A match-4 puzzle by spinning in a hexagonal grid!
HEXvolver is a Match-4 hexagon based puzzle game. By grabbing a gem and moving to neighbour gem, you can orbit the other gems around to line up groups of matching gems. Match 4 or more to gain points and more time to play. With 5 matches, you get a fire gem that explodes on match, and with 6+ you get a lightning gem that destroys rows of gems in all 6 directions. Get a good high score and win the leaderboards!
HEXvolver | A Match-4 Spinning Hex Puzzle
A bit of history and some ramblings
Originally started as a solo gamejam with the intention of getting a game out quickly on Google Play - just to get more familiar with the whole process. The very first version was uploaded in September 2022, with ~24 hours on the work hours clock. It was a very barebones prototype of my idea, and I was confident I could use the remaining 24 hours to fix any bugs remaining, slap ads on it, and push it to Google Play store.
Oooh boy.
Every now and then I have put some hours in the game, and it's finally starting to look and feel like, well, an actual game. The current work hours tally? ...110. A smidge over 48, heh. And there's still a lot of stuff to be done. Especially as I'm also trying to get the game to Google Play...
As a mini-postmortem (even tho we aren't even there yet), the biggest timesinks thus far have been CI/CD related, or other metawork like setting up and managing PlayFab and Google Play. If people are interested to hear more how I've managed to waste hours upon hours with these, I'm up for explaining more (it's mostly my own incompetence paired with stiff policies and systems), but for now, let's just leave it at that.
Biggest gamedesign issues thus far has been how to make the game interesting. Early on I noticed, both by playing myself and seeing others play, that yes, the basic premise itself is interesting, but after a few minutes the gameplay... is just dull. Originally the game had a bigger board (btw. which I will be bringing back, or, well, at least the second iteration of the big board, so, yeah, medium board), and a timed 60 seconds to make matches, and getting some more time on each match, with the global score multiplier increasing every 10 seconds.
This tho might result in an "endless" gameplay, and with no other pacing, yeah, it could get a bit hairy.
For 0.3 (the currently just released version), I made the board one-layer smaller - this makes the game both easier and more difficult: it's easier to keep track of the gems as there are less of them on screen at once and they are bigger, but it's also harder to just willynilly maneuver the gems whichever way you want in multiple steps - and added "levels" or "rounds": once you get to full time, the board shuffles, and your global multiplier increases only at this point. This imo makes the game more interesting and the pacing feels a lot better.
To make it more interesting, the re-up of time per match/gem decreases slightly per level, and to prevent from getting to a difficulty level that forces you into an endless loop once again where you just hover around the midpoint mark in time, every first match of a combo the player makes increases the "time scale" - both time left and time gained are increased slightly. This increases the "risks" but also the "rewards", forcing you to either game over or go to the next level.
This tho, might have the unfortunate side effect of making the game impossible to go forward to the next level after a certain point. I have yet to figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen - I kinda want it to be possible (but difficult) to basically go indefinitely if you are so inclined, but needing something like laser focus at the most difficult levels. Maybe just limit the maximum difficulty increase (you'd still progress to next round and get the next multiplier, but the game wouldn't get any more difficult?)
One of my personal pet peeves is the fact that when you have a match, you start to immediately try to set up the next match BUT there is actually a combo coming, and you don't realize it's still going, and then you don't also realize when you have control back again. The only thing I can think of fixing this some kind of visual and audial feedback/indicator that you have/don't have control, but I don't really have any good ideas what that could be. Maybe just darken the whole gemboard a bit?
Design issues aside, for completely transparency part of the reason I'm writing here is to get more traffic and eyes on my game. It's not _necessarily_ just because of that, but part of that want/need is that I really could use some feedback, bug hunting and testers in general, and all ideas are welcome - like mentioned before, I have some design issues still to figure out, and I'd appreciate it a bunch for any help people can give.
As you might have guessed from the timeline presented, I might forget to develop the game for a day or a few months, but I'm currently very close (even if I'm only at 50%) to my first real Android release (currently in internal testing) for Google Play, which I kinda denote as 1.0, so I'll try to be at least somewhat active here as well.
Thanks for reading my long wall of text, and in advance for any eyes you can give my project, every little bit helps!
