in as least moves possible. I do agree the current number of modes are quite low and do not differ much from each other, so this is an excellent problem to take on in a future update, before the release on the internet.
This time I really wanted ambient sounds. Incompetech, where I usually get music for in my games, did not really had what I was looking for, so in search for a different site, I found the Free Music Archive, with lots of music that is often in Creative Commons. That, and some work from artists and photographers who put their work out with an open licence (on Wikimedia Commons, for example), really make the game look and sound more beautiful than I could ever achieve by myself. I think it is really important for artists to allow a more open use of their work, which is why I like to present my own software through an open license as well. I'm already planning to open source this game once I've added more game modes, and will put it on GitHub for everyone to tinker with.
Let me talk about colorblindness. About 8% of males is colorblind. A pretty huge part of your player base, no? Therefore, in a game that conveys information through color alone, you want to build a prevention against that so all colorblind people can still play it as intended. It also dims the backgrounds a bit, so the contrast between gameplay and background is better. First was the idea to select the color of all blocks yourself, although the solution used were huge icons on the blocks. The Game Accessibility Guidelines contain lots of good ideas to make your game more suitable for everyone, so I recommend everyone to apply at least the Basic Guidelines guidelines to your game.
This time I really wanted ambient sounds. Incompetech, where I usually get music for in my games, did not really had what I was looking for, so in search for a different site, I found the Free Music Archive, with lots of music that is often in Creative Commons. That, and some work from artists and photographers who put their work out with an open licence (on Wikimedia Commons, for example), really make the game look and sound more beautiful than I could ever achieve by myself. I think it is really important for artists to allow a more open use of their work, which is why I like to present my own software through an open license as well. I'm already planning to open source this game once I've added more game modes, and will put it on GitHub for everyone to tinker with.
Let me talk about colorblindness. About 8% of males is colorblind. A pretty huge part of your player base, no? Therefore, in a game that conveys information through color alone, you want to build a prevention against that so all colorblind people can still play it as intended. It also dims the backgrounds a bit, so the contrast between gameplay and background is better. First was the idea to select the color of all blocks yourself, although the solution used were huge icons on the blocks. The Game Accessibility Guidelines contain lots of good ideas to make your game more suitable for everyone, so I recommend everyone to apply at least the Basic Guidelines guidelines to your game.
As a little experiment, I checked how difficult it is to include multiple translations in your game. I made a system that allows me to easily copy a table column into a script, and it includes it in the game! The only included languages as of now are Dutch and English, but these could easily be accompanied by other languages if wished. The game automatically detects which language the OS runs and adjusts itself to that.
The game uses the GameJolt API yet again! As of now, it only supports guest highscores (which are also displayed inside the game for the first time in one of my games). Plans are, for the release version, to include trophies as well, and that I use the data storage to figure out how players play the game- what their favorite game modes are, a collaborative effort in Zen mode to score as much points as possible- in the past this gathered quite some interesting data, so I'm willing to step it up this time to uncover even more interesting data.
All with all, this has been a project that I put a lot of time into, something I really wanted to do after making quite a few jam games last year. I'm hoping I'll get better at finishing projects, so that I can finish more games in a single year. I also feel my programming skills increasing bit by bit, and I learn more about making games immersive and fun. Thank you for reading to the bottom of this!
After originally writing this, I handed in Hexaria at my Informatics teacher. The story, however, is not yet over, as I continued improving the game for release to the world. Next time, I'll talk about building the extra game modes, as well as other stuff I added to make the game better. Stay tuned! You can get Hexaria on GameJolt or itch.io.
All with all, this has been a project that I put a lot of time into, something I really wanted to do after making quite a few jam games last year. I'm hoping I'll get better at finishing projects, so that I can finish more games in a single year. I also feel my programming skills increasing bit by bit, and I learn more about making games immersive and fun. Thank you for reading to the bottom of this!
After originally writing this, I handed in Hexaria at my Informatics teacher. The story, however, is not yet over, as I continued improving the game for release to the world. Next time, I'll talk about building the extra game modes, as well as other stuff I added to make the game better. Stay tuned! You can get Hexaria on GameJolt or itch.io.
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