Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
may be even crazy. What do you think about pushing the player to use more than
one finger to control the game, activating his dexterity and body coordination to the
maximum? We could do something like putting only four tiles in a row. The columns
move, and the player must stop them simultaneously by using four fingers at once
as if he is playing a small piano keyboard. I think that four fingers is an optimal num-
ber; the player uses all fingers except the thumb, which is not nimble enough in this
situation. Now imagine how funny the game process is; the tiles are falling down, the
player has to notice possible combinations and react fast, controlling each column.
But this is not easy, especially when the pinky finger must be used to apply the
brakes to the fourth column. There are a lot of mistakes made, but they can be re-
covered from very quickly because the game constantly generates new content. So,
gameplay is dynamic, funny, and addictive. A possible tagline for this mode is
Catch
the sequence
.
But of course, the game needs more attention towards balance to work well; for ex-
ample, the number of tile types should reduce to four or five, as more number of tile
types increases the probability of long combinations. The speed must be pretty low
at the very beginning of a game session, increasing over time as the game is played.
Because of the dynamic and unpredictable nature of this game mode, the puzzle
cannot be stopped naturally by removing all the tiles from the array as they are con-
stantly regenerated. So, other types of signals to end the current game should be
used: timers (the players gets specific time segments to play) or challenges to collect
a determined number of points (for instance, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000).
