*This series of blog posts explains problems that arose during development with their solutions, as well as found solutions and decisions made. It shows the game being built from the ground up. Check part one here. *This part continues directly where the last part ended.
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 hits 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.
Normal…
…Hard…
…and Expert.
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. <a>
</a> The near-final main menu!
Next time, I’ll discuss the scrapped content, creative commons resources, colorblindness, translations, and the GameJolt API.
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