Save A Small World by chaotikza

made by chaotikza for LD 38 (JAM)

A fairly simple match 3 game where you try to save a small world called Earth from pollution by recycling all the garbage that's being thrown away by the careless inhabitants.

Links

Downloads: itch.io

Source: https://github.com/mattpwest/LD38

Instructions

Swap items by using the mouse to drag tiles around.

You can back out from any screen by pressing the ESCAPE key.

Voting & Credits

We're opting out of sound and music.

Sound was sourced from freesound.org and lightly edited:

http://freesound.org/people/j1987/sounds/178840/
http://freesound.org/people/mohomran/sounds/180738/
http://freesound.org/people/SOUNDSCAPE_HUMFAK/sounds/258023/
http://freesound.org/people/daboy291/sounds/119417/

Music was sourced from freemusicarchive.org and used as is: * Cylinder Nine by Chris Zabriskie

Art was created ourselves with the exception of the world map which was sourced from NASA's Blue Marble project and lightly edited to pixelate it.

Code and game design was all us.

Original URL

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/save-a-small-world

Ratings

Given

11🗳️

0🗨️

Feedback

pixelstuff

09. May 2017 · 18:34 UTC

Very similar to Candy Crush, works fine, could be more fun with some special objects or effects when you make a row of 4 or 5. Maybe do something on the map when you pass the level.

Zirrrus

13. May 2017 · 10:35 UTC

Challenging! I couldn't get past the 4th level.
What I didn't like was that it only matched vertically and horizontally, instead of whenever 3 or more pieces touch(even in weird shapes), but I can imagine that that might have come down to ease of implementation.

Cyberwiz

15. May 2017 · 08:34 UTC

@zirrrus & @pixelstuff thanks for the feedback. We're definitely looking at making the game more fun, sadly we just ran out of time and focused more on having better working menus etc. Also there is a bug somewhere that's causing the tiles shown onscreen to not match the actual tiletype that's assigned to it. Sadly we haven't been able to track it down yet, but will notify you as soon as it's done!

lord-bobyness

15. May 2017 · 19:02 UTC

This game feels really shoehorned into the theme. Making a match 3 game is fine, but it feels like you just took the basic formula and re-skined it. This should be a chance to do something new and unique with the genre by using the theme to rethink and reimagine that basic formula into something new!

P.S. I don't mean to be unduly harsh, it's a fun game, but I think there's a missed opportunity to make it a unique and special game as well. You don't need to use the theme, but use it as inspiration, or just ignore it entirely and make your own game the way you want to make it ;)

Cyberwiz

17. May 2017 · 15:17 UTC

@lord-bobyness thanks for the feedback! We are well aware that it's just the basic match 3 game and we're not trying to push boundaries within the genre. We were merely flexing our design muscles in an attempt to build something a lot more solid than our previous attempts, which is something we definitely achieved this time round and it allows us more flexibility in future iterations without having to go and "rewrite" everything just because it was hacked together. I'll admit that my day-job as a software developer tends to push me towards learning better ways to implementing concepts, but my day-job is not within the same paradigm as this so we just end up spending more time learning the basics in order to have better subsequent games in the future.

glitchy-pixel

19. May 2017 · 22:17 UTC

Atlhough tis a bit short on the theme side, its a fun sweet three match game.

I did manage to get some bugs though (there was a three row on the left, and it ouwldn't combine. It still let me play but for some reason I wasn't able to match onf that side for the rest of the mission.

I would recomend you to polish u a bit more the playing field. The earth bavground behind it doesn't help to make it out the shapes (at least for me), and the antarctica part made it for me for the bottom row to be practially invisible (I din't notice I had an extra row after a while)... a little dark bacground would have helped. Same for the other gui element, seem too dark to me and not enough conrast.

But in the end, I got to relax among a lot of LD entries with a lovely mathc 3 game. Nice job :).