Game Design - Puzzle Games Part 1: Tile-based Puzzles

Games that make your brain hurt

Puzzle games are one of GamePyong's favourite genre of games. We've played a lot of them, from Tetris to Candy Crush Saga. We've also made a few such as Ints, Firewords, Monkory and Quicket. There are many different types of puzzle games and in this series of posts, we'll be taking a look at some of them to see what we can learn. The first type that we'll focus on is tile-based puzzle games.

Tile-Based Puzzles

These are games where you need to manipulate tiles to produce some result. It might be trying to get the tiles to form horizontal lines, matching three or more tiles of the same colour or some other type of tile manipulation. The oldest and arguably greatest tile-based game is, of course, Tetris. Created by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, the game exploded into popularity and is widely regarded as one of the best puzzle games ever designed. It has also spawned a number of derivatives.


Another type of tile-based puzzle game is "match-n" games where players need to match tiles of the same colour or shape to remove them from the board. Games such as Puyo Puyo, Tetris Attack, Dr. Mario, Super Puzzle Fighter and Candy Crush use this mechanic to great effect. Usually, matching and removing tiles causes something to happen such as messing up your opponent's board, spawning bonuses or creating combos. For our own tile-based game, Quicket, we mapped tile matching to cricket actions like hitting a six or getting out.

The engine behind most tile-based puzzles is fairly simple. Usually an array is used to represent the board and each element of the array holds a tile. Moving tiles around the board alters the array. The complex part is detecting when matches (or complete lines for tetris) occur and filling the holes created by removing the matched tiles. The concept of tile neighbours comes into play where whenever a tile is moved, its vertical and horizontal neighbours are checked to determine whether there is a match. If a match occurs, the matched tiles' neighbours are also checked for a match and so on until no more matches can be found. Finally, tweening can be added to fluidly remove tiles and drop new random tiles to take their place.

Comments

  1. Anaya20 December 2021 at 11:39

    Thanks for a very interesting blog. What else may I get that kind of info written in such a perfect approach? I’ve a undertaking that I am simply now operating on, and I have been at the look out for such info. Flow water fountain game

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sana sheikh26 January 2022 at 03:10

    I have read all the comments and suggestions posted by the visitors for this article are very fine,We will wait for your next article so only.Thanks! chess cheat

    ReplyDelete
  3. HopeO30 July 2024 at 14:23

    Great insights on the design of tile-matching games! Speaking of puzzles, if you're looking for a more tactile experience, check out the Adult Jigsaw Puzzles at Bobangles. Engaging with these puzzles is not only a relaxing pastime but also an excellent way to enhance cognitive skills, such as problem-solving and spatial awareness. Like digital tile puzzles, jigsaw puzzles require strategic thinking and pattern recognition, making them a perfect offline activity. Whether you're a puzzle enthusiast or looking to unwind, adult jigsaw puzzles offer both challenge and fun. Explore more at Adult Jigsaw Puzzles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. EduLaunchers20 September 2024 at 03:38

    Amazing post.
    Trusted Overseas Education Consultants in Mohali

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multiplayer Games using Google Sheets

Image
Google Sheets For Multiplayer Prototyping The most essential part of a multiplayer game is the ability for players to communicate with each other in some way. The simplest way to achieve this is for players to have shared access to a database that they both can read from and write to. When building multiplayer prototypes, it can be a hassle to setup a server and database and to then manage connections between players. What if there was a free database that existed somewhere and which players could perform operations on? Well, a database can simply be a table consisting of columns and rows; exactly the same as a spreadsheet. Google Sheets is a popular free online spreadsheet application which can be read from and written to via APIs. The idea here is to use Google Sheets as our backend database for our multiplayer game prototypes. In order to do this, we need to be able to read and write to the sheets via Javascript. To read from the sheet, we can use a library called She
Read more

Caribbean Games - Part 1: All Fours

Image
Caribbean Games is a series that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean. GamePyong will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. A Game of Trump For a Trinidadian game developer talking about games native to the Caribbean, we would be remiss if we didn't kick things off with the most popular card game in Trinidad and Tobago: All Fours! All Fours is a trick-taking card game which originated in England in the 17th century and has since spawned numerous other card games including Pitch and Pedro. In Trinidad, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn't heard of the game. The rules of All Fours are fairly simple. It's a four-player card game consisting of two teams. The goal of the game is to get more points than the other team by winning tricks with the most valuable cards. Points are also awarded for holding the highest and lowest trump and for h
Read more

Caribbean Games - Part 2: Pitch

Image
Caribbean Games is a  series  that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean.  GamePyong  will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. Knuckle Down and Get Rolling Play the game we built for this blog post here: Play Pitch Playing with marbles is one of the oldest and most pervasive games in the world. Made of clay, stone, ceramic or glass, marbles are small spheres about half an inch in diameter; though some like the 'Big-Goonks' are a bit larger. Modern marbles usually contain a swirl of coloured glass inside. In Trinidad, the most coveted marbles were usually crystals (coloured glass with nothing inside), 'K-K' (opaque white marbles with coloured designs), 'Snake Eyes' (marbles that contained 2 or 3 dark swirls) and the aforementioned 'Big-Goonks' (larger and heavier than regular marbles). There are many different games that
Read more