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