Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Many actual natural phenomena can be turned into a story driver for a game; we only
need to switch on the fantasy.
Tile-matching puzzles
Tile-matching puzzles include a very wide range of games that require the players
to assemble a uniform set of specified objects. The most common association is, of
course, a jigsaw puzzle, which became a symbol of puzzles of any type. Jigsaw's
game piece is now a well-recognizable icon. This element illustrates all the principles
most of puzzles have: the geometric shape with cutouts and ledges indicates that
can be connected with another shape, but a picture fragment printed on its surface
is a hint to the fact that the elements are part of something bigger. The world of video
games has its own icon,
Tetris
, which also features complex geometric shapes as
main game pieces (they are known as
tetraminos
). Tile matching is one of the pop-
ular mechanics for video games, because it can be interpreted in thousands of ways,
making game designers switch on their creativity. Even tried-and-true concepts can
be reinvented; for example, there is a game called
Dream of Pixels
by
Dawn of
Play
, which is a pretty talented allusion to Tetris. It uses tetraminos, traditional game
pieces from Tetris, but the main objective is different. Instead of creating packs of
elements on the screen, the player should
extract
individual shapes from a bunch of
cubes.
Match-three games
As the term suggests, a match-three game is a tile-matching puzzle, where a player
shouldmatchatleastthreeelements(inreality,manygamesletusmatchtwoitems).
He/she must construct or find such sequences in the array of typical objects. This
is one of the most convenient types of puzzles to start with because the core of the
game is not complicated and can be developed even by a novice. At a basic level,
it is all about manipulations with a two-dimensional array of data (nevertheless, a
