Holiday Swapz - Free Game

Hi,

Holiday Swapz, a festive match-3 and my first Blitz Max game is being released for free.

http://www.syntaxbomb.com/forum/index.php/topic,1030.0.html

Any bugs and problems, please let me know :)

Cool, thanks for releasing it for free. Looks good.

I'll give it a try tomorrow. I'm sure my daughters will like it.

WOW, it's a nice game, I like it.

BTW...I think I saw Green Grenades in the game....

Nice one.

I did run into a few issues, though:

1) On several occasions, the game got confused. If you play fast and click while there are already blocks cascading, occasionally one of the falling blocks will be off horizontally. The image on the block is then not draw on the center, and the game will NOT respond to any further left-mouse clicks, no matter where you click. It seems that doing a right-click somewhere gets it back to normal though, and you can resume gameplay.

2) The 'click click click' sound effect (dropping blocks?) is kind of annoying, more so because it only appears to come from the left speaker regardless of where on the screen it happens. If you play fast, it sounds like a rabid woodpecker trying out morse code. there's never more than half a second when I'm not hearing the tock-tock-tock-tock noise. (Other than when I run out of moves, see #3)

3) I'm pretty good at most of these match-3 games, and play pretty quickly. Most levels so far I've had between 3 and 4 minutes left on the clock when I finish them. Right now I'm in level 6, with over 30,000 points. However, twice in a row now I've completely ran out of moves. No more options, no firecrackers, and 3 minutes on the counter looking around with no possible moves.
I suggest you try to prevent such a stalemate by either giving you a firecracker or something (if this is already supposed to happen, then it's not working)
Or, if you want to penalize the player for getting locked up in the first place, you may want to detect it and end the game, rather than having him stare at the clock for several minutes. :-?

4) the 'repeat the lights' mini game had the same problem where it didn't respond to my left mouse button at all, until I hit the right one first.. And then it immediately failed me for not repeating properly.

But is a very nice game.

(Note: I finished level 6 on the 4th try, the first 3 ended with me staring at the clock because there were no more moves left)

Level 9 through 16 all had beteen 5 and 6 minutes left on the clock when finished.

It appears that the 'repeat the lights' bonus game has an issue that for like 20 seconds or so, it doesn't respond to *any* mouse clicks, and then tries to do all of them at once.

Oh, noticed some other bugs:

5) On level 12, after a multi-match cascade, one of the squares at the bottom of the grid remained empty. The next time I had a match everything did shift and the empty square got filled again.

6) Upon closing the program, I hit ESC a few times to cancel the active level and immediately pressed 'exit' in the menu screen as soon as it faded into view. Upon doing so, it dropped my back to the desktop but I was left with an 800x600 unresponsive black box in the upper left of the screen, and the exe was still running in the process list and had to be killed manually.

When I started the game again after that, I started hearing the music but didn't see the game itself until I clicked on the holiday swapz taskbar icon. It then switched to the full-screen game mode, and all looked fine again.

Anyway -- After playing this for a while I must say that it is fairly polished overall although it does have a couple of bugs (some of which are more annoying than others)

Having played a number of other match-3's over the past year, I do feel like this one gets a tad monotenous. Other than level 6 where I ran out of moves, there has been no time where I felt even remotely hurried since I always had a ton of time left on the clock.
I like the aspect of having to clear each square at least once, like in big Kahuna Reef -- it makes the various shaped levels a lot more challenging, since certain parts of the board are a lot trickier to get to. In your version, you can just ignore those corners and focus on the 'easy' parts, which is more than enough to get you by. I'd would also be more challenging if there were some squares that were harder than others -- like the frozen squares in Grey Alien's game, or the chained up squares in Big Kahuna Reef.

Additional bonus actions (like the firecracker) would be nice for variety as well, although you probably shouldn't add these unless the overall difficulty is increased a bit first.

But please don't take me the wrong way -- this was just some constructive critisism. It does look very nice, and does well. It's also very nice of you to release it for free, and hats off for actually finishing a complete game, something I personally haven't done. :-)

It's great you've got mini-games, I think a match-3 needs something else these days and mini-games fit the bill. I wanted to get them in my game this year so I could release a gold version but ran out of time. Congrats on the release!

After switching off the music it was much better.

Times Up should read Time's Up (Time is up).

Full screen had some weird flickering going on where the screen was rendered 50% width and 100% width... Windowed worked fine.

I think though this can be chalked up to 'not my kind of game' as I got bored very quickly and uninstalled it. That's not to say it was bad, very polished, nice graphics, etc... But just not my bag!

xlsior,

That's exactly the kind of feedback I'd of been looking for had the game been written a couple of month earlier in the year. I had many ideas on adding features to the boards to vary the difficulty of squares. But alas, the whole game was started too late (although it was never really planned in the first place).

I would of loved to of had another month spent on it, however it had a whopping one month. You can read the background story here > http://www.syntaxbomb.com/forum/index.php/topic,961.0.html



It does check for that and *should* warp a random tile into a cracker one if there are no more moves?

I'll have to get those bugs pinned down in the engine as match-3 will be in one of my games next year, but as a mini-game inside a much bigger game.

Nicely done!

I have another bug for you: it doesn't always perform checks correctly during a cascade - on more than one occasion the tiles falling should have produced a vertical 4 or 5 match, but only the 3 nearest the bottom of the grid actually disappeared (I also got the 'no more moves' bug...).

Congratulations for finishing a game!

If the tiles above are still falling and there's a match-3 below them it doesn't wait for the above tiles to fall before doing the match thing.

Is that the right way? or should it wait if the above falling tiles will create a larger match?



Thanks for confirming :)

hey why didn't you put this in the showcase? Also don't forget to add it here:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=69886

Probably better in the showcase - MOD!! is there a mod around to move this please? :)

@Qube - not sure...

If I match 3 apples (psuedo objects!) and there are 2 oranges below, and 2 above, then when the oranges meet they will be removed as a 4. I believe this is what your code does? The issue I am talking about happens during a cascade - where a match produces a fall, and the result of that fall is a match, which produces another fall - and this all happens very quickly so that you might have (from top to bottom) 2 oranges, gap, 1 orange, gap, 2 oranges: if the 1 orange reaches the bottom 2 first, the 3 are 'matched' before the top 2 catch up (I hope you can visualize what I am trying to say!). I would have expected all 5 to be matched - but then I don't play this type of game very often so could be wrong!

I think it gets a bit squirrely when you continue swapping things around while other blocks are still falling... When do you check if there are valid moves?

It is better that you can swap as other blocks are still falling BUT I personally found this code very hard as there were so many things that could go wrong and needed to be counted for.

Chalky, I think that it's behaving as I expect it to and that to do what you were thinking would mean the code "knowing" that there were some more oranges on the way and thus waiting until the touched before matching all 5 (or tracing back up the column and popping any falling oranges) - it's possible of course...

Chalky - maybe it should wait if the above falling gems would create a larger match. I think this might be happening because there is a slight delay (deliberate) when each line falls down. Yeah, I think that bit needs tweaking to check falling tiles in very close range.



It checks when there are no tiles falling down or being swapped. Oooh, could you do a print screen if you come across it again so I can get a better idea of which scenario the checks are failing? :)

*edit* lol, sorry chalky, I meant xlsior with the no moves bug :p

I'll try - but some of those cascades happen awful fast! Will be in touch if I succeed.

Played some of this today. That second mini-game with the slider puzzle is screwy. If a piece of the picture is near two empty spaces, how do you tell it which empty space to move to?

Eh? Sounds like a bug, there should never be more than one empty space, that's the whole idea behind those slider puzzles.

(I suck at them, haven't finished one of those in the alloted time yet. Although one time I got very close, with just two squares that were swapped with each other)

There never can be two empty spaces.

There was in the Santa picture, unless a part of the picture was totally black and looked exactly like the empty space. And, if so, that is just as bad as a bug. As it confuses the user.

There isn't two black squares in the santa mini game. Did it appear like that or did a square just vanish?

It was like that from the beginning of the mini-game. Something must have gone wrong so that one of the squares never appeared.

Now that you mention it, it was acting like a piece of the picture. I was clicking on the empty spaces trying to see why I could not get a piece to move into it, and one of the empty spaces would give the swoosh sound when I clicked it. Now that I think about it, it was acting like a puzzle piece, but since there was no graphic, I was not seeing anything move.

Ahh, that makes sense :)