So…contrary to the previous article i have written i have done a fair amount of work on my game. I have a splash screen with the twin pines logo on it. I have a title screen and a game screen. The game screen populates a 10x10 grid of ‘tiles’ (currently the tiles are just coloured squares painted directly onto the screen). The tile colours are currently randomly generated. I have a matching algorithm which will detect horizontal and vertical matches of 3, 4 or 5 tiles and returns an array of tiles to be ‘removed’ from the grid. These tiles are then removed from the grid and the tile directly above the removed tile will fall into the space vacated by the tile below it.

Grand progress i’m sure you’ll agree but i’ve come across my first stumbling block. I can only get the tile above the disappearing tile to fall. Tiles above that remain routed to the spot, irritatingly defying gravity. I’m not entirely sure what is causing this. I suspect that the order in which i execute tile updates has something to do with it. Currently they are being executed from top to bottom, so i expect that the collision checking algorithm is being fired and returning true so the tile stays where it is.

Next step is to change the order of my update loop and see what happens. Hopefully i’ve cracked it and can move onto the next step. Filling in the spaces with new tiles.

Exciting times i’m sure you’ll agree