The days go fast!! It’s a little disappointing I’m already a day over my scheduled time-table - but I am enjoying and everything I’ve done has been worthwhile. I just have concerns about the length of this project.. but let’s see how it goes :D

The above gif shows the main visual changes.. along with me getting an awesome 16 combo on stream! There are now trail effects going across chains when they are earned, with floating text showing the length of the chain earned. There is now a minimal GUI that shows the points earned, how long your combo was for one move, along with buttons ready for holding the special abilities you earn.

The match line effect took some time, as needed to do some work with particle systems, and then restructring my camera system to allow particles to be drawn infront of everything else. The scrolling text is simple, but I was very pleased with myself that I was able to create it from scratch without using previous projects as examples.

There were a few bugs occuring, though most of those were generated when I was adapting code and forgot to amend all the values I was copy and pasting! Snarf!! However, I did come across one additional problem, as highlighted below:

The algorithm for dropping blocks didn’t take into account the slighty rare situation of having two seperate gaps within the same vertical row. This wasn’t too bad to resolved, just needed to instruct the algorithm to drop blocks above a gap one by one until it came across another gap or the end of the puzzle board.

The temp GUI was put together relatively quickly as I want to visual design the final layout of the game, rather than going through 5 different iterations that each take a long time to put together. Most of the mechanics for scoring were already in place, but I ended up adding all chains to a list which is then processed at the end of a “turn”, which would then be translated into points based on the length of your combo.

The final thing was to work on collecting information about how many special abilties or enemy buffs were part of chains and add them to their own lists to be processed. Unfortunately something was going wrong where abilities were not being counted accurately, so that will be the first target to solve tomorrow morning!

MAYBE, just maybe, I will start the Tower Defence element tomorrow… wish me luck!