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SoCoder -> Blogs Home -> Blogs

 
Jayenkai
Created : 12 November 2007
 

Gem Puzzle Slide Thing

It doesn't have a name yet!
In Arcade Slots I made a little "Columns" round. The reels spin, then you use the nudge buttons to make 3 shifts to the reels to match up as many rows of gems as you can.

What's tricky about the game is that you are forced to make 3 shifts. So, if at the end of the reel spinning you get a huge row filled with great gems, you STILL have to make the moves. It forces you to think carefully about every move, and since you're shifting the entire reel you have to think ahead for every spot in the grid.

It's slow. And needs time to get a good score.
And I Love it
So, I started working on a full version of my Gem Puzzle Slide thing. (GPS?)

Having got the basic engine up and running a couple of days ago, I started playing with the art today. It's currently using the original Columns sprites that I'd also used in Arcade Slots, so I figured I should draw some new ones.

However, due to suckyness, nothing I drew came anywhere close to Sega's classic sprites. Which was really annoying.
If anyone can come up with anything better than these, using 16x16 pixels each, magenta background, and 256 colors, then be my guest.


In the meantime the game grows nice and slowly, and is kinda fun, too.
I'm going to try and come up with a fair few gameplay rulesets, so as to keep things interesting. One of the most important changes will be the ability to shift rows as well as columns, and also the ability to shift each row/column freely.
That is.. If you grip a column, you can move it up and down as much as you want until you shift a different one. Then limit the number of "Moves" you can perform, rather than each individual shift.

Anyway, I should have a basic demo up and running soon, so look forward to that.

 

Comments
Monday, 12 November 2007, 06:33
spinal
 		Here are some ripped from a bunch of boulder dash clones, can't draw myself either.

Hope it encourages others to do better.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007, 05:38
Jayenkai
 		Started again!
As Spinal's all too aware, the DS has a really annoying sprite issue, whereby you can move sprites in one frame, but if you change the image they're using, they don't seem to change until the NEXT frame.
This means, when you're doing the usual "Scroll a bit, if scrolled X pixels, then shuffle all sprites up and change them to the next one." thing, it does a really annoying flicker between the shuffles.
So, rather than sticking to an array, I'm now having to deal with sprites in set locations, move them physically around the screen, then after the round's done, stuff that data Back into the array and work out what's what.

Very baffling stuff, and just one of those little annoyances that the DS manages to do rather well

So far, it looks a lot like it did before!

Note
Yes, I have added new BBCode just for this!
[img_left]image[/img] to align an image to the left.
[img_right]image[/img] to align to the right.