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A jam submission

Shelf Life V0.1View game page

Bejeweled, but you can put any block anywhere and match them any time
Submitted by 1988stevenm — 1 hour, 37 minutes before the deadline
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Shelf Life V0.1's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Fun#14.0004.000
Music / Sound#14.0004.000
Graphics / Animation#14.1674.167
Technical#14.1674.167
Theme#63.1673.167

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit)

This is a nice twist on the match-three genre. I kept trying to top may best score, it was very fun. This has a very high potential, maybe additional powerups may complete the game. A few more months of continuous development and polishing can turn this into a marketable game. Nice work. =) 

Submitted(+1)

Really fun game! Has a TON of potential with different types of blocks, and the franticness of the timer getting faster and faster gave me a few laughs at trying to scramble around haha. Some feedback!

  • I really enjoyed the gameplay mechanic of being able to move the blocks anywhere. Initially when you explained the concept I was a bit wary of how abusive this could be, but it ended up being really balanced with the timer putting pressure on the player. In the end I think I ended up reversing my thoughts, because it's such a different take on the match 3 formula that gives the game a really unique identity.
    • Being able to pop the matching blocks at any time adds a fun layer of strategy to the game. I found myself building a hilarious mass of colors on one side of the field while working on the other side to keep the timer going.
  • The artstyle is super cute! You did such a great job unifying the design of everything to make them all fit with each other. I also liked how you made the blocks have a visually distinct pattern too. I found myself relying more on the patterns than the colors haha.
  • The menu system is very nice to look at. Very intuitive options and layout.
  • Something I thought was a bit distracting were the B blocks having the shrinking ring. It might just be entirely me, but the ring kind of makes the initial run of the game really distracting since there's many of them on the screen at once, making it slightly visually cluttered. It also makes it a bit hard to know what ring belongs to which B block. If there was a suggestion I could make to this, it would be to have the B blocks have a meter on them instead of the ring. That way it would be easier to tell at a glance when they would go off!
    • In contrast, I thought all the other visual feedback was nice! The game telling you which blocks are poppable was a very nice touch that helped me in pinches.

I managed to catch 2 bugs, albeit somewhat minor:

  • This one was kind of hard to tell what happened, but there was a point in the game where I couldn't pop a chain of a decent amount of green blocks. After I popped another chain somewhere else I was able to pop the green ones. I can't recall how exactly the shape was laid out, but it was in a cross shape with a blobby part near the top left side. I don't know if this might be because my mouse wasn't picking up on my presses though. I did click it a few times and nothing happened just to check, but was able to pop another set right afterwards.
  • The scrolling background in the menu seems to be distorted along where the graphic repeats itself, along the seams. It's a minor graphical thing though!

I would totally love to see this game developed like you stated in the discord server! Hearing that you have plans to add content to it makes me happy.

Developer

1) Since I've mostly been the only person playing the game before the jam deadline, I've become somewhat accustomed to things in the game that aren't clearly conveyed to a new player. A meter above the B blocks, or even a circle-shaped gauge around the B blocks directly, might be more intuitive to show the amount of time left - whichever obscues the least amount of information about the above/surrounding blocks.

2) With the scrolling background -- is there any chance you can make a screencap of the seams between the repeating tiles? I can't seem to replicate it, or it might not register as a distortion to me (see above, becoming accustomed to certain things).

3) The part with the green blocks is concerning. Do you remember if they were glowing the same as other 'matched' blocks, or if any/many of them had been swapped before trying to clear them? I'm wondering if there's a blind spot in the code where they don't check for matches or receive the wrong information from neighboring blocks, or they were somehow not set to the same state as other instances.  Whatever the case, it's not a good look having a matching-blocks game where you're arbitrarily denied the ability to match.

Thanks for taking the time to test the game out! It's encouraging to get detailed feedback from you and everyone else. I know I'm on the right path with this game.

Submitted(+1)

Here's the weird seam-thing in a gif!

It's hard to notice in the gif, (much easier to see ingame since it's larger), but there's a small "wiggling" effect where I assume the pattern repeats itself. It's hardly noticeable, but I just thought it was something to note.


As for the bug, the green blocks were indeed poppable and had the glowing effect. I can't recall if I messed with that area beforehand, but I assume I didn't move a green block there myself, (otherwise I would have popped it as soon as I did). I tried to recreate it as best as I can in order to recreate the issue, but so far it seems to work as how it's intended. Hopefully you can find out what's wrong!

Developer

In GMS1.4 you were able to export your game as a regular .exe, but in GMS2 the default is a .exe installer. I hadn't realised you could send your game to people in .zip form that kept the standalone format. So I've added that to the page. The .exe and the .zip download contain the same data. If you've already downloaded the .exe, feel free to uninstall it.

Submitted

Nice game with a cool timed feature. Graphics and sound are good.

Developer

Thanks for taking the time to play the game and thanks for the feedback! Even with some of the changes made it's still primarily a Match-3 game so there isn't a lot new to say about it, at least for the time being. I want to add different modes or a different framing device for the gameplay in the future that will give people more to talk about.

Submitted

great game ^,..,^

timer is a bit weird.

when my score is high, it goes 100 to 0 in a second

Developer(+1)

I'd say that's intentional (you have a lot more downtime to setup combos during the slow stages, but you're supposed to be forced to scramble and think on your feet much more as your rank goes up), but I don't doubt the actual timer speed is wildly unbalanced and needs tweaking further down the road.

Thanks for taking the time to play the game and thanks for the feedback!