Notester82

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

Puzzle, Rhythm, Roguelike, SHMUP, and Indie game nerd - Electronic music enthusiast - Hobbyist gamedev - Occasional artist - Abstract and Vectorheart art lover - (Current pfp by CivilDog)


sunfire
@sunfire

I've been noodling around with a little arcade puzzler idea in my head, and i've decided to take a break from bigger projects to pursue this for a bit.

Here i'm roughing out the aesthetics and doing a by-hand gameplay test.
The gameplay will be something like this:

  1. player places down lines of tiles (four long in this example) onto the grid
  2. after every player turn, one row and one column of tiles are marked, to show that they will not be activated
  3. once there's only a single tile left unmarked, it is activated
  4. activated tiles connect to each other gridwise, diagonally, or both, and connected tiles are activated recursively and then removed, scoring points
  5. tiles cannot overlap. if the grid is too full to place a new line, turns are skipped until the activation stage occurs
  6. if the activated tile is empty, you lose/the game ends

Aesthetically, i'm going for something in the style of Mixolumia (@davemakes), mostly because i really like the shareable color palette system and i've wanted to use it in something for a while now.
Gameplay-wise, this first manual test up there has shown me that i absolutely need to reduce the connectivity of game tiles, and/or increase the grid size. Currently i'm tossing up whether to reduce the tile types down to just horzontal/vertical/both, whether to include empty tiles that connect to nothing, etc.
The details are yet to be determined but this feels like a solid base to experiment with.

I'd also be interested to hear if anything similar to this has been done before! I suspect this exact mechanical combination hasn't, but some parts (especially the idea of tiles connecting to certain neighbors and not others) might be familiar.


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in reply to @sunfire's post:

Ooooo, this looks interesting! I'm imagining trying to keep the board "sufficiently populated" (placing tiles to maximize connections and be ready for any space on the board to be activated) during gameplay, and I guess the probability space dwindling down with each turn helps too (as long as you have space to place tiles before the turn-skipping kicks in), noice. c:

This is a really cool idea! The slow information gain about an activated tile is something that I don't think I've seen before.

I haven't played around with it at all but my first instinct would be to reduce the tile connectivity and maybe even include somewhat-asymmetrical tiles, things like (N+SE+SW) or (NE+E+SE) or (N+NE+S+SW). I'm not sure what kind of assortment would be interesting without becoming too overwhelming, though.

thanks! i actually ended up playing around with this concept for some time a while back - this post has popped up again after i've mostly finished with the project, but before i've gotten around to uploading it >.>;

i ended up changing a few aspects (most notably the loss condition being when the board fills up instead) and a fairly simple selection of tiles, though i do like your idea of asymmetrical ones as well.

i'll be putting up a post hopefully soon when i get around to showing off the finished-ish prototype. it's missing a few secondary features, but i'm at least glad i ended up with something playable before i moved back onto larger projects.