Posted March 02, 2026 by Driven Games
#devlog
Hey All!
Its been about a month since my last post and I have been slowly chipping away at development. Although progress has been a bit slower than I had hope, I have been pretty good about opening the project and making at least some small changes each day. Considering I do still have a 9 to 5 to worry about each day, I am going to consider that a win. But even with that progress, I still feel like I am not ready to release a demo just yet. So with this update I am going to go over some of the progress I made in the last month and touch on the big challenges that I feel are stopping me from releasing a demo for the game in its current state.
Over the last month I have definitely made some significant changes including:
- Implemented full game loop
- Added controller support
- Implemented Card system and created majority of cards I have targeted for the demo
The biggest of the changes is definitely the last. I spent a great deal of time creating functionality for the cards, using the strategy pattern to create custom resources and incorporating the changes into the game board and score processing. Using the custom resource classes I created (about 5 I think) I created more than 30 cards that are going to make up the pool of power up options for the demo. I am pretty happy with the work here because the existing resources can be used to create new cards, or as a base for any additional custom card resources I may need to add in the future.
I implemented 6 different types of cards for each color tile.
- Add a Tile to Pool
- Chance to Create a Tile when a specific Color is matched
- Multiply the total Points of a match if the match is of the specified color
- Multiply the points for a tile of the specific color
- Increase the number of tile need to create a match for a color
- Add a point for each tile of a specific color that has been matched during the round
I think the above cards offer a good set of base options for a demo, at least to start. From here this can be expanded further.
Now onto the challenges there are 2 big items that I feel need to be addressed ( atleast a little) before I can put out a solid demo. The first is related to the card system. I need to fine tune areas of the card management. Things like which cards are available, how cards can be unlocked, and what limitations should be put on the cards in your deck. Some of the implemented cards are too strong to be available right away so I want to see if there is a good way to unlock cards as others are added to the deck. So I want to try a few things
- Limit the cards in the deck (currently unlimited
- Establish card rarity and unlocks based on rarer cards
- Trade in cards in your deck to add higher rarity cards.
- Individual card tuning or additional scaling.
The next area is level progression and scaling. In its current state the way progression works is there is a target score each level and once reached you pick a card to add to your deck. The next target score then doubles. This is just a little flat and is not as satisfying to reach complete each level. The other two factors that contribute to difficulty are how fast the board fills and how fast the tiles fall. There needs to be some tweaking with how fast each of those items increase with each level. There are bigger tasks I plan to take after the demo to try to add additional challenges (level specific limitations or challenge cards) but at its core the progression needs to feel more satisfying. I have always intended this to be a endless/high score based game so trying to manage this difficulty to keep the player engaged is probably going to involve alot of trial and error. So the best way to handle this is probably just to release the demo and get feedback. So until then I am going to start doing a lot more play testing to start working towards that.
So that's where I am at, the next step is to improve the card system to add enough limits that is challenging but not restrictive. Once that's done I think we are ready for a demo. I would like to get some music in there too but I have only just started playing around in FL Studio.
To all those reading, let me know how interested you would be in seeing the demo sooner rather than later. Here is some very early game play footage to sway your opinion. https://bsky.app/profile/drivengames.co/post/3mdtcpnjkq22m
Anyways Until Next Time!