Yay, new game! What, another match three? Come on, that’s going to get boring. But wait, there is something different in there.
Alright, here is my new game. Years ago, I had this on a phone and really liked it but never found anything like it in flash. So, I made it. Again with FlashDevelop and without any single graphical asset. Seems I developed an interest in computer generated graphics. With all the given filters in flash it’s pretty simple though to make something shiny.

Ok, some facts and pictures. The first fact: I forgot why I choose blue as the main theme.

The menu screen with kegMenu™, German & muted

Programming the game took approximately 2 days. Doing the framework was the harder part. Or shall I say overdoing. That’s what I tend to. All communication between classes is now done with custom events. And wow, these are powerful. I used a state machine for the first time and that makes sense when creating a game without lag.

The game itself comes, like TriPop, with a timed mode, where one has several seconds to score as many points as possible, and my favourite skilled mode, where only moves cost energy and no clock stresses the player. The new thing here is the hexagonal positioning of the balls and that you need to turn triplets either clockwise or counterclockwise to form lines (basic match three game description goes here…) of three or more balls of the same color. With chains longer than three balls or more than one chain on the initial turn you can regain energy. So, choose wisely and play forever. Balancing was big part here, since the timed mode in TriPop allowed the player to swap gems at no cost and thus create really long chains and score high, higher, woot. This time, turning the triplet comes with energy cost (evil grin here).

I first wanted to include a simple pattern mode (different colored balls displaying different patterns) for a better differentiation between the different balls that could be usable for e.g. colorblind people. It turned out, that I made the patterns, which were simple dots at first, a little bit more entertaining.

The game with pattern mode turned off (above) and on

The game comes in 10 languages. English and German were done by me, the rest was done by a part of the great Mochi Community, namely:

• Ernesto Quezada, Spanish
• LustiGames, Hungarian
• Maras, Czech
• kcnh, Dutch
• kou, Greek
• Pavel, Russian
• J.K.S., Finnish
• José Ferreira, Portuguese

So, in the attempt to let people help you on a specific task, the most important thing I learned is: BE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT. I did send out the strings I needed to be translated and installed a test version of the game. What I should have done in addition would have been some descriptions for my dearest translation team to really know that I mean, because aside from SPO there may be other differences in languages… Well, that was one learning. It went pretty good though for a first try. Use short sentences and don’t focus on reusability of single words. The second important was, you may need a fallback font for special characters. Or, upfront, choose a font that supports those. There is a file size optimization possibility I did use for the first languages. It is ‘only embed the needed fonts’. But you can run into trouble there. So be careful. Write a little program, feed it all your strings, let it sort out the uniques and embed those. Otherwise you may miss one or two.

So, aside from all that I included some progression. With every game played, the points are summed and with every level gained the player gets more energy for the next game. Let’s see if I can make it to level 99 (it’s unlimited by the way).

The game over screen showing the players progress

The player’s level is also accessible from the kegMenu™ and there is another leaderboard for the level reached. So, if you are interested you can track my addiction to this game.

Since it’s above 30 degrees Celsius now I’m running out of all the cool stuff I wanted to write. Oh, nearly forgot, here is a link to the game.

Yoho, the game (you just lost it). I love memebase.