It's been a while since I've finished and published a game, a bad habit to get in to, so I decided I should make something before I completely forget how it is all done. In order to give myself a relatively close deadline I am making a christmas game (to get a christmas themed game sponsored you need to ideally have it done by at least early November.)

I'm dusting off an old redesign of Blockdown I had been tinkering with early in the year, keeping just and main matching mechanism but losing the block locking (so it can't really be considered 'Blockdown' anymore). One of the main problems I found with Blockdown was that when you made the 2x2 match the replacement block spawned directly in place rather than there being any cascading. This had been a concious decision at the time for... some reason, but it ultimately led to the game being far too static and so not so interesting.

Now I have altered it so that when you make a match the pieces from above cascade down into the empty spaces, and then the empty spaces left over from the dropping pieces are filled in from the sides. The new spawning pieces then come in from the sides.

Also, I've slightly changed the matching so that not only are the 2x2-on-the-corners base match pieces removed, but also any adjacent pieces of the same type that are touching (and in turn any matching pieces adjacent to those pieces). This should make the board more dynamic and hopefully more enjoyable.

The timer now takes the form of falling snow that builds up in columns on top of the grid. When pieces fall due to a match, they take the snow above with them. If any of the snow piles reaches the top of the screen, that's game over. This is kind of like the Ice Storm mode in Bejeweled 3, but I swear I had this idea before I had seen that! Really!

I am also doing all the art for this myself (I had been determined that whatever my next game was I'd get somebody else - somebody competent! - to do the art).







I think it is turning out okay for the most part; I particularly like my santa! I am drawing the outlines of everything in AutoCAD of all things (use what you've got and what you know!) and then bringing them over to PSP.








In other news, prior to all of this I had been working on a custom game engine, focusing mainly on Line of Sight and Fog of War. Maaaybe something will eventually come of it...