Hi folks,

here is my first post on my first game made with Godot I've discover lately in December 2022, better late than never, right ?

I've always wanted to make game but never get the actual first stage of the rocket, I've played for almost two years with XNA then MonoGame and C# and for some BEPU (a physics library), made some game light "prototypes" based on games I've played before like Tractor Beam, Transplant, Trembling Towers, etc

Unfortunately, these framework are (were) very basic and not a complete sets to make game without spending a lot's of time redoing things many others have already done thousands of times before like UI or advanced rendering engine.

This first game is a remix of the Amiga game Ishid-O-Matic by Robert Bradner released in 1992 in Assassin Game disk #31. The game is itself a remake of Ishido the way of stone by Michael Feinberg. The beauty of the game lies in its rules, there a very few, making the game very easy to understand, but incredibly hard to master, as all great puzzle games are and should be. I won't repeat the rules here as they're fully explained with lot's of  details in original game manual available online on many abandonware websites.

The difficulty comes from not knowing in which order you'll get the stones, planning a lot of 4 ways matches right away sounds insane, whereas the game can be win easily when deck is well randomly sorted.

Here is the menu of the game:

and the start of a single player game:

To keep things simple and because I like the layout chosen by the author, I decide to keep more or less the same design, but please don't be afraid (see picture below), this is a very early version of the game with at least almost all working mechanisms of the game, huge work on polishing, better assets, UI, sounds still need to be done.

I use Godot 4 since beta 9 to make the game, now it is already in RC4, as I start fresh with it there was no issue migrating from an older version, I also follow the Match3 game tutorial series from Mr Taft Creates on youtube and there are a few issues (animation for panels and container sizing for goal holders in UI mostly) and only a few changes were needed to make it work, the most were tweens related as it has changed quite a lot since the stable release.

I expect to release the game on windows only first in March or April for free including source code on github, there are still to do:

• UI (main menu, settings menu, high-scores pages, about page),
• load/save high-scores and settings,
• add sounds,
• add some visual effects for four ways matches and win & loss,
• better assets (do not hesitate to contact me if you want to make some/all),
• maybe some translations too,
• additional release platforms (Linux, HTML, Android, Mac), help needed for this, do not hesitate to contact me if you're comfortable exporting games to these platforms

For a further release, I thought of enhanced game design with new stuff like blocked cells, rainbow tiles bonus, explosions, and more crazy things.

Stay tuned for more update on the game. If you have any question, do no hesitate to comment below.