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Hey, Potatoes Are Not Explosive here,  (although my friends just called me NotExplosive). Just listened! I'm glad you liked it, and thanks for the feedback!

Just wanted to clarify something: new gems don't spawn on the board until the start of your next turn, so all of the gems that fall down during your turn were visible to you at the start of the turn. Which is to say, any errant matches you get are actually "your fault." However it's not your fault for not realizing that , the hardest part of designing a game like this is convincing the player of what they have control over.

Also tiny gripe: I don't think you gave our composer enough credit, the soundtrack is a bit more than just bleeps and bloops, in my opinion. Granted I don't make music so maybe I'm just easy to impress.

(Now I'm gonna write a short novel about what changed since the jam build, you don't need to read this whole next part on the podcast)

Here's a summary of things that were (not) in the original jam build:

• No free movement at the end of an encounter (you ALWAYS moved with the match 3 board)
• Every gem spawned with uniform randomness (which meant it was statistically likely that you'd have zero movement gems for multiple turns in a row). Now the next gem is determined based on how much you "need" it.
• (as you mentioned) No EXP bar, no leveling system, you had 3 action points flat.
• Gems didn't compound their effects, matching 6 gems did the same thing as matching 3. So matching more than three gems was wasteful.
• No "seeing into the future" with the top two rows.
• No level editor / boss fight / campaign. There was only an "endless" mode where every door led to a random room (even doors you had already gone through)
• Enemies were really dumb, most of them would move randomly, not even attempting to move towards the player.
• The board would refresh with new gems right at the end of your turn, which could (and often did) lead to additional matches you had no way of predicting or planning for.

There's probably some other stuff I'm forgetting but it's easy to imagine how this leads to a much worse experience. Most players would stagger there way out of the first room (maybe hobble over to the chest to get the free potion). Then they'd stumble into the first randomly determined room. Then they'd realize they're out of movement gems so they'd wait for enemies to come to them, which they don't do because they move randomly.

If you look at our submission page you see a lot of folks saying "cool idea but it's not very fun" which is totally fair given how the game was back then. I knew there was a good game buried in here somewhere, it just took me a month to dig it up.

Anyway, thanks for playing and talking about it (one of you played for over an hour, holy crap). I tend to post new games pretty often, especially since I'm stuck at home. If you're interested earlier this year I made a relaxing game with the same composer as this one.