| genre: | 3D tile matcher with reverse mechanics | |
| platforms: | mobile devices | |
| Game engine: | Unity | |
| skills: | – fine motor control – fast reaction time – depth perception – sense of rhythm – visual memory – strategic thinking – logical thinking – shape recognition | |
| monetization: | IAP: power-ups and extended holderExclusive or restricted regionsAds | |
| current completion: ~ | 65% | |
| long-term plan: | VR environment | |
| team size: | 1 |
Video overview
Overview and game preview
Sample gameplay
Genre and mechanics
The game builds on multiple skills like quick recognition of patterns, but dexterity is also crucial. By bringing the third dimension into play and getting the entire scene to permanent motion players can use many of their strengths more related to action games.
As against classic matching games, the mechanics is reversed: players do not create patterns, they recognize and mark them. The scene has its own dynamics, driven by nature’s forces (global motion patterns, roaming, spawning and morphing of minerals), the player’s task is to “recognize” emerging constellations and mark each component in limited time. Depending on the level’s difficulty this is also impedited many ways by the environment and the various motions of the scene. Dealing with time pressure and managing limited resources also gets important on later levels.
Platform
Quick and precise marking of tiles while interacting with the scene through gestures makes the game best suitable for touch screens. The long term plan is to place the player in a VR environment that is also a perfect match. Currently the target platform of development is iOS.
Challenges
By design, multiple user skills can contribute to success. Scenes along the journey are intentionally designed to require different skill sets, smoothing the chances between players with diverse strengths and weaknesses. A shorter reaction time can compensate weaker fine motor skills, or better visual memory may outweigh weaker pattern recognition. Design of power-ups’ structure is another means of compensating unequal abilities.
- Fine motor control: Marking objects in motion on a mobile screen while also adjusting zoom and view angle by gestures really rewards precise hand control.
- Fast reaction: Unlike classic tile matchers, the entire scene is permanently changing. Parts of the mines are turning away or get zoomed out from screen. Short reaction time is highly valuable when both recognition and decisions must happen in a tiny time window.
- Depth perception: Finding constellations on a 3D grid is significantly harder than on a plain lattice. Since their motion also happens in 3D the player often needs to instantly develop a plan how to mark them. Which ones will turn away first or get occluded by other tiles and surface obstacles.
- Sense of rhythm: Motions on the scene are not completely random by design, but composed of slowly changing harmonic oscillations. These give the feeling of both randomness and predictability. With practice the player get ‘get tuned’ their dynamics… some Tai Chi experience may also help.
- Visual memory: The majority of objects in a 3D grid is at least partially occluded. Level layout design can amplify this by adding a terrain and rocky obstacles. Sometimes the camera is placed in the center getting most objects out of view. The ability to keep in mind where the promising spots were gives an edge to the player.
- Strategic thinking: Often, there are multiple moves to choose from, and the minerals collected are secondary. Thinking a few steps ahead and weighing other aspects becomes important: allowing a formation grow further instead, making room for mine’s evolution, aspiring to a more valuable combination to evolve, sacrificing energy to hit a hostile object, selecting walls to demolish to lessen obstacles…. Parts of the mine may become strategically more important than others.
The game rules are simple but very different optimal strategies can emerge for different level types. Some decisions also impact the later levels to come. - Logical skills: Some levels are explicitly designed as ‘puzzles’. They can be cleaned up only by finding one correct order the minerals are taken, otherwise the level failed. Solving such levels usually gives a reward or enables the player to enter further mines.
- Shape recognition: Some scenes – especially at later difficult levels – have light conditions tuned to keep objects partially shaded for periods of time. Texture and colors become less recognizable for a while. Most objects still have characteristic in-place motion patters (note, they are living artifacts) also recognizable shapes.
Goal
With a modular structure the levels can have very different look, dynamics and structure. The assigned goals are also easily configurable to offer different experiences and keep the player interested. Virtually any reasonable condition can be expressed as the levels’ goal and implemented as a per-level drag’n drop component that can be re-used or mixed into any level. (see on the details page)
Most frequent goals are collecting specified amount of minerals, clean up levels (remove all minerals), demolish stone objects and constructs, survival games: stay alive in a resource constrained environment, prevent some events to happen on the scene, earn special minerals, etc.
The global goal of the game is to help the player (who is trapped in the hostile environment) go through the levels and fulfill the conditions to get back to her world. Note, the final goal is not to complete all levels, but find find all objects and rewards required to leave that world. The player may (and may need to) visit some levels multiple times.
Monetization
- IAP of power-ups (special minerals): All challenge types and difficulties listed above are paired with specially designed power-ups that compensate for player’s weaker skills or help them through tougher levels. (see config) These can be collected for free within the game, however they have a finite lifetime and wear as activated.
The player can buy extra items as needed. Stronger or specially configured gems can be reserved for IAP only: The same power-up effect can be assigned to multiple rare objects, they come in different flavors. Each can be freely configured how strong their effect are, long their effect lasts, how frequently can be activated and how quickly they wear off by usage. - Exclusive regions, levels: The game is organized around the concept of areas, that in turn are built up from a collection of levels. Specific areas can be offered as ‘side missions’, optionally containing new puzzles or visually unique scenes, differently tuned challenge levels, even own new minerals. A purchased area can also contain ‘rich’ mines where the player finds more power-up minerals (offering a more exciting alternative to buying them directly: buy a mine and collect them for yourself)
- Watching ads for items is also an option.
Platforms
The game mechanics requires a complex interaction with the environment, the experience is designed to give the player a ‘tactile’ feeling that can only be achieved with touch screens. She needs to touch the right minerals with appropriate speed and precision while also controlling the orientation of the ‘mine’ using slide moves. Optionally also zooming into smaller details or out to wider view using pinch gestures.
Currently iPhone and iPad are the selected platforms. Their high graphical performance and the less fragmented platform makes them an ideal candidate.
Targeting Android is also planned, however testing on such wide variety of devices requires more manpower.
The long term goal (actually, it was the original early concept) is to design and deploy specialized levels optimized to VR environments.
For detailed description and technical details click here