Today I wasn’t able to spend as long as hoped working on the development of Honest Dan’s Last Stand! However, some great progress was made and I’m looking forward to making more progress tomorrow.

First I had to deal with a problem encountered in the match checking algorithm, as when we placing a tile in a potential new position, we weren’t removing it from its current position when checking for a match. As a result we were giving a free tile of the same type incorrectly when checking for a match.

The next step was to have tiles move down if there had been a match below them, resulting in a new “empty space”. The puzzle grid was checked over tile by tile, and if there was a gap undernearth a tile - we would give the tile and those above it an instruction to move down the depth of the gap.

Once this was achieved, I then went on to allow new tiles to drop in from the top of puzzle grid to fill any gaps caused from the shifting down of existing tiles. New tiles would start at the top of any column that needed tiles, and then be shifted down until they reached another tile. This would be repeated until the column had no empty spaces remaining.

Finally, the puzzle needed to check for matches after all the existing and new tiles had shifted down into place. Then, the whole board should be checked to see if any new matches resulted from the new tile positions. If so, tiles would shift down and be added again, matches calculated, and the process looped until no new matches resulted after the tiles had shifted down!

At present, it is tricky to observe exactly what happenes following a match, as everything is done so quick and there are no animations to help the player follow the events / shifting down of tiles. This will be my next focus, along with responding to matching tiles that are empowered by special abilities or enemy buffs.