A fun idea and definitely made more fun by adding in a second player. Nice work! PS Jean Luc Picard as Captain!

Fits the theme well and looks pretty good. I love match 3's so I liked the gameplay, but unfortunately the matches just stopped working after killing the first two enemies (not sure if that is exactly where it stopped), so you have a bug somewhere.

@quixatocs Think you for playing! :smiley:

@creepyounguy Oh no! :scream: Please hit me on hilvon1984@gmail.com with the details of what was happening.

Technically Match3 and Arcade bits are linked in pretty limited way (The Match3 feeds the Arcade information on recharging shields/weapons and missiles, while Arcade feeds Match3 with information for screenshake and dropping bits of playfield. So there shouldn't be a link between killing enemies and match3 glitching... but there are quite a few ways Match3 coulf break on its own. :grin:

Anyway - will be looking forward for your feedback. Hopefully the bug will be found soon.

Interesting concept. I think, having a puzzle and a ship on the same screen would make the game more structured. Now it feels like two separated games (I know, it really is). Also, where exactly am I going? =)

@yngvarr *having a puzzle and a ship on the same screen would make the game more structured. Now it feels like two separated games*

Well...

First of all - I didn't want to _mix_ two genres. I wanted the game to preserve both without destroying their core principles. So this separation was aimed at this.

Then there is the fact that the proper way to play this game is 2 player couch co-op. And this separation of game aspects kind of emphases this.

True, this means that I didn't invent a new genre that is a combination of two... but effectively I made two game in one. And all thin in 48 hours... Kind of proud that I managed to pull it off. :smiley:

**Note to everyone**

Thank you to everyone who rated and commented on my game! I really appreciate your feedback. And I will definitely play and rate your games, but unfortunately this will only happen on weekend. Please don't be offended by this delay.

@Hilvon, oops, excuse me, didn't notice your note about co-op in the post. This fact changes everything! =)

Nice concept! It's a bit hard to have 2 brains on the same time but I love the idea and as you said you can call a team mate to help to manage the two screens together. Really good job for a compo entry! :D

Too hard to get into, I reread instructions twice and still I don't understand what "match similar tokens" mean, where are those tokens, how to get them. Pity as I can see there is some talent behind the game and you put a lot of effort into this, my advice is next time go for something much simpler and focus on things you are good at. Making a complex concept work is a skill which takes a lot of practice, but before you get there you should focus on trying to make something as playable as possible. After you start getting playable part right you can start making more and more complex concept which will work, at least that is my humble opinion.

@kr4ft3r Well... I hoped that "Match 3" is a pretty commonly known game concept, that people would be able to get into without a lot of deliberate explanation on my behalf. Like you don't explicitly tell a player that you need to hit an enemy with a bullet to kill it. And if you get hit with a bullet, bad things will happen.

There is a board on the right with tokens of different colors. You can switch a token with another one adjacent to it. If in the result of this move there is a horizontal or vertical line of 3 or more tokens of same color - those matched tokens are removed and score is added. If the move does not result in a matched line, it is not executed.

As for the advise to go for something simpler... :rolling_eyes: Well... I... try... I genuinely try... every time. Every single time. But I feel like the only one time I actually managed to run with something simple was my [runaway convoy](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/runaway-convoy) for LD 39. And the only reason for this was me wasting almost a day on another complex idea before realizing that I will never pull it off. So I had co come up with something I can fit into remaining time.

But at the same time, I'm a programmer to the boot. And while I can do some ok-ish art, and I am slowly crawling into making sounds, those will be mediocre at best. At the same time, I can make some pretty fancy code. And so I base the game idea on something I am good at.

Yes, I noticed your coding is excellent, but even after reading instructions you posted above I still don't get HOW you match tokens, I don't see them as anything but static objects on the right side of the screen. It feels like you are showing me a bunch of colorful mushrooms planted inside a box made of unbreakable glass and you say "just match three, it is easy enough" but I have no idea how to make them do anything. Could be just me, as it seems some other reviewers have figured out what to do, or maybe WebGL version is buggy, I tried clicking everything and everywhere and couldn't figure out how to interact with token map.
As for failings to simplify ideas, maybe you are too smart and have troubles identifying with majority of people who will play the game. You can try making your mind blank and imagining what it feels like to see your game for the first time, or, since you mentioned wife's support, use her to find questions which need answering or complexities which should be removed. Sorry for writing so much but it feels bad that you have such coding knowledge yet I was unable to get fun out of your effort, just trying to help.

@kr4ft3r Erm... Point the mouse. Press the button, drag mouse towards adjacent tile, release mouse. And the move must result in at least one match, or it is not executed.

Though you have a point. Probably should have made a "click-move-click" move scheme to work as well... :rolling_eyes:

Then again, this could also have been fixed with better telegraphing in UI... not like I really managed to work on UI all that much.

And your comments are totally Ok. I appreciate the feedback. Especially since you are not only complaining but actually pointing out how to improve.

Aaah, so you're supposed to drag&drop.. The instructions didn't even mention the usage of mouse, I only tried clicking. Perhaps drag&drop is standard for those games but I just never played them tbh. Well, great then.

@kr4ft3r Well... The "standard" control scheme is "swiping" as most of them are on mobiles. :smile:

Fun idea, I like how the board loses tiles as you get hit.

When my girlfriend gets home i will have to try this with her, it definitely feels like it needs a second player. This may have been intentional, but i found it very difficult to match 3 near the end as i was getting overwhelmed. the shake became to intense to accurately focus.

@schuster Glad you liked the idea. :smile:

@masterkrepta Yes. The game was envisioned to be played as a pair. :smiley: Hoever the difficulty curve is a probably a bit too steep and the controls are.. clumsy. So me and my wife were able to hold a whole minute longer playing together than in solo... So I might have bothced the ballance a bit.

Then again the ballance curve had an ability to upgrade your shield capacity and hardness and firing rate... but it never happened (mostly due to not having enough time to craft UI)

**Thank you for fedback!!!** :smile:

It's fun, but the game is definitely too difficult to play alone xD

Anyway, good job!

Hah, this was pretty interesting~ I'm no stranger to playing two games at once, but it took me a bit to get into the groove. Movement's a little odd, since there's no background to be a point of reference, so you're not sure where you're going or how fast. I like how the match-3 play area gets destroyed the more damage you take, that's a pretty neat feature! Aggravating, but neat!

Also, I decided to see if I could abuse the reshuffle system; since it costs nothing and reshuffles the pieces, logically I could get matches automatically by just spamming it! Well, instead, I got this:


You may notice that I've matched a few colors, but they're not disappearing... I broke something, and it wouldn't register any matches. Game over at that point~

Other than that, this was a pretty neat idea. Good job!

Good idea - my wife and I had a blast.

@arbosis Yes. Guilty as charged. :rolling_eyes: The combination of having two-player mode in mind and some things that should have made a game easier not making it into the game, resulted in solo experience being a bit too harsh...

@justinooncx Wow... Thank you for this crashtest of the system sorts of. Yes... this does ring a bell actually. In short - the matching engine only executes once all the tokens are in place, which it tracks by incrementing a counter when a token need to change position, and decrementing it once the token reaces its destination. But it looks like if you destroy all tokens before they reach their initial positions after being spawned this might result in counter not decrementing properly. And so the match engine is stuck waiting for tokens that no longer exist to report their arrival... Should be easy to fix if I add resetting the counter between clearing tokens and spawning new ones.

And to answer your question - no. You can't have a matching line spawn without you moving any tokens. :smile: The safeguard here is simple: when you initialize the tokens they are creatd in order left-to-right and bottom-to-top, and for each token before a color is picked we check a pair of tiled to the left and a pair of tiles below. If it so happen that those already have same color - we prohibit this color from being assigned to this tile.

I wonder if this bug you really have to put effort into invoking qualifies as "Game breaking" to justufy uploading a fixed version... Probably I will.

@john-darrington Glad you enjoyed it! :smile:

the swipe on the puzzle seemingly wasn't working properly for my case (or maybe I'm missing something?), but dig the idea

interesting mix I played the html5 version and it kept locking up on me. I also had no sound or music. maybe just that version but frustrating. I like the concept though

Very cool and creative mix of genres here! Really found the idea cool and again, as with many games in this LD, so many themes which seem like they wouldn't match but in the end the game is really cool and interesting. And, I think this is super cool and interesting :D


I really liked the enterprise style space ship drawing :D big + from me for the Star Trek reference there.

Like I said, I found this mix very unique and creative, swipe puzzle like candy crush mixed with a big of space battle :D fun stuff

@p-r By "Swipe" you mean playing on actual touch screen? Yes, this might be the case. I don have a touchscreen device to test :( And since mouse events and touch events are similar but not same it is possible that touches are not handled properly. :( Sorry for bad experience.

@blazedragon You seem to be referring to the problem of Alt (used to launch a missile) also opening browser menu which puts the game on pause. I noticed this issue, but didn't feel this would qualify as "game breaking" bug, and it was already submisison hour... :(

And no. There are no music or sounds in the game. Reitrating over Match3 engine 3 times took so much time that I had to cut a lot of things, and sounds are only one of them... althouth probably the most noticable. Followed shortly by lack of helpful UI...

@vkmicro Yes. That's what was cool about this particulat Theme. It basically prohibits making a dull game. But at the same time this is a bad thing as less people would pull this off.

Glad you liked the Star Trek reference in ship design. There is also another franshise referenced in credits roll. May the veterans of holy wars between those two franshises forgive me for liking both. :smile:

Also you to notise that Candy CRUSH is kind of referrenced in game title. :smile:

This was a really cool concept but it was SO complex. There wasn't much feedback in the match-3 part, and I wasn't sure what was for points and what was actually important. Reading the instructions also didn't help a ton, as they were quite dense. Aside from the complexity, I think it would've been nice to have some sort of background to show movement, and some sound effects or music would've helped a lot, too. Overall it seems like you've crammed a whole lot into one jam, and it suffered a bit because it was hard to get the swing of it. Nice work nonetheless. I think I'll see if I can make any more sense of it some other time.

I'm not sure if you were able to see it, but I played your game on my stream at https://www.twitch.tv/saoigames tonight.

I like that you tried to combine a broadside space combat game with match 3. I liked how you divided up the multiplayer so we were each playing completely different games, but impacting the other. For the match 3 side, I would have liked a little guide reminding me what each symbol meant. I forgot what the green shapes did and it meant my partner never had enough missiles. Or just make the icons look like the thing that they do instead of being arbitrary shapes.

As far as flying the ship, the weapon arcs felt too narrow, and it took forever to actually fire the weapons. The display was also a bit cramped, which made it hard to tell what was going on.

This game reminded me a lot of the Space Cadets board game.

I think this has a lot of potential once polished and could be a fun local co-op if the controls for the ship were polished more.