I made a thing..
As I’ve been tinkering lately, I’ve decided to try to make something interesting, or at least fun. Years ago, the wife and I played a lot of match-3 games but we’ve avoided them lately due to microtransactions and arbitrary usage limits.
What did I do?
I wrote a swiftUI program that uses SpriteKit and created a simple match-3 game with a space theme. Four different artifacts to collect as part of the core game loop and credits/tech to collect for a potentially long-term progression system. So far, I’ve only made it to the core game loop and haven’t quite tackled the progression system.
Initially, I had three levels of ‘difficulty’ which were hard-coded and wildly varied in terms of actual difficulty. It never felt quite right. I added an endless mode, which immediately felt more correct.
I added special items that can appear if you match artifacts in particular configurations like a block of four artifacts or match 5+ in a row.
If uses an adaptive difficulty system that tracks how you’re playing and slowly ramps up the difficulty from round to round. Take a little longer to complete your goals? The difficulty ramps up slowly. Breeze through your levels and the difficulty will start to spike.
Roadmap - Where I’m going…
I’m working through Apple’s TestFlight system at the moment to get it into the hands of a few more people so I can gather more feedback. That whole process deserves its own blog. (Don’t even get me started on xcode not recognizing that my apple ID is a paid developer account and not picking up my developer signature)
Beyond the mechanical process of getting it into the hands of more users:
- Resolve a balance issue with the special items that can spawn
- Consider how a tech tree might look and how it could impact the game play experience to increase the strength of special items, alter artifact collection rates, or maybe tweak other game play parameters
- Implement an in-game store to give the player something to spend their credits on.. like special items they can redeem during gameplay.
- Public/Friend leaderboards : which i can’t do until i resolve the xcode problem i mentioned earlier
- replace the sound effects
- replace the artifacts
- rework some of the music..make it more lofi and chill. There’s a current hitch/pause between 30 second tracks..which is noticable and jarring